Bi lives: Nerina Shute/3

(Above: Nerina in 1995, aged c87, right. With Sue1066, left, whose pic this is)

There are so many things you can learn, and be inspired by, when you look at an individual’s life in depth. Studying Nerina Shute’s life through her writings has given me so much to think about. This is just the beginning:

Bisexuality over a lifetime
For many people who aren’t bi – and even for some who are – bisexuality is something that is for young people. Only for young people. I suspect that’s because many of them connect bisexuality with having lots of partners and/or not being “settled down”.

Not much is known about the ways in which people remain bisexual over the course of their lives, how their sexuality changes (or doesn’t), and how these changes interact with the changes in society.

But for Nerina (as with other people of her generation, now dead, such as James Lees-Milne, who have published volumes of diaries) we can see that her bisexuality was important throughout her life. In her 90s, she was happy to tell an interviewer she was bisexual (see this post); in her 80s, in her autobiography Passionate Friendships, she wrote at some length about the (late 1980s) fraught relationship between bi women and lesbians. She simply didn’t understand why this tension existed:

“We are bisexual. We are ambisextrous, as Aimee Stuart would say. Lesbians accuse us of wanting the best of both worlds. Well why not?”

Bisexual life in London
As I’ve already written, bohemian Londoners of this time – whether intellectual Bloomsburyites, or actual and wannabe actresses, people who worked in nightclubs and many etceteras – tended not to choose one opposite-sex marital partner and stay with them, forsaking all other. The blog I referred to in the first of these posts, Cocktails with Elvira, describes many of the personalities involved, and the merry-go-round of relationships in which they were involved. Some of these characters tended to be gay, some tended to be straight, but many of them seemed to have partners or occasional lovers outside of this. What there were, though, were (physical) fights, intrigues and quarrels – something Nerina complains about in We Mixed Our Drinks. No doubt alcohol played a large part.

Playwright Aimee Stuart, friend of Nerina’s from 1926 until Aimee died, introduced Nerina to many of these women through her “at homes”, where sex was frequently discussed and being “ambisextrous” far from unusual. One of them was almost certainly the wonderfully named Sunday Wilshin, who acted in the film version of Stuart’s play Nine till Six. She really intrigues me, and there’s more about her here.

This is a still from The Gentle Sex from 1943, co-written by Aimee Stuart, Moie Charles (also a friend of Nerina's) and others. Apparently there is a free download of the film on that site too!



It also seems that there was a group of women who saw themselves as specifically bisexual, as distinct from lesbian. This was certainly how Nerina saw herself as a mature woman. When young, she was unhappy about her attractions to women, didn’t like the contempt heaped on lesbians, and couldn’t understand the fact that she needed both women and men.

She saw her love for men, and her love for women, as mutually complementary. A relationship with a woman would not threaten her relationship with a man, or vice versa. Her friend and sometime lover, Helen Mayo, thought so too. This is a pic of Helen, left, and Nerina, right, on holiday in Ireland, 1939.


And in Passionate Friendships, she quotes Helen, in a conversation from the late 1950s:

“’To deceive him with another man would be wrong, but not with a woman. There’s no harm in it,’ said Helen, ‘because the love between two women is totally different. It’s a form of friendship, a passionate friendship.’
“Of course I knew exactly what she meant. There is little or no similarity between the lusty love-making of a man or tender or motherly love-making between women. A male lover is unthinkable for a married woman in love with her husband. A female lover can be delightful.”

To Nerina’s husband Howard Marshall, though, a lover was a lover; their relationship ended because he considered she had been unfaithful. The fact that her lover was a woman was neither here nor there. In Passionate Friendships, she blames herself for hurting him so much, and thereby ending their marriage, when she still loved him.

Helen and Nerina’s view of sex between women seems to have some connection with the romantic friendships of the 19th century and earlier, as detailed by Lilian Fadermann in Surpassing the Love of Men. Fadermann, writing in the early 1980s, saw romantic friendships as NOT being sexual. I don’t see that we can know, definitively.

Helen Mayo and her partner (Dorothy Anderton) Andy Sharpe, friends of Nerina’s from 1939 until their deaths in the 1970s, are also interesting to consider. They were a dentist and obstetrician, respectively, so not obvious candidates for bohemianism. Instead, Nerina places them within a work-hard/play-hard, live life to the full framework. Andy had a fiancé who was killed in WW2, and Helen had other lovers too, as well as Nerina. They were extremely sociable and life-loving, with their large house in Portland Place the scene of many parties. This was mentioned in Andy Sharpe’s obituary in the BMJ, with no further comment or explanation.

