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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.
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