Oral History Project Interview Transcription

Jill Gardiner

Q: The first thing that I'd like to talk to you about, the title for it in our project is day life and night life, and the difference between the two, and whether there been a difference between your day life and your night life?

A huge difference in the past when | was employed rather than freelance. I came to Brighton in the 1980s, and at the time I didn't have any kind of life at all.

Q: What was it that brought you to Brighton?

I got a job here. So it was pure chance. I didn't know then that Brighton was renowned for being gay. But I got into a relationship with a woman I met here. We became very close friends and then it just developed into something more. Through her I found a , gay social scene I just didn't have any idea how to find before that, or had never found. My image was that there were going to be all these clubs teeming with women, but it wasn't like that at all. The sort of social life I found through her, a lot of it was based in people's houses - parties, dinner parties - and the most important bit of it for a long time was actually going to Kenric socials. Kenric was a real life-line for us in the 1980s, because it was a way we could meet socially without having to go to a club and knock on the door and sign the book and give our names, and worry about bumping into somebody who didn't know we were gay. There was still all that worry about going out into public places, and although I did that as well, I felt much more comfortable going to these Kenric evenings at the house of Rosemary the artist and her partner Lin.

By 1984 the two main women's clubs in Brighton were the Longbranch which was upstairs in Grand Parade, and Caves which was in a basement in Sillwood Street. Caves was actually done up to look like a cave, with these stippled walls, painted white. It was a great place to go to dance and to be with friends, but slightly nerve-racking going to a known lesbian venue, and having to sign your name - whichever name you chose! - at the door.

So from 1985 to 1992, I often went to monthly parties at Rosemary and Lin's, which I and many of my friends preferred because it was more discreet going to a private house, and they were really good women-only parties. You would hear about them either by word of mouth, through Brighton Lesbian Line, or Brighton Gay Switchboard or through the Kenric newsletter. You didn't have to be a member or sign your name to get in.

Rosemary was an artist, who had originally worked in interior design, but had changed her life in her early forties: she split up with her husband, did an Art degree, and got involved with another woman. Rosemary said exactly what she thought, and could be famously rude to people; though she also laughed a lot and was fundamentally caring. Lin had a dry sense of humour and was very practical: she did the carpentry and building work from Rosemary's designs. If there was ever anyone who was causing trouble, by drinking too much or pursuing a woman who wasn't interested, Lin would have a quiet word and have a taxi waiting at the door for her. They also ran a women's b&b in their home, and hosted the evenings together to reduce the isolation of women.

You felt comfortable there wearing whatever you wanted, at a time when make-up, long hair and skirts were often frowned on in lesbian venues. Rosemary had tumbling curly copper- coloured hair, and wore scarves, jewellery, and occasionally skirts. The dance music was put on the CD player by Lin, who was very laid back, always in trousers, with a Rod Stewart hairstyle. We would bop away to Tina Turner or Whitney Houston in this beautiful, low lit, front room, behind the cream full-length curtains of the bay window, surrounded by Rosemary's huge abstract canvases. There was a sitting-out room in the studio upstairs, and space for a crowd in the kitchen, too.

We had a lot of fun, particularly at the New Year's Eve parties, where fancy dress parades took place down the stairs, with the best costume winning a bottle of champagne. Rosemary and Lin were particularly impressive dressed as Minnie and Micky Mouse. At one stage, we all gave talks on an area we knew about, from family history research to women folk singers, from making your will to lesbian ethics. The women were socially mixed, and of all ages, and included teachers, social workers, accountants, nurses, a care home manager and care assistants. There was a policewoman, and someone ex-army who would have lost her pension if her lesbianism was discovered. Unemployed women went, too, as Rosemary and Lin kept the cost low, at £1 a head, which covered the bread and cheese provided. We all brought our own drink. About half the women had been married with children; some were still married and came with or without their husband's knowledge. One married woman used to come in gipsy skirts and heavy make-up, and developed a crush on Lin. For a lot of women, it was the first place they met other : one of them collapsed with palpitations because she found that so overwhelming. Luckily a nurse was on hand!

You never revealed your surname or expected anyone to give theirs, because many women knew they could be sacked for being gay, or lose their children, and until you knew someone well, you wouldn't trust them with such personal information. We never took photos without asking permission; blackmail was a risk. I knew one teacher who was threatened with being outed to her employers by one of her exes. Not surprisingly, quite a few women were self- employed antique dealers, shopkeepers or art gallery owners: occupations that made it easier to live more openly if you wanted.