Things I don’t know about Nerina
Although I wrote above about Nerina’s lifetime of bisexuality, in fact there is little publically available information about her life in old age. I found a couple more pictures of later-life Nerina via Google Images, and they intrigue me. They are from Sue1066’s flickr account. Who are you, Sue1066? You obviously knew Nerina (see the picture of the two of them at the top of the post) and perhaps have some connection to her family – given that some of the other pics are of Nerina’s mother’s childhood home and a memorial with her maiden name Pepper Staveley. I hope you don't mind me using your pic.

Obviously, there are lots more things I don’t know. And sadly for my bank balance, these are the sort of interests that lead jobbing writers to attempt biographies.

The most obvious are: what were the real identities of her lovers Charles – abortionist turned condensed-milk salesman; and Josephine – Catholic monocle-wearer, met at a lesbian party, greatly in love with Nerina, and her assistant at Max Factor in the late 1930s? Cocktails with Elvira contains a number of candidates for Josephine, although I don’t think any likely monocle-wearers are mentioned.

Maybe Nerina was deliberately laying false trails for any future nosey-parkers.

Bi lives: Nerina Shute/2

(Left, Nerina Shute in the late 1930s)

This is the second post in my LGBT history month series on bisexual writer Nerina Shute. If you haven’t read yesterday’s post on why I’m doing this, best to read here first.

Nerina's life and times

Nerina Shute was born to an upper middle class family in Northumberland in 1908, the daughter of Cameron and Renie. Her father was in the army, her mother wrote several scandalous novels which were optioned by Hollywood.

While in California (with Nerina), Renie invested all of her money in a married paramour’s gold mine and when Cameron came to visit them, persuaded him to invest his money too. The married man was killed in a car accident and the goldmine was found to be devoid of gold, meaning that the family lost all their money.

Nerina won a short story competition while still in the USA, despite the fact that she had left school at 14. She came back to Britain from California, aged 18, soon moving to London, where she became a typist at the Times Book Club. Attending dance classes, she met playwright and bohemian stalwart Aimee Stuart, who held frequent parties and gatherings in her central London flat. As Nerina wrote later in We Mixed Our Drinks (where she writes of herself in the third person:

“Shute was an odd, rebellious young woman who happened to come of good family but preferred to be thought a ‘bohemian’ than ‘a lady’ or even ‘a gentlewoman’. She was untidy, careless and heavily made up with lipstick and rouge and eye-black ... Behind a half-hearted attempt at flippancy she was deeply in earnest. Behind her sex-talk and her bad manners she was old fashioned, and full of what she herself sometimes called ‘twisted ideals’.”

In 1927, at the tail end of the silent picture era, Nerina was offered a job as a reporter on Film Weekly. She interviewed many celebrities, and did not mince her words, offending many film stars such as Madeleine Carroll, who she described as a “ruthless Madonna”.

Here she is in The First Born, a great (silent)film that was restored/relaunched recently by the BFI.



Nerina also made a nuisance of herself around film sets: director E A Dupont banned her from his productions, and she once returned disguised as a rabbi to see what was going on.

In 1931, her first, autobiographical novel, Another Man’s Poison was published, causing scandal with her relatives, and attracting reviews, as one of its main characters, Paula, describes herself as ambisextrous. This received a fortuitous review from Rebecca West in The Daily Telegraph:

“Miss Shute writes not so much badly as barbarously, as if she had never read anything but a magazine, never seen any picture but a moving one, heard any music except at restaurants. Yet she is full of talent.” (Shute, 1944:40)

This was excellent publicity for Nerina, despite the fact that she was hurt by it, thinking it an accurate criticism. As “the girl with the barbarous touch” she wrote a series of articles for the Sunday Graphic newspaper at 10 guineas a week (compared to £4 for her job at Film Weekly), giving the opinions of “the ultra-modern girl”. Subsequently, she was invited to Lord Beaverbrook’s estate (he was then owner of the Express newspapers) and given a job as a general reporter at the Express, where she was sacked again, this time after six months.

“Far from being a good reporter, she was inexperienced, useless at writing a straightforward news-story, and on top of these fundamental drawbacks, as everyone probably knew, she disliked her job.”

Nerina was aware of her attractions to women from the 1920s on, and was nervous about them. She did not want to become a lesbian, feeling that the societal opprobrium was too great, and she felt “hurt and diminished” by this prejudice.

But around this time, she met “Charles”, a doctor who had been struck off for performing an illegal abortion. Feeling lonely, and anxious to lose her virginity, they began a relationship and were soon in love. After some months, she went to “live in sin” in Liverpool with him, where he had got a job as a condensed-milk salesman. She became jealous, however, which caused arguments, and so she left him and returned to London. Here they are, posing on Blackpool Pleasure Beach, in 1930.



