Original subtitles

This programme contains strong language, drugs

and strong sexual images from the outset and throughout.

But one thing, right, 50 of us lot get on the bus

and the whole world knows we're lesbians.

There's no mistake about it. They know what we are.

We're out of the closet wearing what we're wearing.

I'm saying that you're discounting and trivialising

a whole other range of sexual feeling.

Do you call yourself a dyke?

Yes.

I'm not saying, tell me what you do in bed and why is it better and why is mine wrong?

I... I just wanna say one other thing.

No, I don't... I just said to you... Can we listen to what's being said?

MUSIC: I Hate Being In Love by Amy And The Angels

# I hate being in love

# I hate being in love

# I hate being in love Ooh-ooh-hoo

# I hate being in love

# When my friends have told me, it is such great fun

# First you dodge to see her and then you're on the run

# Every other weekend they ask you how'd it go?

# Isn't it fantastic? And I say, no, no, no!

# Cos I hate being in love

# I hate being in love

# I hate being in love Ooh-ooh-hoo

# I hate being in love

# You hold my hand and kiss me

# You buy me ice cream cones

# You hope to write me letters

# And say you'll miss my bones

# I can't say I'm unmoved

# I'm feeling I don't know

# Cos I hate being in love

# I hate being in love

# I hate being in love Ooh-ooh-hoo

# I hate being in love... #

We weren't lesbians. We were dykes.

We wanted to be sexual people.

Rebel dykes were outlaws. This was way before there

were queer activists or Riot Grrrls. We invented it.

INAUDIBLE

It was a great time and a terrible time

to be young and queer in London.

Obviously there was Thatcher. That was a common enemy.

Thatcher had just got in in 1979.

We were on the street. We were working class. We were young.

We were punks. We were poor.

We were a kind of subculture.

We're a community because there were so many laws made against us.

Politically, there was there was always this attempt to silence.

# All those people in the dole queue... #

We had to ring Lesbian Line to find out

where there might be a dyke bar.

I came to London in the mid-'70s

and I didn't know any other lesbians.

There weren't any other lesbians, as far as I was aware,

I was actually the only one.

So it was very difficult.

There was nowhere to go. There was no club, so it was...

It was really...isolated.

I was living in quite a conservative town just outside Winchester.

I had seen a woman in the town who I liked, who was cycling

around dressed all in black with a great chain strung

across her and obviously developed a massive crush on her.

The only problem was she was about 15 years older than me and she said,

"Go to Greenham."

Greenham Common was a women's peace camp and you wanted to go and join

and live there.

CHANTING: We are strong, we are strong, we say no,

we say no to the bomb, to the bomb.

We are women, we are woman...

Women came from everywhere. Hundreds and thousands of women came.

We say no to the bomb, to the bomb.

We are women, we are women...

Suddenly there I was with all these other lesbians

and women who thought they might be lesbians.

It was like a ready made community.

MUSIC: Statement by Poison Girls

It was that version of being a woman and then later sort of realise

that version of being a dyke that really made me want to go there

and live there more than the nuclear protest, if I'm honest.

We were reclaiming that land by putting women's energy into it.

We really needed to reclaim space.

Everything seemed to be owned by the patriarchy.

And I was a separatist then. I wouldn't even have had a male cat.

There were eight gates, you know,

all the colours of the rainbow, around the base.

Orange Gate was the musician's gate.

Green Gate was a notorious gate of separatists.

There was a brand of feminism which said that you had to be a lesbian.

Their view is that lesbianism

is a political as much as a sexual identity.

It's about giving all of your identity, all of your energy,

all of your identity to your sisters and withdrawing from men and male

behaviour as much as possible.

After that, I moved to Blue Gate

where there were far more younger women.

Blue Gate was the gate nearest the pub.

So that was like your young drinking lesbians gate.

We weren't really into that sort of housewives for peace kind of image.

MUSIC: Drink Problem by The Gymslips

After school on a Friday

I'd get on the bus and up to Greenham, spend the weekend there

and then come back to school on the Monday morning.

So I did that as often as I could, really.

One time... I can't remember who it was said,

"Come on, come with me, let's go and get some booze."

And just took me into the woods.

And it turns out that a group of women had broken in

to the squaddies bar, essentially,

and nicked all of their alcohol, just the lot.

We were very politically aware, but we were also really naughty.

We just... We took great delight in really just winding them up.

One year they bought over this Blackbird spy plane

that had this special skin on it,

which meant that it could fly at particularly fast speeds.

About six of us broke into the base one night and threw paint

at this plane, which...

The level of damage to this skin was in the kind of multi-millions.

They bailed us, but the prospect was

of kind of going to prison for, like, 25 years or something.

There was a nine-mile fence, remember,

so it was impossible for them to control that amount of perimeter.

So you'd just go to a bit where there weren't any patrols

and you get your bolt cutters out and in you'd go.

So we were just crawling around in the bays, you know,

planting acorns in circles on the full moon.

The first time I had sex was in the base.

So I went in with this woman who I fancied. I'd never had sex before.

And it was all smoky and misty all around. So that was quite exciting.

Some of the older women sort of like decided that they would tell us

all about lesbian sex.

We were told that we had to keep our nails short

and one of the few women that were in was into SM,

who was a vegan, showed us how to make whips out of rubber

and things like that. So that was a happy time.

I met loads of fantastic women who were squatting in London

at the time. I ended up squatting in Brixton.

There was a lot of empty buildings in Brixton.

Some landlords that weren't there

and just leaving their properties empty.

I hitchhiked from Finland.

We came to London and we didn't know where to sleep.

And we walked through Brixton

with my friend Emma, and she said, "Wait here."

And they came back with a crowbar hidden, like, under her jacket.

So she broke in very quick, changed the lock and said,

"OK, here's your new apartment."

It was good to open them up and give them some life.

