Lesbians of the world come out!


“Some women can’t say the word lesbian… even when their mouth is full of one”

For anybody living under the impression that the gay community in Britain is any less patriarchal than wider society the results of the Independent on Sunday’s 2008 Pink List must have been an eye-opener. The list of Britain’s 101 most ‘influential’ gays and lesbians was unlikely to be ground-breaking but the fact that the list was made up of 83 men and only 18 women suggests a wide disparity in the mainstream gay hierarchy, having said this I could confidently predict that if the list had been a gay rich list the gender balance would probably have been equally skewed. Bisexuals and transgender people however fared even worse with out a single mention.

What the list reveals though is a far wider problem in the LGBT community; there is not a single significant lesbian role model for young people. While one could turn on the television any night of the week and see reasonably realistic depictions of gay males can we say the same about lesbians? When was the last time a mainstream publication was launched with a lesbian target market? Gay men have Attitude, GT and all sorts of other alternative FHM magazines but what about lesbians? This poverty of lesbians in the public eye is epitomised by the inclusion of 1980s pop diva Samantha Fox on the pink list: the reason being because of an appearance on Celebrity Wife Swap.

One of the great problems with the depiction of lesbians in the media is that so much of it feels targeted at men, be it the lesbian antics of TATU or soft porno movies along the lines of Bound or even the gruesome spectacle that was Cruel Intensions. Even the great majority of lesbian porn is aimed at men. As I write this I’m trying to wrack my brain for a single high profile lesbian writer in a single daily newspaper or a single lesbian pop star or entertainer… who would have ever thought Alex Parks had the potential to be revolutionary? Other media omissions have included the recent Channel 4 gay season which was almost entirely dedicated to the plight of gay men, in fact arguably the centrepiece of the season was a drama called Clapham Junction which on one hand insinuated that every man in London as a closeted homosexual but on the other hand didn’t have a single lesbian character. Similarly Bad Girls insinuated that the only place in society one can find lesbians is in prison.

One could justify this sexist whitewash by saying that the media is reflective of viewer demands. In some ways the problems I have outlined are problems of a wider society in which all of the media institutions and the majority of the worlds money in the hands of men. Nevertheless there have always been and are today a number of brave and inspiring lesbians and I can only conclude that if the media and wider society do not change their outlook soon then young lesbians across the country can look forward to yet another few years of having Samantha Fox as their best public face and after hundreds of years of being overlooked by British law and whitewashed by our media then that would be tragic.