Once more, she became a journalist, where she says she was obliged by her editor to write light stories which she felt were wrong in times of terrible poverty. For instance, she was sent to investigate nudist clubs and colonies “which were springing up in the green fields of England like rude little mushrooms”. She went to visit nudists in Earl’s Court but was amused to find that, for the interview, they were clothed. The editor wanted her to write stories about how they were immoral but she liked the nudists she met and wouldn’t do it.

Like very many creative (and other) people of that time, she was attracted by what appeared to be the greater equality in Russia, although after a trip there she also offended Russian Communists she met by saying they had replaced religion with politics.

Around this time, she also began a relationship with a woman she calls “Josephine”, who was a close friend and lover until the end of the 1930s.

Disillusioned with journalism, and by the lack of success of a play she had written, in 1935 she began to work for Max Factor as their publicity manager, doing what she described as “commercial propaganda” and becoming what she called a “Bond Street blonde” – well dressed and groomed, wearing high heels and bleaching her brown hair. This was a dramatic contrast to her previous look of androgynous messiness, complete with black hat. She was also briefly married to James Wentworth-Day, a high Tory journalist, who attracted her with his strongly felt ideals, even as she furiously disagreed with them. The marriage only lasted a year.

He was around 40 when they married, so I imagine this is him in the 50s:



By 1937, Nerina had lost her eagerness to write:

“A few years ago Shute had been the budding novelist and journalist, a young woman of rebellious thoughts who dreamed each night of rising up and up into the golden heights, creating with words the brave people and the lovely places she saw so clearly in her New World. Full of ambition, she had been a pig-headed untidy young romantic; she intended to write what she believed, live as she wanted, and to hell with criticism”.

In 1939, while riding her horse in Rottingdean, Sussex, she met Helen Mayo and Andy Sharpe, two women who lived in Portland Place in London and worked as a dental surgeon and obstetrician respectively. She went to live with them, becoming Helen’s lover, and worked as a nurse, almoner, and ambulance driver, throughout the war.

She also met her second husband, Howard Marshall, in 1940, a very prominent radio journalist, and the first person to broadcast ball-by-ball cricket commentary.

For the duration of the war, their relationship was intense and idyllically romantic, much of it carried on in intense secrecy as he was both famous and still married, his wife and sons being in America for safety.

This – Begin the Beguine - is one of the songs they used to dance to:



They married in 1944 and were both strongly socialist at this time, endlessly discussing what a better world might look like. Still, however, she had creative ambition: “... she was not a good enough writer. With all her heart she envied the experienced word-wealthy people”. She did, however, publish We Mixed Our Drinks (discussed in the previous post).

In the immediate post-war period, their relationship was “blissfully happy” despite the fact that they were both unemployed and in general found this period difficult:

“When all the excitement was over we all had a feeling of anticlimax. We had done our job. We had won the war. We were unprepared for the long littleness of life.”

What a telling quote! Their intense relationship soon began to show cracks: she wanted to go out, he wanted to stay in. For some years, she acquiesced to this, despite increasing loneliness. When Howard began to work in PR in late 1945, they hired a French housekeeper, "Renee". Renee brought fun and joy into what, over the next few years, became an increasingly unhappy marriage. They loved each other but were wildly incompatible.

Howard did, however, support her quieter, more intellectual endeavours. Nerina studied English at London university, and began to write the first of her historic novels. This one, about Shelley, was published in 1951



After a few years, Nerina and Renee began a sexual relationship (instigated by Renee) which seems to have been maternal on Nerina’s side. Renee, however, was in fact in her 30s, and her mental health was deteriorating. Her family had died in a bombing raid in France, and she had found parts of her mother’s body scattered in the ruins of their home.

Towards the end of her three-year stay with Nerina and Howard, Renee had a serious nervous breakdown, eventually returning to France. Nerina then became very depressed as well and sounds as if she were on the edge of a breakdown herself. “The longing to escape had returned ... this time I felt a desire to die”.

During a furious argument with Howard on New Year’s Eve 1953, several years after Renee had returned to France, she told him she had had sex with Renee. He had known nothing about her attractions to women. Despite speaking on the phone and writing letters, they never saw each other again, although she maintained until the end of her life that she still loved him.

This is Howard, perhaps in the 1940s.



Nerina went to stay in Sussex with her mother and her mother’s much younger and alcoholic sixth husband, Noel. While her depression lifted rapidly, she, her mother and step-father struggled financially, negotiating with the Inland Revenue, trying to make money on renovating houses and moving, or selling off parcels of land. Over the next four years, as her mother’s health deteriorated, Nerina wrote a memoir of Renie’s life Come into the Sunlight, designed to be a reflection of her mother’s joyful philosophy of life. After her death, Nerina and Noel soon moved to London, where they lived in Chelsea, at this time just starting to be the centre of Swinging London.

When she and Noel decided to take ballroom dancing lessons (so Nerina could take Noel’s mind off drinking) they were taught by Phyllis Haylor.

