Women who love women are Lesbians. Men, because they can only think of women in sexual terms, define Lesbian as sex between women.

Brown contrasts self-definition with definition imposed by a dominant culture. In the first sentence, “Lesbians” are simply women whose primary romantic and emotional attachments are to other women—an identity grounded in love and community. The second sentence critiques a patriarchal lens that reduces women’s relationships to sexual acts, implying that male-centered discourse tends to eroticize and trivialize lesbian identity by treating it as a category of sex rather than a full human bond. The quote thus functions as both a defense of lesbian subjectivity and a broader feminist argument about how language and power shape what counts as “real” identity.