3: Lisa Diamond
Welcome to Episode 3, where I discuss the science and politics of sexual identity with LISA DIAMOND of the University of Utah. We’ll also hear about Lisa’s personal story—how she came to identify as a feminist, as a lesbian, and as a scientist, and how all of those identities have converged on a profound body of work. If you’re interested in a deeper dive into this research, you should check out her award-winning 2009 book entitled, SEXUAL FLUIDITY: UNDERSTANDING WOMEN'S LOVE AND DESIRE, about which Hanne Blank of Ms. had this to say:
"Captivating, nuanced, and rigorous… Diamond’s work is vital precisely because sexual fluidity is not a new concept—Freud called his version ‘polymorphous perversity’—but merely one that is typically dismissed. Nor is it news to women, particularly not to a generation for whom a nonspecific ‘queer’ affiliation, or no affiliation at all, is increasingly common. What is so important is not that this fluidity exists, but that someone has finally paid it systematic attention and found that it is in fact not the exception, but may well be the rule."
And while you're at it, check out this truly seminal paper Lisa wrote for Psychological Review on the differences between romantic love and sexual attraction in the determination of sexual orientation. It’s an amazing piece of work, and pretty accessible even for non-specialists. Here it is: WHAT DOES SEXUAL ORIENTATION ORIENT? A BIOBEHAVIORAL MODEL DISTINGUISHING ROMANTIC LOVE AND SEXUAL DESIRE * * * As always, remember that this podcast is brought to you by VQR and the Center for Media and Citizenship. Plus, we're a member of the TEEJ.FM podcast network. AND... The music of CIRCLE OF WILLIS was composed and performed by Tom Stauffer, Gene Ruley and their band THE NEW DRAKES. You can purchase this music at their Amazon page. Find out more at http://circleofwillispodcast.com This podcast is powered by Pinecast.
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Jim Coan: From VQR and the Center for Media and Citizenship, this is episode three of Circle of Willis, where I discuss the science and politics of sexual identity with Lisa Diamond of the University of Utah. We'll also hear about Lisa's personal story, how she came to identify as a feminist, as a lesbian, and as a scientist, and how all of those identities have really converged on a profound body of work. Have a listen.
[Intro Music]
Jim Coan: Hey, everyone, it's Jim Coan. This is my podcast, it's called Circle of Willis. You're not gonna believe this, but this episode features Lisa Diamond, Professor of Psychology and Gender Studies at the University of Utah. And we are going to talk about everything from the science and politics of sexual identity to Lisa's personal experience coming to identify as a lesbian. How about that?
Jim Coan: I feel really lucky to have had the opportunity to talk to Lisa because, well, you know, Lisa is both an excellent conversation partner and an internationally recognized pioneer in the scientific study of sexual identity development. And that's not too easy to pull off, that combination. Lisa's sort-of fearless. I don't know if she’d cop to that, but it's true. For example, one of the things, one of the many things, to admire about Lisa is that she sees no contradiction in having both a kind-of a strong scientific and a strong political point of view. Certainly on questions of sexual identity and bonding, but on a number of other issues as well. And she, in fact, she describes herself as a feminist scientist, which is not to say that her science is uniquely feminist in some way, but rather to sort-of just assert that she's both a feminist and a scientist, and proudly so. Sometimes controversially so. I mean, she's absolutely willing to let politics inform her scientific point of view, but she is equally willing to let science sort-of update and inform her politics.
Jim Coan: Now, in our conversation, we talk a lot about the sample of women, this the sample that she studied for years, for decades now. And, how her pursuit of the sample grew out of a social commitment to bring sexual identity development into the sort-of scientific light. But we also discuss how the systematic study of this sample caused her to almost completely rethink her understanding of same-sex sexuality. And I guess now's a good time to point out that if you're interested in a sort-of a deeper dive into this research, you should check out her award winning 2009 book entitled “Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women's Love and Desire”. I'll link to which you can find at circleofwillispodcast.com. And I guess, while I'm at that, while I'm at it here, you can also find a link there to a truly, really, a truly seminal paper that Lisa wrote for Psychological Review on the differences between romantic love and sexual attraction in the determination of sexual orientation. It's an amazing, amazing piece of work and really pretty accessible, even for non-specialists. I think you should read it.
Jim Coan: But now, I've already said that Lisa spends a lot of time discussing her own sort-of emerging identity as a lesbian, but in listening to the conversation again, as I did recently, just this morning, it struck me that Lisa's is really the story of multiple emerging identities. For example, you know, it's also about the development of her political identity as a feminist, and about the development of her professional identity as a scientist. And what's fascinating to me about her story is how as each of these identities develops, they slowly sort-of intertwine over time to kind of converge on her work as one of our, really one of our most important psychological scientists. I think, you know, I think her story is instructive, you know?
Jim Coan: The way that we develop really can inform our interests and the questions we ask. And it's probably true that we should draw from, or at the very least, sort-of respect the sources of information and identity that constitute who we are as we're developing our professional lives. Lisa's story really illustrates for me how the convergence of personal and professional interests can be powerfully rewarding. Not only for her, but, you know, owing to the body of knowledge she's contributed, really for all of us. At any rate, I'm deeply, deeply grateful that Lisa took the time with me to record this conversation. You know, throughout she's really, she's thoughtful, she's funny, she's wise. And above all, I would say extremely generous in her level of self disclosure. That kind of generosity is really, it's priceless, and I'm so glad to have captured just a little bit of it to share with you here.
[Guitar music fading in]
Jim Coan: So that said, people of the world, struggling students, colleagues, friends, perplexed adolescents everywhere, here's Lisa Diamond.
[Music fades in, then out as conversation begins]
Lisa Diamond: It's the most low brow, you know, you can do it just from your bedroom.
Jim Coan: Yeah, I’m shooting for low-brow. That's what I'm...
Lisa Diamond: And then you can get a huge number of followers, and then it just sort of takes off.
Jim Coan: And just does its own thing. Well, that's why I asked you to come in and talk to me so I can get a huge number of followers.
Lisa Diamond: There you go. That'll work.
Jim Coan: Yeah, see? Yeah, it should. You're kind-of famous. You have a Wikipedia entry.
Lisa Diamond: What?
Jim Coan: Did you know that?
Lisa Diamond: No.
Jim Coan: Yeah. I found it. I don't have a Wikipedia entry. There. How do you do that?
Lisa Diamond: I had no idea.
Jim Coan: Yeah, I found it.
Lisa Diamond: Now I’m sort-of obsessed. Now I feel like I’m…
Jim Coan: Now, don't look at it yet because I don't want to bias you. I don't know if it's true or not.
Lisa Diamond: I'm afraid. I'm afraid of what's on there.
Jim Coan: It said you're a feminist is that...
Lisa Diamond: I am a feminist, dammit!
Jim Coan: See, that's excellent. It's accurate.
Lisa Diamond: It's accurate.
Jim Coan: Okay, so, I guess, when I think of you, I think of feminism. I also think of sexual identity. And you've sort of blown my mind with that because I really...
Lisa Diamond: Just doing my job.
Jim Coan: Well, you know, I didn't, I never… I, well, part of it is that I come from a very working class background. Good people, right? Not bad people. But definitely sexist people. Definitely homophobic people.
Lisa Diamond: That’s sort of both my parents, you know, my parents came from... My mom's from a very small town in Florida, and still has a lot of, like, sexism and racism. And my dad, you know, was raised, you know, very poor and working class. His father died when he was 16. So his mom was... so they both came from not explicitly conservative, but kind of traditional, and I think especially my mom from the South. I mean, when we visit her relatives it's like a different world. It's like, you know, a much more segregated world.
Jim Coan: Yeah.
Lisa Diamond: And that's always a bit of a shock.
Jim Coan: But did she go to college?
Lisa Diamond: She did go to college. She is interesting, she has a background that I didn't know a lot about until I started doing interviews with her. And I was, sort of blew my mind because I didn't know that much about her background. And, you know, she was in this really kind of small town where education for girls was not a big thing.
Jim Coan: Right.
Lisa Diamond: And, at some point, she decided that she really wanted to get out of Lakeland and go to college. But there was no money. Her piano teacher, because my mom was a pianist and she and she ended up becoming a piano teacher, her piano teacher found a bunch of scholarships for her to apply to and sent my mom on these, you know, made tapes of her playing piano. And she got a scholarship to pay for the first year. But then she showed up to – at Wesleyan, Georgia. And her mom was not in favor of it. She was like, this is crazy. We don't have enough money for you, you know this, but you know, just trying to get through the first year. And she ended up being something like $200 short.
Jim Coan: 200? Come on…
Lisa Diamond: And her piano teacher took a collection from other families in the community.
Jim Coan: In Lakeland.
Lisa Diamond: Yeah, to support my mom.
Jim Coan: Lakeland, Florida.
Lisa Diamond: Lakeland, Florida.
Jim Coan: And that's, that's in Georgia, the Wesleyan at Georgia is in Atlanta?
Lisa Diamond: No.
Jim Coan: No? Where is it?
Lisa Diamond: I don't remember exactly. I visited it once. But it's small.
Jim Coan: Really? It's small town? Like something like Athens, that kind of small?
Lisa Diamond: Yeah. And I remember at one point, you know, as because Lakeland, again, is a kind of... I remember saying to my mother at some point, I don't know how you came out of that cloud. How did you, you know, how did you know to, you know, how did you not end up there. And mom looked at me and she said, I was not going to stay.
Jim Coan: So she wanted out.
Lisa Diamond: She wanted out, and she got out. And I gained so much respect for her because...
Jim Coan: Yeah, because that's, that's tricky.
Lisa Diamond: She became a really fiery…
Jim Coan: When was that? That was like the mid 60s?
Lisa Diamond: Let's see, she and my dad got married ‘64. So I think she got out around... She was born in ‘43. So she got out when she was 18.
Jim Coan: Yeah.
Lisa Diamond: But she didn't finish college because she met my dad during the summer.
Jim Coan: Right.
