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.
