Lesbian Strength

A history and celebration of my tribe

In 1973, the majority of lesbians involved in the Gay Liberation Front in the UK walked out of the movement en masse, sick of the sexism they were experiencing from many of the gay men involved. This exodus was the beginning of the autonomous lesbian pride movement.

Four years later, in 1977, the year that I was outed as a lesbian aged 15, newly-elected Labour MP Maureen Colquhoun came out as ‘gay and proud of it’. But, despite both the gay rights and Women's Liberation Movements being in full force at the time, Colquhoun’s constituency soon showed its disapproval. The party refused to support her, and there were calls for her deselection. The local party chairman, Norman Ashby, said: ‘She was elected as a working wife and mother... This business has blackened her image irredeemably.’

It is interesting to note that the next member of Parliament to come out as gay was Chris Smith in 1984. Far from being vilified like Colquhoun, Smith received a standing ovation for his announcement and was wrongly credited with being a ‘pioneer’ of gay rights in Westminster.

My first foray into lesbian culture was in the working-class bars of Newcastle, in the north-east of England. I was terrified of being kidnapped by predatory butch lesbians. Kids at school had labelled me a freak and a pervert, and said that I must really be a boy, and these slurs had stuck to me. I had not yet met the feminists who would disabuse me of these myths. In fact, the first time I was approached by a lesbian and asked to dance was by a young woman dressed in a Bay City Rollers outfit.

In those days, lesbians were divided between feminist lesbians and ‘bar dykes’, meaning traditional lesbians who organised into butch and femme identities and socialised mainly in the dingy bars and clubs, away from 'normal' people.

There was a distinct class divide. The bar dykes were mainly working-class, and veterans of lesbian culture. Many had previously been in the Armed Forces, often as a way of avoiding men, marriage and children.

On the other hand, the feminist lesbians were very political about their sexuality. Understanding heterosexuality to be bad for women under patriarchy, we saw our attraction to other women as liberating and positive. We were comrades in arms as well as lovers.

I soon chose my tribe, but it was not without angst. I was solidly working-class and well out of my comfort zone having dinners with the feminists. I was having to endure stodgy baked potatoes with vegan spread and chewy aubergines – a vegetable I’d previously never even heard of. Asking for salt or ketchup would have been as appalling as whipping out the latest copy of Playboy.

Yet those lesbians were beyond inspirational. They taught me to feel pride in myself, and anger about male violence and dominance over women. They rejected sex stereotypes and were critical of butch and femme role-play, while offering support and friendship to women embedded in that culture. I came to learn that lesbians were hated because women are hated, and that rejecting heterosexuality was a dangerous but exhilarating thing for feminists to do.

By the early 1980s, most of the feminist lesbians I hung around with were practising non-monogamy (what is now known as ‘polyamory’). We rejected the exclusive couple relationship, and put friendship on the same scale as romantic and sexual relationships. These were revolutionary times and, when women at Greenham Common began speaking out in the press about how many of them were lesbians, the issue became more high- profile. During the miners’ strike, many of the women who had become politicised as a response to Thatcher’s government finally admitted how unhappy they were living with sexist men. So, they packed a rucksack and joined the women at Greenham.

By the late 1980s, with the AIDS epidemic in full swing, and gay men being vilified by most of the mainstream press as well as the Thatcher government, many lesbians joined forces with the boys, offering support and solidarity. Then came Section 28 and our reunion was fully cemented.

However, with Section 28, most gay men were defending an essentially gay identity, the ‘born this way’ attitude. Meanwhile many lesbians were doing the direct opposite, chatting about how proud we were to be lesbians, inviting other women to join us, wearing T-shirts with the slogan, 'We recruit'. This was a significant moment because it was when identity and equality politics took centre stage. It was the moment when everything changed.

During that time (unsurprisingly when so many lesbians had adopted gay male culture) the UK saw the emergence of a pro-pornography and pro-sadomasochistic lesbian culture. A sex toy business aimed at lesbians, called Thrilling Bits, marketed vibrators named after anti-porn feminists and, equally shockingly, a black dildo named ‘the Whitney’. Intersectional feminism had not yet reached the lesbian sex toy market. Other lesbians tried to join the party by wearing leather and chains, producing and consuming pornography, practising extreme body modification, donning drag and adopting the gender-neutral ‘queer’ label.

