REFLECTING ON LEZ/BI VISIBILITY AND WHAT IT MEANS TODAY

WORDS CARRIE LYELL

I’ve always been visible as a lesbian, long before I even knew what a lesbian was. I was serving butch dyke realness on the swings aged six, sporting a skinhead at seven and wearing dungarees and Doc Martens, well, throughout my childhood, really. Carrie was a queer fashion icon in the 90s, that’s for sure. Looking back through family photos now, two things strike me. One, it’s incredible that my parents didn’t know they had a baby gay in their midst, and two, where can I get those dungarees? Shoreditch, eat your heart out.

My parents weren’t the only ones who were oblivious. It didn’t occur to me until I was 14 or 15. Others clocked it long before me. A family friend asked my mum if I was gay when I was around 12, and everyone at school – including the teachers – got the memo a good few years before I did. I don’t know who their references were, because there were certainly none in my life. None that I could identify, anyway.

Lesbians, and lesbian culture, existed, of course. From the poetry of Sappho to Anne Lister’s diaries, Radclyffe Hall, Virginia Woolf and Gluck; the Gateways, lesbian pulp fiction paperbacks of the 1950s, The Killing Of Sister George, BBC drama Girl and pioneering lesbian artist and activist Barbara Hammer – all evidence that women had been loving women for a long, long time before I came along. Desert Hearts was released in cinemas the year I was born; the same year Martina Navratilova won her sixth Wimbledon title. When I was just a few weeks old, Margaret Roff was elected mayor of Manchester, becoming the first openly lesbian mayor in the UK.

“All those who came before me had done the hard work and written the map”

I was two years old in February 1988 ,when a group of lesbian activists abseiled into the House of Lords after peers voted in favour of Section 28. A few months later, on 23 May, a group of women including Booan Temple forced their way into the BBC News studio, interrupting Sue Lawley midway through presenting The Six O’Clock News. One of Temple’s fellow protesters was famously sat on and held down by Lawley’s colleague, Nicholas Witchell. In a 2018 interview with The Guardian, Temple said: “The LGBT community had been getting more vociferous in the 80s. We were starting to demand more rights, not least of which was the right to live in safety.”