And we needed somewhere to live.

You know, London was different then. It was harder to get around.

And it was dirtier. It was meaner.

Especially in South London at that time, there was

still quite a risk of being gay bashed.

It was easier to be nocturnal so that the straight people

didn't ever get to see you.

But in those days, people were very homophobic, so there'd

be always people shouting remarks at me as this very obvious dyke

walking through Soho with my shaved head and my big boots.

And suddenly the same guys were giving me lots and lots of money

to see my body. It was kind of nuts.

Always had like a legal and illegal part

and it was quite sleazy places.

And you did have to really look out for yourself.

I would take my speed and I would share it with my friends and we'd go

tramping around the city centre of London at night

and I felt like it was my city.

And then there was that whole twilight zone, literally the

twilight zone, where it was evening, you'd woken up, they were all coming

home from work. And that's when things happen. That's when...

Yeah. Stuff happened on the streets.

The chances are you probably were gonna get your head slapped about.

And so it was dangerous just to be who you were in those days.

You didn't want to get spotted on the streets.

You would drop hands at certain moments.

At least two of my friends were cut on their face

because they'd been identified as dykes.

So I ended up... My mum was a nurse so that qualified me to do

butterfly stitches, which I made out of...

I dunno, gaffer tape probably.

And fixed a scar on her face.

I kind of like was getting grief, homophobia and racism.

My first six months in London,

I went to a few political meetings.

They had some sort of conference at the South London Women's Centre

in Brixton, which I was invited to as a black woman.

And when I got there I was like,

"Oh, God, this is so serious."

A lot of discussion around Greenham Common, for example.

Now, I just come out of the Army.

Do you think I was mentioning that to anybody?

It was Saturday night, I'm not having a workshop,

I'm not having a hug in.

I just want to cut some shapes on the dance floor.

I just want to go and say hi to people.

There weren't that many places for a young lesbian to go.

When I came out about 1986,

there were something like three or four bars or clubs that I knew of.

There was Gateways.

And I think there was, like, that Kenric Society for, you know,

the rich women of Kensington and Richmond, which obviously

didn't apply to me.

You get your dole on Thursday and you spent it by Friday night.

We made our own entertainment, really.

I used to DJ when I was in the Army, out of desperation.

I knew a good party.

We called it Sistermatic.

And the club was run by four black women, four very,

very different black women.

And before we knew it, it'd kind of blown up into this amazing party.

We played a lot of lovers rock, reggae and dance, all sort of music.

And we took it on a journey

and we played house music in its early format. Well, I did.

And, yeah, between me and Lorna,

who was one of the other DJs in the collective,

we could we could play from 10:00 till 10:00 next morning.

I started to see a rise in the number of Asian women

that would come. Lots of different young, younger black women

coming through.

So we had a whole scope of people dancing to the same sort of music.

You had your kind of Greenham Common-looking feminist.

You had your kind of S&M dykes on bikes kind of thing.

And there was quite a few of them.

Let's see the Black Widows tattoo.

Hi!

MUSIC: Sister George by Sister George

The lesbian motorbike group was the Black Widows.

There was about, I don't know, 20 of us. 30 of us.

And, um, we used to go and runs.

We've all got crash helmets and nobody can tell who we are.

And, you know, and you see people going, "Oh, my God."

And then we get off our motorbikes, we take off our crash helmets and it's like, "It's women! Let's go!"

A lot of the motor biking lesbians I've met used to go to The Bell,

so obviously I went to The Bell.

The Bell was the only truly mixed place for lesbians and gays,

you know. The Bell... I mean, The Bell was crazy.

Glue sniffing, drugs,

too much booze, fights.

There were skinheads but I...

I think the thing was cos I had a mohican at the time

and I used to work out a lot,

I had a stance, you know, I had an attitude.

And there were some beautiful women there as well.

So it was just like, what's not to like?

People like Sinead O'Connor would go there and nick our style.

Yes, she did.

Wednesday night, it was meant to be women's night.

I remember the very first time we went, it was completely dead.

The music was just bland and awful.

We thought, "We can do better than this.

"Let's try and get a night here and get some second hand vinyl

"and, you know, be creative."

The Sleeze sisters, the monumental Sleeze Sisters, Trill and Pom.

They played everything that I wanted to hear.

One of the first serious bands I was in, Mouth Almighty,

one of our first gigs was actually at The Bell.

There were loads of lesbian bands on the scene.

How could I forget the Brixton legends that were

the Sluts from Outer Space?

"Dykes get in a lot of trouble cos we don't suck no dicks.

"Why don't we get together and throw some fucking bricks?"

# Dykes get in a lot of trouble cos we won't suck no dicks

# So then we get together, throw some fucking bricks... #

A, you couldn't be a woman in a band.

B, you couldn't be a women only band.

C, You couldn't be lesbians.

So, you know, on all commercial fronts we were fucked,

but we didn't care. We just did it.

# We're a riot, we're on a riot

# We're a riot, on a riot of our own... #

And that's for the first time I came to London, just to find a band.

We got to organise this big concert in the Fabrik in Hamburg,

which is this big musical venue. They said,

"This doesn't actually exist as there aren't women in bands to play there."

And I said, "You must be joking. We will find them.

"We will bring them here and they will play."

So I came in December 1986.

I mean, on this Monday evening is kind of when my life

really totally changed.

It was... It was amazing.

I met these Finnish women that were visiting.

Seija was telling me she wanted to start this women S&M club in London.

I was really fascinated with the idea, and I was also

very fascinated with Seija I have to admit,

she was very gorgeous-looking, tall.

They were wearing these uniform caps, these long military coats,

big boots, and very she was very passionate about her ideas

and I loved that.

We had already been running a club called Extasy in Finland since 1985

doing the kind of things with arts, pornography and SM

and we always mix those three things together.

