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This article summarizes findings from two ongoing studies charting the development of 167 adolescent and young adult sexual‐minority women. Resultsdocument considerable variation in the quality, relative distribution, and context of women's same‐sex and other‐sex attractions. Furthermore, contrary to conventional wisdom, the timing of a woman's first same‐sex attractions is not systematically related to subsequent features of sexual identity development. Rather, the quality and context of a woman'searly attractions and behavior is more important. We argue that variability in sexual‐minority and heterosexual women's development is best explained by interactions between personal characteristics and environmental contexts, and we urge future studies of the sexual‐minority life course to include women with same‐sex attractions that do not identify as lesbian or bisexual.
Diamond et al. (Sat,) studied this question.