From straight to lesbian

[thomas1965]

I wonder what could turn a straight woman into a lesbian.
Imagine a lesbian woman who is secretly in love with her straight friend.
What could bring these two together?

I am thinking about a RPG based on a lost bet, where suddenly the straight woman develops feelings for her friend.
Another idea would be a kind of "marriage-of-convenience". Those ideas don't sound too convincing.

Any better ideas?

 

[TheRedChamber]

I wonder what could turn a straight woman into a lesbian.
Imagine a lesbian woman who is secretly in love with her straight friend.
What could bring these two together?

I am thinking about a RPG based on a lost bet, where suddenly the straight woman develops feelings for her friend.
Another idea would be a kind of "marriage-of-convenience". Those ideas don't sound too convincing.

Any better ideas?

I've just completed a story on this very subject this afternoon. (Or rather two 'straight' strangers who hook up and start a relationship) I don't claim to be an expert on such matters but here are some of the tropes I found useful.

- Alcohol. And lots of it. (see also weed)
- A general dissatisfaction with men. Both of my characters were divorced and got chatting about their failed marriages.
- The road not taken. One of them had an aborted same-sex encounter at university and always wondered what might have happened.
- Attraction. The ladies were put in a semi-competative scenario where 'she's hotter than me, becomes she's hot becames she's hot and she thinks I'm hot'
- Sexual frustation. Its either go home unfufilled or try something new.
- Plausible deniabilty. We're just having a girl's night out. She's just crashing at mine. We're just fooling around. It's just one night, doesn't mean anything.
- Fate. The universe (read 'author') wants this to happen and it closing the net around us so it seems inevitable and right.

I'm also trying to navigate my way around 'turns a straight women into a lesbian' which is a loaded phrase. I'm about to write a converstation on the theme of 'why do you keep saying we're lesbians, we're bisexual surely?' - 'yes, but we're in a lesbian relationship and I'd rather focus on that than keep saying bisexual and reminding you that you have other options'

 

[onehitwanda]

Imagine a lesbian woman who is secretly in love with her straight friend.
What could bring these two together?

While I think that everyone lives on a continuity between black and white on all their views and positions, it's very unlikely that a completely straight person is going to be interested in a gay fling. That said, I had "straight" university friends (god, I feel old) who all went over to the Dark Side based on variations of:

• prior dilly-dallying. Water that's flown down a channel once will do it again.
• straight-up confession. Someone told them they were hot and it triggered something in them
• curiosity
• fury with cheating partners and a desire to get even by doing something completely abnormal - and then discovering that they actually liked it
• good old drunk & horny

Personally, I love a good crisis - straight friend rescues lesbian friend from sticky situation (awful date, assault, broken-down-car) and in the ensuing escape sequence the rescued girl confesses her feelings in a moment of weakness, leaving the straight friend confused, and flattered and... curious.

Crises push us well outside our normal self and we do all sort of batshit things in a stressful situation.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

I'm also trying to navigate my way around 'turns a straight women into a lesbian' which is a loaded phrase. I'm about to write a converstation on the theme of 'why do you keep saying we're lesbians, we're bisexual surely?' - 'yes, but we're in a lesbian relationship and I'd rather focus on that than keep saying bisexual and reminding you that you have other options'

Sounds like the sort of conversation you get when a lesbian and a bisexual are in a relationship. There's a cartoon which goes "people keep saying we're in a lesbian relationship... but I've looked around.... everywhere... and I don't see any lesbians..."

The linguistics were odd in the 90s and 00s - lesbian as an adjective meant 'does stuff with women'; as a noun it meant 'doesn't do stuff with men'... Confusing and annoying!

Alcohol, snuggling and pure curiosity/try anything once can all suffice to get a woman and her friend together.

 

[elizaloo]

I'm with RubenR above; is there a particular reason she couldn't just discover a latent Bi side?

Over the last two years I've been kissed by two different women....I found it incredibly arousing. Enough to pursue further? Not really...but since I love kissing in general, I would have been completely open to some serious making out with either of them.

I have a neighbor (one of the women who has kissed me) who is heavily attracted to my husband (and he to her) and I wrote a quick story about how she and I seduced him together...a situation I found appealing.