There were a lot of trans people there and lesbian mothers,

and there were bisexuals and androgynous people

like how we called ourselves.

It was kind of like a really open queer group, and it attracted people

who were artist-minded and who were really free, free in their will.

She was an artist, but she wanted to also bring sex into art

or art into sex.

Chain reaction had had a real build up

from women all over the place. Some saying, "Oh, no,

"you don't want to go there. Don't, you know, women..."

And then other women saying, "Oh, you know, you've got to go. You've got to go."

I knew you had to wear a dress code, and I...

I had a leather jacket, and I had Dr Martin boots.

I thought, "Oh, that'll do."

So I went and, you know, I paid my pound and I got in

and I was just so scared of meeting anybody.

And I thought it was going to be, you know, I didn't

really have an understanding of what happened there.

We would arrive at about 9:00. I think we opened about 10:00

and we would have our tool of choice, which was

a roll of black bin liners, and then we would cover up all the windows

with black bin liners.

That was all the decorating we did was just covering up the windows.

There was a back room where...

That was almost like a culture of its own, actually, the pool room.

Sometimes you'd wander in with your rubber dress trying to

attract a butch's attention.

Everybody was very busy, of course, coming there and looking very cool

in their leathers and finding people to have sex with.

But the cabaret was a bit like the highlight.

I had seen maybe one Monty Python film, and when I saw the first

cabaret at Chain Reaction, that's what it reminded me of.

It was so bad it was good.

We had things like mud wrestling. Yes, I did that.

Baby oil wrestling. Yes, I did that.

Spaghetti hoop wrestling. No, I didn't do that.

Spaghetti. Which we haven't actually forgiven her for.

INDISTINCT CHATTER

I just really fancied having ketchup

poured all over me

and have it run over me. I thought

that'd be quite theatrical.

I got to be the person who did a lot of the cabarets because

I was quite excited about getting fucked in public.

My name in those days was Jane Campbell, and I was known

as Jane Jane Queen of Pain.

When I was a kid, I had behavioural stuff about...

Attention seeking, they used call it. Attention seeking behaviour.

And, you know, I was actually quite lonely, kid.

But anyway, it developed into a kind of sexuality.

And I was very ashamed of wanting sex all the time.

You know, that slut shaming thing that goes on about if you love sex

there's something wrong with you.

And, yeah, I just got loved and all my friends

were really accepting of it and indulgent of it

and I learned to love it myself. Love that part of myself.

I was crucified to a cross,

tied to a motorbike. Um...

It was just thrilling. My eyes popped.

A lot in leather. Just really sharp looking.

You allow to be butch and femme but not in the old-fashioned '50s way,

which is kind of the image we had behind us.

Depends how far we go back but that was that whole

pre-Chain Reaction thing,

which was really kind of about butch and femme and looking like

a straight man and a straight woman, because if you were able

to pull that off, you could walk past a homophobe

and they wouldn't clock you.

So that was the idea behind butch and femme, especially if you wanted

to be a bit tarty.

You were better off with a really, really butch woman

because then you really did pass as straight.

And I could wear lipstick and I could be girlie.

I could wear heels, but I wasn't buying into the straight world

at all, which I would never have done.

So, yeah, it felt like a freeing.

There was very few safe spaces and at Chain Reaction

it was a space for femme dykes to be femme.

Another thing about Chain Reaction, which was very different for lesbian

clubs at the time, was that it was trans inclusive.

Little did I know that some years later I would identify

as both trans and intersex.

I mean, this was the '80s.

Trans people who identified as lesbian or bi

tended to be very deeply in the closet about it.

Both because of getting access to surgery and drugs

from the gatekeeping doctors and because people were led

to believe it was unacceptable on the scene.

Compared with every other lesbian scene in London, Chain Reaction

was comparatively accepting of trans women.

The same month that I actually transitioned,

The Transsexual Empire was published in London.

In which Janice Raymond said, quote,

"The transsexually constructed lesbian feminist

"violates women's sexuality and spirit."

So having a place to go where being trans wasn't

an absolute no-no was very, very cool.

Chain Reaction, I don't know how long it lasted,

but maybe it was only a couple of years or so.

But it really... It really created an incredible bond between us.

We hung out together in a big house.

There were three houses of lesbians, all, you know,

like almost in a row.

There were just lesbians stuffed into every room.

There was, like, I don't know, maybe about six rooms, but there'd be

18 people living there.

There'd always be a menagerie of animals, rats,

terrapins, dogs, everything.

Cats, obviously.

INAUDIBLE

It was a real creative time.

I mean, everybody was... People were either taking photographs

or, you know, writing or making art or doing theatre.

The scene was...different. It was a lot more intimate.

Everybody sleeping with everybody else.

That thing in The L Word where they've got that big chart

at the beginning, they nicked that off us. That was our idea.

It was like a lesbian soap.

And there was one woman on there who was incredibly cute

and she pretty much slept with everybody.

And so they made this big chart with her name in the middle

and then arrows going off to all the people she had slept with

and then all the people they had slept with.

We loved each other. And then we loved people who loved our lovers.

So why wouldn't we want to shag them as well?

Jane and I had exactly the same place to butches.

So really, I had great years playing

Nab That Butch, and Jane would see, and if Jane saw me being interested

in somebody, you know, we had a real fierce, friendly competition.

She usually won.

We loved each other.

Just one big, happy, shaggy family.

Originally, I come from East Germany. When I was 17, my family

escaped to West Germany.

My father, he had real problems in East Germany,

was put in prison

as a political prisoner for two and a half years.

I knew if I stayed on my own, I would have a lot of repercussions

of them escaping.

I found it very difficult to fit in in the West and I had quite

a kind of left...

My parents left and lived somewhere else.

I was on my own and feeling quite lonely when I came to London.

I was single for quite a while.

What really saved me was the women that I met and who I made friends

with - that became my family.

