Question for the Forum (I Had this in the Wrong Place)

Mine vary. Older characters are not happy to be who they are more often than younger characters, and acceptance is sometimes a plot element for such characters.

The characters in my project are lesbians ~1950, and given the prevailing norms of their time, they have varying levels of comfort with and acceptance of their proclivities. Between the four main characters and a handful of secondary characters, they span a range from devil-may-care free-spirit, to sexually confident but pragmatically closeted, to religiously anxious, to complete denial.

For instance, one of my main characters is sexually confident and absolutely sure that her lesbianism is right for her, when she is with a woman. But she also carries a burden of constant awareness of it as a thing separate from herself, of the need to be cautious and keep up a front in polite society (she dates men for cover), of bitterness and occasional self-loathing about it. She sometimes allows herself to wonder whether the prevailing psychiatric theories are true, whether she might actually be psychologically damaged or sick. She has been in analysis for her lesbianism but found that she did not want to be cured of it. So, she loves sex, has a strong sexual appetite (one of her friends calls her "a red-blooded American pervert"), but is nevertheless conflicted about what all of that really says about her.

Another of my main characters is married to a man to whom she has never been sexually attracted, but she is not an introspective person and tends to bin off uncomfortable thoughts and will them out of her mind; so she has steadfastly refused to consider the reasons for her frigidity. She meets a girl to whom she becomes powerfully attracted, and rationalizes those feelings away too, right up until the girl takes her to bed. Even after that, even while they are carrying on a very passionate affair, she insists "I'm not like you," constructing in her mind some kind of rationalized distinction between herself and her lover, who has been aware of her attraction to girls and women her whole life.

ETA: I should probably add that it's not an erotica project (though there's sex in the story); I usually choose posts to read from the "New Posts" button and don't always pay enough attention to what section of the forum I'm in.