It’s rarely a good idea to reread diaries from your teenage years. Recently though, I found a passage from my own that made me laugh. At 15, on the verge of coming out as a lesbian for the first time, I wrote that I hoped telling people about my gay identity would help me to stop thinking about it all the time. It didn’t work out that way. In fact, I have spent the last three years researching the history of lesbian feminist writing and activism for my PhD. I spend a lot of my waking hours thinking about what it means, and has meant, to be a lesbian.