- #BOULEVARD OF BROKEN ROADS TEXT POST TUMBLR HOW TO#
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But in college, Grace started questioning whether she was really as attracted to men as she’d assumed. “I think when I was first going through puberty, I kinda took my attraction to men as a done deal, like, Of course I like guys, why wouldn't I? And I like women too, so the bisexual label was the one I was most comfortable with,” she said. Grace, 21, also found the document revealing when she discovered it last year. “The ‘Am I a Lesbian?’ doc confirmed it for me.’” Rachel found that many of the experiences described in the doc resonated with her, including “reading a desire to be attractive to men as attraction to them” and “dreading what feels like an inevitable domestic future with a man.” “I am a lesbian,” she said she finally decided. By 2019, however, she was questioning whether she was truly attracted to men as well, or simply assumed she was.
#BOULEVARD OF BROKEN ROADS TEXT POST TUMBLR FULL#
(All the women interviewed for this article opted not to share their full names for privacy reasons.) She’d known for years that she was attracted to women. “I came out as bisexual when I was 18,” Rachel T., now 23, told VICE. In the document, which she said took her two days to compose, Luz analyzes ways compulsory heterosexuality-a term first popularized by Adrienne Rich that refers to the pervasive cultural expectation that women be attracted to men-might present itself, such as “the assumption that any feelings that you have towards a man MUST be attraction” or “only developing attraction to a guy after a female friend expresses attraction to him.” The penultimate section of the document, “You might be a lesbian if TL DR,” is a checklist of signs that a woman’s attraction to men might be social conditioning rather than an innate part of her sexual identity. So… what happens if you want to be with women? What happens if you’re not attracted to men at all? When you’re trained from childhood to see romantic/sexual relationships with men - and only men - as major life goals, how do you separate that from what you want? We literally cannot exist in public without men loudly grading us on how well we’re pleasing them visually.
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Our magazines are full of sex tips on how to better please men, our movies are about how we’re supposed to fall in love with men. We’re supposed to be pretty for men, we’re supposed to change the way we talk so men will take us more seriously, we’re supposed to want a man’s love more than anything else. Women are taught from a very early age that making men happy is our job. I created the document as a tool of self-reflection for myself and others.” “I started researching compulsory heterosexuality and found that many lesbians had the same experiences I did. “I realized I loved women when I was a teenager, but I never quite knew if my attraction for men was real or a social construct I took in as a facet of my identity,” she said. Luz, now 21, told VICE via email that the “Am I a Lesbian?” document emerged from her own journey of self-discovery. “Am I a Lesbian?” began as one woman’s attempt to distinguish between orientation and conditioning now, two and a half years later, it’s clear that Luz spoke for more people than just herself. When a relationship with a man is portrayed as the ultimate goal of every woman’s life, and women are sexually objectified in every form of media, it can be difficult to recognize genuine attraction. Influences from church to Disney movies to car commercials weave heterosexual fantasies into every part of life.
While the prevailing “born this way” narrative of orientation suggests that everyone knows whether they’re gay, straight, or bisexual from an early age, it’s not always that simple when we are overwhelmingly socialized to be heterosexual.
(When you click on it, you get an error message saying it’s been taken down for violating their terms of service, but the specific violation is unclear.) Copies are shared daily on Twitter, Tumblr, and Reddit, and a whole contingent of mostly young women credit Luz-though seldom by name, since it doesn’t appear on the document-with helping them come to terms with their homosexuality. The Tumblr post in which Luz shared the document has received more than 30,000 notes, although the original link to the Google doc no longer works. In the years since it was first posted, the “Am I a Lesbian?” doc has become something of a cult classic on the lesbian internet, although its author, Angeli Luz, has until now been mostly anonymous.
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