Nerina and Phyllis began a relationship and remained lovers until Phyllis’s death. This was, according to Nerina, a very happy relationship although no particular details emerge in her late-life autobiography Passionate Friendships.

“Phyllis made me happy with an adoration based on a need for motherly tenderness which only a woman can give to another woman. Now, late in life, Phyllis was giving it to me and I was giving it to her. It was like a marriage. We became passionate friends, and our friendship lasted until the day of her death.”

During the 1970s, Nerina wrote two travel and history books about London’s villages, as well as a volume of tell-little autobiography, The Escapist Generations and, in 1986, The Royal Family and the Spencers.



In 1981, Phyllis died suddenly of a heart attack and Nerina was alone once more. Although this is not mentioned by Nerina, her obituaries mention that she began a relationship with another woman, Jocelyn Williams, in 1989, and they stayed together until Nerina died.

In later life, Nerina became as fervent a conservative as she had once been a socialist, but she remained interested in the contemporary world, even as she distanced herself from some of it. With the publication of her final autobiography, Passionate Friendships (1992), she was able to talk more freely about her bisexuality:

“I believe there are many women in the world who need the love of another woman in addition to the love of a man. We are bisexual. Usually we hide this fact from our husbands for fear of ending a happy marriage. I made the mistake of telling my husband ... By explaining how it all happened, and how it ended, I may possibly give help to others.”

So not exactly what bi people tend to think these days, then! Nerina was a product of her class and time, but/and I warm to her and think she would have made a marvellous companion.

In tomorrow’s post, I’ll be writing about some of the questions and issues that studying Nerina’s life has led me to consider.

(The information in this post comes primarily from Nerina’s memoirs and autobiographies, with additional information from Shepperton Babylon, by Matthew Sweet, and from various obituaries.)

Bi lives: Nerina Shute

Nerina Shute, in the early 1930s








February is LGBT history month (in the UK) and – although I have several other blog posts in the offing/promised/massively overdue - I really want to add my twopennorth while I can.

Actually many more pennorth than that. This is a long post, so I’m splitting it into three, to be published over three days, thereby just about squashing it in before the end of the month.

People in the bisexual community often talk about the need for more information about bi lives – people who are now, or were in the past, some kind of bisexual. And whereas there can often be debates or confusion about whether we now can give a contemporary identity (bisexual) to them then, with Nerina there is no confusion. "I am bisexual," she said to writer Matthew Sweet, when she was in her 90s. "What does your generation think about such things?"

Nerina Shute: 1908-2004
This isn’t the first time I’ve written on this blog about Nerina – teenage film critic of the silent era, novelist, London bohemian, laugh-out-loud memoir writer and explicitly bisexual at a time it is so often assumed that people weren’t. But since 2006, when I wrote about her before, I've had more time to think about her, and her life and times.

I first found out about Nerina when I read her memoir We Mixed Our Drinks in around 2000, while I was doing research for another project. Published in 1944, WMOD is the story of her life from her teenage years in the USA when her mother lost all their money in a goldmine fraud; her time as reluctant film critic – she didn’t like film stars; an even more reluctant journalist – she didn’t know what she was doing; and an eager young novelist (nicknamed “the girl with the barbarous touch”).

At the time, WMOD was considered very shocking. Nerina is open about having lived with a man without being married, about being taken to a Chelsea orgy (where the hostess wore a vest that was both too long and too short, and they were thrown out for not taking off their clothes), about the “pansy” and lesbian circles in which she never quite said she moved.

I am fascinated by Nerina for a whole range of reasons, some of which may already be apparent. So fascinated, in fact, that even though writing about her was a significant part of my master’s degree in life history research, I still google her and her gang to see if anything new shows up. Sure enough, I found this superlative blog Cocktails with Elvira. It’s based around a notorious court case – of socialite Elvira Barney, who shot her lover in 1932.

The blog also contains a lot of information about bohemian London of that time, much of which would now be (and somewhat differently would have been then) considered “queer”. This is not simply the haute intelligentsia of the Bloomsbury Group, which has been well-documented. The various overlapping London bohemias of the 20s and 30s (and earlier, and later?) seem to have been overwhelmingly queer. Musicians, actors, models, chorus girls and boys, journalists and people about town seemed to have been strikingly unstraight. Not to mention artists, particularly those condemned with the word “Chelsea”.

“Hello darling, how’s your sex life? Lousy, darling, how’s yours?”
While Matt Houlbrook’s brilliant book Queer London looks at all the different ways in which men at this time interacted with each other for sexual/romantic purposes, there has been very little published about women’s relationships with each other outside of the most famous instances – Violet Trefusis and Vita Sackville-West, for instance.