If I were to write (another story) about a woman 'discovering' an attraction to her friend, it would go something like a situation I had once. Went on vacation with a female friend - had some wine, hung out discussing old times, bedtime came about and she invited me back to her room to continue the discussion. At the time, I panicked - married, totally hetero, had small children - and so I declined. Now that I'm older and the 'lines we can NEVER cross' are blurred with age, it's likely I would embark on that adventure. Because, why the hell not?

To me, that's a more likely scenario than something random.

 

[SimonDoom]

Handled the right way, almost any explanation could work in a story. I wouldn't overthink it. Figure out an angle or explanation that's interesting and erotic to you and run with it.

My experience is that there are always going to be some readers and critics who read your story and say, "That could never happen!" You can't write for those people. Try to be mindful of character transitions and developments and throw a few bones toward plausibility and that will probably be enough, for yourself and for most of your readers.

 

[onehitwanda]

Now that I'm older and the 'lines we can NEVER cross' are blurred with age, it's likely I would embark on that adventure.

Funny how time does that, isn't it.

 

[MillieDynamite]

Just write it as innate yearning curiosity.

 

[Lifestyle66]

I wonder what could turn a straight woman into a lesbian.
Imagine a lesbian woman who is secretly in love with her straight friend.
What could bring these two together?

I am thinking about a RPG based on a lost bet, where suddenly the straight woman develops feelings for her friend.
Another idea would be a kind of "marriage-of-convenience". Those ideas don't sound too convincing.

Any better ideas?

My main couple starts with the wife very straight, as in avoiding other couples with a wife listed as Bi or Bi-curious. In one of their early encounters in a foursome, the other wife reaches over to "play" with her. Then in another encounter, another wife casually asks if she can kiss her, she hesitates, then says "Well, Okay." and the other wife just goes down on her. Next, she's being fucked from behind, and she slowly "allows" herself to be pushed to between the legs of another woman where she explores from that new vantage point (such as Millie's curiosity mentioned above). She discusses these things with their mentors (an older couple) and that wife explains how other women know better what she might want. Within the next chapter or two I plan to write she'll go down on another woman to "return the favor".

So, it's a gradual progression overcoming her homophobia.

I'm not very good at describing the emotional love aspect or getting into her head for a lesbian affair (I write from the husband's first-person POV.) That would probably require her becoming disillusioned with her husband, possibly over jealousy seeing her husband with some woman she liked and played with, or the couple having some major conflict during which she turns to a single woman at a swinger party (I added one of those to my swinger series character list for just such future options.)

 

[Lifestyle66]

Another thought just occurred to me ... you might write the story with the woman's husband or boyfriend leading/pressuring her into a swinger situation (house party with multiple couples), and she gets jealous seeing her guy with another woman. Then yet another woman (her friend at the same party) comforts her, and they just hit it off, catching her at an emotionally vulnerable moment.

 

[Britva415]

"Bi" is what you're looking for.

The whole thing about "turning lesbian" is that besides being unfactual, it feeds the agenda of those who would "turn" gays straight and are afraid of gays because they (pretend to) think gays want to turn their kids.

Do you want to write a story with essentially homophobe propaganda in it?

 

[thomas1965]

Do you want to write a story with essentially homophobe propaganda in it?

Absolutely not. It starts as a platonic friendship with common interests and hobbies. Just a straight woman who has a lesbian friend.

 

[MillieDynamite]

I heard if you can get a straight woman to stand at one end of a rainbow she is turned into lesbian.

Sounds like a load of blarney from a leprechaun who loves to watch women fucking together. He lives next door to Jo and I and constantly ask if he can just sit and watch. His name is David Caruso, actually, it isn't, but he always looked like a leprechaun, didn't he? He looks like a plump one these days.

 

[onehitwanda]

I heard if you can get a straight woman to stand at one end of a rainbow she is turned into lesbian.

I did this once. It turned my hair sexually-frustrated purple but that was about all.

 

[onehitwanda]

...because you're already a lesbian

This explains... everything.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

I heard if you can get a straight woman to stand at one end of a rainbow she is turned into lesbian.

Thanks to my parents living in America, I grew up with a toaster oven. When that episode of Ellen came out, Brits who I had to explain to what a toaster oven was, all jumped to the conclusion that I'd acquired it in a far more interesting way.

Sadly, no.

