Concerned Women for America profiles Valerie Pegues’ victory over “lesbianism.”
To be lesbian means to be attracted to women.
But Pegues says she was always attracted to men, and while growing up, she never had any thoughts of being intimate with women.
She didn’t kiss a woman until about age 20.
Even after that, the article offers no indication that Pegues felt strongly sexually attracted to women, though it appears she did have sex with some, anyway, mainly because she had issues with men, which she chose not to resolve.
So it seems that Pegues had sex with women not because she was in love with them or because she was attracted to them, but simply because they were there.
In the popular view, this is not “lesbianism.” It is casual sex. It does not surprise me that someone who has sex for no particular reason would also drift into drugs for no particular reason — as Pegues says she did.
After that kiss at age 20, instead of pursuing a responsible course of action (for example, “it didn’t feel right, so I didn’t do it again”), she blames the kiss — not her subsequent day-to-day choices — for destroying her life in some obscure supernatural fashion.
The CWFA article portrays Pegues as a young, unhappy “tomboy” with a remarkable lack of self-esteem, self-discipline, maturity and responsibility, blaming lesbians for her own choice to live life adrift.
It saddens me that the religious right and ex-gay movement remain unwilling to offer positive role models for change: people who really were lesbian, ex-lesbians who remain proud to be tomboys, ex-lesbians who don’t blame their own choices on other people — or people who simply acknowledge that the “tomboy” phenomenon has little or nothing to do with being lesbian.