A Diary on Growing Up Gay in the Eighties

In 1983 thirteen-year-old Natasha is in love with her French teacher, Miss Williams. When Natasha is cruelly banished from Miss Williams’s class forever, the love develops into obsession … stalking … unhealthy behaviour … and painfully misguided cries for attention.

This uncomfortable yet light-hearted memoir in diary form is primarily a record of obsession.

Natasha is a love-sick lesbian teenager in an all-girls school in the eighties, juggling her Latin homework, Bible study, a crush on Elaine Paige, and her suppressed sexuality. How can she make sense of it all?

But more importantly … tormented by unrequited love … how can Natasha make Miss Williams love her back? Take a sneaky peek inside …

A Diary on How I Acquired my Eating Disorder

In 1989 nineteen-year-old Natasha is obsessively in love with her former teacher, Miss Williams. The tattoo she flashes around says so. Natasha meets Alex, a girl her own age, who questions her about the tattoo. An awkward romance is born.

In this real-life teenage diary Natasha records her panic at a looming LESBIAN relationship. To lose some excess fat, she starves herself of food … whilst working in a chip shop. And just to make sure she’s gay, Natasha drags five boys into bed in the space of a week, a sin for which the sexuality police threaten to kick her out of the university Lesbian and Gay Society.

In this coming out story and love story, Natasha struggles with clumsy attempts at heterosexuality, the sickening effects of weight loss techniques, disapproving shaven-headed lesbians, and sexual harassment in the chip shop.

A Diary on Screwing Up my Year Abroad

In 1990 twenty-year-old Natasha finds herself in France on her university year abroad. She is ANGRY. Everyone should be a lesbian, or she will punish them for their oversight (particularly her bemused fellow English assistant friend, Ange).

The frites and the pâtisseries are not helping Natasha recover from her bulimia. And the door-to-door Mormon missionaries are bedevilling her reluctant search for God.

Natasha does not respond well to the frosty demands of the headmaster of the school where she is teaching.

She passes her time befriending a pair of thieving drop-outs on the run from the law, skinning up grilled banana skins, dodging flashers, and hitch-hiking around Europe.

School, Bulimia, France

Lesbian Crushes at School
In 1983 thirteen-year-old Natasha is in love with her French teacher, Miss Williams. When Natasha is cruelly banished from Miss Williams’s class forever, the love develops into obsession … stalking … unhealthy behaviour … and painfully misguided cries for attention.

Lesbian Crushes and Bulimia
In 1989 nineteen-year-old Natasha meets a young woman her own age and panics at a looming LESBIAN relationship. She starves herself of food. And just to make sure she’s gay, Natasha drags five young men into bed in the space of a week.

Lesbian Crushes in France
In 1990 twenty-year-old Natasha finds herself in France on her university year abroad. She is ANGRY. Everyone should be a lesbian, or she will punish them for their oversight (particularly her bemused fellow English assistant friend, Ange).

Q&A with Helena Whitbread and Natasha Holme

In the form of a Q&A, this book compares and contrasts the diaries and lives of 19th century lesbian diarist Anne Lister and modern-day lesbian diarist Natasha Holme.

Like Anne Lister two hundred years before her, Natasha wrote her diaries in a secret code, based on the Greek alphabet. The book contains photographs of Anne’s and Natasha’s encoded diaries. It is divided into sections such as …

  • Early sexuality
  • The mentality behind keeping a detailed diary
  • Encoding
  • Obsessiveness
  • Christianity

“When I first heard that you have been keeping a diary from a young age and, furthermore, that you had used an esoteric code, I was immediately interested. I was further intrigued by the fact that you are a lesbian and wrote about your sexual life. It seemed to me that a modern parallel could be drawn with Anne Lister, the early 19th century lesbian diarist who had written a great deal about her lesbian sexuality in her journals, couched in a secret code of her own devising. I thought it would be interesting to see how far this hypothesis could be taken and wondered if you would be willing to join me in an exploration of the similarities and differences, as diarists and as lesbians, between yourself and a woman who lived some two hundred years before your time.”

Helena Whitbread