Now that I’ve read all Nerina’s memoirs/autobiographies, it seems really apparent that there was a lively lesbian/bi/queer women’s scene in London in the interwar period and afterwards. There is more information about some of these characters in Cocktails with Elvira, and I wish I had the time to research this properly. This scene was mainly based around friendship networks of various sorts, rather than the cottaging/picking up/Turkish baths scene etc, described by Houlbrook.

While these women were often well-off, sometimes rich and independent, they weren’t necessarily so – Nerina came from a once-rich background but in the 30s she was often without a shilling for the gas - indeed the whole mix of class and bohemias seems to be to be quite complicated. I’d love to know how much, if at all, any sexual/romantic friendship networks spread to “ordinary women”.

It also seems that there was a group of women who were actively, explicitly, bisexual, who sometimes wanted to distance themselves from lesbians and sometimes had relationships with them. I’ll be looking at this in a bit more detail in a couple of days.

When I read Shepperton Babylon by Matthew Sweet – about the British film industry - I was delighted to discover that Nerina was bisexual, and quite happy to talk about it. I was much less delighted to find out that, at the time I was first devouring We Mixed Our Drinks, Nerina was actually still alive and living in Putney. She didn’t die until four years later. I suppose that’s the hard lesson for oral historians: the people you really want to speak to are often just beyond reach.

Tomorrow, I'll be posting more about Nerina's life and loves. Then finally, I'll be looking at some of the questions that her life, and what I know of her thoughts and opinions, pose for bisexual people today.

Getting gaydar

One of the googled queries that often sends people to this blog is: “How do I know if X [person that I fancy] is bi?” Chances are, they go away entirely unenlightened.

I was thinking of this myself the other day, when I was chatting to someone I know slightly. She knows about me – and we have always had a rapport – but, unless she tells me, how will I ever know if there is anything to “know” about her?

I am not planning to proposition her, indeed am quite enjoying the continued existence of Unresolved Sexual Tension, but I’d like to know that UST is what it is, and not just friendliness.

In the past, I have got this horribly, hideously wrong – to the embarassment and bafflement of both parties - and I just wonder how other people sense mutual sexual attraction.

Going clubbing
No doubt if you are operating in an entirely lesbian/gay environment, then it is easier. At least if you are in a queer club, it’s likely that the people who are there are queer. And that’s one of the reasons why LGBT online dating is so popular – you at least know that people there are looking for lovers of whatever gender you are.

But queer people operate in all sorts of mainstream and heterosexual environments too, and seem to meet partners there without necessarily verbally coming out to them. How?

Assuming everything
My lack of gaydar, though, isn’t confined to people I may sort of kind of fancy. Several times over the past year, I have been told that “of course” so and so is gay, what was I thinking?

Well, what was I thinking? In theory, I don’t assume anyone is anything. In practice, unless people have an obvious attachment, or I meet them in an unarguably queer environment, I kind of think they’re all asexual.

British newspaper publishes good bi article shock

Hallelujah! The first positive piece about bisexuality in an eon is published.

Basically, writer A, Stephanie Theobald (writer of chick lit), used to be a lesbian. Now she’s having a relationship with a man. Viz, writer B, Jake Arnott (far more famous writer of gay gangster novels). He has always been bisexual but mostly had relationships with men. Now they’re in lurve and want to tell the liberal intelligentsia about it.

Or: two novelists each have a new book to push, and they’ve found a handy two-in-one angle for a nifty little feature.

But...

Mr Writer
I have absolutely no beef with Mr A. I have never read any of his books (or hers for that matter) but what he says is interesting… In fact, it's all good: the first famousish bi man out and proud in the UK since Tom Robinson.

According to the piece, he has identified as bi since he was young, and came out as such in the 80s. But he didn’t find acceptance on the politicised gay scene at the time; nor did he find much scope for bi political activity. So, although he was always in relationships with men, he always knew that was not the whole story. Then he met Ms Theobald.

Ms Writer
Stephanie Theobald was (I think) a fashion/style journalist, and a lesbian. Back in 2002, she wrote the most virulent piece of drivel that I have ever seen on male bisexuality, since the work of 1950s sexologists or contemporary religious bigots, or rejected comments on this site. And it was published! In the Guardian! No way am I going to link to it (can’t find it anyway). But it was all the usual stereotypes with extra added venom.

She thought bi women were sell-outs too and wrote so at length. Then she became one. Oh well, it just goes to show what many people think – that those who are secure in their own sexuality don’t have to ridicule that of others.

Out and proud hypocrites, as she styles herself, are simply hypocrites. She doesn't say she's wrong, or apologise, just jokes about it. Pah!

It occurs to me that this is the first time I have ever really slammed any other "bi" people on this site, but I do believe that she deserves it.

