Tag Archives: diary

Book cover of Helena Whitbread's No Priest But LoveHelena Whitbread’s second book, No Priest But Love, first published in 1992, is the lesser-known follow-up to the 1988 publication of I Know My Own Heart (republished in 2010 as The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister).

This portion of Anne Lister’s diaries covers the years 1824 to 1826. The book begins with Anne’s stay in Paris, where she wins the affections of a widow whose social standing and financial worth do not meet Anne’s aspirations.

Whilst continuing her affair with the love of her life, Mariana Lawton (married to Charles Lawton), Anne seeks a suitable life partner who will also allow her to climb the social ranks. She manages effortlessy to seduce a number of willing young women and writes freely in her diaries of her desires and of meeting those desires. About one sixth of Anne’s diaries–the encoded parts–cover this area of her life.

“As a document of one woman’s revolt against convention and as a celebration of love between women, this is an uplifting book.”–The Independent

Book cover of Stick Figure: A Diary of My Former Self, by Lori GottliebAlthough it reads like diary entries, only parts of the book are dated, for example ‘Winter 1978.’ At the age of eleven Lori Gottlieb begins a diary. Her first entry proclaims that she wants to be the thinnest girl on the planet and that there is nothing else for a girl to wish for. This is a story of treatment for, and recovery from, anorexia.

Check out this book on Amazon.

  • 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

VG Lee, lesbian author and comedian, wrote the hilarious (and fictitious) Diary of a Provincial Lesbian. This event, featuring a selection of authors, sees VG Lee’s first London reading for her new novel, Always You, Edina, and takes place at Polari at the Southbank Centre, Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, London SE1 8XX. For updated details, see VG Lee’s events page.

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?