That was something that was lasting.

There were people that loved me and that I loved.

Our birth families had rejected us, basically.

So we would get together at Christmas.

This one Christmas, I think we had 26 women for Christmas dinner.

So we'd wake up in the morning, everybody would be in jim-jams

and we'd have Bucks Fizz.

I think we all got drunk before 11:00.

Mountains of presents that we all just gave each other.

We spent all day just unwrapping presents.

And of course, we'd have to have a turkey.

Baya fisted the turkey!

And everyone watched. Had this enormous turkey, it was so big

it wouldn't fit in our tiny little oven.

Probably have taken some acid in, in the afternoon, to go

with the Bucks Fizz.

And then about eight in the evening, "Oh, my God, we've got a turkey.

"We need to put it in the oven."

So I started, you know, mixing the apples,

onions, breadcrumbs, stuffing.

As I was stuffing the turkey, I just sort of tripped out.

As if I was in a different galaxy -

having sex with the turkey was a perfectly fine thing to do.

It was weird.

It was like our little own fantasy world.

# No regrets

# I don't need a permanent lover... #

They were decorating with black plastic

and all black stuff.

So I had this idea that tonight I do something really nice and soft,

and I went to Waterloo Flower Market in the morning to pick up flowers

that are being left on the floor.

And we had a huge amount of flowers and we took them to the club

and we were putting them up everywhere.

Then we heard a knock in the door.

They were all covered in the face.

We couldn't recognise them.

With sticks and bars and shit.

And they had crowbars and axes.

Smashing up the bar, hitting some

of the women who were there, and just screeching

about violence against women.

And finally, the woman behind the bar, she started screaming

out really loud.

It was an organisation called WAVAW - Women Against

Violence Against Women.

It's a group called Women Against Women who are into sadomasochism.

It was like lesbians against violence,

against women standing outside.

And they would sit outside the club

and hiss to everybody who came in.

I was brought up as a socialist.

I was never to cross a picket line.

I had to cross my first picket line because they were trying to stop us

from going in.

And I knew some of those women.

So the women that I took to Greenham ended up being some of the women

that picketed Chain Reaction on the first night.

One of my performances did get stormed, actually, by some

of those women.

I had my friend in the audience who came and volunteered.

She had to pick things out of the bag.

And I would say, "How would you like me to use this on you?"

But she was blindfolded, you know, and had to touch things and ended

up with her on all fours,

sort of tied up and hot wax started,

and it just went absolutely crazy because a whole load of women

stormed the stage, tried to beat us up.

They didn't realise it was a whole set-up, that it was playing

with this idea of how far can you push things and almost putting

a mirror up to oneself and others.

And then there was this huge debate with some of the other women saying,

"What the hell are you doing?

"You can't go and attack women for this," you know.

"And you don't know, even, the context."

I understood that they perceived SM as aping or copying

domestic violence relationships.

There's blood in your hands.

And there's a man in your head and you're violent.

When we were beating each other and cutting each other...

..it took the power away from that thing.

Somehow we felt much more like we could survive a beating.

Even though I knew a lot of these women were sweeties

underneath, very often there was a kind of callousness displayed.

I had ideological political

differences with some of the women

in Chain Reaction, who wanted

to enact Nazi fantasies or wear

Nazi uniforms to the club.

And that was, that was the line you do not cross.

I did not want to be part of that, and I argued fiercely against it.

And I won.

We got denounced in the London Women's Liberation newsletter

for wearing instruments of torture and Nazi regalia.

Just a little over the top.

Never worn a swastika in my life.

Shout at people who do.

But, you know, we got denounced for wearing a Muir cap

and a biker jacket.

A hugely political thing, wearing a leather jacket,

as a lesbian. You're a Nazi if you did.

We at Chain Reaction,

on the contrary, work towards a mutual and equal power exchange

based on the principle of consent.

Lesbian S&M is a woman's right to say no and her choice

to say a yes.

There was a great big talk about the lesbian scene

and sexuality, and we went down the Bell dykes, and the

Chain Reaction dykes in our leather and Muir caps and, you know, chains

and what have you.

And sat there clanking away in the seats, listening to people

talking about how wrong S&M was.

Despite attempts at sexual repression both

within and outside the gay community, Chain Reaction continues

to be successful because we encourage women

to explore their sexual fantasies, to be themselves, and to make

each other feel good.

We work to create an atmosphere that is safe and nonjudgmental.

Everybody had completely lost their sense of humour,

by this time.

Dykes are being told that they're fascists

and they're perverted and they're male-oriented.

I mean, that's what needs to stop.

And I think that's what we need to talk about.

Linda Bellos, I think it was, said that if she saw a black woman

with handcuffs on, it reminded her of slavery and she thought

that they were diminishing themselves and their ancestors.

And at that point, I was sort of getting nudged by people sitting

next to me.

And I stood up and I was like, "Well, I'm black and I wear a

leather jacket and I've got chains, so..."

Then I sat down again.

So that was my, my immense contribution to the conversation.

But, you know, I think even just that little thing did actually

make a bit of a difference because, you know, it just showed

that you can't generalise and you can't say that what I believe

has to be what you believe.

As far as I know, my experience of women involved or who find

themselves invested and interested in exploring

role play and sexuality in general are absolutely anti-racist,

anti-sexist, anti-fascist.

And what we're doing, basically, is trying to play with all

these symbols, and they are symbols, and they are very powerful symbols

both of oppression and of violence as opposed to being ourselves

oppressive and violent.

It's not anybody can do anything to anybody whenever they like,

whether it's violent or not. It's not about that.

It's a very structured thing and there are certain rules

within that anarchy.

The issues about S&M and lesbians really arose because of arguments

within feminism, and those, those happened right

from the '70s upwards.

When I came out in the mid-'70s, I felt like I was a

bit of a second-class lesbian because I was a lesbian out of lust

and not out of politics.

