Whatever happened to the 'Lesbian Until Graduation'?

QUEER WORD
Lesbian Until Graduation (LUG)

What It Means:

A slang term for a woman who has relationships with other women during university, only to seemingly ‘switch back’ to men after graduation. Use of the term is meant to imply that the whole thing was just temporary experimentation, nothing but a phase that ends when real adult life begins.

Let’s Use It In A Sentence:

Annabel was terrified to be seen donating her flannel shirts to the charity shop - what if someone she knew spotted her and thought she was a LUG?

But was the LUG even a thing?

I’m almost embarrassed to admit this, but when I first heard the term lesbian until graduation (long after it had peaked in popularity, mind you) I just kind of…. accepted it. 

Even though I didn't actually know any women who'd had an experimental lesbian phase at university before swanning off into heterosexual suburbia, I never stopped to ask whether the term described a real phenomenon, or was just some hyperbolic nonsense dreamed up to satisfy a culture titillated by the idea of sapphic experimentation. 

In my defence, it felt like a very American thing. Having grown up on those outlandish and unrealistic '90s US college movies (my underdeveloped brain not quite grasping that American teenagers don't actually look like 5-year-old actors) I could quite readily believe that there was a slew of young women ‘trying it out’ all in an over-earnest attempt to rebel, or establish their independence, or just … have a story to tell later. 

Which is exactly what the LUG is supposed to represent, right? That fresh-faced, wide-eyed ingenue who treats college as this four-year window where the normal rules don't apply and she can try on different identities without any real world consequences. 

But after doing a little bit of digging, it turns out that the humble LUG might not actually be as common as we were all led to believe.

History of the LUG

So, let’s go back a few decades… 

Lesbian Until Graduation first started swirling around in the early 1990s. A 1993 New York Times piece, for example, referred to it as ‘new campus slang’, particularly at women's colleges like Smith and Wellesley.

And despite virtually no first-hand evidence that this was actually a thing, people just… accepted it.

And, sure, you could explain that away, I suppose. The stigma of being labelled a LUG meant no one was likely to volunteer the information, after all. And so the idea slipped quietly into the cultural bloodstream, an unproven but irresistible shorthand for a certain kind of privileged, experimental college girl.

A decade later, New York Magazine drew a neat line under the phenomenon with a 2003 feature about women who’d identified as lesbian in the ’90s and were now dating men. The article called them ‘hasbians’ (a portmanteau of ‘has-been’ and ‘lesbians’) and framed those earlier years as a sort of queer gap year. Nothing more than a youthful detour before returning to the ‘proper’ path of heterosexuality.

And though no one could confirm whether the women featured in the article, such as the surname-less ‘Patty’ (who was quoted saying, “with a man, orgasm is the goal. With women, you’re not as focused on it”) were even real people, the story stuck. I mean, who doesn’t want to read about the women who stared into the abyss of lesbianism and lived to tell the tale? 

And, that seemed to be it. A cultural phenomenon that came and went. 

But then, if we skip forward to 2011, The New York Times reported on a CDC study that found women with college degrees were less likely to have had same-sex experiences than women who never finished university. Ten percent of college-educated women versus fifteen percent of women with only a high school education.

Huh. That kind of just undermines the whole concept, right? Were there a bunch of temporary lesbians out there in college-land or not? 

(What I especially love about this study is that the researchers couldn't even come up with a plausible explanation. One expert essentially shrugged and said that maybe people just wanted to believe college women were having sex with each other).

So why did the idea of the LUG take hold?

It kind of ticked every box. It was believable enough to feel true, salacious enough to sell, and safe enough to reassure everyone that it wasn’t too queer. 

First, there’s the social side of it. University is different. For a lot of people, it's the first time away from their hometown, their parents, their boyfriend-who-they-didn’t-have-the-heart-to-break-up-with-before-they-left-but-now-that-they’re-surrounded-by-new-opportunities-they-might-have-to-rethink-that. 

You're in a temporary bubble where you can reinvent yourself and date people you'd never have met otherwise. For some, that includes exploring sexuality in ways they didn't feel safe doing before.  

Then there’s the cultural side. The '90s queer scene, and especially the lesbian scene, was electric: riot grrrrl, ACT UP, Lilith Fair, women’s studies courses, Ani DiFranco! All of this collided with pop culture in ways that made queerness feel radical, urgent, political and…. well... cool. 

Journalists, always keen to translate the underground for the mainstream, wanted a version of that story they could sell. The LUG gave them the perfect narrative arc: college girls experiment, maybe dye their hair green and get a piercing, but ultimately always go back to ‘normal.’

Edgy enough to be interesting, but safe enough not to threaten Aunt Geraldine back in middle America (who, as it turns out, was probably more likely to be experimenting than the college girls she was reading about!).

And then, of course, there’s the gaze. Because what would a damaging lesbian stereotype be without a little help from straight men?

The LUG fantasy has always been filtered through the heterosexual male imagination. Women’s attraction to each other is seen more as a performance, a titillation rather than a truth. It’s the same logic that gave us all of those bad ‘90s movies that I was talking about, performative kisses in films like ‘Cruel Intentions’ and ‘Wild Things’. They framed same-sex attracted as some kind of spectacle, not a meaningful connection between two individuals (and, crucially, by the credits, those women always returned to heterosexuality).

Oh, and, finally, let’s not forget our old friend biphobia. The women in these stories couldn't be bisexual or pansexual. They had to pick a lane.

So were LUGs real?

Well…. sort of.

Of course there will be some women who identify as lesbian at university and later identify as straight or bi. Sexual identity can be fluid. People change. That's what that is.

But the idea of an epidemic of straight girls cosplaying as lesbians before graduating into heterosexuality? 

That was a lie. 

Alas, there were no erotic pillow fights in the all-female dorm, no secret sapphic societies meeting late-night in the library. It was all just exaggeration - a story that let the media reinforce this myth that women’s desire are playful and temporary.

And that’s perhaps the worst legacy of the LUG. It let everyone believe that queerness could be tried on, toyed with, and then safely outgrown. No disruption. No lasting consequences. Just another youthful phase neatly tied up in time for graduation day.

And the reason it stuck probably tells you more about what society wanted to believe about women’s sexuality (that it’s malleable, experimental, and ultimately containable) than about what was actually going on.