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This is a
fascinating window into a moment in time, it feels very remote and
yet the 1990s are well within my own lived experience. It points to
the ebbs and flows of progress.
Is the social action
and community groups that created the context for the Lesbian Line a
thing of the past – has the hyper-connectivity of the internet
liberated or entrapped us? Once the internet arrived it is remarkable
how quickly the phone-lines faded.
As well as
recounting the stories of the callers and the phone-line volunteers
from the log-books Lovatt tells a wider story of the interactions and
the conflicts within the Gay, then Gay and Lesbian, LGB, and
eventually LGBT+ liberation movement within London, and more broadly
the stories of LGBT+ people in the UK in the 1990s.
While that wider
context is useful, I perhaps felt the balance could have been more
focused on those directly connected with the Lesbian Line.
That there was a
need for a Lesbian phone line (in fact more than one phone line)
distinct from those catering to the whole LGBT+ community reflects
the predominance of gay men within the community and ways in which
the experiences of gay (white) men were not particular relevant or
useful to Lesbian callers. At times this is something we shy away
from, there is a desire to put the emphasis on the collective LGBT+
experience. But doing so tends to privilege the gay (white &
able-bodied & middle-class) male experience and silence all other
expressions of queer identity.
The stories from the
log-books are funny, heart-warming, heart-rending, and at times
troubling – the volunteers did not always deal with the calls /
callers well. Lovatt identities a consistent failure of the
volunteers to know what to do in response to trans and non-white
callers – something that needs to be named honestly whilst not
diminishing the great service those same volunteers gave, the radical
stand that being part of a lesbian support network was, the
transformation and validation it brought to many lives.
Reflecting on the
imperfectness of the Lesbian Line and the women that answered it,
Lovatt sees the messiness as important because “Acknowledging this
mess allows us to resist simplistic understandings of objects and
people and hold two contradictory states at once. The useful
in/stability of the archive collapses the binary between perceptions
of ‘good’ and ‘bad’, between order and mess. It allows us to
see that there are bad gays and terrible lesbians. That ordinary
people are capable of harm to one person and kindness to another.
That not every phone call can be an answer to a problem. Mess is
real, mess challenges us to unpick the sanctioned, sanitised
narrative and root about in the fragments for the difficult and
uncomfortable truths that help us understand our past.”(p207)
Lovatt also reflects
on the importance of telling queer histories, writing that “When I
came out, I had only scraps of gay and lesbian history. Everything I
knew had been dragged together piecemeal… so much of it I had
stumbled over by chance.” (p178) Even with the greater visibility
we have today, we live surrounded by straight people and their
stories and their histories, and this is partly why I find myself
really only reading queer stories these days, I have to quietly admit
I am not that interested in the lives of straight people, I have had
my fill of those stories already.
The importance of
our stories and histories must never be underestimated, and when we
hear that book bans are rising in this country we need to resist and
tell of our history all the louder.
And finally, this
line spoke to me “I find myself these days thinking of my gender
more as a habit than an identity.” (p123) even if I am not sure how
exactly it sits with me.