I have quite a lot of vanilla sex.

What is vanilla sex?

What is it?

Well. I don't know,

maybe you should define what vanilla sex is because you say

you're a hot vanilla...

I think it's fantastic that you're a hot vanilla dyke.

INAUDIBLE

I just wanna say one other thing.

No, I don't. I just said to you...

Can we listen to what's being said?

That's basically what the whole lesbian scene

was around the '80s.

It was a hugely homogenised view of lesbian society

in which you had to be wearing pastel colours and dungarees and go

to Greenham and wear Birkenstocks.

And we did not want to do that.

That's why we were the rebel dykes, you know.

We wanted to do what we wanted to do.

We came out of punk, you know, we came out of art school.

We were musicians, you know, we were artists.

We didn't want to do necessarily what everyone else wanted to do.

You don't look like a bunch of dykes, you look like a bunch of punks.

That kind of every woman can be a lesbian, which started

as a political theory, ended up as a kind of rule of thumb.

And then we started making more and more rules for ourselves

about what you had to do to be a proper lesbian.

And there started to be all these rules about what you did

and didn't do in bed.

Penetrative sex was wrong, and any kind of dominance

and submission games were wrong.

Any kind of role playing was wrong.

And that's where the hatred of SM dykes by the mainstream lesbian

feminist movement came from.

And it was never The Twain Shall Meet.

And it came out of really genuine concerns in things like Women's Aid

and stuff like that about male violence.

But it got transmogrified into essentially

the lesbian sex police.

There was this joke back in the day that the authentic version

of lesbian sex was holding hands in 20 passionate positions.

Because it's the only way that you could possibly

remove all inequality.

You can't go around telling people who they're allowed to have sex

with or how they're allowed to have sex.

I think there were quite a lot of women who got labelled S&M dykes,

who probably did very little S&M activity in bed.

But I swear a lot of people joined in cos they were

having more fun.

I honestly believed that we could actually win

fights and battles, and it was up for grabs and they were not

going to take it from us, and they were not going to tell us what to do.

And I think the anti-censorship battle was one of those battles

that they weren't going to be able to tell us what we could

and couldn't read, particularly when it was about our own sexuality

and our own identity.

And unfortunately for the radical feminists, they picked the wrong

side when they went against pornography and they went

against people's own sexuality.

They were, they were just, like, so off-message.

Because the bottom line was, we love women,

we really love women.

Quim was a lesbian magazine for dykes of all sexual persuasions.

The first issue was on penetration, and we asked questions

about what your experience of penetration was,

because at the time, it was a bit of a no-no.

Now, obviously, a lot of us were doing it, but there was a whole

politics around it.

So we thought, well, we'll just say, what is it for you?

How does it feel for you?

And the idea was to give everybody their voice

and their say.

When I first came out and first found out about dildos, essentially,

we were lucky if we could get black rubber dildos, but they always

had balls on them.

So of course all the lesbians would chop off the balls,

and they were really quite ugly.

And then of course they couldn't keep them held in very well.

So there were always chopped-off, lopped-off bits.

And then when I moved to San Francisco, my first dildo

I bought at Good Vibrations,

and not very hygienic,

but it was a leather one, but it didn't have balls.

So it was the first one that we'd ever seen

that didn't have balls.

So that was my first one.

Then, of course, coming back to London.

And Kai Hoyle, who is the MD of Shush, she also is a rebel dyke

and Shush was born out of this period when we were saying

we don't want to be dictated to about how we, how

we should be having sex.

We don't want people to tell us what to do.

It's women's right to decide on their own sexuality.

And very much that we don't want penises.

You know, we do want penetration, but we don't want penises.

So Shush started making dildos ball-free,

un-penis-like dildos, which sort of revolutionised really - lesbians

then could actually finally get hold of things that they wanted.

With my girlfriend of the time, I ran the first mail order sex toy

business "by lesbians for women",

we always said, and it was called Thrilling Bits, which was terrific

because I was able to stand up on a chair at places

like Fallen Angel and go, "I'm one of the women with Thrilling Bits."

We imported terrific stuff from San Francisco, which was a bit

hairy, because Customs didn't like it.

And so we had to name all

these things because we weren't going

to give them the names they had in the straight catalogues,

which were all really sleazy.

So we named them after famous lesbians or women we thought ought

to be lesbians, were icons.

So we had a Dusty, we had other things like that, and our sense

of humour got the better of us again.

And so we called our smallest, most inoffensive vibrator, the Sheila,

after Sheila Jeffreys, a radical feminist separatist - who went

through the roof.

One of the things we sold and we sold quite a lot of,

were dental dams, and they were actually squares of latex,

and you were supposed to use them for cunnilingus.

So if you were going down on your girlfriend, you would put

this between you and her.

And it was the equivalent of a condom, except they were

thicker than condoms.

They used to come covered in sort of medical talcum powder.

So you had to wash them before you went anywhere.

People tried to manufacture sort of little harnesses for them,

like those things you used to have with sanitary towels

in the '60s.

It was these strange harnesses.

People tried all those things, but it was completely pointless

because it's very, very, very difficult indeed to pass

HIV through cunnilingus.

But we weren't entirely certain about that at the time.

Like, people used to put them on their coffee tables

as a discussion.

I was actually running this business at the same

time that I was helping to found the Stonewall group

as it was, what we called it, then, Stonewall now.

And we would have meetings in my living room.

And I remember one time, we'd just had a shipment of stuff

from America and we got out the dental dams and the lesbian porn

magazines, On Our Backs, and all of that stuff, and showed

it to everyone who was there.

And Stonewall was mixed, lesbian and gay.

And I remember the group passed this dental dam around pretty much

in two fingers from one to the other, and God bless him.

Ian McKellen looked at it,

stretched it, pulled it about, and went, "May I?" I went,

"Do what you like with it."