Bi The Way
Well I saw this film mentioned in my last post, and certainly didn’t hate it as much as the Bi-Furious writers, although their criticisms - too many to list here - are generally valid. It was about a world that seemed very foreign to me – bi teenagers in the US. At least it was laugh-out-loud funny in places. And it did show that, for some young people, being bi meant they were a target for bi and homophobia, not just lots of sex!

One thing that really pissed me off though: no activists. Robyn Ochs was allowed precisely one sentence. Of course those young people (and others like them) are going to feel abandoned and isolated if they don’t know there is a whole movement of individuals who are battling for them. The bi movement/theorists seem to be made invisible in all places and times. As the bi-furious people wrote, there was no sense of bis being part of a queer community at all.

Complete absence of a sense of history or geography too. Lookie here, filmmakers Brittany Blockman and Josephine Decker, bisexuality didn’t spring out of nowhere last year or the year before, some time after Madonna kissed Britney. Bisexuality exists everywhere and at every time. And not just for teenagers, either.

Women not-loving women

Someone commented somewhere on this blog that one of the things they liked about it was that I wasn’t a “cheerleader” for bisexuality. True. I’m not really a cheerleadery type of person – sceptic, I think is about right, although common sense, or down to earth probably covers it. Some people, including me, are bi. Here are a few things we might find important / interesting / relevant, and here are some other ways in which people aren't giving us our due. And that's about it.

However, I wish, I wish, I wish, that so much of the writing on bisex I am sent through my Google Alerts wasn’t from young bi women getting a tough deal from lesbians. It makes me wonder what has changed since the 80s. Well, obviously, a lot has changed but it seems not enough.

These days I get no personal flack at all from lesbians, but then I am 51 and very much out. I have been bi for so long that no one is going to tell me I can’t be, or that I’m really a lesbian, or that anything I do is for the benefit of men. I'd probably burst out laughing. Any argument they throw at me, I can throw back at them. But anyway, any new lesbians I meet are usually interested, rather than hostile. Of course, that wasn't always the case, and I have had my fair share of blanking / looks of disgust / losing friends / not getting lovers / horrible comments as I hear about now.

(Just to make things clear, I know that lesbians do get a raw deal in society at large. What's more, if I were (and when I have been) after a committed relationship with a woman I would be really unhappy if she were to treat it as something trivial. But what about taking people as you find them? Not judging them before you even meet? Imagining that it might be possible for lesbians to treat bi women badly as well as the other way round?)

For myself, I would go along with a woman I interviewed once who said: "Why on earth would I be interested in them, if they aren't interested in me?" Dr Sue says best leave anti-bi lesbians to their own devices when it comes to being friends/lovers, and find some nice bi women instead.

These days if I get any bad responses they are from heterosexuals (although not a lot of them really – most I meet are nice!). And it is those respectable, polite, middle-class people whose look of disgust and response of silence gives away their real feelings.

It's heterosexual society, not individual lesbians, who have power over bi women. Individual lesbians can make your life miserable, sure, but they can't take away your kids.

Divide and rule

A landmark report by Stonewall was in the Guardian newspaper, (including online) and quite possibly other serious UK papers yesterday. It’s a depressing report, concluding that most lesbians and gay men expect to experience homophobia in all/most aspects of their daily lives.

For the majority of my readers who don’t live in the UK, Stonewall is a “professional lobbying group” which “put the case for equality on the mainstream political agenda by winning support within all the main political parties”.

Now, what I have to say in the following post is in no way to lessen the fact that this report is important, or that lesbians and gay men have a tough time. They do. The idea, for instance, that gay teenagers (and those who aren’t gay at all but are “different”, or don’t fit in to gender stereotypes) suffer more homophobia (much more, it seems) than they used to, is frankly terrible. That we are all (yes, bi people too) meant to sit back and take random homophobic comments from all and sundry. It ought to be enough to make queer people want to act. Do something like, oh I don’t know, join Stonewall…

That notwithstanding, the attitude Stonewall seems to have drives me up the wall. As a campaigning organisation, it says it promotes equality and justice for Lesbians, Gay Men and Bisexuals. Huh. If they have ever done anything for bi people, except when they couldn’t avoid it because of our same-sex behaviour, I’ll be mighty surprised.


The mystery of the vanishing bisexual
Everything this report says about lesbians and gay men is true for bisexuals too. And, as they apparently asked 1,658 lesbians, gay men AND BISEXUALS then surely some of their findings must apply to bi people too. Except that we don’t know. The word bisexual only appears three times in this report (ie “The last five years have seen a catalogue of legal changes benefiting lesbian, gay and bisexual people”; “In 2007 Stonewall commissioned YouGov to survey a sample of 1,658 lesbian, gay and bisexual people across Britain.” Plus once in the conclusion in a similar fashion.) Elsewhere, we are noticeably absent. For instance: one in five lesbian and gay people expect to be treated worse by police than a heterosexual…. Nine in ten would expect to face barriers to becoming foster parents because they are lesbian or gay. Etc.