Lisa Diamond: Working as a waitress in New Jersey.
Jim Coan: Wait, how… I don't know, that's a lot of story there.
Lisa Diamond: Well, she just, you know, from one of her roommates, she was like, “I need to make money over the summer or else I can't keep going to college.”
Jim Coan: So go to New Jersey to make money?
Lisa Diamond: And, well, that was where a lot of the Catskills, like there were a lot of these sort of summer clubs for the New York set...
Jim Coan: She got a job.
Lisa Diamond: She got a job as a waitress, and that's where she met my dad, at the New Jersey Shore during the summer. And they knew each other for three months. And he proposed, and so she left college.
Jim Coan: They did that then
Lisa Diamond: I know.
Jim Coan: People did that then.
Lisa Diamond: They did that then.
Jim Coan: They were nuts!
Lisa Diamond: And that kind-of shocked me. And her mom totally disapproved and wouldn't go to the wedding.
Jim Coan: Course she did. Wouldn't go to the wedding... Yeah, well, there you go.
Lisa Diamond: Yeah.
Jim Coan: Three months. And your dad was going to med school?
Lisa Diamond: Yeah, yeah. And he had also sort of pulled himself up by his bootstraps to...yeah.
Jim Coan: He was from New Jersey?
Lisa Diamond: He was from, well, he spent his childhood in Washington Heights in New York.
Jim Coan: New York.
Lisa Diamond: And then they moved on to New Jersey.
Jim Coan: So, on, sort-of on the Northern part of Manhattan?
Lisa Diamond: And then went to Rutgers for undergrad.
Jim Coan: Yeah. In Newark?
Lisa Diamond: Pardon?
Jim Coan: In Newark?
Lisa Diamond: Yeah. Yeah. So they both had these really hardscrabble backgrounds. And we're both really... and so then they end up in Los Angeles
Jim Coan: Los Angeles.
Lisa Diamond: Which is like for, you know, someone raised in the winters of New York, for my dad was like, you know, this sounds good!
Jim Coan: It does, I bet. I mean, you're a physician in the early 70s in Los Angeles, it's warm…
Lisa Diamond: Warm weather, and, you know, he went to...
Jim Coan: It’s sunny all the time.
Lisa Diamond: …Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, which was at that time, was really becoming like a rising star for cardiovascular medicine, which was what, you know, he ended up doing. So it was one of those, you know, right place right time.
Jim Coan: And that's where you spring forth out of the void. So you're an LA girl…
Lisa Diamond: Born in LA.
Jim Coan: Yeah. Yeah. And raised.
Lisa Diamond: And raised.
Jim Coan: And how did it affect you?
Lisa Diamond: I really was not crazy about LA, so I don't know how it affected me. And it's funny, because as I got older, and especially when I went to college in Chicago, people would say to me, “you don't seem like you're from LA. You seem like an East Coast person.” And everyone has always told me that I seem like I'm from New York.
Jim Coan: Yeah, you do have a New York-y kind of vibe.
Lisa Diamond: Yeah, you know, I don't… who knows? You know… what that means.
Jim Coan: You know LA, you know, LA can have a similar kind of vibe, it seems to me sometimes. It depends on what part. LA is very diverse.
Lisa Diamond: Yeah.
Jim Coan: But there are parts of LA that have that sort of already, you know, cultural...
Lisa Diamond: And I did a lot of theater. I mean, because it's LA...
Jim Coan: Yeah.
Lisa Diamond: I was into acting at a very young age. And I tried to do it, you know, because the bad thing about being raised in LA, if you're into theater at all, is like, if you show any aptitude for anything theatrical, then everyone's like, always try and get an agent and start to do commercials. And blah-blah-blah-blah-blah…
Jim Coan: Right.
Lisa Diamond: And that's actually really hard to do. If you really want to do that, it's like a full time job. And so like, I was going to an acting school where everybody else and my acting classes was like, doing professional stuff. There was, like, people who ended up being, like, famous in my... I think Stephen Dorff was like in my classes.
Jim Coan: Stephen Dorff… Wasn’t he like an action guy or something?
Lisa Diamond: Yeah, he did some, like, big movie and I was like, oh my god… But that, like, I was not... you know, I was never successful with that. I never managed to get an agent or do anything and so I felt like, Oh... I was just doing plays, you know? But it was, it's hard in LA to you know, just want to do that because everyone was trying to get you to do some toothpaste commercial, and that was not my thing.
Jim Coan: That wasn't your thing. What was your thing? I mean... Did you identify as sort of feminist early on, or were you sort-of politically…
Lisa Diamond: It was not until later in high school.
Jim Coan: High school? Well, high school is sort of like, I mean, I think about, if you're gonna get that way, it's not going to be before high school.
Lisa Diamond: You know, Betty Friedan, because I went to an all girls high school...
Jim Coan: Is that how you pronounce it? Friedan? I thought it was “Freeden.” Oh, my whole life. I've just, my mind blown all of a sudden.
Lisa Diamond: And she came to talk at my high school. I think when I was in like, ninth grade, maybe? I didn’t even know who she was.
Jim Coan: Ninth? Friedan goes to your high school?
Lisa Diamond: Yeah.
Jim Coan: In the ninth grade?
Lisa Diamond: When I was in the ninth grade. And, you know, she was an old curmudgeon, you know, at that point. But it was kind of controversial, because, you know, this was an all girl school. It was, you know... There were a lot of sort-of society girls there, and a lot of them thought that feminism was just, like, not for them. So it was very controversial, and I remember hearing people debate, you know, like, whether it was a good idea that Betty Friedan was coming in, I was like, I don't even know who Betty Friedan is.
Jim Coan: This is what, like, 1985?
Lisa Diamond: This would have been... Yeah, I guess 1985. And she just said, you know, “this is what feminism is: If you think that you should be able to make your own decision about whether you want a job, or whether you have a family or whether you do both, if you just think that that should be your own decision to make, welcome to feminism.”
Jim Coan: And that just seemed pretty obvious to you. Yeah.
Lisa Diamond: And I was like, Oh, my God, really? You know, and...
Jim Coan: Why? Because you didn't… you hadn't entertained that?
Lisa Diamond: I don’t think I had –
Jim Coan: Oh, one of the things that I thought. I remember first learning about feminism, and one of the things that I think that that struck me when I was first experiencing that was I hadn't thought about the fact that those things weren't true. Until someone was telling me that that ought to be true. Like it didn't… I mean, I was sort of, I mean, not that I didn't see sexism happening. But I hadn't really reflected upon it.
Lisa Diamond: Yeah, I don't have a clear memory of what I thought before that. I just hadn't, you know... I think maybe it was just again, right person, right time. My brain was sort of ready for it. And my closest friends, you know, my very best friend, who I've known since I was five, is a woman named Janice Kim. And she was the child... she was a Korean child of immigrants. You know, her parents basically came over here, had her, and she didn't speak any English. And that she went through kindergarten twice, just to learn English. And then we met, you know, in elementary school, and she was always really interesting because she knew from a very early age, and again, it was a sort of classic Korean immigrant experience of: I need to succeed for my parents, because I'm gonna support them. She was an only child.
Jim Coan: She's gonna make the change. She’s gonna be the vanguard.
Lisa Diamond: So she, even at that age, she was, like, thinking about her future and thinking about, you know, career. And so, because she was so career focused, she was like “that, you know, that was an amazing speech. That is awesome. Like, feminism is awesome.” And so she sort of helped to articulate for me, you know, like, yeah! So a part of it was hearing Betty Friedan and part of it was having a group of friends that were like, well, hell yeah.
Jim Coan: Yeah.
Lisa Diamond: You know, hello!
Jim Coan: And you were in an all girls for private school?
Lisa Diamond: Yeah.
Jim Coan: Boarding School?
Lisa Diamond: No, not boarding school. Just private school.
Jim Coan: Just private school. So that probably helped a bit too.
Lisa Diamond: Yeah. I mean, I thought it was great. Because there wasn't, you know, all this attention on how you looked, you know? We had uniforms.
Jim Coan: Right.
Lisa Diamond: You know, you just showed up for class, wearing your uniform with your hair all crazy. And it wasn't this, you know, when I see a television series where you see people at high school and there's like, it's basically a meat market. You know? And it wasn't like that at all.
Jim Coan: So you went on, you went to the University of Chicago, right? For undergrad? You must have been a really good student.
Lisa Diamond: I was a very good student.
Jim Coan: Holy crap.
Lisa Diamond: But my dad was really disappointed that I didn't want to go to, you know, Harvard or Yale or Princeton.
Jim Coan: Really?
Lisa Diamond: Every, ‘cause, yeah. Because, you know, he had in his mind, I think he was really proud of me, but he had a certain… You know, I think University of Chicago was sort of lower on the radar. And so I, you know, I quickly figured out...
Jim Coan: You don't think about it. It's not as much a part of the popular... You know, they take that as a badge of honor.
Lisa Diamond: Exactly.
Jim Coan: It's where it's where fun goes to die. That's the slogan
Lisa Diamond: And that was, you know, because I was not like a social, you know, kind of kid. So, but I think as…Once I was there, he, you know, I think he understood the reputation.
Jim Coan: Oh my God, it's an incredible reputation..
Lisa Diamond: It’s an amazing, well, I mean… I think in some ways it has more of a reputation as a place for graduate study than undergrad.
Jim Coan: Yeah, I think that’s probably true.
Lisa Diamond: And at that time, the ratio of graduate students, there were two graduate students for every undergrad student. So there were a lot of graduate students.
Jim Coan: Oh my God. So that gave you a lot of exposure to graduate school as well, probably.
Lisa Diamond: Somewhat. Although, you know, it was almost like a big mystery. The thing that was funny, you know, because I did a lot of theater and I did a lot of music. And I was always meeting first or second year graduate students. Because, as we all know, after the first or second year, you're really working hard, so you just kind of disappear.
Jim Coan: Yeah.
Lisa Diamond: And so I was like, how long does graduate school take? Because the only graduate students I've ever met...
