By Kathleen Gilbert
UNITED KINGDOM, July 7, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) - British comedienne and former lesbian Jackie Clune has published an account of how, exhausted by the emotional dysfunction of her lesbian relationships, she discovered in her subsequent relationship with her husband a freedom to "[walk] alongside each other rather than spending life locked in face-to-face intimacy or combat."
"Looking at my four children racing around the garden with their father, it seems almost impossible to believe that only a few years ago I never imagined having a family," writes Clune in a column published in the UK's Daily Mail June 26.
Clune, who is also known as a cabaret performer, actress, and broadcaster, says she was raised in a "very traditional Irish Catholic" home and and fell in love with a man at 17. It was in college that she stumbled upon a pamphlet claiming that heterosexuality is a mere construct to be altered at will, which prompted her to break up with her boyfriend and live the typical lesbian lifestyle for the next 12 years, until she was 34 years old.
"I was excited by the close bond a relationship with another female could bring," she writes.
But the experience was not as she at first envisioned it to be. In an interview with the Times' Penny Wark in October 2005, Clune called lesbian culture "dictatorial and intimidating" and "the opposite of the sapphic fluffy nirvana I expected."
Despite the closeness of her relationships, Clune admits that the hyper-emotional world of a female-to-female sexual bond was "exhausting." "The women I went out with were by and large more inclined to be insecure and to need reassurance and I found myself in the male role of endlessly reassuring my girlfriends," she writes. "The subtle mood changes of everyday life would be picked over inexhaustibly."
Clune describes how one lover was so jealous and insecure that "every single time we enjoyed a night out ... we would have a row and have to leave." "Back home, we would then spend the next four hours arguing about our relationship and my feelings of loyalty, fidelity and so on," she writes. "It was never-ending."
"Can you imagine waking up beside a woman when you've both got raging PMT (premenstrual tension)?" she adds.
Ultimately, she says, the emotional rollercoaster forced her to reconsider her lesbian plunge - something she clearly says she "chose," and was not born into. "Unlike most men, women, of course, offer each other endless support and there's hardly ever any lack of communication," writes Clune. "But - bizarre as it may seem - I found myself longing for exactly the opposite."
Following "a calculated decision to try men again," Clune says that she found in her future husband Richard a "quiet kindness" and "lack of neediness" that appealed to her. "I felt we were walking alongside each other rather than spending life locked in face-to-face intimacy or combat," she writes. "It felt natural and not at all scary. He was sanguine about my past and never suffered the insecurities I had come to expect."
"It was a breath of fresh air. I've always been fiercely independent and felt I could be myself with him."
Although harboring no hard feelings toward her former companions and way of life, Clune concludes that she had "outgrown lesbianism." "When we're young, we all need to belong to a tribe and to have a banner to march under," she says, adding that "calling myself a lesbian was almost like calling myself a punk or a goth."
She says her return to heterosexuality continues to draw vitriol from the lesbian community: one major lesbian publication voted her "Most Disappointing Lesbian Of The Year," and a now-defunct Facebook group was erected entitled, "People Like Jackie Clune Should Be Taken Outside And Shot." "Although the criticism is hurtful, I understand where it's coming from - I've confused everybody," she says.
Arthur Goldberg, a board certified counselor and expert on assisting individuals with unwanted same-sex attraction, told LifeSiteNews.com (LSN) that Clune's story is "not atypical" of the lesbian lifestyle. Goldberg, who is co-founder of Jews Offering New Alternatives to Homosexuality (JONAH), argued that if proponents of the homosexual agenda "admitted what the true aspects of many [homosexual] relationships are," the notion that they are simply equivalent to heterosexual relationships wouldn't hold water.
"One of the key criteria of lesbianism is emotional dependency," said Goldberg. "In male gay relationships, it's much more about sex. More typically [with] lesbian women ... it's much more serial monogamy.
"Your relationship lasts 2-3 years [in which] you can't live without the other person, your whole world is this person, which is why there's so much jealousy in the lesbian world, and why there's so much violence in the lesbian world."
Goldberg said it was also not uncommon for women, often more "sexually fluid" than men, to choose to enter the lesbian lifestyle after some experience of disillusionment with men, before returning to heterosexuality.
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