Eventually, these evenings came to an end when Rosemary and Lin moved to Scotland, but it is thanks to them that I met a lot of the women who are still among my closest friends today, and for that I will always be grateful to them both.

That was my in the 1980s. I did go to clubs a bit, but it's hard to say anything interesting about them because I didn't go very often. You'd sign in, you'd dance...

Q: The signing in - why was that?

Because they were members' clubs - it was to do with their licence. You had to sign in, in order to be allowed in. The first time I went to one, I just gave my real name and then someone told me that the police got to see the books, so I thought, "Oh, what if my employers find out?" so next time I gave a different name. It was a bit nerve racking.

One club I went to, this would be about 1993, it was the Sussex Club in Regency Square, which was run by a very nice straight couple. A woman called Shirley, who had long blonde hair, was usually on the door. I went there with my friends Joyce and Margaret who have always been out as long as I have known them. Shirley said to me, 'What's your name?" and I turned to them and said, "What is my name?" I couldn't remember what name I had used to sign in the last time! I think when you had signed in once they kept a note of your name and you could just say who you were at the door. Shirley was quite amused, but whatever name I used, I was let in in the end.

Q: And the difference of names; was because of fear of being found out at work?

Yes. It's always difficult to know how real the danger was. I worked in education. I was thinking about why it was. People would probably assume it was Section 28. Well it wasn't that actually. Section 28 was horrendous and we all knew it ought to be repealed. But we also knew it wasn't being used to prosecute people, and liberal straight people that I worked with thought it was ridiculous as well. It also applied to local education authorities, and not to teachers or to particular educational institutions. So Section 28 wasn't the reason, it didn't restrict me. What it was, was that I felt that if I had been known to be gay at work, I wasn't quite certain that the head would back me up. I might be at risk of losing my job at some point, because in law we had no positive right to be employed if we were gay. You could be sacked for being gay: that was legal, and didn't change until 2003, because of a change in European law. Who is to say whether that was a realistic fear or not? But it did mean you were careful.

But at the same time, I was also very determined to live my own life. You found a way of doing it. There was the social life, which was a bit behind closed doors, but it was in people's houses, and I made lots of friends that way. Through them I heard about the women's walking group and I used to go out with them. Occasionally a straight woman friend would come along, but it was basically lesbians who went.

The women's walking group started in 1988 and I joined it in January 1991, and used to go fairly regularly until about 1997. It was very informal, and only advertised through word of mouth, and I think through Lesbian Line. It met on Sundays, always 3 weeks apart,and each walk was led by someone who volunteered at the end of the previous walk. It also used to organise a New Years Day walk, and in April, a walk thorough the bluebell woods. It was very inclusive as well because costs were so low - people brought a packed lunch, and if you didn't drive, you just contributed £1 towards petrol. Women of all ages would come, including at least one in her mid- 80s. We used to meet in Brighton, and go all over Sussex. We occasionally went for tea at somewhere like Rottingdean afterwards, or, sometimes, if there was a birthday, to someone's home for tea.

Sometimes there would be as many as 20 gay women on the walk, and we went all over the Downs and the coast. Some of the others also used to go on a walking weekend in Dorset. The walks were usually about 6-8 miles, and a long walking group also developed as an offshoot for those who wanted to do 12 mile walks, who overlapped with the original walking group.

What was so great about the walking group was the chance to meet all sorts of gay women and have as long or as short a conversation as you wanted. If you talk to strangers in clubs and pubs, they tend to think you are chatting them up, but on the women's walks, people assumed that you simply wanted to get to know them, and it was much more relaxed, you could make friends more easily. You could also walk on your own, in silence for a bit, still part of the group, but just enjoying the countryside, no one minded that: though we would always make a point of making newcomers feel welcome. It was a really good antidote to loneliness for some shyer women, and could be a lot of laughs, particularly when we got lost.

Again it was word of mouth, people heard about it through a friend. I think they gave a phone number to Lesbian Line but it was mostly word of mouth and friends of friends joining. It was very informal. It was a kind of network - I think that's quite typical of a lot of the gay women's friendship groups I've been involved with, rather than being through an institution or organisation. You'd hear about things, and you'd try them and if you liked them, you'd carry on.

