Reflections on "Compulsory Heterosexuality"

Over the twenty-three years since it was written, I probably became more critical of my essay than any other possible reader. I stopped giving permission for its inclusion in anthologies and college readers because I felt it flawed, outdated, and in certain important ways no longer representative of my thinking and the thinking I respected. It also seemed to me that the ensuing years produced more grounded scholarship, more refined critical thinking, and, simply, more witnesses than were available to me in 1979-1980 when I was writing it. "Compulsory Heterosexuality" was an effort of the 1970s explosion of lesbian and feminist consciousness in the United States, revolutionary in its activism and spirit, still groping for historical, intellectual, and analytic tools.