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II. Subverting Psychology and Prioritizing Politics: Reflections on The Social Construction of Lesbianismfrom an Irritated Youth

I first encountered The Social Construction of Lesbianism (1987) in the spring of 1988 when I was wading through the literature on lesbian and gay identity in the early stages of my PhD. I was a very fastidious student so, when I read a relevant book, I would write comments about the text on postcards and staple these into the book. Hence, I have a detailed record of my original responses to The Social Construction of Lesbianism – and what entertaining reading it makes. From my comments, it is clear that I disagreed with many of the central critiques offered in the book. It was the politics of the book that I found most irksome. All the previous literature on lesbian and/or gay identity that I had encountered was political only to the extent that lesbians and gay men were represented as facing social prejudice which potentially rendered the identity formation process very difficult. It was therefore concluded that the chief identity task facing lesbians and gay men was to construct a sexual identity that they could evaluate positively and to integrate this identity into their macro-sense of self, allowing it to take its place alongside the individual’s other salient identity commitments (for example, see Cass, 1979; Coleman, 1982; Lewis, 1984; Minton and McDonald, 1984). In my PhD, I dismissed Kitzinger’s contention that these liberal humanist models try to assimilate lesbian (and gay) identities into the established social order and thereby undermine the challenge they pose. My rather curt conclusion was that ‘the policy of the present study [that is, my PhD work] is . . . to assume that most people do not wish to be revolutionaries but wish to carve out a quiet life within the existing social order’ (Coyle, 1991: 96). I think I still believe this, although the relative lack of appetite for revolution among lesbians and more especially among gay men is now a source of dismay