A reporter asked Fran Leibowitz, who is 70-years old, when did she know she was a lesbian. Here’s her reply:
“This is something that’s very hard to explain to young people today. Being gay, it was illegal then. Forget fighting for gay marriage, how about just trying not to go to jail? So you never saw it, it was never talked about, it didn’t exist in the world. So if I had not seen occasional mentions of it in books, I would never have heard of it. I had a friend who grew up in a very blue-collar environment in Wilmington, Delaware, and she thought she was the only [lesbian] in the world, and that was a common thing then. I have a very vivid memory of when I was 12 and in the backyard reading, and I remember having this exact thought: ‘Well, I suppose if there’s such a thing in the world as lesbians then someone has to be them. But why does it have to be me?’ Because I instantly knew that I could not live like that in the world I was living in, and I was pretty happy in that world. Of course, what most people did was they stayed in that world and pretended to be straight, but that never occurred to me.”
From
this article in The Guardian.