Modern Family’s Julie Bowen claims that, despite falling in love with a woman before, she is heterosexual.
Bowen said ‘no homo’: “I’m straight. I’ve always been straight. I was in love with a woman for a while but she didn’t love me back,” the “Modern Family” actress revealed in her “Quitters” podcast.
“She liked women but she didn’t like me in that way,” Bowen, 52, continued. “It never really took off so I never really had to challenge my concept of my sexuality.”
Here’s a controversial take for 2023: straight women don’t fall in love with women, just like lesbians don’t fall in love with men. Sexual orientation isn’t a concept, but a reality. Genuine attraction to both sexes is called bisexuality. This is bisexual erasure.
Sure, straight women can have their sexual orientation tested with feelings for women that they need to untangle: is it platonic or something more? But a straight woman eventually understands it was platonic. She doesn’t simply fall in love with a woman without making her bisexual.
Words have meanings. I don’t call myself a lesbian because I want to be one. I don’t call myself a lesbian because I’m abstaining from some hidden attraction to men. I don’t call myself a lesbian because men are jerks and I’m done with them. None of that is true. In fact, those takes are what inform the homophobic idea that lesbianism is deviant behavior rather than innate and natural orientation. Heteronormativity means we may have slept with men in the past because that’s what is normalized. But it cannot be love or actual desire. That involves attraction to men.
I call myself a lesbian because I am not attracted to men and am attracted to women. If I had fallen in love with a man in the past, then I wouldn’t be a lesbian. Yep, even if the love happened over a decade ago. Sure, maybe I wouldn’t want the attraction to men, but sexual orientation isn’t about what makes us comfortable. It’s just an objective truth about ourselves. Like having naturally brown hair. Dying it blonde doesn’t change your roots.
Why can’t people say the word “bisexual”? It seems that if bisexuals are not pretending to be straight, like Bowen, then they’re pretending to be gay when it’s convenient, or using the all-inclusive, no-meaning, “queer” to further alienate themselves from the bisexual label. What’s wrong with articulating our authentic nature, even if it’s not palatable to ourselves? Isn’t the goal to grow comfortable with the truth, rather than live a lie?
A “lesbian” woman I used to run in political circles with–she actually introduced me to radical feminism–sympathized with political lesbianism: the homophobic idea that any woman can choose lesbianism for political, mainly feminist, reasons. Was I surprised to find out, only recently, that she cheated on her girlfriend with a man, has had two boyfriends since then, and says in casual conversation that she “used to be a lesbian”? This is what sends me into a fit of rage over not using the correct label that properly reflects the nature of your sexual orientation. She was always bisexual. The signs were there when she defended political lesbianism to the extent she did. She just lied.
Bowen’s refusal to see herself as anything “less” than heterosexual appears to be straight-up internalized homophobia. But why is she telling the whole world about the love she had for this woman if she experiences shame over it?
Is it a publicity stunt? Does Bowen use “fall in love” loosely? Is it hyperbolic? Did this woman merely test Bowen’s sexual orientation, with Bowen ultimately brushing the “crush” off when the woman didn’t reciprocate feelings? Is this another case of straight women using same-sex allusions to appeal to lesbian fetishism, for attention? Or did Bowen honestly fall in love with a woman without seeing how that defies heterosexuality?