Jim Coan: It takes two years.
Lisa Diamond: Like they just, they disappeared. Like poof! They're gone. You know, I met the first years and the second years, and then, like, they go underground.
Jim Coan: Well, so what do you do at University of Chicago? Did you... were you psych major?
Lisa Diamond: I was a psych major. Sort of by accident.
Jim Coan: By accident? Man, me too, actually.
Lisa Diamond: Because I had a very... My roommate was my very best friend. And also like, I was completely in love with her. And...
Lisa Diamond: How'd that go?
Lisa Diamond: We were, well, it never turned out into anything but like, you know, if it wasn't for her...
Jim Coan: But by this time, are you fully identifying as a lesbian?
Lisa Diamond: No way. At that point I just, I viewed.... the way I dealt with my sexuality in high school was I believed that I was just not a sexual person. And I, apparently my friend – I've forgotten this – I announced to my friends in 10th grade that I was never planning to get married or have any relationships.
Jim Coan: Wow.
Lisa Diamond: And they were like, um, oh, okay, all right. But then I did.
Jim Coan: They're like, what, what's the… Why does this come up?
Lisa Diamond: I don't even remember. But at around, I think around my junior year, I'd gotten involved with some community theater. And one of the people who was involved in that group ended up being my sort of first like, major boyfriend. And it was perfect because we started, you know, becoming close friends. And then he left to go to college at Berkeley. So it was perfect, right? Because we had no... he was gone! And so we just wrote letters. And that was perfect for me because he was smart and funny. And he was so smart. And, you know, really intellectually challenging. But he was gone.
Jim Coan: He was gone. Thank God.
Lisa Diamond: So that worked out, you know, pretty well. And then he went to England, which was even better!
Jim Coan: You went to England?
Lisa Diamond: No, he did.
Jim Coan: Oh, he did. Yeah, that's even further away.
Lisa Diamond: Even better!
Jim Coan: Can't fool around.
Lisa Diamond: And so I didn't really spend that much time trying to understand my sexuality at that point. My, I was...
Jim Coan: But you were sort of in love with your roommate.
Lisa Diamond: Well, that was high school, but you know, so high school boyfriend was the one that was in England.
Jim Coan: Oh, I see.
Lisa Diamond: But I was also in love with my best friend in high school. Who… It was like a really intense emotional relationship.
Jim Coan: Yeah.
Lisa Diamond: So I was able to sort of explain that to myself as like, we're just you know, no one understands our intense…
Jim Coan: Right. We have an... You know, that's also a thing. Yeah, that's a...
Lisa Diamond: It totally is a thing.
Jim Coan: Yeah.
Lisa Diamond: I remember, you know, there was this dicey period in junior year where we were all in the AP English class, and we were reading “Mrs. Dalloway”, which is like this famous lesbian novel.
Jim Coan: Very important book.
Lisa Diamond: But we had just interpreted it as like a version of our friendship. And we're like, oh my God! You know, this is the first novel that understands our relationship. And the other people in the class are kind of like...Mm…
Jim Coan: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah….
Lisa Diamond: So I never actually actively questioned my sexuality in high school. I had alternative explanations, I guess was assigned to a part of me for everything. Like I had this boyfriend. You know? He was smart, but he was gone.
Jim Coan: You were smart. You were really capable of rationalizing everything.
Lisa Diamond: Absolutely!
Jim Coan: Clever people do that. They're very good at that.
Lisa Diamond: But, and, it wasn't until I went to college, and just immediately was just so struck by my roommate. And it was also so obvious to me at that point that my feelings for her were erotic and not just emotional.
Jim Coan: Yeah that takes it up a level. That's a different level.
Lisa Diamond: Yeah, you know, and so that's when sort of the shit hit the fan. Before then I hadn't, you know, I was not worried about it. I was just like, I'm just not a sexual person. I just don't enjoy sex with men and that's no big deal.
Jim Coan: So was your mind blown open? Or was it, did it seem like this... This is understandable, or this was inexorable, or this is deeply part of my identity, or what?
Lisa Diamond: It was pretty blown open. I remember walking around the streets of Chicago, thinking like, what am I going to do? And I couldn't even imagine telling my parents, you know? I just remember thinking, there is no solution to this. There's just no, there's no way that this is gonna work. And now, you know, now it's like, my life is so completely fine, that it's... I find it really instructive for me to remind myself of that, because I think sometimes the queer community can be really unforgiving of folks who take a long time to come out.
Jim Coan: Is that true?
Lisa Diamond: Yeah. And so I have to remember my really freaked out, you know, 18 year old self. And I have to, like, consciously remember that feeling of fear.
Jim Coan: Well, it also reminds me of the It Gets Better campaign, you know? That whole thing that seemed like a very important message that time, you know, is part of this, you know? That time marches on and things change over time. And it can be hard to see how things are improving when you're in it.
Lisa Diamond: And also, I mean, the thing that I find frustrating now is that, you know, if you're living in a big urban center, things are great. But there's a lot of, you know, queer folks living in Lakeland and Nebraska. And I think the meat is like, oh wow, it's cool to be gay now. And I'm like, no, it's not! Not for someone…
Jim Coan: Oh, my God yeah.
Lisa Diamond: …You know, in rural Michigan, it's not. I mean, the Internet has changed everything. I mean, I can't imagine… I probably would have come out so much earlier if the internet had existed.
Jim Coan: Yeah.
Lisa Diamond: You know? With it just... I remember walking to the areas where I knew what the gay newspaper in Chicago was. And I would go and I would get it, and I would bring it home. And I would read it cover to cover. And then I would rip it up into pieces and take it to a distant trashcan to throw it away. So that my roommates just did not know.
Jim Coan: Wow. Wow. How about that? Yeah. I mean, I remember, you know, going to high school in Spokane, Washington, which is a really conservative place. Really, really very conservative. Then moving to Seattle and being you know, what…
Lisa Diamond: What is happening?
Jim Coan: What in the hell? And, but my early explanation was, you know, gay people are from big cities. And really, it was only really driven home when I moved to…
Lisa Diamond: I grew up in LA. Like I could have actually had... There's a huge gay community in LA. But I didn't know anything about it.
Jim Coan: Yeah.
Lisa Diamond: And also, when I was growing up, you didn't think about like, gay as meeting lesbians. You thought of gay as being gay men.
Jim Coan: Yeah.
Lisa Diamond: You know that time in the 80s, there wasn't as much visibility about women as there was about men. So I just thought of, like, you know, West Hollywood as gay men. Not any women.
Jim Coan: You know, on your mental map.
Lisa Diamond: Yeah.
Jim Coan: Yeah. Well, and it's important for all of us. You were saying that, you know, if the internet had existed then,, that things might have unfolded differently. I think that's really true. People don't realize, even by the 80s and 90s, it's still pretty fraught. I mean, I remember going to Seattle and trying to find a roommate, and I found a roommate. Nice guy. We're talking and I learned he was gay. And I said, yeah, I'm not going to be your roommate. This was me. I'm a nice guy. I'm a nice guy that wanted to do the right thing. But I...
Lisa Diamond: One of the things that I have, like, such deep shame about is when I fell in with the community theater crowd, when I was around in 10th grade. And so I again, I was clueless then. I thought my intense, you know, best friendship was purely platonic.
Jim Coan: Yeah.
Lisa Diamond: And this community theater group was run by four openly gay men, all but one of which died of AIDS. And at that time, the guy who was in charge was infected at that point and actually had active AIDS and I didn't know it. But at some point, like I remember when I first got involved with him, I remember making some anti-gay AIDS joke just out of ignorance and not realizing. And like I remember the other...
Jim Coan: Yeah, ‘cause it was just what people did, right?
Lisa Diamond: And other folks were like looking at me and then someone was like, do you realize like, all the people in charge are gay men and one of them does in fact have AIDS and I was like…
Jim Coan: Oops.
Lisa Diamond: And I think oh my God, here I am like, little miss like lesbian poster child, but in 10th grade, I was as ignorant as they came. I was as ignorant as everyone around me. And I think it just shows that that stuff is in the culture.
Jim Coan: Yeah. It's implicit. It’s part of the water we’re swimming in.
Lisa Diamond: It's implicit. It's all around you. It's all around you.
Jim Coan: Yeah, I think that's right. So you realize…You sort of come to terms with your, your emerging sexuality…
Lisa Diamond: In college.
Jim Coan: In college. What do you do about it?
Lisa Diamond: I ended up... There wasn't a lot going on on campus. So I ended up getting involved with the National Organization for Women chapter in Chicago. There was a big chapter in Chicago. So I just started showing up to volunteer. And I ended up on the board of directors, you know.
Jim Coan: NOW, right? As an undergrad?
Lisa Diamond: Yeah. Yeah.
Jim Coan: Holy shit.
Lisa Diamond: Well, because, you know…
Jim Coan: How’d that happen?
Lisa Diamond: Well, I came to realize, you know, soon after volunteering, that there were a lot of folks who come and go, and there are a lot of folks who are not that committed. So when someone shows up, and they're committed, they like, grab them. They're like, okay, you're not flaky, you know? We need non-flaky people. And, so that was really great because at that point, I was deciding what I wanted to do with my life. And I'm like, do I want to do activism? Or do I want to do academia? So a lot of the work that I did with Chicago NOW was me trying to figure out what I wanted to do. At that time, there was a lot of activism around the abortion issue going on because that was right before the big Casey decision. So I got trained in clinic defense, because there, this was the time that which the anti abortion activists were trying to shut down the clinics. So there was a whole, like, you know, all-day training where you learned how to physically protect women, how to link arms, how to, you know, how to get women in and out of the clinics. So we did a lot of clinic defense. We did a lot of, you know, policy activism...
Jim Coan: This was all early 90s?
Lisa Diamond: Yeah. around ‘91 and ‘92.
Jim Coan: Yeah.
Lisa Diamond: And that was amazing. And that was where I met my first lesbian lover.
Jim Coan: Lesbian lover.
Lisa Diamond: Who was 16 years older than I was. Which is not that uncommon, I think...
