In her reader Lesbian Images, Jane Rule, herself a professed and practising lesbian, attempts to debunk the time-honoured theories that homosexuality is a sin and/or a sickness. For the most part she is successful, amassing a great deal of evidence to shore up her arguments about what lesbianism isn't. Unhappily she doesn't enlighten us much about what it is, claiming magisterially, "the reality of lesbian experience transcends all theories about it." (p. 87)

Rule argues that psychological theorists and practitioners who insist that lesbianism is a sickness are dangerous in that they often produce traumas in individuals who before suffered from nothing but a loving preference for their own sex. Lesbians, she complains, endure prejudices as ill-considered and unfounded as those traditionally heaped against left-handed people. The analogy is apt, for examples abound of the sorry repercussions of "correcting" a child's left-handedness. But what about the male and...