Catatan

In 1997, the actress Anne Heche began a widely publicized roman-
tic relationship with the openly lesbian comedian Ellen DeGeneres

after having had no prior same-sex attractions or relationships.
The relationship with DeGeneres ended after two years, and Heche
went on to marry a man. The actress Cynthia Nixon of the HBO
series Sex and the City developed a serious relationship with a
woman in 2004 after ending a fifteen-year relationship with a man.
Julie Cypher left a heterosexual marriage for the musician Melissa
Etheridge in 1988. After twelve years together, the pair separated

and Cypher—like Heche—has returned to heterosexual relation-
ships. In other cases, longtime lesbians have unexpectedly initiated

relationships with men, sometimes after decades of exclusively
same-sex ties (examples include the feminist folk singer Holly Near,

the activist and writer Jan Clausen, and Deborah Sundahl, a found-
ing editor of the lesbian magazine On Our Backs). What’s going

on? Are these women confused? Were they just going through a
phase before, or are they in one now?