Jim Coan: No, it's not that uncommon.
Lisa Diamond: I mean, she was pretty freaked out about like, you know, you're, you know, “I'm, like, spoiling you,” and I'm like, “I'm a willing puppet. It’s okay.”
Jim Coan: Because you're, what, how old were you at that point?
Lisa Diamond: At that point I was 19.
Jim Coan: Well, so you start to really experience it. Did you talk to your parents? What happened?
Lisa Diamond: I did. It did not go great.
Jim Coan: It did not go great?
Lisa Diamond: My mom, well, my mom was okay. Mainly because I was crying. And, she I think, you know, turned out to sort of be freaking out on the inside, but she did a good job of being like, I love you. You know, I just want you to be happy. My father did not believe me. He thought that it was a political act. And he said because he was because he was a bit upset that I was like becoming this feminist, activist. Yeah, so he was like...
Jim Coan: ‘Cause you’re working for the National Organization of Women. They're just putting ideas in your head.
Lisa Diamond: You don't have to be a zealot. You know, at some point, he called me a zealot. And I'm like, it's not really a zealot thing. So that was, that was not great. But my sister, who I'm so close to, was great. And apparently what happened is she sort of sat my parents down to give them a talking to and was like, you know what?
Jim Coan: This your older sister? How much older?
Lisa Diamond: Yeah, she was like, whatever you guys are dealing with… She's two and a half years older. Whatever you're dealing with, you need to not burden Lisa with this.
Jim Coan: Yeah, good advice.
Lisa Diamond: So go ahead. Go to therapy. Go to PFLAG. Work out what you need to work out. But do not share your bad feelings with her. Go ahead.
Jim Coan: That’s pretty wise. It’s pretty wise.
Lisa Diamond: It is pretty wise. So I was like, afterwards, I'm like, wow, I guess you know, it was a little rocky, but everything went okay. And I found out that, like, they actually were struggling quite a bit. But they kept it to themselves.
Jim Coan: They were thrown into turmoil. Yeah. That's what parents... Parents need to do that sometimes, to work it out by themselves. They need to deal with that.
Lisa Diamond: Yeah. They did not like my first lover. She was really butch and I think that freaked them out.
Jim Coan: Yeah, that's a little freaky for...
Lisa Diamond: And so I think that was part of it was they were like, “waaaa.” You know? And then I went to grad school, I met my current wife, like right away. Like immediately.
Jim Coan: And that was it. That was at Cornell?
Lisa Diamond: That was at Cornell.
Jim Coan: So you got your undergraduate degree in psychology?
Lisa Diamond: Yeah. And that was the thing. So the reason I got it in psychology is because my roommate in college who I was totally in love with. I was gonna...
Jim Coan: Oh, yeah, we lost that thread!
Lisa Diamond: We got sidetracked. Yeah. So, I was going to major in anthropology because the, you know, Chicago has got an amazing anthropology... So all the courses that I really liked were in anthropology. And then she announced that she was going to major in anthropology and I thought it would be bad for our friendship if we had the same major. I thought that would make us competitive. So I'm like, okay, then I'll switch to psychology, so that we don't have the same major.
Jim Coan: You’re kidding.
Lisa Diamond: And that's why I became a psychologist. And then she ended up switching to psychology too. So all of that was for naught.
Jim Coan: What a pain in the ass.
Lisa Diamond: Yeah. So if I had not been in love with her, I might have been an anthropologist.
Jim Coan: Well, anthropology lost out.
Lisa Diamond: Yeah, there you go.
Jim Coan: So, why did you decide to...
Lisa Diamond: The anthropology department kind of well, at that time...
Jim Coan: Yeah, it wasn't like what it is now, yeah.
Lisa Diamond: It wasn't very interesting. There were boring classes. Like, I'm not even sure... I don't know. It was weird. It just shows how random these things are.
Jim Coan: So how did you decide to... Did you apply widely to grad school, or did you… Was Cornell the only one you were…?
Lisa Diamond: I did figure out, because I took a year off between graduation and grad school. So, I didn't feel panicked, and I knew that I needed to find, like, a topic to study.
Jim Coan: Yeah.
Lisa Diamond: And, you know, because I was a newly out person, I spent a lot of time in the bookstore, like reading all the books about gay people.
Jim Coan: Sure, why not?
Lisa Diamond: And I discovered a book written by one of the faculty at Chicago, Gilbert Hurt, called “Children of Horizons.” And it was about the adolescent gay youth group in Chicago called the Horizons Project. And that was a time that gay youth groups did not exist. It was just not on people's radar that you could be a gay teen. So this was a revolutionary kind of book. And I was like, oh my God, like, this is what I want to do. Like, this is new, it's interesting. Like, I don't see a lot of women in these stories. And so that I hooked on that as like, okay, that's gonna be the thing that I apply to graduate school to do. I want to do stuff on gay youth with a focus on women. ‘Cause no one was doing it.
Jim Coan: That sounds... Yeah. Wow. So that really lit your fire, as they say.
Lisa Diamond: Yeah. Yeah. And so that, you know, it was hard, because there were only two places that had faculty who were doing gay stuff, right? This was a time that...
Jim Coan: Two places?
Lisa Diamond: Yeah. And, University of Chicago was one of them because Gilbert Hurt was there. And Ritch Savin-Williams at Cornell. So everywhere else I applied were folks that had stuff doing adolescence, but they didn't have stuff doing… Like University of Michigan.
Jim Coan: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Lisa Diamond: And it was just basically for me, the decision was, do I want to have to educate my own advisor about gay stuff? Or do I want to go to a place with someone who already kind of knows the landscape?
Jim Coan: Could thinking, you know, your activism being involved with NOW and your sort of activism, with regard to your emerging identity... How did the science fit with that? I mean, did science seem very compatible with that? Or did you, was there any tension? Sometimes I think that there's tension around those kinds of advocacy...
Lisa Diamond: Well, I think so, you know, I mean… You know, my father was an academic. He was an academic cardiologist. And starting from when I was, like, 12, or 13, he would actually give me his journal articles to edit and review. Which I didn't, I was like, what. I didn't even understand what journal articles were.
Jim Coan: He was a cardiologist?
Lisa Diamond: He was a cardiologist. But, you know, he basically did a whole lot of work on applying Bayesian statistical methods to the prediction of cardiovascular disease.
Jim Coan: You’re kidding. Shit, that's pretty advanced.
Lisa Diamond: It was very advanced. And you know, not just because he's my father, I'll toot his horn. He sort of revolutionized the field of predictive cardiology.
Jim Coan: Wow.
Lisa Diamond: So but his papers were really statistical and theoretical and I couldn't understand.
Jim Coan: Like, why am I editing this?
Lisa Diamond: Yeah. I have no idea. I don't know what a receiver operating characteristic is dad, I don't know. I can't. But he could tell that I had an aptitude for writing and for science, and he wanted to encourage that. So, he wanted me to go into academia. He loved that side of me and that was a part of our connection. So I think a part of me wanted to please him and wanted to be a scientist. And when I discovered that there was sort of a field of scientific research on queer people it was like, oh!
Jim Coan: That's me. I’m the target for doing that.
Lisa Diamond: I can do both. I can do something that satisfies the activist side of me, but it can also be grounded in science, because this is a legitimately understudied phenomenon.
Jim Coan: Yeah. Knowledge is good, knowledge is good. Knowledge will help.
Lisa Diamond: And you know, yeah so... I think that's what happened. And also, you know, when you're a smart kid and you go to college, you don't really know what to do. Like, I didn't really know what jobs were out there. In the year between graduating and going to grad school, I was working at the University of Chicago's basically rape crisis center. And that was just really kind of frustrating and didn't feel very helpful, because there was there was like a gang rape that was not being dealt with very effectively by the administration. So I felt like wow, I'm not really able to do anything, you know, of value. Like who I am, this activist, and I'm failing at, you know, advocacy and activism. I think I'll go back to the safe world of books and deep thoughts. Yeah.
Jim Coan: So you get to Cornell, do you meet Judy right away?
Lisa Diamond: I met Judy within like two weeks.
Jim Coan: Holy crap.
Lisa Diamond: Yep.
Jim Coan: That's, well, yeah, that's settled that
Lisa Diamond: Wasted no time.
Jim Coan: Good. I guess. I mean, that, I don't know.
Lisa Diamond: And it was interesting, at that time, people did not go to graduate school to work on gay stuff. It was, you know, most of them...
Jim Coan: I mean, it would have been very specialized.
Lisa Diamond: Well, it was... More than that it was just stigmatized. It wasn't really... It's hard to remember now how dangerous it was. And Ritch Savin-Williams, my advisor, you know, ended up telling me that when my application came in, he had been about to retire early. Because since he had, you know, he was a full professor and he had shifted to doing work on, you know, queer youth. And basically, people stopped applying to work with him. No graduate students wanted to touch it with a 10 foot pole.
Jim Coan: Wow.
Lisa Diamond: So he was like, well, if this is the way, and he had gotten a re-specialization in clinical, so he had started seeing, you know… He was doing research, but he was also seeing clients. And he was thinking, you know, I think I’ll just…
Jim Coan: I can apply my knowledge and skills in a different way.
Lisa Diamond: Yeah. And he was like, I think I'm just gonna leave the whole academic thing behind. And then he said, like, “I was in that thought process, and your application came in. And I was like, wow, a graduate student is willing to actually do gay research? Like, wow! And so it's like, okay, I'll try this out a little longer.” And then he ended up, you know, he just recently retired. So he ended up, you know, staying and doing, like, some amazing work over the past 20 years. And like, I saved your career.
Jim Coan: Yeah. Well, you saved it for all of us.
Lisa Diamond: Because it was just… It really was that uncommon. And because it was a small niche, I felt really isolated from the other graduate students.
Jim Coan: Yeah.