Now, if they had separated out the bisexual responses, or put bi responses in with the lesbian and gay ones, fair enough. But they didn’t. “Bisexual” is simply a word here, put in as a sop to us, a token that means absolutely nothing. Really, they mean lesbian and gay, and people who are having same-sex at the moment who they count as really lesbian or gay.

Do they not realise that, if a doctor, MP, schoolchild, panel of foster-parent approvers, etc etc etc knows someone is bisexual they very probably think a) they are lying to us/or themselves and are really gay; b) they are oversexed and highly promiscuous, therefore dangerous to society and children in particular. Therefore, bisexuals are considered at least as bad as someone who is in a committed same-sex relationship and quite possibly very much worse.

For myself, I remember going to the doctor and being grilled about why I didn’t need any contraception, didn’t I want a boyfriend… etc. Pretty much the same as a lesbian would be grilled I suppose – but I wasn’t one. I imagine (probably correctly) that if I said I was bisexual they would have been even keener that I take a contraceptive pill!

Mind survey
I wonder if the people who wrote up this research have ever read the Mind survey that shows bi people having worse mental health than lesbians, gay men, or certainly heterosexuals? That they were extremely unlikely to tell health care providers they were bisexual, had little support from friends and family, were poorer and so on. I wrote about it on this post.

This survey took place in Britain about British attitudes, but I think much of it is likely to be true for you too, wherever in the world you live.

No bath but plenty of bubbles

I’ve been reading No Bath but Plenty of Bubbles An oral history of the Gay Liberation Front 1970-73 by Lisa Power. Published in 1995, this book about gay liberation in the UK isn’t in print any more, but you can buy second hand copies here.

There was a hell of a lot to fight about 35 years ago – and these people fought it with humour, ridiculing mainstream society. They went to meeting upon meeting, demonstrated wherever and whenever it seemed appropriate, the men dressed in radical drag, and everyone generally had a whale of a time.

This was the time of phenomenal political activity in the UK (and much of the world too) where people thought things could and would change just like that. One of the manifestations of this was (in London at least) squatting the masses of rundown property that existed at the time; living communally and trying to get rid of privacy and private property (no toilet doors, anyone?!?); linking gay liberation with all sorts of other liberation too.

Perhaps their finest hour was the 1971 Festival of Light – an evangelical Christian festival, designed to promote traditional Christianity and family values – where they carried out a hysterically funny intervention, dressing as nuns, letting out mice, singing inappropriately and seemingly having a lot of fun.

The radical drag of those times (men with beards and some lovely 30s frocks that I wish I could wear) was meant to throw stereotyped gender roles into disarray and no doubt was part of the precursor for today’s transgender movements.

As one Michael Brown said: “I was angry, I was thrilled. We thought we could change the sexuality of everyone and not just homosexuals.”

What a lovely thought. So how did they go about it?

To start with, it seems, there was a kind of embracing of polymorphous perversity – that that was a goal in and of itself. Even people whose sexual practice was strictly het could join gay lib if they wanted to support their sisters and brothers.

But after a while things got stricter, people weren’t able to keep up the level of activism over the course of years – meetings every night were a bit much. They fell out with each other – there were personal and political differences. And of course, many – although not all - of the women felt that their issues were not being taken seriously enough. There was also a distinct feeling that women would go off with men if there was the slightest possibility of them doing so – one of the ideas that led to separatist lesbianism that affected so many women at that time.

One woman at least – Sue Winter (who are you and where have you been since 1995? There’s nothing on google) – flew the flag for bisexuality as a gay lib activist. And there were men (such as Tim Clark) who found that, when they had relationships with women, that they weren’t quite so desirable as gay libbers anymore. Polymorphous perversity as a goal for the immediate future faded away, identity politics crept in, and gay liberationists concentrated on being Gay.

Many of the demands that were in the 1971 manifesto have been met in Britain - up to a point - so hurrah for us! No, that sounds too scathing - many people's lives have been absolutely transformed by the changes since then. Young queer people can't really imagine how bad it used to be, in the UK at any rate.

However, I felt sad and nostalgic reading this book. I was too young to be involved in this, although I did come into contact of the dribs and drabs of radical drag, certainly feminism, and general political activity. I wish there was that level of excitement, hope and optimism now – instead of debt, work-hard play-hard, careerism, stress, more debt. And so on. There may be civil partnerships (in the UK, and some of the rest of the world) but what there isn’t is a sense that things in general, not just sexuality, can really profoundly change. There’s assimilation, but it’s been at a high price. You have to be a “good” gay, essentially "straight-acting", if you want to be accepted.

