This post is about the “lesbian” falls for a man trope, also known by other variations like “lesbian” with an exception trope or “cure the lesbian” trope. A story utilises this trope when a female character who has been introduced as a lesbian develops romantic feelings for a male character or decides to have sex with a male character. Often, though not always, both things happen in tandem.
Usually when the “lesbian” character is shown to have sex with a man, the content creators/writers responsible for the trope treat the incident as a one-off bad decision that will never happen again, and maintain that the character is still a lesbian. The excuses for using the trope by the creators of the media (and subsequent defense of it by uncritical fans) are numerous:
- She was struggling with internalised homophobia.
- She’s a teenager; everyone knows teenagers do stupid things.
- She was curious about what it was like to be with a man.
- She wanted a baby.
- She was having relationship problems with her girlfriend/wife.
They are all bullshit, including the one about internalised homophobia, sorry. Lesbians don’t have sex with men. If a writer is too unoriginal to think of a way for a lesbian to deal with self-loathing that doesn’t involve taking dick, it’s better that they just don’t write stories about lesbians. Seriously—there are many, many ways to show a lesbian struggling to accept herself that don’t involve fucking a man.
Sometimes when the “lesbian” character is shown to fall in love with a man, the content creators/writers still claim the character is a lesbian, but the excuses change:
- Sexuality is fluid! Nobody is 100% straight or gay.
- Every lesbian I’ve known has been with a guy before.
- She wasn’t converted, she still likes women.
- Well yes she’s technically bisexual, but some women think they’re lesbian and later discover that they’re bi.
The homophobia here is pretty self-explanatory.
Occasionally when a writer tells a story about a lesbian-identified character who becomes attracted to a man, he or she does acknowledge that the character is indeed bisexual and not lesbian. (Emily Fields from Sara Shepard’s Pretty Little Liars book series and Leila from Desiree Akhavan’s cornily-titled show The Bisexual come to mind.) So again apologists like to say, “Some bi women think they’re lesbian at first but then realise they’re bi.” Okay. But why are there so many stories about women who think they’re lesbian at first and then realise they’re bi? Why are there so few stories about women who think they’re bi at first and then realise they’re lesbian? For that matter, why are there so few stories about women who have a history of relationships only with women throughout their lives? Why, in supposed lesbian stories, is there almost always a man involved somewhere?
I want people to pay attention to the excuses, the justifications, and the dismissive and disrespectful comments that media creators/writers make when they receive criticism from lesbian readers/viewers, because they reveal the blatantly lesbiphobic attitudes they are operating on. Here are some examples.
The much-lauded-by-critics, much-hated-by-lesbians film The Kids Are All Right features a same-sex female couple that used a sperm donor to have children. One of the “lesbians” has sex with the man who donated his sperm. Here is what the filmmaker, Lisa Cholodenko, said in an interview.
If you don’t believe homosexuals can happily fuck the opposite sex, your views are “really dated” and “lack open-mindedness.” Cholodenko doesn’t believe homosexuality exists.
In Skins US, Tea Marvelli comes out as a lesbian and then becomes attracted to a male character and has sex with him. In an interview with AfterEllen, the hetero male showrunner, Bryan Elsley tried to explain his decision.
AE: It’s not always the case, but often times women who view themselves as sexually fluid label themselves as bisexual. Do you look back and wonder if maybe you should have given Tea that label instead of lesbian?
BE: Tea definitely identifies as a lesbian. In fact, it is really interesting to me that so many of the young people I spoke to definitively characterized themselves as lesbians and they report that for various reasons they’ve all had sexual relationships with men. I think that possibly what happens, with both men and women, is that there is a process so many people go through whereby there sexuality is in question, often into adulthood. Often times in adulthood, people get more entrenched in their position.
[...]
BE: This story, in so many ways, is about how Tea finds her feet, and how Tea remembers who she is. I feel that the story lands in the correct way.
AE: Correct in the sense that it echos the stories young lesbians shared with you?
BE: Right. No one I’ve spoken to, in all the years I’ve been writing, even when I was writing Naomily — I’ve never met a lesbian who said, “You know, I’ve never, ever considered sleeping with a man. I’ve never slept with a man. I’d never consider doing that.” If we think back on our own teenage sexual experiences, so many of them are confusing and wholly unsatisfying. Probably at the heart of the Tea controversy is my belief as a writer that you should never allow characters to act in a codified way. Or in a correct way. You shouldn’t adhere to black and white social or political ideas. In a way, that sort of makes me naughty.