Lisa Diamond: Because I would go to the big conferences, like Society for Research on Child Development and APS. And there wasn't anything going on with regard to sexual orientation or LGBT issues. And so I just felt like I'm doing something that no one else cares about. And, you know, when you go to these conferences, you see all these hardworking graduate students wearing little suits and carrying their posters, and they know exactly who to talk to. They're, like, already angling for the jobs they're gonna get, the Post-Docs... And I just, like, it's kind of it was, it was very intimidating. And I just felt like I'm not a part of that world at all, because the work I'm doing… No one's gonna hire like, I'm just not a part of this world. And I came close to quitting, you know, several times, because I would go to these conferences, and I found it so demoralizing, and I was like, there's no way... there's no way I'm gonna succeed at this.
Jim Coan: Well, you know, it's, you know, it's really funny, or maybe not fun. Maybe this isn't funny. Maybe this is more sad-ish. But I didn't identify... I mean, when I thought about Lisa Diamond, and Lisa Diamond's work, I thought about attachment.
Lisa Diamond: That started in graduate school!
Jim Coan: And, you know, attachment and bonding, and attachment and health. And so I didn't think about sexuality until I'd known you for a while longer.
Lisa Diamond: What's interesting is that I found that like, you know, because I started doing the attachment stuff, they're sort of like, I have two sets of colleagues. Some know a lot about the attachment stuff I do and like, had no idea about the sexuality stuff. Some know about the sexuality stuff, and have no idea about the attachment stuff. So I always felt like in some ways, I have these like, dual sets of colleagues.
Jim Coan: Right.
Lisa Diamond: That didn't necessarily, you know, interact with each other, but one of the reasons that I, you know… When I got to know Cindy Hazan and started doing the attachment stuff, you know, I was so passionate about it. But I remember Ritch was like, “well, it's really good that you're interested in this because you need something more mainstream.”
Jim Coan: Right. Isn’t that funny? Isn’t that so interesting?
Lisa Diamond: “You need something other than the gay stuff. And I'm glad that you actually are interested in this and that you're not just doing it, because you need it. But the truth is that you do need it.”
Jim Coan: Well, and there's also a very important way in which we need to understand attachment processes in sexuality, right? And still, there’s very little…
Lisa Diamond: Yeah. And at that time, there wasn't… Yeah, there still wasn't a lot of cross-talk for that.
Jim Coan: Hardly any exist to this day!
Lisa Diamond: So I believe that I would not have gotten the job at Utah if I had only been doing the gay stuff. I think it was the fact that I was doing both. Because I was hired in a joint appointment position. I'm a joint appointment with Gender Studies. So the Psychology folks really liked the attachment stuff. The Gender Studies program really liked the queer stuff.
Jim Coan: Were you a joint... were you jointly hired right from the beginning?
Lisa Diamond: Right from the beginning, the position was a joint appointment.
Jim Coan: Wow. That's pretty, I mean, University of Utah. You think about going from the frying pan into the fire.
Lisa Diamond: I know. I was so doubtful. And so was Judy. You know, who had...
Jim Coan: Yeah. You know, where is she from?
Lisa Diamond: She's actually from Los Angeles as well. But we met, you know…
Jim Coan: Yeah, you meet in Cornell.
Lisa Diamond: But it worked out well, because it makes the holidays easier. And she was... she had gotten her master's in History and then decided she didn't want to do academia. So she was still kind of casting about for what she wanted to do.
Jim Coan: And she's like, Utah, really? Salt Lake City? This is our destiny?
Lisa Diamond: She was very doubtful about it.
Jim Coan: Yeah, I would be too.
Lisa Diamond: She had done all this research. She's like, there's only one job there that I can imagine wanting, but she got it. And then she, her career ended up really taking off, you know? And so it ended up being a good fit, and I cannot, I literally cannot believe that I've been there for 17 years.
Jim Coan: 17 years.
Lisa Diamond: It's like, what happened? I truly… But it's an amazing place, you know, you're talking about, like, queer migration, every gay person in the state of Utah. And some of them from Idaho, come and live in Salt Lake City.
Jim Coan: Because Salt Lake City is a refuge in their area, sort of a regional refuge. Most regions have one or two of those, you know, Tucson is sort of like that in Arizona.
Lisa Diamond: And we ended up on a list of like one of the top 10 gay places to live, like, in America. So really, there's a huge queer community there. And it's totally and of course, work at the University, everybody at the university is from someplace else. They're all completely progressive.
Jim Coan: Yeah.
Lisa Diamond: And it's been totally awesome to work there.
Jim Coan: So where did your, where has your research... I mean, so now, when I think of Lisa Diamond, predominantly, I think about your certain attachment papers that I always cite and talk about with my students. You know, like, you know, sort of a regulatory system that attachment brings and bonding creates. But what I really think of these days is this concept of sexual fluidity, which was one of the things that really surprised me. I mean, you know, by that time, though, by the time I'm getting surprised by this work, I'm enlightened, you know? I'm fully enlightened about sex, I'm like, I'm good with everything. I'm down some of my best friends are the gays, whatever.
Lisa Diamond: I’m down with the gays. And then it's like, what are the gays?
Jim Coan: No, and then wait a minute, what, what?
Lisa Diamond: Who are the gays?
Jim Coan: Exactly, then then, you know, the ground, under even my progressive feet starts becoming very uncertain. When I think about the idea that people change. And I started, I mean, I think I sort of responded negatively at first to that, I mean because, you know, I'm not opposed to this in any way. But I was sort of surprised.
Lisa Diamond: For a while the progressive, what seemed to be the progressive opinion is like, I know gays are born that way. It's not a choice. Like, let's you know, it's a very sort of ethnic model of gayness.
Jim Coan: And even among people that I knew who were gay, all my adult life, you know? I've often felt that even within the sort of queer community, there's a kind of outsider status to bisexuality, for example, and people have talked about that a little bit. I don't really understand it, you know, at a visceral level, but I understand it at a conceptual one.
Lisa Diamond: I think a lot of minority communities have a lot of boundary policing that goes on. I think it's true for you know, ethnicity it's true for religion. There's always a lot of boundary policing. I think that's a part of any marginalized group's coping mechanism.
Jim Coan: Yeah.
Lisa Diamond: Are you in or are you out? And, you know, and so I think that's where that sort of came from. But I think some of the fervor around the boundary policing is energized by the very fact that those boundaries are permeable. And everyone knows it. And that's why it makes it so scary!
Jim Coan: It makes it very comfortable, right? Anything that's uncomfortable, we just want to make that go away. So tell me about the sample that led you to these conclusions, this very famous sample.
Lisa Diamond: Yeah so, It was just the most simple, the most terrible, terribly organized master's thesis project in the history of the world.
Jim Coan: That goes back to your masters.
Lisa Diamond: Yeah, yeah. So basically, I land Cornell, and Ritch didn't have any existing samples that are, you know… Most graduate students go and their advisor has a research project that they start working on. Well Ritch, you know, didn't, you know? Because he was thinking about leaving it, you know? So he didn't have any data for me to work with. And he's like, well, what are you... what do you want to do? And I'm like, well, you know, all of these studies of sexual identity development are on men. And largely it was because samples were recruited by just going to like community groups.
Jim Coan: Right.
Lisa Diamond: And, you know, those groups always drew more men than women. And so I only found like one study that had any women in it, and it was like, 10 women or something. I was like, wow, okay. I'm supposed to find a topic that no one's doing. And like, my, that will be my thing. Like, where are women's voices, where are women's experiences? I was, like, “Ritch, I just want to interview a bunch of women and like, see what, you know what their process of identity development is.” And he was like, okay.
Jim Coan: [laughs] That’s what he sounds like, huh?
Lisa Diamond: And I've joked with him like, since then, I've been like, how could you let me do this crazy project? Like, where… You know, why weren't you forcing me to have like, more clear cut... And he's like, well, I think you did okay. So like, obviously, it was not such a disaster. But I really, I...
Jim Coan: He's gonna love that characterization.
Lisa Diamond: I did not have a lot of clear ideas about what I wanted to do. I just knew I wanted to interview women and just sort of, you know, get...
Jim Coan: But how did you... so you just came up with your own line of questioning? You know, like, oral history interviews or what?
Lisa Diamond: Yeah, I looked at the very small literature,...
Jim Coan: Were they all open-ended questions?
Lisa Diamond: Oh, no, I had... Yeah they were pretty open-ended. I had questions.
Jim Coan: Did you do, like, attachment scales and things like that?
Lisa Diamond: No, because I started the project before I discovered attachment.
Jim Coan: Oh, got it. Okay.
Lisa Diamond: Like I didn't…. You know? And so basically, I just wanted to know the process through which women started to question their sexuality.
Jim Coan: And you had to seek out to find the women who identified at time one as a lesbian?
Lisa Diamond: I had to find the women. I didn't, I didn't want them to necessarily identify. I just said they just have to have some form of same-sex attraction.
Jim Coan: So that’s pretty open-ended.
Lisa Diamond: I didn't require them to identify. So basically, and the internet didn't exist, so I was like, how are we going to find these women? And Ritch was like, well, there are pretty big, you know, communities in like Syracuse and Rochester. So, and I didn't have a car so I bought a used car for $5,000.
Jim Coan: Wow.
Lisa Diamond: A 1989 Toyota Corolla that I still have.
Jim Coan: Stop it. Oh cut it out. What are you talking about?
Lisa Diamond: Oh yeah, oh yeah. We call it the Firebird because it's actually been on fire. But it's still running. And basically, every single weekend, I would drive to Syracuse, or Rochester, or Binghamton, or Elmira, or Freeville. And I would go to places that had coffee shops, anything where there were, you know, gay community where I thought young women might be. And I would just physically walk up to people and be like, I'm doing a study about, um…
Jim Coan: Are you shitting me? You just ask them about their sexuality?
Lisa Diamond: Yeah, I was, like, I'm doing this interview study. I had no money.
Jim Coan: Yeah, that's a lot of leg work. That’s not messing around.
Lisa Diamond: I’m doing this interview study, you know? And Judy and I, you know, because we were a new couple. So she would actually sometimes come with me to recruit people. And she was way better at it than I was. She has no fear. She just walked up to people. And she'd be like, I found you like, five more and I'm like, what?