And he just pulled it to his mouth and stuck his tongue

through it and experimented with how it would actually

be to use it.

And I just thought, "Oh, God, I wish I had a camera at the moment.

"One of our great stage actors having fun with a dental dam."

I had started photographing queer dyke life in 1982.

Love Bites was created by a kind of sexual performativity, instead

of performing what was actually going on in the clubs,

because we all wanted that to be a safe and private space.

Instead, we kind of created sexual happenings.

We created, like, a lot of interest and intrigue, what we were doing,

and we were performing for each other.

At the time, the sex wars were raging.

They were trying to exclude us.

The radical lesbian separatists did still have quite a lot of power

at that time.

Many book shops wouldn't stock it because they thought

it wasn't feminist.

And our argument was that we were women and this was our lives

and we were feminists, and we may be experimenting with sexuality,

but that did not mean we weren't feminists.

When Love Bites came out in 1991,

they successfully excluded

Love Bites from gay and lesbian book shops. In Silver Moon,

Sister Right, and Gay's The Word.

When the book shop was open,

we were a lesbian and gay feminist shop.

It was different from gay book shops in the past, which were book shops

for men where they could go and get erotic material.

And this was a book shop set up by socialists,

and it was about ideas.

So gay politics, and biography and history and coming out.

And it wasn't about selling erotic magazines and we didn't sell them.

You have to remember, this was also the era when Gay's The Word

book shop in London was raided and seized.

The case eventually collapsed in court, but the police were trying

to say things like The Joy Of Lesbian Sex was inherently

pornographic and things like that. Stuff that would not

have been pornographic amongst heterosexuals, was definitely

pornographic if it was lesbian.

On Our Backs was a lesbian publication from San Francisco,

and it was essentially mostly soft, a little bit occasionally of hard

porn for lesbians.

On Our Backs was definitely a banned publication.

I started as photographic assistant and I went in there sort

of on this mission to kind of change the look of it a bit.

I felt like the style of the photographs and the women

was a bit old-school, and I wanted to kind of get the newer, younger

generation that was out there, involved.

It featured actually some of the English S&M dykes

and, and it was run by, partly by English women who'd gone out

to San Francisco.

And that's where I first met my London dykes, actually,

And it was very early on in my, in my employment there.

And I first met Seija, from Finland,

she came in to the office one day

and she had with her Baya and Aphra.

And I saw these women and I was just kind of like, "Whoosh, who are they?

"OK, pictures.

"I want to take pictures with them."

I was at the time still back and forth between here

and San Francisco, and I was still at On Our Backs.

I was working with Del La Grace, who

I worked with on Love Bites.

I'd met Del La in San Francisco and I interviewed Del La

for On Our Backs.

We became really good friends, and we've worked together ever since.

One of the books that we didn't stock at the start was Love Bites,

when it came out.

We were worried about it and we took legal advice.

We had a big meeting about it because there were a number

of images in the book that we thought could make us

liable to prosecution.

But I have to say, Sister Right,

which was the women of colour book shops, were the only ones

who were honest enough to say, "We disapprove of the content.

"We do not support lesbian SM."

And we did this whole performance march against the censorship

of love Bites.

I wasn't too worried about the Obscene Publications Squad.

There was all sorts of rules, archaic rules, you know, to do

with how erect a dildo can be.

It can only be, it has to be less than 45 degrees.

Really weird stuff.

I didn't expect to find myself

in court for an over-45-degree dildo.

It was an awful distraction, all of that stuff,

because there was, really we wanted just to get on with the creativity,

exploring of what we were doing.

And I think that started the realisation that this was a

backlash against people for their sexuality.

There was always this attempt to silence. The AIDS activism

was Silence Equals Death, which is one of the slogans

that we used, because nobody recognised us as a community

and having a voice at all.

ACT UP is the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, and it's an AIDS

activist group which I got involved in after going to the '87 March

on Washington, and seeing the Names Project be unfolded,

and just standing there for hours,

hearing name after name after name.

In ACT UP,

we wanted to talk about women and AIDS.

One of the things that was happening on the women's scene, on the dyke

scene, is that there was becoming a sort of faction that was saying,

"Well, you know, we're lesbians, we don't get AIDS,"

who became very judgmental.

And so we needed to talk about behaviour, that the virus

was passed by behaviour and not by identity, you know.

It was great because it really did get people talking

about the nuts and bolts of

what, you know, what we did.

You know, lesbians use IV drugs.

Lesbians are strippers and sex workers. And something that very few

people talk about,

but lesbians sometimes sleep with gay men and, you know, with men,

but also with gay men,

the proximity.

And in those days, you know, drugs, partying, you know, things happen.

But I think particularly with sex workers, it was an issue

because there was from, from one faction, there was this whole sort

of attitude that if you slept with men in any way, shape or form,

you were not a lesbian.

Up until then, lesbians are not seen as particularly activist and the gay

male scene was split between activist gays who all wore loads

of badges and did gay volunteering work for Switchboard or Friend

or whatever, and scene queens who went to Heaven

and all those things.

And none of the groups got together.

And lesbians didn't mix much with gay men and the two types of

gay men didn't mix much.

Section 28, as well as HIV, brought us all together.

Section 28 of the Local Government Act

said that local authorities

were not allowed to promote homosexuality

as a pretend family relationship.

And these are the sort of things that made us rebel dykes.

It wasn't

we just woke up one morning and go, "Oh, let's be rebels."

We actually had things to rebel against.

My girlfriend in the late '70s, early '80s, she'd left her husband

to come and live with me, and brought her baby.

He took the baby and he never came back.

And we were both very distraught, like, "What's going on?"

This solicitor who he hired, took the case to court, and the judge

ruled in his favour because we were lesbians.

That's why we were rebels.