Q: I wanted to ask how your professional life progressed, because you've written, you've done interviews, you've been involved with lots of things, and been out in that way, how that worked, the process of that

It was actually through the women's walking group really, because I met Linda on the first walk I went on, in January 1991, and she encouraged me to join this lesbian and gay oral history group, the Brighton Ourstory Project, which she and Tom had set up three years before, in 1988. At the time they were in the middle of work on Daring Hearts, they were doing all these life story interviews because they were interested in lesbian and gay history and they wanted to know about our past. They had done a show in the Brighton Festival called Really Living, and then they had got agreement with QueenSpark Books to do a book called Daring Hearts. They were looking for more people to help with that. So I joined the group. I didn't actually do any interviewing for Daring Hearts because I was too shy! Which is ironic as later on I did a whole book based on interviewing women about the Gateways Club, but at the time I just felt quite shy about the process of going and meeting people and asking them about their lives. But I was fascinated by what they said, so I did some transcription, and I was involved in the editing.

At the time, most young people couldn't afford computers really, they were so expensive. There was one guy in the QueenSpark group, an older straight man, who had an Apple Mac, and we used to go to his house. I think he left the key hanging on a string behind his letter box when he was going to be out, and we could go there and do the transcription at these pre-arranged times on his Apple Mac. Today everyone has gadgets but then we didn't.

So I did quite a bit of transcription on this Mac. And then we had print-outs of the interviews, and if three people highlighted the same passages in the transcripts, then it went in a pretty definite pile to go in the book, and if only two people did, they would go in a possible pile, and if only one person did, then they might not go in at all. So we had all these piles of highlighted pieces of paper, and they were sorted into a structure, and that's how the book emerged. It was Linda and Tom, I think, who did the bulk of the interviewing. They were always the key figures in the group because they had set it up and they had been in it all the way through.

When Daring Hearts came out in 1992, and we did this launch show of readings from it, it just created this huge buzz, people loved it! We used to do a show in the Brighton Festival each year, at the Royal Albion Hotel, with actors reading from the interviews, and it would be packed out. It was advertised in the Brighton Festival programme. And people would be crying and laughing during the readings, they would come up and hug you afterwards, and thank you for doing it, it had such a big impact, particularly the first few times, because it was new. It made people feel valued, not just the people who had been interviewed, but the people who came to hear it, all felt that their lives were being recognised, and included and valued in some way.

In the early '90s, things were beginning to change a bit, but looking back in my diary for 1991, I was saying that I had hardly ever seen anything on television about gay women, or heard anything much on the radio. There were a few things in books but there was hardly anything positive in the newspapers. You didn't often see in the media the sort of things that you were experiencing in your daily life. It wasn't just about seeing women hugging and kissing, I also didn't see many media images of gay women doing things socially in groups and being open about their sexuality. There were isolated celebrity lesbians, like Martina Navratilova, and she was very important to us: people would rush down to the Eastbourne tennis tournament to watch her play. But when it came to women in groups, what mainstream coverage I saw tended to be of political campaigns, like Greenham, but those often just weren't covered positively if they were covered at all, and of course only some Greenham women were gay. By the early '90s, it did all start to change a lot, I think, and we in Ourstory were part of that change, which was partly initiated by the outrage so many gay people felt about Section 28. I used to make sure I stayed in and watched television if there was anything on with a lesbian or gay theme because it was so rare, like when Portrait of a marriage came on TV or Oranges are not the only fruit. Now there might be one programme of lesbian or gay interest in a week, but then there might be one or two in a year, so you would not only set the video recorder, but you would sit there glued to it, because you wanted to watch it as soon as it came out. That's been a huge change in the last 20 years, that there is just much more in the media, and if you're young now and coming out you've got the Internet, which is such a huge boon. But then, there was very little.

Ourstory was very exciting then, for those reasons. So we used to do a show each year in the Brighton Festival; we did an exhibition each year, sometimes in the Taking Liberties women's festival, including one in 1993 called 'The Spice of Life', which was about the Brighton Variety Club. That was at the Middle Street Primary School. The school obviously wasn't bothered about Section 28, they thought it was fine to host an exhibition on a gay theme, at half term. It was actually on the site of the club, that's why we wanted to have it there. We did another exhibition in Taking Liberties in 1994 called 'Schools out: dykes behind the desk,' and in 1995 a Brighton Festival show and exhibition called "Learning between the lines - amusing, amazing and heart-rending real-life stories of lesbian and gay schooldays." It was heartening for me to be able to share insights that I had gained from my career, and stories from my own schooldays, particularly as some of the others then ran workshops for students on teacher training courses, using the memories we'd collected.

