A black and white photo of a woman in lingerie.

How do you know? 

By Nancy Ford

A not-small earthquake hitting Manhattan. A major eclipse darkening most of America. Nationwide, an ominous redux of armed troops confronting college students protesting U.S. involvement in an unwinnable war.

2024 has already proven to be a wham-bam year, although, without many thank-yous, I am except for Tay and Bey both dropping jaw-dropping albums. And we are not even at the halfway point yet.

Did you notice I didn’t mention Trump in that intro paragraph ticking off all of these various calamities, even though he is the undisputable King of All Calamities? I thought I’d hop down from my soapbox for a minute this month to focus on something far more entertaining than the Orange Roughy. You’re welcome.

While scrolling/strolling through the interwebs recently for something pleasantly lesbian-adjacent to focus this What a World on, I stumbled upon a fun if not-particularly-accurate read. It was pithily titled, 20 Turn-of-the-Century Ways to Tell if a Girl Would Become Gay or if a Woman Was a Lesbian according to the Medical Journals of the Day, originally compiled by Dell Richards.

The list offers an opportunity for us to look back on the silly assholes of Medical History who sought to quell the viral nature of young maidens ripe homosexuality by educating the public regarding how to spot lesbians and subsequently convert or destroy them, Richards writes. You never know when a lesbian is in your neighborhood, driving their car down your street, or shopping next to you at the grocery store.

Well, yes, actually, usually we do know when they are in our immediate periphery, Dell, thanks to a reliable yet largely inexplicable phenomenon we call gaydar.

You thought I was going to say Grindr, didn’t you? Nope. That’s a different conversation for a different time.

I could have used Richards’ handy-dandy list a couple of months ago when Better Half’s mother asked us what gaydar was.

Understand, BH’s mother is a loving, wonderfully accepting model of what anyone, LGBT or not, could possibly want in a parent. She wasn’t questioning the veracity of gaydar. She just wanted to understand how it works.

Go ahead. Explain the dependability and wonder of gaydar without making it sound, at best, like ESP or at worst like voodoo.

Somewhat stumped, BH and I fell back on phrases like, It’s like women’s intuition, and You just know.

The Ways to Tell list addresses the following lesbian tendencies as the medical community observed them between the years of 1890 and 1910. Among those tendencies:

  • Smokes cigarettes in public. Well, what do you know! That explains the closer-than-sisters bond between Lucy Ricardo and Ethel Mertz, and Laura Petrie and Millie Helper. Mary Cooper and Brenda Sparks, not so much.
  • Has a capacity for athletics and an incapacity for needlework and other domestic occupations. Uh, how do we know Megan Rapinoe wouldn’t tear it up with a crochet hook?
  • Tomboy habits. Habits like, maybe, wanting the right to vote? This hint popped up in 1895, right around the same time those notoriously tomboy-ish suffragists were duking it out in the streets fighting for our sacred franchise. If you enjoy your right to vote, maybe thank a lesbian.
  • Dresses in boys’ clothing. There were no lesbian femmes the Gay 90s? But who would play the wife (she asked sarcastically)?
  • Abandons dolls and girlfriends for marbles and masculine games. OK, guilty. Never owned a Barbie. Loved the movie, though. And while some might argue I have on occasion lost my marbles, never have I abandoned a girlfriend.
  • Goes to bars. I guess Richards never heard of demonstrably straight sisters Jenna and Barbara Bush, who enjoyed many, many a margarita in Austin when their daddy W was Texas governor. And thanks for taking that long, long walk back to the early 2000s with me to get to that punch line.
  • Has no breasts to speak of. Please. I haven’t seen my feet since 1966.

The list winds on, mostly reminding us of how far we have progressed as a civilization especially when it comes to our sexuality. Mostly. Well, mostly in blue states.

But here’s the good news: Despite all its calamities, it’s 2024. In most cases, if you want to know if a woman is a lesbian or not, just ask her. If it turns out she is a lesbian, great. If she does not, just tell her you meant it as a compliment.

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