[bold mine]
This hetero man believes sleeping with men is a totally normal part of being a lesbian, and that all lesbians do it anyway. He thinks writing a self-identified lesbian character who can connect with a boy more than a girl and who would want to sleep with a boy in the “right circumstances” is a lesbian experience that lesbians can relate to. And this is a direct consequence of bisexual women mislabeling themselves as lesbians despite acknowledging that they are attracted to men, as you can see from Elsley’s comments. Elsley tries to explain away her attraction to the male character as “a mistake.” He bizarrely claims that this storyline doesn’t fall into the “lesbian” falls for a man trope and is “different” from other times it’s been used. Funnily enough he is also responsible for Emily in Skins UK having sex with a guy one episode after coming out as a lesbian. He probably thinks that was original too: she did it because she pitied the guy for feeling like a loser for being a virgin. Like most opposite-sex attracted people, Elsley cannot conceive of the existence of women who don’t sleep with men for any reason. And like most hetero men, he views female sexuality as passive—he imagines his own disgusting fantasy about lesbians and views a lesbian as an empty receptacle who would tolerate it rather than trying to imagine what a lesbian would realistically want in a woman. Hence he imagines that a lesbian would fuck a man solely to boost his ego. He doesn’t believe female homosexuality exists.
In the show Hannibal, Margot Verger, who was supposed to be a lesbian (and is a lesbian in the book series), has sex with a man in order to get pregnant. The explanation was that she needed to secure a male heir so she would maintain hold of her family’s inheritance, from which her abusive brother tried to cut her off. Those who defended this writing decision claimed it was “necessary” for the plot. Never mind that this plan was stupid as fuck, having a not-insignificant chance of failure from the get-go considering the possibilities that she might 1) fail to get pregnant from the encounter or 2) have a daughter instead. Never mind that in the books, Margot is infertile, and she and her girlfriend go about getting an heir with IVF. Lesbians can become mothers without fucking a man!
Here was what the gay male showrunner, Bryan Fuller, had to say in response to criticism from lesbian fans:
It’s easy to despair as a lesbian when you see shit like this.
In this postmodern “queer” era where sexual fluidity (aka bisexuality) is viewed as more progressive than and superior to homosexuality so that bisexuals question whether lesbian identity will survive their “gender revolution,” it seems like the defense of this trope by non-lesbians has become even stronger and more persistent. In late 2016 author Julie Murphy announced her new book Ramona Blue, in which a girl who is introduced as an “out and proud lesbian” falls in love with a boy. Lesbians downrated the book on GoodReads, and bisexuals rushed to defend the book and raise the ratings. They declared lesbians “biphobic” for hating on the book, and claimed that having a problem with the “lesbian” falling for a guy trope obviously just means you have a problem with bisexuality. The most common defenses were that “sexuality is fluid” (a phrase which appears in almost every single positive review of the book) and that some bi people think they’re gay at first.
I’m going to use Murphy’s book as a kind of case study because it’s a relatively popular one that was supported by a lot of bisexuals. Supposedly it was based on the author’s own experiences of discovering she was bisexual. But Murphy’s book doesn’t even tell a story about a girl coming out as bisexual after becoming attracted to a boy for the first time. Ramona calls herself lesbian or gay, and is referred to by other characters as lesbian or gay, through the entire book.
Long after she’s fallen in love with and had sex with a boy, she’s still calling herself a lesbian.
This dialogue takes place early in the book, before she falls in love with her male friend. It’s funny that Murphy decided to write this dialogue—what lesbians will recognise as a typical conversation with a clueless straight person minus the “well, in recent years”—because it doesn’t fit in this book at all. Ramona does kiss a boy and then realises she likes boys, that’s the plot of the book. Murphy’s attempt to mock the homophobic idea that lesbians have to kiss boys to be sure they’re not attracted to boys by putting these words in her main character’s mouth is borderline insulting in its fakeness because Murphy herself believes the very idea she’s pretending to mock.
This little internal monologue is very revealing about the mental state of bisexuals who want to call themselves lesbian.
This is Ramona’s response to being asked if she’s bisexual. She likes girls, and now she’s in love with a boy, but she...doesn’t know if she’s bisexual. Why does the dumbass author act like it’s so confusing and difficult for this obviously bisexual character to recognise that she’s bisexual? Ramona’s justification for continuing to call herself gay/lesbian is that she only likes one boy. Freddie is her exception. Like we haven’t heard that one before. How does anyone think this is good bisexual representation? Bisexuals are always complaining about how people assume they’re straight or gay based on their relationship history, and saying that their attractions don’t have to be split 50/50, that they can have preferences, that their preferences can change, and none of that changes the fact that they’re bisexual. They also complain about how bisexual characters are rarely labeled as bisexual, and are instead incorrectly referred to as gay or straight. But when both of these problems are promoted in this extremely homophobic book, bisexuals throw all that criticism out the window and support the homophobic narrative. Sometimes I wonder if bisexuals hate lesbians more than they love themselves.
