I've just been re-reading the great article about lesbian visibility that was linked up thread by OhHolyJesus.
andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/where-have-all-the-lesbians-gone-0a7
Here are some particularly heartbreaking quotes.
"But there’s something else going on right now, because it’s not just lesbian bars that are disappearing; it’s lesbian as a category itself.
"After Portland’s last lesbian bar closed in 2010, as Ellena Rosenthal explored in the Willamette Week, there were attempts to start lesbian-specific nights at various venues, but most avoided the L-word to appear inclusive of trans and nonbinary people. One event, called Temporary Lesbian Bar, apologized after being accused of condoning “trans women exterminationism” for using the labrys — a double-headed ax that symbolizes female strength and has long been a part of lesbian iconography — in their logo. That event still exists (or did before Covid), but the organizers make sure to advertise that, despite the name, it’s “open, inclusive, and welcoming to all people.” (Oddly, these fights only seem to occur around women’s space, not men’s. If gay bars, bathhouses, and clubs go extinct, it will be because of Covid, not because of infighting over inclusion.)
"Portland may be a parody of PC, but it’s not an outlier. When I came out in North Carolina in the early 2000s, the term “lesbian” was fading and “queer” was rapidly rising. Most of my peers saw lesbians as stodgy, old-fashioned, and uncool, whereas queers were hip, edgy, and inclusive. Yet “queer” is vague enough to mean nearly anything, so the label says less about your love life and more about your politics. (I propose we all start using the Kinsey Scale instead.)
"The flight from “lesbian” has accelerated since. An academic in the Southeast, who asked to remain anonymous, told me that when she mentioned to a colleague that she’s a lesbian, the colleague “reacted like I’d confessed to being a Confederate Lost-Causer. She told me that the term is outdated and problematic, and I shouldn’t use it.” So the lesbian keeps quiet about her identity: “It’s like living in a second closet.”
"Not long ago, it would have been the Christian right stigmatizing homosexual women. Today, it’s also from people who call themselves queer."
[...]
"There’s been no clear polling on the shift from “lesbian” to “nonbinary,” and so my sense that the lesbian is endangered is purely anecdotal. But there are plenty of anecdotes. After I put out a call on Twitter asking lesbians for input, my inbox filled with emails from women who said vast portions of their friend groups have adopted new labels and pronouns. But none feel like they can openly discuss it, which is apparent by the number who asked to remain anonymous: all of them.
“Lesbians are pretty thin on the ground for Gen Z,” a student I’ll call Halle wrote me. “I have one other lesbian friend, and together we have collected reports of five other lesbians between the U.S. and Canada, of which three are in our generation…. I do not know how things were in olden times for the elder gays, so I admit that a paucity of lesbian friends may in fact be normal for twentysomething gay women in left coast liberal cities, but I like to imagine there was some Arcadian past where short-haired women in Carhartts could gather in groups greater than two.”
"Halle doesn’t live in Tehran. She lives in Seattle. Another young lesbian I spoke to told me she used to identify as both nonbinary and trans. “There’s a really thriving, active online and in-person trans community and queer community,” she said, “but there’s hardly anything for lesbians, and if you try to create that, you get pushback. It’s not cool to be a lesbian in the same way that it’s cool to be queer or trans or nonbinary.”