Children who need to be taught to respect traditional moral values

are being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay.

To have Margaret Thatcher's government come up with an idea

that your relationships were pretend and that you should be silenced,

you shouldn't be allowed to be spoken of,

it was a really outraging feeling.

It was quite, you know, celebratory in the '80s.

There was a lot of fun and pleasure in it and we'd moved on a lot,

I think from the kind of '50s or '60s sense of people feeling a

bit apologetic about their sexuality, to feeling great about it.

Hi, we're all gay. It's great, in't it?

We went on a lot of marches against Clause 28.

It was horrifying because I had so recently been at school

and then Clause 28 was coming to really stop even teachers

being able to respond to a child who might be in real danger.

Even if you've got nice parents, it's hard to come out.

And so a teacher is the next port of call and they weren't allowed

to even listen or even respond in any positive way.

It was just - we knew that it was dangerous.

We knew already that people killed themselves because they...

..needed to come out.

And then the government was telling teachers

that they can't be themselves.

It's a relationship.

You can't start by being covered up and being restricted

and being scared.

It was quite a pernicious idea within this Local Government Act

that the promotion of homosexuality should be outlawed in schools,

and in particular that schools should not be able to teach

what they called a "pretended family relationship."

That having gay, two lesbian mothers, for instance, was actually a family.

But they were saying that's not a real family.

It felt like it was mainly gay people fighting it.

There were straight people fighting it, but I didn't feel like the media

was supporting the fight.

Yeah, it felt quite scary, like that

we weren't going to win.

We were talking to ourselves, by the '80s.

We were a completely self-referential, internal-looking.

We weren't capable of talking to anybody we didn't agree with.

We weren't capable of the grand gesture.

And the thing that happened with Section 28 and the abseilers

was that the grand gesture came back and the grand gesture came back

led by lesbians.

And I think for us that came very naturally.

That was the kind of, I think part of, in a way, the training camp

that Greenham Common was for activist women and for activist

dykes at that time.

Greenham was very much about that, about doing physical things, cutting

fences, blockading, entering the USAF base,

pushing out boundaries

and stepping over boundaries, and making kind of quite symbolic

actions that, you know, that were headline-grabbing as well.

We were quite conscious of that, that sort of way to use the media

and grab headlines in that way.

It was actually loads and loads of women who'd never been seen

before, absolutely livid at this legislation.

We had a meeting at my flat in Clapham to talk about direct action

and where we wanted to go with it next.

There was a debate in the House of Lords coming up, and the first

idea we had was a bit more ambitious.

We wanted to hijack a boat and board the Palace of Westminster

from the river.

So storm it from the river and you know, seriously

talking this through.

But there was issues of the tide times and where we were going to get

this boat and everything.

So maybe a little bit, a bit ambitious.

And then I think we were sort of - I think the TV might have been on.

We were reminded of the way the House of Lords is, where there's

the public gallery above where the Lords sit, and so sort

of had this idea of abseiling in or sliding in.

A couple of people went, Sally and Janet, I think, went up

Clapham High Street and bought a couple of washing lines and we kind

of chopped those into four, and then we wrapped them, like, four of us

had them under our jumpers or whatever, wrapped around us.

We were queuing to get into the House of Lords for this debate.

So Paula was kind of shouting out, "Are you a Lord?

"Are you a Lord? Can you sign us in as a guest, to come

"into your guest gallery?"

And before too long, one guy said, "Yes, OK, I'll take you in."

And so he signed in four or five of us, and we went into this side

gallery, which was lucky actually, because the visitor's gallery

is significantly lower than the public gallery.

So we were sitting there and the debate was going on,

and I can't, you know, it's a very adrenaline thing,

I can't honestly remember much about it now, but we got

these ropes out, tied them to the little wrought iron balcony,

and pitched over.

I got rope burns going down this nylon thing very badly

to the floor.

And then other friends, who were in the public gallery, were shouting

and, you know, kicking off and everything.

Their sort of security moved quite quickly.

They held us in there for a good number of hours.

We didn't get charged with anything at all.

They could have charged us within their own bylaws, but I think

they just thought, "Let's get rid of them."

And this actually caused a huge stir because it was the first time

that a lot of gay men had seen lesbians involved in direct action

and doing something that was for everybody.

It was lesbians who became the outrageous activists.

The invasion of the 6:00 News at the BBC was another high-profile

action that we did.

I didn't actually go in there, but I was kind of involved

in the thinking about it. Red and Stella, in particular, who'd

been on the abseiling, and then various other dykes who hadn't

been on the abseiling but were really, really keen to do some more

direct action around Clause 28, came together in a new sort of group

of activists, and we started to plan.

It was helped by the fact that one of the dykes had a friend

who worked, I think, as a runner in the BBC,

and passed us a floor plan

so that they had an idea of where the studio actually

was in this massive TV centre.

There was quite a lot of hair-raising bits of being on

completely the wrong floor.

I seem to remember they had to sort of lock themselves in the toilet

for quite a long time.

They were a bit more organised this time,

they had T-shirts with Stop The Clause on.

I think they had to go in and strip off and get their T-shirts in place.

But anyway, they kind of pulled it together, as we know, because we

do have the film footage of that.

And they got into this studio and padlocked themselves

to the bottom of the desk, which is why they couldn't so easily

get rid of them.

And you could hear these muffled voices from under the desk.

The 6:00 News from the BBC, with Sue Lawley and Nicholas Witchell.

Good evening, the headlines at 6:00.

In the House of Lords, a vote is taking place now on a challenge

to the poll tax.

Tory rebels have said the tax...

This is about rights for lesbian and gay people!

And I do apologise if you're hearing quite a lot of noise in the studio.

Stop the Clause!

I'm afraid that we have rather been invaded by some people

that we hope to be removing shortly.

In the meantime...

