Category Archives: Journalists resource

  • Readers will be gripped, shocked, entertained, and informed
  • Lesbians with eating disorders will know that they are not alone
  • Readers will gain direct insight into the mentality of someone living with an eating disorder
  • Readers will become aware of some of the pressures involved in coming out as gay
  • The take-away message of this story is that letting oneself fall into a lifestyle of disordered eating and not seeking help does not pay off
  • Lesbians with eating disorders
  • Lesbians looking for ‘coming out’ stories
  • Lesbians
  • Women and men, of any sexual persuasion, with eating disorders
  • People who want to understand how an eating disorder develops: parents, carers, friends, professionals
  • People who experience obsessive love
  • Enthusiasts of The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister
  • Readers who enjoy diaries and memoirs

I have not found any of the following:

  • Diary of an eating disorder with a lesbian theme
  • Autobiography on bulimia written entirely in diary format
  • Diary on coming out
  • Diary of an eating disorder with a love story theme
  • Diary of an eating disorder without retrospective comment
  • Diary or memoir of an eating disorder which is not presented from the viewpoint of  either recovery or of recovered ability to manage the disorder
  • Diary or memoir of an eating disorder without the professed aim of helping others or of helping the author to come to terms with her past or of dispelling myths
  • Living with a drug dealer
  • Experimenting with drugs
  • A summer of shoplifting
  • Squatting
  • Hitch-hiking
  • Wandering and sleeping rough
  • Relationships with women
  • Knowingly dating a transsexual woman
  • Unknowingly dating a transsexual woman

Eating disorder facts and statistics

  • Beat (www.b-eat.co.uk) is the new name for the former Eating Disorders Association.
  • Approximately 1.6 million people in the UK are affected by an eating disorder.Source: b-eat.co.uk/about-beat/media-centre/facts-and-figures
  • Of those affected by an eating disorder 89% are female, 11% male.Source: b-eat.co.uk/about-beat/media-centre/facts-and-figures
  • It is estimated that of those with eating disorders:
    • 10% are anorexic
    • 40% are bulimic
    • 50% fall into the EDNOS (Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified) category

    Source: b-eat.co.uk/about-beat/media-centre/facts-and-figures

  • Eating disorders affect children as young as six.Source: b-eat.co.uk/about-beat/media-centre/facts-and-figures
  • Eating disorders have developed in women in their seventies.Source: b-eat.co.uk/about-beat/media-centre/facts-and-figures
  • Anorexia has the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric disorder, from medical complications associated with the illness as well as from suicide.Source: b-eat.co.uk/about-beat/media-centre/facts-and-figures
  • 20% of anorexia sufferers will die prematurely from their illness.Source: b-eat.co.uk/about-beat/media-centre/facts-and-figures
  • Some eating disorder autobiographies are banned from treatment centres as inpatients use them for learning new tricks. One such book, Marya Hornbacher’s autobiography Wasted, is known as an ‘Eating Disorder Bible.’
  • There exist two sub-culture groups, Pro-ana, and Pro-mia, which support eating disorders as a positive lifestyle choice. Ana is derived from ‘anorexia,’ Mia from ‘bulimia.’ Ana and Mia are personifications of the illnesses and are used as code. Those in Pro-ana groups make and wear red beaded bracelets to recognise each other and as a constant reminder not to eat. Those in Pro-mia groups make and wear blue beaded bracelets. It is thought that there are more than 500 Pro-ana and Pro-mia websites. These websites warn visitors to stay out if they do not already have an eating disorder or if they are in recovery. The content of the websites includes tips and tricks, forums and ‘thinspiration’ photo galleries.Source: news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7259143.stm
  • 20% of young women diet either all or most of the time.Source: b-eat.co.uk
  • 1.19 million people watched Embarrassing Fat Bodies in the first week of August 2011, the third most watched programme on Channel 4 that week. 2.65 million people watched Supersize Vs Superskinny in the first week of March 2012, the fifth most watched programme on Channel 4 that week.Source: barb.co.uk/report/weekly-top-programmes-overview (The Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board)
  • Slimming World is the most popular slimming magazine. In the first half of 2010 their circulation was 302,738.Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_magazines_by_circulation
  • Dieting women read beauty and fashion magazines for ‘thinspiration.’
  • There is a National Eating Disorders Awareness Week which takes place February/March every year in the UK.

LGBT facts and statistics

  • Around 10% of women are wholly or partially attracted to members of the same sex.Source: avert.org/gay-people.htm
  • The lesbian (or lesbian tendencies) and eating disorder crossover could amount to around 142,400 women in the UK alone.
  • Very little research has been conducted into lesbians’ experiences of eating disorders. Rebecca Jones, PhD Psychology student at the University of the West of England, is addressing this need. Her discoveries so far have revealed the following reasons that lesbians fall into an eating disordered lifestyle:
    • a response to the stress and uncertainty of not fulfilling hetero-normative expectations
    • to fit into hetero-normative standards of femininity by being slim
    • to avoid one’s sexuality by focusing on food
    • to defocus people’s attention from one’s sexuality by being ill
  • There is a National Coming Out Day celebrated every year on October 12th in the UK and on October 11th everywhere else in the World.

The book facts and statistics

  • Samuel Pepys wrote 2,000,000 words. Lesbian diarist Anne Lister wrote 4,000,000 words. I have written 7,000,000 words to date (2013).
  • Lesbian Crushes and Bulimia is the first book to present a diary account of living as a lesbian with an eating disorder.
  • I have found just one other autobiographical book that combines the subjects of eating disorders and lesbianism. Written by celebrity Portia de Rossi, Unbearable Lightness: A Story of Loss and Gain, published in 2010, is a bestselling memoir about how her fear of coming out lead to her anorexia.