Jim Coan: Angrily, she would say that to you.
Lisa Diamond: And so then I would schedule the interviews, and then I would kind of drive back and do, like, 10 interviews in a day, you know? In a particular location. And just drive back and forth, drive back and forth, drive back and forth, drive back and forth. And it was just like, boots on the ground.
Jim Coan: Oh my god, Lisa… And as a grad student. You're taking classes and you're, you're eating, you know, eating…
Lisa Diamond: Top Ramen.
Jim Coan: Rice and Top Ramen. The whole thing.
Lisa Diamond: I remember eating a lot of sweet potatoes while I was driving. And I could munch them in one hand while driving the car.
Jim Coan: Sweet potatoes, ‘cause they’re nutritious - Wait, what, you didn't cook them?
Lisa Diamond: No, I cooked them in the microwave, but then I would eat them like an apple.
Jim Coan: Really?
Lisa Diamond: You know? Yeah.
Jim Coan: Holy crap.
Lisa Diamond: Just nuke 'em and then wrap them in tinfoil.
Jim Coan: That's a little crazy. I would say that's a little… That qualifies, that crosses over the line into crazy a little bit .
Lisa Diamond: It's a good portable food.
Jim Coan: Yeah, I guess that's true.
Lisa Diamond: So, you know, so I did the interviews, and I knew I wanted to follow folks over time, but I didn't really have a clear plan on that. And so, you know, it just sort of emerged spontaneously, but I just recently have been doing the 20 year old follow-up interviews.
Jim Coan: 20 year…
Lisa Diamond: 20 years.
Jim Coan: That's amazing.
Lisa Diamond: And what's hilarious, and people are like, “How did you…” and I only lost…
Jim Coan: From this little… Because you’d think that… I just have to process this for a sec. Can I do that? I just have to, because when I think about a 20 year longitudinal study, I think of a multicenter NIH…
Lisa Diamond: I know! But it's a small number of women.
Jim Coan: You know, gigantic fucking, you know, millions of dollars with multiple, you know, PIs. And you know, and you're talking about a...
Lisa Diamond: One person, no money, no funding. And I think the reason that I haven't lost folks is because it's always me. I never had anybody else do the interviews.
Jim Coan: They know you.
Lisa Diamond: They know me and…
Jim Coan: Trust you.
Lisa Diamond: What's been sort of gratifying over the years is, you know, because I was a grad student, when I started, I was close in age to a lot of the participants. And so when I call them, you know, every couple of years, they're like, so what's going on with you? So, you have a job, like, you're at Utah, I saw you on the web, like, I'm so proud of you! So there's not a big power imbalance the way there is because I was young and naive when I started it. And so they feel proud of me. And when I published the book, I sent them all a copy of the book.
Jim Coan: Wow, that's nice. They're like your collaborators in a way. All they have to do is be honest.
Lisa Diamond: Exactly. Yeah.
Jim Coan: And so at what point do you realize that people are not being consistent in their reporting?
Lisa Diamond: Well, when I asked women to talk about some of their earliest attractions, a lot of them were just describing these really passionate friendships similar to the one that I had in high school, my with my best friend. And I would be like, well, you know, were you attracted to her? And they'd be like, no, I really wasn't. And I was like, wow, that… Because, you know, similarly, because I wasn't really aware of feeling, like, erotically attracted to my best friend in high school. It was the one in college. It was like, we were really like, we were in a romantic relationship with one another.
Jim Coan: You were just drawn to them. Yeah. And adolescence is so intense anyway. It would be easy to not know exactly what’s going on.
Lisa Diamond: Yeah! And so that was the first thing that struck me was that there was something that we were all assuming that those romantic feelings always co-occurred with sexual feelings. And it was clear to me from the interviews that that wasn't the case. And that's why I sought out Cindy Hazan because I was, like, trying to understand this. And she introduced me to attachment theory. And I started doing all this reading, I'm like, oh, they're attachment bonds! They're just not sexual attachment. They're more analogous to parental attachment bonds. And so she introduced me to sort of a framework that helped me make sense of the fact that there were these romantic relationships between women that had all of the signature features of romantic attachments: the obsessive proximity seeking, the separation distress, the safe haven. They just weren't sexual. And it was, you know, maybe a developmental thing. And that was, you know, the big sort of “aha” moment.
Jim Coan: Well, and also you're catching these young women basically still as adolescents.
Lisa Diamond: Yeah. The age range was 16 to 23.
Jim Coan: Right? So adolescence is a time, I mean, in attachment terms, where your world is turning upside down, because you're sort of cutting those early attachments.
Lisa Diamond: And those systems have not gotten integrated yet. Yeah, you're in this transitional thing, where...
Jim Coan: You have to rebuild your social set of attachments. And that's terrifying! Like, you need to latch on.
Lisa Diamond: You have to rebuild it! And for most adolescents, their first full-fledged attachment figure that's not their parent is a romantic partner. But these girls had sort of figured out a sort of transition. That their first attachment figure, other than a parent, was their best friend. And it just wasn't a sexual relationship.
Jim Coan: I mean, I think about Eleanor Maccoby stuff about how girls'...
Lisa Diamond: Same-sex friendships.
Jim Coan: Same sex friendships, how they're sort of nicer.
Lisa Diamond: Yeah! They’re safe!
Jim Coan: For girls especially, right? Because boys are kind of a pain in the ass. I mean, you know, I mean, I don't want to be too generalizing. And boys have their own, I think version of this.
Lisa Diamond: Yeah.
Jim Coan: But the inculturation in the way, the way things go, they're not oriented towards that sort of supportive behavior.
Lisa Diamond: And they don't get that sort of cultural permission.
Jim Coan: They don't. That's right. So they have their own issues there.
Lisa Diamond: You know, so I ended up designing my dissertation around female friendships to try to sort of, you know, make that…
Jim Coan: That was very ahead of its time. Holy shit.
Lisa Diamond: But it was a total failure. It was like the worst dissertation ever and nothing ever got published from it and it was a complete bust.
Jim Coan: Yeah, that happens, unfortunately.
Lisa Diamond: You know, but so it's odd. It's like the work that I ended up publishing more and getting more known for was my master's thesis research.
Jim Coan: Yeah.
Lisa Diamond: And the dissertation just sort of died.
Jim Coan: You know, I published my master's thesis and I never ever, ever published, would never publish my shitty dissertation.
Lisa Diamond: And I always tell that to graduate students to sort of reassure them. I'm like, it's just another study.
Jim Coan: Yeah.
Lisa Diamond: It's not going to be the last study you do. So don't try and make it your be-all end-all. You know, it may not, you know, work out. But it was the dissertation that got me into psychophysiology because I was using really bad psychophys methods to try and sort of test the difference between romantic relationships and best friendships. So then when I get hired at Utah...
Jim Coan: That's a good idea.
Lisa Diamond: They're like, Oh, well, so you want to set up a psychophys lab? And yet, I had never been trained in it. Like we didn't... the psychophys measures that Cindy Hazan was using, were basically the heart rate monitors that runners buy. It was just heart rate. There was nothing else.
Jim Coan: And they weren't so great then. They weren’t so…They weren’t the hot stuff.
Lisa Diamond: No. And so I didn't know, I mean, it was my dad, who was like, you know, you really need separate measures of the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system. I'm like, oh. And I was like, wow, I'm, like, trying to get into this field. And yeah, I'm not being trained by people who know anything about it. So when I landed at Utah, it was just luck because Tim Smith was there, Bert Uchino was there. And you know, and they're like, you're gonna benefit a lot from being here. And they just supported me completely. I had to set up the psychophys lab, having never actually collected valid psychophys data ever. So I just hit the books, and was completely 100% self taught on everything, because I never had any training in it. At all.
Jim Coan: And what kind of stuff did you start finding?
Lisa Diamond: Right away, I mean I was very, I became really interested in the emerging research on emotion regulation, and the parasympathetic nervous system, the whole porges and vagal stuff. And so I quickly was like, wait. This all suggests that attachment security should be related to, you know, vagal tone. And I couldn't understand why I couldn't find any research on attachment theory and psychophysiology. Other than like, one chapter that was on like, kids getting, you know, in the strained situation. And that was, you know, what I really wanted to do. So I ended up writing a review paper on… I'm like, wow, either I'm, you know, is it possible that I'm the first person who's seeing why this is relevant? And it turned out that that was sort-of true. Like, no one was doing it in adults, there was stuff on kids.
Jim Coan: Right.
Lisa Diamond: So I wrote this review paper that basically was a way to sort-of force myself to really articulate okay, like, where am I going with this? You know, if I'm going to commit to this, like, I need to make sure I'm not going down a rabbit hole. So a part of it was just me boning up on it. But that sort-of served as the framework for what I ended up doing, which was looking for associations between vagal tone and vagal withdrawal and attachment and security.
Jim Coan: What was the bottom line there? I mean, it's a vagal... So does attachment security increase parasympathetic tone? Or does it go the other way?
Lisa Diamond: Well, yeah, so individuals who are insecurely attached have lower vagal tone. Which is exactly what you would expect if attachment insecurity is some form of regulatory deficit.
Jim Coan: Yeah. Creates emotional regulation problems.
Lisa Diamond: So that was true. And so you know, that was the first thing I found. And then since then, I've found other manifestations of that and other ways in terms of looking at couples and looking at how individuals who have lower vagal tone have different sorts of reactions to their partners, negative affects, and stuff like that.
Jim Coan: Yeah.
Lisa Diamond: But all of that was on like, heterosexual couples. So, I was still doing the gay stuff and I was doing this attachment stuff. I basically had two different careers going on and two different sets of colleagues. But because I had a joint appointment in Gender Studies, it was okay. And my biggest insecurity early on at Utah was that someone was going to say to me at some point, either you're a qualitative sexuality researcher, or you're a quantitative psychophysiologist who does attachment, like, pick one.
Jim Coan: Right.