Friends

There’s a saying, I don’t know if you know it, which goes roughly as follows:

What do gay men take on their second date? What second date?
What do lesbians take on their second date? All their furniture because they’re moving in.

So far, so clichéd. But what about:

What do bisexuals take on their second date? Their friends, because after all what’s the difference between friends and lovers?

I read that, or something like it, on a wall at a bi conference once and it’s stuck in my mind. For many people, particularly – but not only - in the politicised bi community, the friends/lovers blurriness is something to celebrate. You ought to be friends with your lovers, right? And people who have been your lovers, who have shared that kind of particular closeness ought to stay your friends. The relationship ought to be able to change and encompass being sexual or not.

Then again, you can be so close to your friends that you find the attraction growing into a sexual one.

Sounds lovely. Now doubt some people, some of the time, can manage this (and I’m not even going to go into jealousy, emotional trauma, and so on in this post!)

And/or lovers
But for myself, I have always found the friends/lovers thing very hard to manage. My normal pattern, for instance, is to have a group of friends rather than one particularly close one. However, when I have had a female “best friend” as I have had a couple of times in my life, the sexual tension has always been hard to navigate. To start with, they have always been heterosexual. Then again, I have sometimes felt confused about what sexual attraction means in that context. With someone I hardly know, if I feel a desire to be with them a lot of the time, I’d put that down to attraction. But if you are already close, what does that mean?

I remember a woman I interviewed once – and I think it is women, much more than men, who are confused by the borders of sex and friendship – who said that she felt her sexual feelings towards women kept her distant from other women as she was worried about how they’d react to her bisexuality and made her fearful of rejection. So much for all women being bi! I understand what she means, too, as I have felt it myself. When other (straight) women have said things in my presence like: it’s so relaxing being with women because you don’t have to worry about sex, I do feel like quietly screaming. No dear, not for me it isn’t.

Straight people, most of the time, don’t have to think about this. This is something lesbians – and to a lesser extent gay men - have to face as well. So how do we all manage it?

Cruising for girls

So lesbians are learning to cruise. At all-night women-only saunas and via the internet. Allegedly. It's no longer just gay men after some no-strings how's your father.
In a feature in the Guardian today www.guardian.co.uk/gayrights/story/0,,1834025,00.html, one Jaq Bayles writes about this "new" lesbian sexuality. Well, if lesbians were having more casual sex, it wouldn't be so surprising, would it? Thanks to gaydar and internet sex sites for people of every sexuality, everyone's doing it. Potential lovers are just so easy to get hold of.
A couple of months ago a friend/one-time girlfriend and I agreed (in a half-jokey way) that we would never have got together if gaydar had existed then. Certainly, there's a lot more women to choose from: if I wanted to find a 25-year-old blue eyed banker who also liked salsa dancing, that wouldn't be too much to ask. Gaydargirl has plenty of bi women, or lesbians who are happy to date bi women, too.
There's also a massive increase in swinging due to the internet, and I have interviewed several women who told me they had got into it precisely in order to have casual sex with women. But as their male partners were always very much in evidence, that was sometimes a bit hard to organise.
One of the reasons why lesbian sex - or indeed any sort of casual sex - is so much easier to get via the internet is that it takes away so much of the physical and emotional danger. I do remember about 15 years or so ago some lesbians tried to set up a cruising area on Hampstead Heath. But it never really took off. I certainly would never have gone there, even if I was crawling the walls, and the physical danger aspect is a definite part of that. It was also the idea that you were really ceding control: in the semi-dark, how can you see if you fancy someone? What if it all turned out to be an emotional nightmare? What if you got cold feet?

Trained to change behaviour
Radical feminist Sheila Jeffreys says that women are being "trained" to change their sexual behaviour by sex entrepreneurs. Now I hate this idea that women are these pure beings, existing in some kind of pre-lapsarian state - until some nasty men, or pseudo-men, or women acting as agents for men - come to corrupt them. Only then will they want to have heterosex / S/M / promiscuous lesbian sex - depending on the decade she was writing in - rather than the utterly egalitarian un-messy (in any sense) lesbian sex that she thinks best for women. I may be parodying her views - or at least exaggerating them - but not by much. Women do always, and have always, liked all sorts of different things sexually. There was always casual sex and some lesbians have occasionally slept with men. The idea that it has suddenly started is nonsense.
Where I do sort of agree with the nay-sayers (in this case a bloke, queer theorist Stephen Maddison, is the idea that "cruising is a commodified, competitive and highly ritualistic business". Yup, no chance for an older, unattractive, shy person. And he also says "Gaydar culture institutionalises erotic interplay, turning adventure and wonder into a sexual McDonald's."
True. How much more spontaneous to meet a short-term sweetie walking down the street or in a bar, with no money changing hands, data being captured, or cookies placed on your computer. But much more of a risk - and much less likely that you'll get the person that you want.