AUTHOR DIANA SOUHAMI TALKS TO JANE CZYZSELSKA ABOUT HOW WOMEN WHO LOVE WOMEN BECAME A REVOLUTIONARY FORCE

PHOTO VERA JACQUET

When she was growing up, Diana Souhami says there was no vocabulary for what she felt she was. Born in 1940 – “I’ll be 80 this year,” she says proudly – the references to homosexuality made by family members were negative and she remembers them vividly. “They weren’t vicious,” she remarks, “they were more like asides”.

She remembers her mother saying she thought her daughter preferred the company of women to men, to which the young Diana retorted, “Well, what if I do?” The reply lodged in her like a bullet: “Well, I can’t say we like it very much.” Once, her father said of Gertrude Stein, “Wasn’t she a dirty lesbian?” In the 1970s, during the gay sex scandal involving Liberal MP Jeremy Thorpe, her youngest brother said, “I’ve nothing against homosexuals, I just don’t want them running the country”. Souhami’s mother concurred. “I couldn’t defend myself,” she recalls. “I would make some hot reply at the time, but they were wonderful lines and I built them into radio plays and other bits of writing. For me, it was a liberation and salve and a way of getting my pride back; my assertion, my dignity, finding my own identity.”

Souhami has been giving voice to long-gone lesbians and gender nonconforming individuals for the past 35 years, documenting the lives and loves of people such as author, poet, playwright and art collector Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, who stayed together from the day they first met in 1907 to Stein’s death in 1946. In the home they shared in Paris, they wrote notes to each other inscribed DD and YD – Darling Darling and Your Darling. In Souhami’s first book about the couple, Gertrude And Alice, published in 1991, the focus was on “the happy marriage between two eccentric women when so many heterosexual marriages failed. It was a model marriage if you like,” Souhami smiles.