Lesbianism at Women's Colleges

A college friend passed this piece on to me today. It's a story about Wellesley College, and the sexual adventures of the women there (threesomes with professors, sleeping with campus police officers), but is also about how many women become bisexual or lesbians during their time there — women called LUGs (lesbians until graduation). The article is dead on — every example they cite occurred at my college, and with someone I knew (or even myself).

"Others may turn to their classmates. "I call it the 'prison effect,'" says Jess Eason, a sophomore from Alaska. "You know how once you're around the same thing for so long, it starts to appeal to you? That's sort of my theory on Wellesley College. After a while, you start finding women more appealing.""


While I knew many girls who experimented with other girls because they were legitimately curious, some were just bored. Every school year started with us wondering which extremely beautiful straight first-year with a boyfriend was going to start playing for our team next (and there were many). And while many of these sexual encounters and relationships ended at graduation, and women went back to dating men, others just needed this wake-up call to come to terms with their sexual orientation, and deal with feelings they had been suppressing.

One of my very good lesbian friends commented to me once that while she knows that not all the women who date other women during college are lesbians, the experience gives them a chance to really appreciate other strong, beautiful women, and learn something about themselves along the way.

And then there are plenty, who, like me, went in straight but open-minded, and stayed gay upon graduation. And for this group, I think we all had it in us all along, but it took being surrounded by 2000 incredibly intelligent women to bring it out.

Why else does lesbianism thrive? For one, the campus environment at women's colleges tends to be even more liberal and accepting than other colleges — people transferred because my school was too liberal, and not the other way around. So if you're going to come out while at college, women's colleges are a very good place to do it. When a friend of mine told us sophomore year that she was gay, we gave her a cake with rainbow sprinkles and a little sign that said "You're Gay!" (And then we sat around and listened to Catie Curtis. I really could not make this stuff up.)

Being a lesbian at women's colleges is also very cool — since a lot of straight girls headed to nearby campuses on the weekends to get action, those who stuck around were the cool lesbians, the girls everyone wanted to be friends with (I'm getting nostalgic just writing this).

The same sort of thing has occurred for years at women's colleges, but it was known then as "smashing." Smashing was when a girl would develop an innocent crush on another girl, but it would rarely lead to anything sexual. This still happens now, but today there's far more sex involved, even if the girls turn out to be straight at the end of college.

So there's some insight into the hidden world of 4-year lesbianism that occurs at so many women's colleges, and my attempt to explain the environment that I came out in.