 

[Bramblethorn]

I wonder what could turn a straight woman into a lesbian.

This is a pretty popular theme in the Lesbian story category, although some handle it better than others.

One that I've seen more often in real life than in fiction: Jane marries Tom, Tom becomes Teresa, Jane finds that her attachment to her spouse is stronger than her attachment to being straight. (Though at that point Jane is more likely to call herself "bi" or "it's complicated" than simply "lesbian".)

Why does she has to turn into a lesbian; wouldn't being a dormant 'Bi' be a more likely option? Or something like 'Pan'? I'm not too well introduced into the linguistics, but it's not unusual that people don't fit in the boxes with the major labels.

Yep. In my experience, the most common "straight-to-lesbian" pathway looks like this:

"Whoah, I saw you kissing Alice. So you're a lesbian now?"
"No. I am bi. I have always been bi. I told you I was bi twenty years ago."
"Oh yeah but I just figured you were saying that to be trendy... So anyway, Alice turned you lesbian? Go her!"
*bisexual death stare*

Language: in practice "bi" and "pan" mean pretty much the same thing, whether somebody calls themselves one or the other says more about their social affiliations than about their orientation.

Another option is "queer", which is broader and basically means "not straight and I'm not pigeonholing myself beyond that". This is more common among younger folk. It used to be an anti-gay slur so older gay folk will sometimes object to that term, but these days a lot of those objections are actually coming from straight people trying to drive wedges.

 

[Britva415]

Absolutely not. It starts as a platonic friendship with common interests and hobbies. Just a straight woman who has a lesbian friend.

Only, she's going to "turn" lesbian in the story?

Do you see my point?

Maybe you're unfamiliar with what I'm talking about.

 

[Britva415]

In my limited experience, it is usually gay men who drive wedges, but that may be a colloquialism in the UK

I'm not totally sure I get what the two of you are saying, but:

"Don't call me queer, I don't like it" isn't wedge-driving.

"Don't call yourself queer, they don't like it" is.

 

[Bramblethorn]

I'm also trying to navigate my way around 'turns a straight women into a lesbian' which is a loaded phrase. I'm about to write a converstation on the theme of 'why do you keep saying we're lesbians, we're bisexual surely?' - 'yes, but we're in a lesbian relationship and I'd rather focus on that than keep saying bisexual and reminding you that you have other options'

Be aware that that one is also a loaded statement. The implication that bi people are more likely to cheat is one that bi people hear a lot, and it can be very harmful.

 

[Bramblethorn]

In my limited experience, it is usually gay men who drive wedges, but that may be a colloquialism in the UK

Tsk tsk! ;-)

In the sense of anti-LGBTQI+ straight folk posing as gay allies and trying to create frictions between different groups in that acronym.

 

[Bramblethorn]

I'm not totally sure I get what the two of you are saying, but:

"Don't call me queer, I don't like it" isn't wedge-driving.

"Don't call yourself queer, they don't like it" is.

The behaviour I was referring to is a mix of the latter, and straight people choosing to find "queer" offensive on behalf of older gay men who didn't ask them to get involved. (In particular, straight people who only ever seem to take an interest in "supporting" gay folk when they can use that as a weapon against some other group.)

 

[Britva415]

Like I wrote before, I'm really not into the labeling-stuff, so am I wrong in thinking that 'Bi' appreciates women for being women and men for being men, (in, appreciating breasts, figure, toned and muscled body) whereas 'Pan' is more focussed on a mental/emotional level?

I always thought that "pan" was just about explicitly signaling potential attraction to more than two genders.

I'd be surprised if there were many bi people who were actually not able to be attracted to enby, trans or other people.

But I can't speak for what pan people think.

 

[thomas1965]

Only, she's going to "turn" lesbian in the story?

Do you see my point?

Maybe you're unfamiliar with what I'm talking about.

No, I don't get your point. If you have a straight and a lesbian woman and want a HEA, what else can you do?

 

[Britva415]

The behaviour I was referring to is a mix of the latter, and straight people choosing to find "queer" offensive on behalf of older gay men who didn't ask them to get involved. (In particular, straight people who only ever seem to take an interest in "supporting" gay folk when they can use that as a weapon against some other group.)

Right, I get this. I just didn't think that gay men were doing the same thing if they were objecting to people using "queer."