The other thing I would like to say about Ourstory is that Tom and Linda have been so hugely important in Brighton's gay life, and in the greater visibility and confidence that a lot of us feel now. Tom and Linda both deserve enormous credit for what they did over the years, and if it had not been for all their work in the 1990s, I think perhaps what you are doing now, your project, might not be happening, might not be funded, might not be thought of.

Linda made herself available to be a spokesperson. The Argus would phone her up if they wanted a lesbian view on something. That's actually very brave. It was just who Linda was, but you really do need that sort of person.

We had an Ourstory exhibition at Brighton Library, which was called 'Gay Girls and Bachelor Boys' in 1997. We had had exhibitions in the Library before, on the landing outside the Reference Library, but I think this was the first one opposite the issue desk, in such a high profile space. This was in the old Library, which is now part of the Dome. One librarian appeared and said that we couldn't have the banners and the street puppets - these enormous heads called Hate Fear and Ignorance, which had been used to protest against the Conservative Party Conference, from the beach - because they might offend some of the public. Well, of course, we took no notice, and they stayed. Some time after that, the Library set up a lesbian and gay consultation group, which Margaret and I joined, as a result of which a lesbian and gay section was set up in the Library. I stayed in Ourstory till about 2002.

In 1992, I also got involved in a group called Brighton Poets, which was open to everyone, it wasn't a gay group, but I just found it a really comfortable space to read my poems and have them workshopped and eventually do readings.

Brighton Poets was fantastic for me. It was set up by Don Paterson, Eva Salzman and Jackie Wills, who were well known poets - they were up and coming then, but they were beginning to be known. They were really enthusiastic, they brought all these really good poets down to read to us in Brighton. We had workshops at the Sanctuary Cafe, which also happened to be a very lesbian-friendly venue, in Brunswick Street East in Hove. It was a vegetarian cafe, and had really funky design, with brightly coloured walls, and was on three floors. We used to meet in the basement. Quite a lot of lesbian events went on there over the years, but Brighton Poets met there as well.

Some of my poems were quite openly gay; not all of them, some of them were on other themes. We also published a Brighton Poets pamphlet which had three of my poems in, two of which were pretty obviously love poems about a woman.

It would probably be too self-indulgent to read one of my poems, wouldn't it?

Q: Oh, would you?

Well, if you're sure. This one used to go down well and it's already been published. I don't mind it being reproduced provided my permission is obtained first, and my name is included as the author.

CHESS GAME

© Jill Gardiner

Shall we play chess or go to bed? We can't make up our minds so you get the chess set, I fetch the wine, and we both slip out of our clothes.

This bed is big enough for all of us: you, propped up on a pillow too far away to reach; between us, queens and kings, their armies of retainers.

A clock ticks. Your pawns advance. My knight prepares to pounce. The curve of your hip. Two moves and I'll have you in check. Too late. What is your bishop doing down there?

You tell me I'm beautiful: this is not the time, now you've swiped my pawn, gone up a piece. Oh your skin and you so at ease in it as if you went naked everywhere.

I must concentrate, this is serious. Your breath so close, your body out of reach. I could stretch... You must be joking. Not my queen. Your breasts. I resign, I concede.

That's amazing!

I read that kind of thing in public at the same time as I was not out at work. We did at Brighton Poets eventually have what were billed as lesbian and gay poetry readings, where Marià Jastrzebska and I both read our work. On one occasion, in 1994, in the round room with a bar at the back of the Sussex Arts Club in Ship Street, Marià also organised a group of lesbian line dancers - this was absolutely inspired! - to perform after us. So there were the Brighton Poets people who were there for the poetry, and there was this big lesbian group who turned up to hear us and to watch the line dancers, and it was just this amazing event that everybody really enjoyed. Brighton Poets thought the line dancers were fabulous, they said they'd never seen anything quite like it! I really liked these events where you could bring the two worlds together.

