According to analytics from Google Trends, searches for “am i a lesbian masterdoc” and “lesbian masterdoc” spiked between February and June 2020, with subsequent peaks in December 2020 and June 2021. Luz’s piece had a renaissance during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, a time when a surge of people came out.
The document now lives on DocDroid, a site that allows PDF sharing. The Masterdoc has received over 32,000 notes on Tumblr since 2018, though the links on Luz’s original post no longer work. “Allowing people to identify based on where they are willing to put their romantic and sexual energy is more powerful and gives people agency.” “It’s ok to try on the lesbian identitiy and see how it fits you,” she writes. Luz, the author, reassures the reader that to be a lesbian, one does not have to relate to the entire document, have identified as a lesbian in the past, or plan to in the future. It lists miscellaneous criteria, like wishing one were a lesbian, having to “learn” to love men, or an attraction to male television or book characters rather than real men-which Kirsch found impactful-as possible hints of lesbianism. It attempts to reconcile confusing feelings that queer people might have had about being attracted to men versus women. The Lesbian Masterdoc discusses compulsory heterosexuality, or the concept that all people assigned female at birth are forced to be attracted to men. But for others, it’s already outdated and includes transphobic sentiments that perpetuate harmful ideas used to gatekeep marginalized people from the lesbian community. Even though identity is complicated, the masterdoc has helped many lesbians and non-lesbians alike find certainty in who they are.
“Lesbian isn’t a dirty word and being a lesbian is beautiful.”įour years after it emerged online, the Lesbian Masterdoc is a controversial text that both lacks historical awareness and speaks to a generation that has largely explored queerness on the internet. If being in relationships with men isn’t appealing to you, if you can’t truly see yourself ending up happy in relationships with men, or if your attraction to men makes you uncomfortable, you may be a lesbian,” Luz writes in the masterdoc. “Ask yourself if you can have healthy fulfilling relationships with men and actually wanna be with them. In the document’s “How do I know if I’m a lesbian?” section, Luz suggests readers consider if they feel they can be “truthfully happy” with a man, rather than whether or not they are “attracted” to men, to answer the section title’s question. The 30-page piece was first published as a Google Doc on her Tumblr page. (Luz did not respond to the Daily Dot’s requests for comment.) The Lesbian Masterdoc is a common nickname for a document titled “ Am I a Lesbian?” that was written in 2018 by Angeli Luz, a life coach and reiki healing specialist.
She now identifies as queer and describes herself as someone who is attracted to feminine energy, regardless of someone’s gender. “Then I read it and then I was like, ‘Oh, shit,’” Kirsch told the Daily Dot in a phone interview. When she came across a TikTok that suggested she read the masterdoc, she decided to finally do so. A bunch of “gay feelings,” she said, started to pop up. Kirsch stayed away from the masterdoc until shortly after marrying a cisgender man in the middle of 2021. So, she avoided the masterdoc Kirsch had a sinking suspicion that if she read it, it would reveal that she was queer. The first time Sarah Kirsch heard about the “Lesbian Masterdoc,” a publicly shared document meant to help people figure out if they are a lesbian, she was deeply closeted and afraid of anything associated with queerness.