Friday 20th October 1989, University

Fifth day of my period, so this morning I started taking the pill.

8:30pm Lesbian and Gay Society party at Davis’s. There were about ten people there, sitting around on the floor and listening to Nina Simone. Vikki was among them. Wow!

Tom’s actually a bit of a prat. So, I was only vaguely interested when he told me he was bisexual. I had thought that if he were there I’d like to sleep with him tonight. I really feel this urge to sleep with another man. I feel quite impatient about it. I could go to The Halls bar Sunday night, or wait till I’m working there on Monday.

Drank lager and red wine all night. Talked to Vikki. I really like her. She told me that she’d been in The Halls in her first year, but had had to leave in April because groups of boys used to shout “lesbian” at her and laugh when she walked into the dining hall. They used to urinate up her window. Incredible.

She has a much older girlfriend called Sam. Damn. I hate that. They all seem to have girlfriends. I hate couples. I like people to be available. One other girl and I were the only ones who did not look like stereotypical lesbians. I drank too much. I kept falling back against the wall with my eyes closed. It served as a minor source of amusement. I really enjoyed the evening. But the silly thing is: I just kept thinking I wanted a man to sleep with.

Erin, a girl whom I’ve often seen talking to Vikki around university, said she would let me sleep at her place. She is not physically attractive. She’s quite short, pale, and a bit dumpy with spiky, mousey hair, and round glasses.

We went back to hers and lay in her bed and talked. The drink was wearing off. She lay very close to me. Sometimes our bodies were touching. I didn’t mind at all. I asked her how many women she’d slept with.

“Five.”

“Men?”

“None.”

She is repulsed by the idea of sleeping with a man. This is odd, because it’s very enjoyable. We talked all around the subject. There are two types of “dyke,” as she put it: butch and femme. She is butch and prefers butch. She said she had been “in lust with” Vikki. She likes short hair. I am femme, she said.

Erin was in the same halls of residence last year as a girl called Tonya, with whom I have been quite friendly. Tonya had told Erin about me in the summer term. She’d said I was in love with my teacher, told her about my tattoo and shown her a photo of me.

Erin had been aware of me, she said, since the first term of last year. Apparently the people on the Lesbian and Gay stall at the Freshers’ Fair had watched me walking self-consciously backwards and forwards, trying to pluck up enough courage to go up to them. That is precisely what I had been doing. I felt really silly when she told me that. But I had eventually obtained my copy of the Gay Times.

We talked for ages—about her, because I was asking the questions. Later she put her arm over my front. She was on my left. Later still she rested her head on me and held me. It just felt warm. I thought she was slightly forward, but it didn’t seem out of place. It was comfortable and nice—lying in bed close to someone. When she did this I said, “You’re very confident, aren’t you?”

She said she wasn’t, then started to say, in a semi-suggestive, unsubtle way, “If I were confident, I would …”
I offered, “If you were confident, you’d finish your sentences.” She laughed and gently hit me.

One of the best parts of the conversation was her telling me about her sleeping with the five women. She didn’t enjoy the first three times at all, because there was no emotion involved. The other two times were wonderful because she was in love. We decided to go to sleep 5:05am. We lay quite close. Beautiful.

This synopsis contains light spoilers.

Lesbian Crushes and Bulimia is a real-life diary portrayal of an obsessive nineteen year old lesbian, Natasha, whose internal homophobia, alongside infatuations with other women, bring her condemnation in both her gay and straight environments and drive her into a state of compulsive binge-eating and purging.

This true story is set in 1989, one year after the infamous Section 28 was introduced, according to which it was not permitted to “promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship.” Lesbian Crushes and Bulimia is the first book to present a diary account of living as a lesbian with an eating disorder.

Natasha is obsessively, unrequitedly in love with her former teacher, Miss Williams (names have been changed), a love which she declares openly as a tattoo on her wrist. She meets Alex, a girl her own age, who questions her about the tattoo, revealing her own remarkably similar obsessive love for her former teacher, Miss Wilson. A romance blossoms between the two girls. Alex is slim and beautiful, Natasha is not.

Alex, who does not want to be gay, claims that she believes she is heterosexual. Natasha decides to experiment with boys.

When Alex, influenced by her mother’s homophobia, rejects Natasha, the latter, in her characteristically obsessive fashion, starts to fall into an alarmingly bulimic lifestyle in an attempt to lose weight to feel worthy of winning Alex back.

As the months of bulimia unfold, Natasha engenders disapproval in the gay scene’s hardcore lesbians and spends her time compulsively weighing herself, starving herself, and experimenting with methods of ridding her body of food.

Does Natasha succeed in feeling attractive enough for Alex? Does she succeed in winning Alex back?

I have been a devoted, prolific diarist for very many years, from childhood through to the present, propelled by the luxury of owning a detailed record of my life. I have always kept two copies of my diaries–in different towns–to avoid accidental loss. In 2013 the number of words I have written exceeds 7,000,000.

Formerly in code (before the purchase of a computer), my diary entries reach around 1000-4000 words per day and have included subjects such as living with a drug dealer, experimenting with drugs, wandering and sleeping rough, shoplifting, squatting, my affairs with women, and unknowingly dating a transsexual woman.

I love my diaries. They are my life’s work and my joy. I aim to make a career out of revisiting them for publication.