This is the third-last page of the book, and still Ramona cannot admit that she’s bisexual. Notice that she’s trying to figure out what she wants to call herself, not what accurately describes her—and the word gay is still listed among the labels she considers as her options. Doubtless this book’s apologists would say that her questioning her identity at the end is a step in the right direction, but it doesn’t make up for the fact that she never stops calling herself gay/lesbian.
Just one last passage to really drive home how homophobic this book is. Every single “gay” character has a history of heterosexual dating, because of course they do. Exclusive same-sex attraction is too restrictive to be real. “Everyone experiments,” after all. This is just a variation of the “everyone is a little bit bi” narrative.
I need you all to understand this: most of these writers are not attempting to represent the experiences of bi women who used to identify as lesbians. They are trying to represent lesbian sexuality as inclusive of men. They are challenging or outright denying the very existence of female homosexuality.
Somehow, despite all this, opposite-sex attracted people act like stories about lesbian-identified women becoming attracted to men are bold, creative, daring, and break some kind of taboo. As if treating lesbians like shit has ever been taboo. Indeed, people who defend this awful trope act like lesbians are evil and bigoted for confirming that homosexuality is real. Take this snippet from a review praising the homophobic trash book Stray City by Chelsey Johnson, written by none other than Trish Bendix, who was booted from AfterEllen after years of writing shitty homophobic drivel.
Too bad moving to a different site didn’t make her stop writing shitty homophobic drivel.
For those of you who are under the mistaken impression that women who identify as lesbians and then find themselves attracted to a man are a rare, underrepresented, sidelined story that is in desperate need of being told, allow me to present this (incomplete) list* of characters in television, films, and books who were introduced as lesbian characters to the audience/readers and then shown to have sex with, fall in love with, or otherwise express attraction toward a man. I have done my best to limit the examples to those that fit at least one of the following criteria: 1) the character was described as gay, lesbian, or homosexual in the story by the character herself; 2) the character was described as gay, lesbian, or homosexual by another character or an omniscient third-person POV narrating the story; or 3) the character was described as gay, lesbian, or homosexual by the writer/creator/cast, so that you can’t claim “well nobody ever said she’s a lesbian.” **
From television:
Mona from Seinfeld (1993)
Zoe Marshall from Pacific Drive (1997)
Joan Golfinos from Mad About You (1997)
Debbie Buchman from Mad About You (1998)
Frankie Stone from All My Children (2003)
Lindsay Peterson from Queer as Folk US (2004)
Charlotte Beaumont from All Saints (2004)
Tina Kennard from The L Word (2006)
Michelle from Dante’s Cove (2006)
Bianca Montgomery from All My Children (2007)
Niki Stevens from The L Word (2008)
Emily Fitch from Skins UK (2009)
Liz Cruz from Nip/Tuck (2009)
Janis Hawk from Flashforward (2010)
Pepa Ramos from Los Hombres de Paco (2010)
Babs Duffy from Law & Order: SVU (2010)
Tea Marvelli from Skins US (2011)
Irene Adler from Sherlock (2012)
Sadie from New Girl (2012)
Jenny Harper from Two and a Half Men (2013)
Lucy Westenra from Dracula (2014)
Nikki Boston from Waterloo Road (2014)
Margot Verger from Hannibal (2014)
Amy Raudenfeld from Faking It (2014)
Whitney Taylor from Twisted (2014)
Rose Solano from Jane the Virgin (2014)
Louise Ellison from Hell on Wheels (2014)
Joan Ferguson from Wentworth (2015)
Mimi Whiteman from Empire (2015)
Rachel Calloway from Family Time (2015)
Helen and Betty from Masters of Sex (2015)
Zoë Rivas from Degrassi: Next Class (2016)
Teresa Fenchurch from Home Fires (2016)
Gail from Red Oaks (2017)
Neika Hobbs from Dear White People (2017)
Andréa Martel from Dix Pour Cent (2017)
Leila from The Bisexual (2018)
Kate Connor from Coronation Street (2019)
Finley from The L Word: Generation Q (2020)
Shane from The L Word: Generation Q (2021)
Ziigwan from Shoresy (2022)
From film:
Stella Cooke from A Different Story (1978)^
Marijo from Gazon Maudit (1995)
Amy from Chasing Amy (1997)
Jill from The Monkey’s Mask (2000)
Aina from Todo me pasa a mí (2001)
Ricki from Gigli (2003)
Sasha from April’s Shower (2003)
Fatima and 17 others desperate to get pregnant from She Hate Me (2004)
Allegra from Puccini for Beginners (2006)
Natsuko and Tomomi from Toppuresu (2008)
Jules from The Kids Are All Right (2010)
Phoebe from Father of Invention (2010)
Hannah from Your Sister’s Sister (2011)
a woman from Mes deux amours (2012)
Adèle from Blue Is the Warmest Colour (2013)