Through Ourstory, I got interested in the Gateways Club, which was the main lesbian club in London for many years, particularly in the '40s, '50s, '60s and '70s. It was open from 1931 to 1985 and was the longest surviving lesbian club in the world. I came to write a book about it partly because of Ourstory, as a lot of women mentioned it in their interviews. Obviously people who live in Brighton often go up to London as well. The Gateways had been really important to gay women: they used to say things like, "It was the only place you could go"; "it was always there", "you could always drop in and meet somebody you knew". It was a fixed point in people's lives. I just thought it would be really interesting to know more about it, and I was talking to my girlfriend and I said, "A book on the Gateways would be great!" and she said, "Well, why don't you do one?" I said, "I couldn't, I never went there." And she said, "Well, that makes you ideal! You haven't fallen out with anybody, you're not in any one clique: they'll all talk to you." That planted the idea, Ourstory and what she said, so I started interviewing people, first of all friends in Brighton, and then friends of friends, and then more widely. It took about seven years to do all the research and writing up. From the closet to the screen - women at the Gateways Club 1945-1985 was eventually published by Pandora Press in 2003, and was reprinted recently.

I also wanted to write a well informed social history of gay women in post-war Britain, because I wanted to read one, and couldn't find one that included oral as well as written sources, at the time. You really do need oral sources for lesbian history before the 1970s, because there are so few printed sources; and diaries and letters don't tend to include enough from the perspective of working class women. It seemed to me that using a place that so many gay women had been to, at least once, was the perfect link to reconstruct the history of our everyday lives. The politics, it seemed to me, had already been well covered elsewhere.

I don't know how much more you want me to say about it, because the Gateways Club was in London and the interviewing was done all over the place, it's not about Brighton.

It's a very interesting piece of work

It speaks for itself, though.

I did the same sort of process as we had done in Ourstory with Daring Hearts but I did write connecting text as well. I also did a lot of research in the British Library and various archives. I wanted it to be academically rigorous, as well as readable.

Q: How did it make you feel, the whole process of interviewing?

It was over a huge period of time, about six or seven years. It did make me feel more connected with earlier generations of gay women, because of the continuity of experience. Although there were crucial differences between each era, there were women I talked to who were very out in the '50s, or times when you would have thought it was not possible, and others who were still leading double lives in the '90s. I was very struck by the individual variety of experience within each period, there was much more than I was expecting. It was the same effect as Ourstory really, it just makes you feel more part of a community that has a whole history and that your own experience is reflected by the experience of other people in the past. You get inspired sometimes by the way that they got through things.

Empowering

Mmm.

Q: In that process, when you were speaking to people, did you see trends emerging in language through the different time periods? The words people used, the context they used them in?

I'm not sure I feel qualified to generalise really. There was enormous variety. I know what words I feel more or less comfortable with, but I am not sure I could sum up for everyone else.

I don't like the term "" and never use it to describe anyone I know. It's the term that was always used negatively by straight people when I was growing up, particularly by older people. I know some gay people have tried to reclaim it, and I have met two older women who prefer it, but I still feel excluded by it. I'm participating in your project despite the name of it - I don't think it is the name that the LGBT community would have chosen if we had been consulted. I've always liked the term 'gay' because it sounds cheerful, and because it is a term that we chose ourselves. Many of my friends feel the same. Sometimes you need to specify if you want to make clear that you are talking about women, so I would say "gay women" or "lesbian and gay" or "lesbians". My more feminist friends tend to talk more about "lesbians". Often all the labels are a bit unnecessary, I'd rather be known as an individual, with all my facets, as a poet or whatever, not just for who I might fall in love with. But sometimes you need the labels if you are talking about something a particular group has in common.

Q: And do you think the labels help in increasing the visibility of people, raising a profile, having a presence?

Yes.

It's only one part of you, isn't it? There's a need to use some sort of term when you're applying for funding, or want to get a point across. But in your private life, you don't want to be banging on about it all the time.

Absolutely!

I don't have any more to add really.

Q: The sort of support of the kind of network that you speak about in Brighton, do you think there are particular instances where that has been seen to be beneficial to the people involved? Obviously there's a general feeling that it's positive, but are there instances where you can see how that support has changed things for the better in the face of a society that may not be as inclusive?

I'm not sure what you mean.

I'm asking about friends and family and the networks that build up and whether that has been specific to lesbian links in Brighton.