And Sue Lawley holding it together very well,

I think we all have to agree she did a masterful job there,

whereas Nicholas Witchell, who then went on to be the royal

correspondent, you know, he got stuck-in off camera.

Stop section 28!

Stop Section 28! Helping the security guards to squash them

and get on top of them.

And direct action is important.

With one thing done by half a dozen people,

you can be on the 9:00 News and reach the whole country

and make a point.

And, you know, sometimes it doesn't work, but when it really works,

by God it works.

And it was horrific.

And yet, looking back, it was the thing that brought us

all together and founded what has since become one of the most

successful lesbian and gay movements in the world,

because it really pissed a lot of people off.

People really became aware of how oppressive the

Tory Government were becoming.

Lots of people came out and said, "This is not on."

Then there was far more marching and far more demonstrating

and it became very hardcore with the police.

And around the same period was the poll tax, right?

We were pretty much doing a riot a week, I think!

There was a lot of going on, where we were protesting

and agitating, really.

About 1990, I kind of got bored of the party lifestyle,

you know, even...

And I wanted to do something, yeah, a bit more challenging.

It was fun.

But I got, I just got bored of it. You know, we didn't have...

Didn't go...

You can't do the same things for years on end.

I moved on.

There was a point when I dropped out of the

Chain Reaction Collective.

She was pretty much excluded.

Not exactly for being trans, but that was a factor that was used.

It was weird because, like, nobody would actually say what I'd done,

and most people just got the idea

I'd done something, and it was awful.

Maybe Roz slept with the wrong person?

In the end, all of the fights and the debates within feminism

absolutely got me down.

And in the end, I left London because it just did my head in.

I tried to find a squat in Amsterdam.

It was fucking freezing.

Every day, I would take an acid tab.

I just lived in this completely psychedelic, fucked-up world.

I ended up getting arrested on some demonstration.

I still to this day, don't know what the demonstration was even for.

And it was actually during those three days in the police station

when I sort of detoxed off drugs and realised this wasn't

a very good idea.

After being a traveller for about a year, which didn't really work,

I found myself in a women-only space.

So it's a rural women-only community.

It was bought and paid for by some of the women coming from Greenham.

I don't want to say exactly where it is, because it's kind

of like a women's refuge.

People went on and became famous artists, famous film-makers,

lecturers, journalists, barristers, nurses, all sorts of things.

A few months after Mouth Almighty split, I actually got my first job

as an indie guitarist with the band Curve.

I saw them on the telly on the Monday, answered the advert

on the Wednesday.

I went to the audition on the Friday and was in the band by teatime,

so that was good!

At least I hope that nowadays for young people, it's much easier

to be what they are.

And I think it's taken this 30 years to develop that people can start

feeling more comfortable in the way they feel inside.

I'm about to start a new club, which is about - all women welcome.

It means queer folks, it means nonbinary.

You know, when I hear my nieces and nephews talk

about their experiences with gay and lesbian young kids...

..that's what I kind of go,

"We've moved on."

The trouble is that we've gone so far into the mainstream

and we're so respectable now, that we're losing all our

sharp edges and we're losing our ability to be the rebels.

One thing I find most amusing is about SM,

because it was very secretive in the '80s, and it's taken

all these 30 years to become something like of a normal thing.

And now you see these books like Fifty Shades Of Grey,

and it's a normal thing,

you know, anybody does it and they discuss it, you know,

in their workplace.

I can have sex in private now, and still enjoy myself!

Yeah, and in the end, it isn't two groups, is it?

No groups are homogeneous. No.

But the thing about us as SM dykes was that we were ostracised

from the lesbian community, and so we formed

a family around that.

And, you know, 30 years later, we're still friends

because there was a very few of us that felt we were really interested

in sex and being positive about sex.

It was like a real energy of what people had and they wanted

to share and they wanted to explore.

And that's maybe why it continued after the collapse

and after the moment, that people took it in their lives

and they continued.

Every Tuesday, we took over the Gay Men's Club in Vauxhall.

We started the UK's first ever lesbian S&M night, Chain Reaction!

We wanted what

the gay men had access to, places to have sex!

The show I'm doing now is my perspective of gay pride

from the viewpoint of a rebel dyke.

So there's that whole thing of just being always challenging,

always challenging the norm, challenging what's expected

and getting power from doing something else.

And, you know, I've been called sir my whole, my whole life!

And so I thought, "OK, I could probably be a drag king again."

Funnily enough, the drag king community very much reminds me

of the rebel dyke community, because we're a minority

and we've got each other's backs.

And that's a really, really lovely feeling.

We as older lesbians have paved the way so that younger people

can come along and have kind of like the freedom

that they've got now.

Not that most, most of us have any clue.

In the same way, I had no clue about all the previous

older lesbians that had gone before me.

It's very necessary that this story gets told because we all stand

on the shoulders of giants.

And if the women hadn't started Gateways, we would never

have started Chain Reaction.

But this story has been so far unsaid, so I'm very happy

that it's finally been documented.

I don't want to be a straight gay, which is how we used to refer

to people like that in the '80s.

For me, the whole point of gay liberation, the whole point

of coming out is to come out as yourself, whatever that is,

wherever it leads you.

You should be yourself.

And rebel dykes in the '80s did that at a time when there

were really far too many people, both inside the movement

and in in the general public, all trying to tell us how to behave.

And, you know, we had to fight long and hard to find our place.

But, you know, we did.

I mean, look at lesbian society now.

That's cos we did that.

We did that. Be thankful.

# I let her take me home

# Even I knew the signs

# What can you do with a girl

# That is not hard?

# So even though I knew

# She was trouble from the start

# I stayed another night and I'm still yawning

# I met a girl

# She never had much time

# I stayed another month and I'm not sorry

# I met a girl

# She never had a heart

# I should have known it from the start

# Well, I know it wasn't smart

# But I'm not sorry. #