Samantha from Contracted (2013)
Kelly from La crème de la crème (2014)
Pegeen from The Humbling (2014)
Sara from Tutta colpa di Freud (2014)
Gabbi from Me Him Her (2015)
Kim from Funny Story (2018)
Alex from You, Me and Him (2018)
Claire from To Each Her Own (2018)
Sofía from A pesar de todo (2019)
From books:
- Molly Bolt from Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown (1973)
- Sissy and Jelly from Even Cowgirls Get the Blues by Tom Robbins (1976)
- Tretona Getroek from Who Was That Masked Woman? by Noretta Koertge (1981)
- Lai Fun and Stefanja from Venous Hum by Suzette Mayr (2005)
- Ronit Krushka from Disobedience by Naomi Alderman (2006)
- Honor Carmichael from When the Light Goes, #4 in The Last Picture Show series by Larry McMurtry (2007)
- Emily Fields from Wicked, #5 in Pretty Little Liars series by Sara Shepard (2008)
- blond from Gunjo by Ching Nakamura (2010)
- Cameron Post from The Miseducation of Cameron Post by Emily M. Danforth (2012)^
- Gillian from Adam by Ariel Schrag (2014)
- Bee from My Real Children by Jo Walton (2014)
- Kara from Hometown by Matthew Keville (2014)
- Ellie Turner from Changing Tides by Sarah Darlington (2015)
- Peggy from Mislaid by Nell Zink (2015)^
- Gretchen from What We Left Behind by Robin Talley (2015)^
- Sana Kiyohara from It’s Not Like It’s a Secret by Misa Sugiura (2017)
- Ramona from Ramona Blue by Julie Murphy (2017)
- Lakshmi from Marriage of a Thousand Lies by S.J. Sindu (2017)^
- Iris from The Handsome Girl & Her Beautiful Boy by B.T. Gottfred (2018)
- Andrea Morales from Stray City by Chelsey Johnson (2018)
- Erin from On Burning Mirrors by Jamie Klinger-Krebs (2018)
- Isa from Profound and Perfect Things by Maribel Garcia (2019)
* I excluded characters who are prostitutes (unless they sleep with men outside of their “job” in the sex industry) or who are forced into relationships with men, as those situations fall under a different trope (the raped/abused lesbian) and do not necessarily reflect an intention on the part of the writers to make audiences/readers believe that lesbians can be attracted to men or need to “try” sex with men.
** This list doesn’t even account for the het- or bi-washing of real life lesbians from history in films about their lives; or for other versions of this trope, such as a lesbian character from a book being changed to a bisexual character in the film or TV adaptation. Nor did I include the female characters who are attracted to men and have sex/relationships with men, but later retconned as lesbian when they show attraction to women too (e.g. Willow Rosenberg from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Santana Lopez from Glee, Gail Peck from Rookie Blue). I hate that these bisexual narratives are presented as “lesbian” representation and I hate them for normalising the idea that lesbians who aren’t out sleep with men, but if I tried to include them all this list would be 1000x longer and at that point it would make more sense to make a list of media in which the characters are actual lesbians who don’t sleep with men.
^ Bonus points for a “lesbian” and a “gay” man getting together.
If I have made any mistakes in the list of media, corrections are welcome. But please don’t reply to this post just to say something like “_____ shouldn’t count because she didn’t go through with having sex, she only made out with him!” or “_____ shouldn’t count because she did it out of self-hate!”
In comparison, I can think of only one storyline that involves a female character who was labeled as bisexual, then later relabeled as lesbian, and that’s Cosima Niehaus from Orphan Black. Since Cosima never described herself as bisexual onscreen and never showed any attraction toward a man, the show creators eventually labeling her as lesbian was congruous with what they showed us of the character’s sexuality. This is a very different thing from labeling a character as lesbian and then showing her have sex with a man, as the character’s sexual behaviour is incongruous with the label they’ve given her. If Cosima had been shown to have relationships with both men and women, then I would have objected to the showrunners labeling her as lesbian.
Also, I want to note that relabeling a formerly bi-identified character as lesbian wouldn’t have the same impact as relabeling a formerly lesbian-identified character as bi because a woman partnering with a man is always seen in society as the good and natural kind of relationship. There are a lot of people who believe homosexuality (especially in women) is a choice or a phase, and having their homophobia affirmed over and over again by shitty stories certainly doesn’t help lesbians. Writing a story about two women partnering for life and being happy and satisfied in a relationship with no cheating is something that would be truly original.
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