Lisa Diamond: Pick a direction, because right now, you're all over the map. But to me, they were always deeply connected.
Jim Coan: Wait, someone did say that to you?
Lisa Diamond: No, no, that was my fear.
Jim Coan: That was your fear.
Lisa Diamond: It was my fear.
Jim Coan: That doesn't seem to have happened.
Lisa Diamond: No! And I remember when I was writing my third year statement, for my third year review, really trying to, like, articulate why these were both actually connected.
Jim Coan: Figure out what the nexus is that links them up.
Lisa Diamond: Yeah. And I think from that, a big part of that was the psych review piece, you know, on the links between attachment and sexuality. That for me, was like, I needed to publish that to show that these were not two different lines of research, they were actually connected. If I could just, you know, explain how they were connected.
Jim Coan: Well, and you know, there's sort of a meta-scientific aspect to this too. Because by the time you're doing the psychophys attachment stuff, there's a big giant literature on attachment and a big giant literature on psychophysiology and measuring parasympathetic tone and what it's associated with in terms of self-regulatory capabilities and on and on. But there's not that much about sexuality and sexual identity formation, all that stuff. And one of the things that, I mean, even Pauper wrote about was that you have to develop the hypotheses, you gotta figure out what to look at.
Lisa Diamond: I was always shocked by the fact that, because I always would attend the IARR meetings, the International Association of Relationship Research. And every other year, they would be international. And I would always attend the International Academy of Sex Research. And they also alternated. And I was always shocked by the fact that I was the only person who was at both meetings. I'm like, don't the relationships people want to know about sexuality?
Jim Coan: God, it's still such a problem.
Lisa Diamond: And don't sexuality people want to know about relationships? And I kept thinking, “oh, I'm sure next year I'll see some of the same people.” I'm like, no… No… Like, what's going on? I mean, the fields were very segregated. And I think a part of it is this sort of squeamishness about sexuality among the relationship researchers.
Jim Coan: Is it better? Is it better now? Has it gotten better?
Lisa Diamond: Not that much better.
Jim Coan: Really?
Lisa Diamond: I gave a talk at the IARR meeting in Israel called “Where's the Sex in Relationship Research?”
Jim Coan: Yeah.
Lisa Diamond: And, you know, I was saying to folks, you know, we have these 36 item measures of conflict.
Jim Coan: Yeah.
Lisa Diamond: And then the measure of sexual satisfaction would be like, are you satisfied? Yeah? Okay, all right, that's all we need to know. And I’m like, um…
Jim Coan: And forget psychophys, there's no… You know, applied to sexuality...
Lisa Diamond: Nothing about like, what you do, how you negotiate. You know, your sexual practices.
Jim Coan: And, see, that's what I'm saying. That's why you need to have these more open-ended qualitative approaches, because you're gathering clues as to where to look more quantitatively, systematically down the road. You really need to build that foundation. So, I want to pivot a little bit, because I really want to get back to what sexual fluidity is. What did you discover it is? And it sounds like you've been using the attachment framework to explain it a little bit. But I wanna just, what is it?
Lisa Diamond: So, the way I would describe it and sort of what sort of happened as I started doing follow-up interviews around every two years with my respondents was, I would find that their sexual identity labels kept changing. And I found that a lot of them were engaging in relationships that didn't match their pattern of attraction. So some of the women who were like, “oh, I'm 95%, attracted to women,” then I talked to them two years later, they're like, “well, I started sleeping with my male best friend.” And I'd be like, “whoa, okay.”
Jim Coan: Yeah, that's a pretty big change. What the hell is going on?
Lisa Diamond: What's going on there? And it was clear from talking to them that it wasn't like they were going back in the closet, or they were repressed. They were... all my respondents were really open and like, you know, they were not deluded or repressed. So that standard explanation of, “oh, you're just going back into the closet” or “it’s false consciousness, you don’t know what you want.” Instead, they were like, well, this relationship just really kind of blew my mind. And so again, I was really drawn to this notion of attachment, that there's something about specific relationships that can be so compelling that it draws women into erotic feelings that they didn't have before.
Jim Coan: In for either...
Lisa Diamond: For either direction!
Jim Coan: Yeah.
Lisa Diamond: Because I also was talking to women who I was interviewing, who were like, “I think I'm pretty heterosexual, but I just started sleeping with my female best friend, and I don't know where that came from.” And then I would talk to them two years later, and they’d be like, “yeah, back with men.” And I'd be like, “so were you deluded? Were you…” and they'd be like, “I don't know. It was just that one woman.”
Jim Coan: That was a thing that happened. That was a thing that happened and I did it.
Lisa Diamond: It was a thing that happened.
Jim Coan: Was there, like, confusion or shame?
Lisa Diamond: I was totally confused!
Jim Coan: In them.
Lisa Diamond: I mean, yeah. For them, there was a lot of confusion, a lot of shame. I think, especially for the women who had been identified as lesbian who started relationships with men. The lesbian community was like,”get out,” you know? So some of them had...
Jim Coan: So coming from all directions.
Lisa Diamond: Yeah, yeah. And I think that's changed a lot since then. But at that time, it was really fraught for a lot of these individuals. Which was part of what, you know, as I started to do the research became really compelling to me. Because invariably, the women who had those sorts of experiences felt that they were the only one. They were, like, one woman actually said to me, “I feel like I'm a bad example of a lesbian, so if you don't want to continue interviewing me, that's fine because I don't want to mess up your study.” And I was like, oh my God, you don't realize.
Jim Coan: This is my study.
Lisa Diamond: Yeah, I'm like you don't realize how common you actually are. And so that was something that struck me right away was that all of them seem to think they were the only one having this sort of more fluid experience. And I was like, oh my God, I think our whole model of what's normal and what's exceptional is reversed.
Jim Coan: Because the fluidity was the norm.
Lisa Diamond: Yeah.
Jim Coan: Right? I mean, it was relatively rare that people were all in one direction or all in the other.
Lisa Diamond: So I was like, oh my God, we've got this completely wrong. Like, completely upside down.
Jim Coan: That’s fucking… That’s amazing. Do you know that’s amazing?
Lisa Diamond: The thing is that early on, you know, when I was publishing the first, you know, from the first couple rounds of follow up data, people were like, well, you know, you've got this weird sample, and that's a small sample. And I was like, I totally get that. They're like, you know what, you may be onto something, but it's probably not that big of a phenomenon as your sample is making it seem like. You got a weird sample.
Jim Coan: Yeah, because it’s like, what, 100 women?
Lisa Diamond: And now, I feel so validated because now we have these unbelievable representative studies. The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, longitudinal studies from New Zealand, and they've all shown the same thing. And I'm like, I was right! It wasn't just my tiny... Like, you're right!
Jim Coan: Your tiny shitty sample from Cornell. I mean, New York.
Lisa Diamond: I had this tiny sample but I was not wrong about the phenomenon. And now I feel... So now when I give talks, I present all the big data, because I'm like, see! I wasn't crazy. I was not crazy.
Jim Coan: Yeah. Right? Because especially in the current climate, it's a little bit nerve wracking, you know? But you know, your sample wasn't that small. It was what, over 100?
Lisa Diamond: It started with 100 women.
Jim Coan: With a decade?
Lisa Diamond: That is small and it's like, you know, a completely snowball sample. So I mean, I totally get that. But I also feel that there is a role for small sample research. And I feel like my study is an example of the fact that you need that sort of work for hypothesis generation.
Jim Coan: Oh, completely, absolutely. Yes.
Lisa Diamond: And you need it to be able to figure out what questions to ask. So certainly, I never expected it to be the last word on anything. But the only way to get some of the information that we need is through that more intensive small sample work.
Jim Coan: Yeah.
Lisa Diamond: And, you know, that has no funding, and that is cheap to do. And that, you know, you just kind of pull it out of your, you know, out of your hat.
Jim Coan: And is there any evidence that there are sex differences in this? I mean, is this the same for men?
Lisa Diamond: Initially, I really thought there were. Initially I was like, this is like a female phenomenon. But I think largely, I'm starting to doubt that because I've started collecting data from men, and they're showing some of the same kind of variability that I used to think was more common in women. So I kind-of feel like the jury's out on that. I used to think that women were way more fluid than men.
Jim Coan: The common story is that women are more, you know… Fluid.
Lisa Diamond: Yeah and I was part of that. I was one of the people, you know, making that argument.
Jim Coan: And that men, that it is more of a genetic...
Lisa Diamond: It might be. It might be that there is, you know, more fluidity in women than men. But I think the size of that gender difference is an open empirical question.
Jim Coan: Got it. Yeah. That's just amazing stuff.
Lisa Diamond: I mean, women have had more cultural permission to dabble in same sex sexuality than men have. And so that gives them more opportunities to sort-of figure out.
Jim Coan: But what about the historical record? I mean, I've heard, for example of, you know, ancient Greek culture being the opposite.
Lisa Diamond: Yeah. Yeah.
Jim Coan: I don't know whether there's anything, I don't know what... I mean, I have no, literally no idea what the evidence is, for any of that… Like “The Iliad” or something.
Lisa Diamond: I think a lot of that just shows that sexuality, I mean other cultures, you know, it's only the contemporary West that has linked same sex behavior and attraction rigidly to an idea of a fixed orientation.
Jim Coan: Yeah.
Lisa Diamond: You know, you find same sex sexuality in every culture that you look at. But it coexists with normal heterosexual behavior. And so it's only relatively recently that we think about it as a trait of a person. And so how they explain it is kind of up to every culture. Is it just men being horny? Is it a form of male friendship, which was true in a lot of cultures? So you find different versions of it, you know, across history and across different cultures. And, you know, in some cultures, for example, the penetrating male, the active partner is not considered gay. You know, it's only the passive partner who is considered gay. So it's like, yeah, you can engage in as much same sex behavior as you want. As long as you are the penetrator. That's a totally heterosexual male role.
Jim Coan: Well, it seems to me that there's also ample space for other sort-of sexual behaviors that are not, you know, fully penetration right?
