A tomboy growing up, a dedicated feminist who came out at 14 and emancipated herself at 16, Lyn Duff was a self-declared enemy of dresses. But now at 19, she has discovered that wearing dresses actually expands rather than constricts her identity. Duff is a staff writer for YO! (Youth Outlook), a newspaper by and about young people published by Pacific News Service.

SAN FRANCISCO -- When I was a child, my mother always wanted me to wear dresses. She thought that dressing in a feminine way would somehow make me polite, quiet, gentle, and obedient. I'd always preferred to wear shorts and a tank top -- after all, how easy was it to ride a bike or climb a tree in a dress?

When I came out at 14 as a lesbian my anti-dress attitude was further reinforced by my gay friends, who declared adamantly that dresses were for girls who chased boys. Through most of my teenage years, dresses were not a part of my fashion consciousness. But one day last year -- as I sat in my jeans on a steamy Greyhound bus, sweat pooling in my underwear -- I actually found myself wishing I had a dress.

I began to visualize myself wearing different kinds of dresses. Maybe I'd go for the Haight Street look -- long, lacy vintage (read used) dresses with combat boots, or perhaps a starched and earthy dress accentuated with Berkeley-bought Birkenstocks. My fantasies were running wild. I envisioned myself in a long, loose, flowing dress (floral perhaps), running through a field of wild flowers like a deodorant ad gone crazy. The fantasy faded when I stepped off the bus and doused my head with cool water, but the idea stayed in the back of my mind: Were dresses an option for Lyn, the emancipated teen feminist?

I owned many different types of pants: cords, dress pants, chinos, khakis, sweats, and jeans in four different shades of blue. Up until then I had been proud of not owning a dress. After all, dresses signified women's oppression, subordination, and objectification, as well as my mother's ceaseless desire for me to be heterosexual. But even though dresses symbolized all these things, they were, after all, just articles of clothing. I decided that maybe I should stop thinking of clothes in terms of what I didn't want to be.

I started to look in thrift stores for a dress I might like. I tried some on. At first they made me feel weird, like someone could see my underwear. Finally the day came when I got up my courage and bought a couple of dresses at Goodwill. It was easy to justify: I thought, "Hey, they're only three dollars each, and if I don't end up wearing them I can always use the fabric for quiltmaking."

The dresses hung in my closet for some time. It wasn't until last December that I really needed them. I'd been invited to work with street kids in Haiti, and a few days before I left I got together with two friends who'd traveled and lived there before. "Some people think because it's a Caribbean island you can just go around in T-shirts and shorts and casual clothes all the time," Nina mentioned. "But it's not appropriate. You have to dress nice."

"Is this okay?" I asked, motioning to the corduroy pants and oxford shirt I was wearing.

Laura looked me up and down for a moment. "Well, uh, yeah, but you'll be really hot."

Hot? "You mean it's hot in Haiti?" I had no clue.

"You do have dresses, don't you, Lyn?" Laura asked with an expectant look.

I looked up from the stray noodle I was playing with, nodded my head, and smiled. "Of course I do."

As I thought about it, I realized that Haiti was the perfect place to wear a dress. There were no friends to be shocked or to say I looked weird. No one was going to accuse me of selling out. I wouldn't be obliged to explain or justify myself to anyone.

A few days later I arrived in Haiti. After three hours of baking in the Caribbean heat while negotiating my way through immigration, customs, and the baggage claim, it was liberating to pull off my sweaty jeans and slip into a cool dress.

After a while, I actually started to like them. Dresses were cool (in the temperature sense), easy to care for, and they made me feel different. Wearing dresses when working with children, for instance, made me feel maternal, and oddly religious. So much of my life had been spent rejecting dresses, and everything else associated with heterosexuality, that I had missed out on all these things. It wasn't that I had rejected my identity as a woman, but I had rejected other people's requirements of me as a woman. As a result, I had been defining myself by what I wasn't.

Weeks later, when I got home to the States, I continued to wear dresses. Haiti had liberated me and given me a different perspective. Some of my friends and co-workers still tease me about it, but it doesn't really bother me. I think a dress-wearing Lyn was always trapped inside me, and it's good to finally set her free.