I was a lesbian for a semester at Wesleyan - it was a graduation requirement.

The line is framed as a punchline: it uses exaggeration and deadpan specificity (“for a semester,” “graduation requirement”) to satirize stereotypes about elite liberal-arts campuses—especially the idea that same-sex experimentation is fashionable, expected, or institutionally encouraged. Read this way, it’s less a literal autobiographical claim than a comic critique of how identity can be treated as a social credential, and how outsiders caricature campus culture. The joke also plays on the tension between genuine sexual identity and performative experimentation, inviting readers to notice how absurd it is to imagine sexuality as a box one checks to satisfy institutional norms.