But lesbians always prevail. In 1994, the Lesbian Avengers group was founded. In its mission statement, it described itself as a ‘non-violent direct-action group committed to raising lesbian visibility and fighting for our survival and our lives’. It was also concerned with equal immigration rights for lesbian partners, education, healthcare and an end to anti-lesbian bigotry. Refreshingly, the Avengers were critical of mainstream gay male culture, including the normalisation of prostitution and pornography.

One of the Avengers’ campaigning aims was to ‘combat lesbian chic‘ (otherwise known as ‘lipstick lesbianism’). Suddenly it was more than OK to be a lesbian – it was even fashionable.

Conventionally caricatured as too ugly to get a man, being a lesbian was now the coolest thing around. But only if you were young, conventionally attractive and, ideally, famous. The August 1993 edition of Vanity Fair kickstarted the trend, with its front cover featuring singer k.d. lang dressed in a man’s suit and enjoying a barber-shop shave by supermodel Cindy Crawford, who was wearing a high-cut swimming costume and heels.

What was neither chic nor cool, though, was getting beaten up, losing our jobs or having our children removed by the family courts, literally because we were lesbians.

The Avengers was set up to assert the rights of lesbians to challenge the gay male domination of the entire so-called queer movement. Lesbian culture was disappearing, and

by the late 1990s had become ‘lesbianandgay’ with a focus on hedonism rather than politics.

Around this time, many women moved to the Yorkshire town of Hebden Bridge, which has the highest number of lesbians per head in the UK. When it was named the lesbian hub of Britain in 2001, Thatcher’s former press secretary Sir Bernard Ingham wrote in his column for the local paper that the fact that so many lesbians had moved there did not ‘say much for the men of Hebden Bridge’, and pondered what life was like ‘BL’ (Before Lesbians).

However, the publicity brought many young isolated lesbian couples to the area, and Hebden Bridge is still populated by lesbians of all ages. Visiting the town is a bit like entering the late 1970s. The most successful plumbing business in the area is run by lesbians. Its name? Stopcocks.

Things changed dramatically when lesbianism became more entangled in gay male culture, with a focus on clubbing, consumerism, social acceptance and sameness. The focus shifted from demanding our rights and liberation as proud lesbians, to asking for tolerance. Lesbians now wanted the same as heterosexuals, so the campaigns focused more on equal marriage and coupledom than direct action. Suddenly, the turkey baster, an instrument used since the 1970s by lesbians wishing to have children without the involvement of men, was swapped for a trip to the IVF clinic – with the sperm donor often becoming a hands-on father.

As lesbians bought matching wedding outfits and began to emulate traditional heterosexual family life, the political focus of lesbians as front-line warriors against patriarchal heterosexuality waned. We went from picket lines to picket fences.

Having started out as a marginal and marginalised subgroup of sexual outlaws, paving the way for other feminists to resist compulsory heterosexuality and male dominance, we later morphed into a tame, apolitical version of our foremothers.

But now, something is brewing in Lesbian Land.

The uncompromising, in-your-face butch lesbians I met in the 1970s are making a comeback. Lesbians are currently under attack as viciously as we were when I first came out, but this time we are attacked by those who claim to be progressive. We are now pressurised to use the term ‘queer’ and told that we are transphobic bigots if we refuse to accept that some lesbians have penises.

Anti-lesbian bullying is nothing new but today it comes in an insidious disguise, as outlined in a deeply upsetting BBC article about the so-called 'cotton ceiling'. The piece includes interviews with lesbians who have felt pressurised into sex with trans-identified males. They are told that men can be legitimate lesbians.

Many of the young lesbians I interviewed for my recent book on feminism told me they are often told by men whose advances they spurn that they are unfuckable, despite having previously made their intentions plain. It takes me back to a few years ago when, having enjoyed a couple of drinks with the crime writer and lesbian Val McDermid, we decided to form a rock band called ‘2 Ugly 2 Rape’, so often had we both heard that phrase from disgruntled men.

Lesbians are cool and edgy – not because we pose in swimsuits and lipstick (although whatever floats your boat, girls) – but because we understand the revolutionary power of defining our own sexuality. And, as a result of the misogynistic backlash against us in recent years, we are once again becoming a force to be reckoned with.