Some of my friends are gay and some are straight, and I would just talk to whoever I wanted to speak to. I think in terms of friends and individuals, rather than of going to one group or another.

Q: I suppose the presence of your work as a poet is ... well it's wonderful, your poetry is wonderful - the process of creation is separate from the working life, like my work in theatre, it's a lot easier to be out in theatre. Artistic movements, artistic people perhaps have I suppose a more liberal approach than society in general. Do you think there's a link with Brighton specifically and those sorts of art forms?

I think if you're gay, you just find places where you feel comfortable. But I think everybody does that in life, don't they, whatever interests or personality they have got, and there are just some places where you feel more comfortable than others, and you test the water and if the reaction is OK, you just carry on. Writers' groups and poetry groups I have always found absolutely fine and a very comfortable place to be. I'm not sure I can say anything further, or anything interesting about this other than what I've said.

Q: Well, if you're happy, if you have covered everything you want to cover, we could wrap it up.

There's a few other things, perhaps different themes. Shall we just stop for a moment?

Sure, yeah.

[Break].

The Only Alternative Left was a new women's space, which had opened by 1990. It was run by Monica, who had this whole big house in Hove, some of which were rooms that she let, I think usually to lesbians, and she ran a b & b there as well. There was a big ground floor bar, and then a bit later on, there was also a basement room, which was used for shows, and maybe films. Certainly I remember seeing Donna and Kebab there, two women who performed comic songs and cabaret. There was a restaurant on the first floor called Café Jules, which was run by Jules. We used to eat there sometimes; it was good food and reasonably priced. Straight women did come to the restaurant too, I saw a couple of Labour councillors I knew eating there, and they weren't gay.

It was a comfortable, stylish venue, which felt more open than some of the clubs - you didn't have to sign in at The Only Alternative Left. It was just a pleasant venue in which to meet women, and very spacious. Some of the women who had been to Rosemary and Lin's started going to The Only Alternative Left instead, because it was more of a place where feminists hung out. It was very successful for quite a while, from 1990 to 2000.

Q: And the Lavender Lounge Bar?

The Lavender Lounge Bar was one of the Brighton Ourstory events in 1997. It was basically a cabaret night, put on at the Lift, on the top floor above the Pig in Paradise pub, which was in Queens Road, it's now a pub called Hope. We re-created a 1960s / nightclub for the night, and we dressed up. Nicky Mitchell was in full butch drag, and Phil Starr, in an amazing frock, each performed some of the songs, and then in between, we had readings, by actors, of extracts taken from the interviews. It was really popular, it sold out and people kept asking us to repeat it. It did create that atmosphere of a bar where everybody was crammed in. That venue felt like the right period too.

In the shows, we would originally have four actors, two male, two , reading extracts, from the interviews. The year after the show to launch Daring Hearts, we did a Brighton Festival show called Like Mills and Bleeding Boon, which was about love and romance, and there were various others after that. So this was a bit of a change from that. There were still the readings, but there was also the music. The music actually came from songs that had been sung at the Rehearsal Club in London from 1967 on, and they were gay lyrics set to popular songs. That was great fun. Some people there had been to the Rehearsal Club so it was authentic for them.

Q: The readers, were they people that you knew that you brought on board?

They were all professional actors. One of them was Jane Boston, who had been involved in Siren Theatre, and there were plenty of others over the years, the ones I remember best were Ted, Simon and Charlie. The fact that it was read well was important.

Q: Siren Theatre Company - did you see much of their work around that time?

I know I went once or twice but I don't remember the detail.

Q: And we were talking about the Gateways launch

When I brought out From the closet to the screen, we had a couple of launches in London, but we also had one in Brighton at the Old Market. I insisted on having it in the bar there, rather than in the big hall, because I thought it would feel more authentic and also I wanted it to be free, so that anybody could come who wanted. So the bar was packed out, a bit like the Lavender Lounge Bar show, and feeling a bit like the Gateways itself. Again it was the same reaction, just this huge warmth and enthusiasm, and a lot of laughter. There was always a lot of laughter at the Ourstory shows. We had some tragic stories, and some stories that would make you laugh, and it was the same at the Gateways launch, there was a mixture. I got a really warm reception from people. It's the feeling that something you've had to hide is something suddenly to be proud of, because there it is, published, and other people are interested in reading it. It's good for people's self-esteem to feel that kind of recognition.