Lisa Diamond: Yeah.
Jim Coan: I remember reading one of the surprising things I've read...
Lisa Diamond: Of course, Bill Clinton would say they're not sex, so.
Jim Coan: I remember reading Christopher Hitchens' autobiography. Do you know what I'm referring to? And I mean, Christopher Hitchens is sort of, like, chest pounding neocon guy. And he, there's all kinds of stuff in there about engaging in sexual behavior with boys, all through his adolescence and describing that this was utterly normative. At least in his recollection. This was not...
Lisa Diamond: A lot of folks think like, oh the boarding schools, circle jerks, and stuff like that. You know, so I think that there's a lot of space for individuals to interpret attractions and behaviors in a lot of different ways, depending on the context. And we are relatively unique as a culture in that we take any sign of same sex sexuality, and we say, that must be an indicator of something permanent about you.
Jim Coan: Yeah.
Lisa Diamond: And the truth is that sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn't.
Jim Coan: And maybe the truth is that often, it isn't. Often, it's just, but you know.
Lisa Diamond: It's a pretty flexible system. Think about, I mean, the people, you always hear about people being like, well, I can't reach orgasm unless I think about some particular thing, and it will be something kind-of crazy. We're like, wow, obviously, sexuality is a pretty flexible system. You know, that you've learned something at some point that gets integrated into your mind.
Jim Coan: Yeah.
Lisa Diamond: And, you know, so clearly, cognition and exposure, play a role in helping to set sexual trajectories.
Jim Coan: Yeah.
Lisa Diamond: So why are we so surprised, you know, by that amount of fluidity. It's like, clearly we're not, you know, like, the animals that literally cannot mate unless they are, you know, ovulating.
Jim Coan: Right.
Lisa Diamond: We are a pretty complicated species.
Jim Coan: If you... I was saying to someone, maybe Eli, a little while ago that, you know, if you try to find real, unequivocal generalizations about human behavior, it's just really fucking hard to do. You can't... The rule for humans is flexibility. And that’s true almost exactly. That’s what we did.
Lisa Diamond: Yeah. Because that's what's adaptive because of our large brains and because we lived in diverse environments.
Jim Coan: We created this capability over phylogeny to flexibly adapt to all kinds of conditions and that means that, you know, not only sexuality, but brought mating strat- you know, like monogamy. You know, all of these other things that we sort of, on one camp or another, we want to say is a fixed trait.
Lisa Diamond: It's also true with stress sensitivity. Which I think is so interesting that all of us research showing that exposure to early adversity, can render children, sort-of set the development of their stress response systems to be hypersensitive. And that hypersensitivity is adaptive, right? Because if you're living in a dangerous environment, you need to be hyper vigilant.
Jim Coan: Yeah.
Lisa Diamond: And that hyper vigilance actually makes them more sort of absorbent of good environments as well as bad. So we as a species have evolved mechanisms to take in what kind of environment am I in? And the body changes. It's not just a, you know, a behavioral change. There are physiological changes that occur. And that's what I find, you know, so fascinating.
Jim Coan: I guess, I have really one more thing I really wanted to ask you, which is, given this almost dizzying array of flexibility, fluidity, of difficulty typologizing individuals, where does that leave us politically?
Lisa Diamond: Interesting, that's part of what I'm going to talk about. You know, I think that the gay community has made a huge mistake in using the fixedness of sexual orientation as the grounds for civil rights by saying, we're born this way. So it's not our fault and please love and accept us. That, first of all, is just scientifically wrong. There are definitely biological contributions, but they're not deterministic.
Jim Coan: Right. Like anything that genes influence.
Lisa Diamond: I know, it's like any geneticist is like, that's a stupid thing to say about anything. But it's again, it's like the way science gets popularized.
Jim Coan: Right. For political reasons.
Lisa Diamond: For political reasons. So A: it's just wrong. And there's enough data on change now, to show that it's just completely whacked. B: It's actually not...
Jim Coan: You're gonna catch hell for that.
Lisa Diamond: You know, I don't... That's the point. I feel like at this point in my career, I need to like... I always joke with my partner. I'm like, you know, I have job security and I'm like, I need to use my power for good. So if anyone's gonna catch hell for it, I'm safe. Go ahead.
Jim Coan: Good. Good.
Lisa Diamond: So A: it's wrong. B it's actually unnecessary. I partnered up with a brilliant colleague of mine in the law school at the University of Utah Cliff Rosky who does work on sort-of the LGBT legal stuff. And if you actually look at the decisions, the immutability of sexual orientation has not actually been a factor in all the legal victories. We think it is, but it's actually not. So we think that it's helping us and it actually hasn't been that important, because there are so many other grounds on which those decisions have been made. And it wasn't a factor in the most recent Supreme Court victory. Usually, it's the fact that animus against any particular group is not constitutional. So if you know, regardless of whether it's immutable or not, if a law appears to be motivated by animus, it's just wrong and that was the basis for the Lawrence vs. Texas decision.
Jim Coan: It’s just wrong. That’s a very good point.
Lisa Diamond: Also, laws against LGBT discrimination are often founded on the sex discrimination industry. It ends up being a form of sex discrimination to discriminate against, like, same sex marriage. In terms of the Equal Protection statutes, immutability is one of the list of things that folks can consider, that the Supreme Court can consider in whether or not a law is constitutional. But it's not the only one. History of discrimination is another one. So it's, again, it's like it hasn't been you know, it's one of several things that can be considered. Another is that courts have changed their definition of immutability from a trait that cannot change to a trait that is so central to a person's sense of self that it would be wrong to make them change it.
Jim Coan: Yeah.
Lisa Diamond: So even the definition of immutability, from the courts perspective, is not what most of us think it is.
Jim Coan: Yeah.
Lisa Diamond: So for all these reasons, we've just been on the wrong road. And then the final thing which, you know, for me, is the most important take home message is that it is simply unjust to the entirety of the queer community to make the fixedness of your sexual same sex sexuality, a condition for your right.
Jim Coan: Yeah.
Lisa Diamond: Because it marginalizes bisexual individuals.
Jim Coan: And it’ll wind up doing more damage, again.
Lisa Diamond: It marginalizes the kind of women in my study who had one same sex relationship. That there shouldn't be some litmus test for rights where it's like, well, if you're a stable lesbian, you're allowed to be protected by the laws. But if you're someone who had just one same sex relationship, you don't deserve your rights. It sets up a hierarchy of, you know, queerness. And, you know, there was, basically, any civil rights strategy needs to protect the entire population.
Jim Coan: Yeah.
Lisa Diamond: And so this notion that fixed patterns of sexual orientation are worthy of respect, and others are not, it's just antithetical to any sort of movement for self respect. So the correct answer to like, oh, you know, are people born this way or are they not? That's an interesting scientific question. Like, it's one of my interesting scientific questions. But it has no role in public policy debate. It's like a “so what?” It's like, it doesn't matter how you got there to be doing... Either, we're a society that protects the privacy of individuals to determine their intimate lives or we're not. No one ever asked during Loving vs Virginia: are some people born, like, attracted to people of the other race?
Jim Coan: Right. The question is: is this justifiable constitutionally, or not?
Lisa Diamond: No one cares why you want to marry someone of another race? Do you have the right to make your own marriage choice or do you not? We don't care why, like, are some people born loving black people? I mean, like, that would be a ridiculous question. No one would ever think to ask that question.
Jim Coan: These people are in love now is the only question.
Lisa Diamond: Yeah. How you got there is an interesting scientific question. But it absolutely should have no role in the public policy debate at all. And so I feel like part of my mission now is to try and make that point because I'm so tired of seeing the science be bastardized. I mean it's just, it's amazing. Even on the website for the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is like this, famously, progressive site.
Jim Coan: Yeah, sure.
Lisa Diamond: They're like, if homosexuality is genetic, as most scientists believe it is, then, you know, discrimination… And again, I'm like, okay, that statement. If homosexuality is genetic, as most scientists believe. I'm like, do you understand how heritability works? And yes, there's a genetic contribution. But the heritability of sexual orientation is actually lower than the heritability of smoking. And it's lower than the heritability of job satisfaction.
[Outro music on guitar fades in]
Jim Coan: Okay. Both of those things surprise me a lot.
Lisa Diamond: And you will not open up any magazine and see a picture of a baby and saying, is this child born unsatisfied with their job? You know? The heritability of sexual orientation is around 35%.
Jim Coan: Wow.
Lisa Diamond: So yes, that is significantly greater than zero. That is statistically significant, you know, contribution, but it's obviously not deterministic. And we can't make that a precondition.
Jim Coan: Yeah. Yeah. Lisa, it's so great to talk to you. Thank you for doing this with me.
Lisa Diamond: This was fun.
Jim Coan: Was it fun?
Lisa Diamond: Yeah.
Jim Coan: Oh good.
Lisa Diamond: All right. I look forward to hearing the rest of these. I want to hear Eli's.
Jim Coan: Yeah, I'll play for you. Okay.
[Musical Interlude]
Jim Coan: Okay, that's it. That's all I got. Thanks to Lisa Diamond for being so forthcoming and candid. I could have kept going for a lot longer, but I didn't want to push my luck. And I hope in any case that Lisa enjoyed it as much as I did. And hopefully as much as you did.
Jim Coan: Folks, the music on Circle of Willis is written by Tom Stouffer and Jean Rulli and performed by their band the New Drake's current information about how to purchase their music, check out the about page at circleofwillispodcast.com. Don't forget that Circle of Willis is brought to you by VQR and the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia. And that the Circle of Willis is a member of the TEEJFM network. You can find out more about them, that network, those guys at teej.fm. And if you like this podcast, why not give us a little review at iTunes? And let us know how we're doing? It's easy. Just do that. I'll see you all again, at episode four, where I talk with Will Cunningham of the University of Toronto, about becoming one of the world's preeminent neuroscientists and about the aesthetics of data analysis, believe it or not, among many other things. Until that time, I'll see you later. Bye bye.
[Outro Music]