Q: In Brighton, having those kind of events with this warmth... Brighton does feel like it's separate, I think, now, to the rest of the country in the way that it feels to be not straight, to be queer or gay or however you choose to call yourself. Over the period of doing these events, does it feel like a cumulative sort of process?

I've got braver about doing public speaking every time people have asked me to do it. And getting a very positive reaction from people is encouraging, it encourages you to do more.

It's a lot easier than it was, and what has made it a lot easier is partly the media, I think that's been hugely important: just being included, there being images out there. The internet has made a huge difference too, because you can just research any topic, and whatever minority you are part of, you can contact people who are similar or find them reflected. We didn't have that option in the 1980s - to find information, I would go and hunt around in reference libraries, or go to alternative bookshops - Compendium was one of the biggest, in Camden, or we would often go to the women's bookshops: Sisterwrite in Islington or Silver Moon in the Charing Cross Road. By the 1990s there was the fabulous Out! gay bookshop in Dorset Street, Brighton, and there's always been Gay's the Word in London. These bookshops would have noticeboards too, and leaflets, and small circulation magazines that you couldn't find elsewhere.

By the time I was growing up there were things like Time Out and you could find venues through that. But going to a gay club all on your own is not that easy and if you do, you're not necessarily going to meet anybody. That would not have been a very good way in. Actually meeting somebody who then introduced me to a whole social network was much more natural and a much easier way in.

Q: I wanted to talk about From the closet to the screen coming back into print

There's suddenly been a whole revival of interest in the Gateways, just recently. I was approached by a group called Duckie to be on a panel in London talking about the Gateways. They are organising two wonderfully theatrical disco nights in London Pride next week, called 'Duckie goes to the Gateways', where I am going to be selling books. Maureen Chadwick has written a play, The Speed Twins, which is set in an afterlife version of the Gateways, and is going to be on at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith in September. Maureen has asked me to write the programme notes for that. At this Gateways panel, there was the same thing as I mentioned before, this huge enthusiasm, from a female and male audience, which included younger people, as well as women who remembered the Gateways.

One of the things I think is so important is to have these events where you get people of different age groups together, because it doesn't necessarily always happen naturally in friendship groups. When you're clubbing there aren't many older lesbians there, but events like that which bring older and younger lesbians and together are really great, I think, because you learn from each other.

Definitely!

I think the appeal of the Gateways is that it was the longest lasting lesbian club in the world, and so for younger women today, as well, that's still got a buzz to it. And also it did appear in a Hollywood film, The Killing of Sister George with actual footage shot with Gateways Club members, who were hired for the film. It's so rare to have film shot in a gay club in that period, it was shot in 1968.

I need a break I think!

Yes, let's have a break!

[break]

I wouldn't go on Pride marches for some years, because I was nervous about someone at work finding out I was gay and it getting back to the head. But there was one year when I really wanted to go on the march, and not just slip discretely into the park later in the afternoon like I usually did. So I decided to borrow a wig from a friend, and I had these special Pride sunglasses, which are rainbow rimmed, and I put on some clothes I wouldn't normally wear. And I just mingled with the crowd on the march and it was so euphoric, the people in the streets were cheering us and it was fabulous just being part of a whole crowd of gay people. By the time you get closer to Preston Park, practically all the people on the sides of the road are gay anyway. But there's a lot of straight people who stand and cheer and wave in the town centre, who seem very welcoming. So it does make you feel really included and part of Brighton, and that our presence is welcome.

I was on this march in my disguise, and I was so well disguised that as I came into Preston Park, I saw somebody I knew, and she didn't recognise me! This was a straight friend of mine who was there with her two young sons, because she thought they would enjoy seeing it. I had to go right up to them, and wave at them, and say, "Hello, it's me!" They had often invited me round with my girlfriend, so she just roared with laughter and the boys took a moment to work out who I was. That was sometime in the '90s.

On the Pride march in 2012, I just felt completely comfortable about being out, so I went with Marion, who had been on the very first London Pride march, back in 1971 and we just walked together in the crowds, and I went dressed as I would normally be, no sunglasses. It felt just as euphoric, it was lovely: the same crowds, the same welcome, and the sense of just being part of something joyful, and then ending up in the park just enjoying mingling with friends.

That's it really.

Great!