#59

Suzi Sevgi from FiLiA in conversation with Susan Hawthorne – Spinifex and Lesbian author.

Suzi: Welcome to the FiLiA Podcasts Lesbian Archive. I am very pleased to say, and I feel honoured to have, Susan Hawthorne join us from 1500 miles away from Brisbane, Australia. Susan Hawthorne has been a feminist activist since 1973, and she has worked on publishing for five years or more.

She's the co-founder of Spinifex Press with Renate Klein in 1991 in Australia, which is a radical feminist publisher. And she uses her publishing platform to ‘un-work the system’ as Valarie Solanas put it by ensuring the visibility of indigenous, lesbian, working class and migrant writing. And she wrote Bibliodiversity: A Manifesto for Independent Publishers on this subject, which in today's language is about diversity and intersectionality of voices.

She will also be speaking on the subject of violence against lesbians, and she has written widely on this matter. She has a collection of poetry to deal with violence against lesbians and importance of lesbian culture, which are The Butterfly Effect, Cow, Lupa and Lamb, and The Sacking of the Muses and her latest novel Dark Matters.

I would like to start by asking you how you would describe the current state of lesbian and lesbian feminist culture and spaces at this time in Australia.

Susan: Well, in Australia at the moment, we're facing a lot of difficulties of the same sort that are happening in the UK. There's an attempt to bring in, that already in Tasmania they've changed laws around sex and gender, pretending that gender is the same as sex, which is a big problem because it's clearly not. 

I am in fact about to publish another book called In Defence of Separatism which I wrote in 1976 but I'm now finally putting it out into the public sphere because there's a big problem around this.

So the situation for lesbians is pretty dire because we are subsumed under the label LGBT, sometimes I, sometimes Q, sometimes who knows? And so lesbians are having a bit of a tough time. 

Suzi: I think you, if I recall correctly, you were talking about the importance of language in Dark Matters and also in politics as well, I think you touched on the subject of how do we need to separate our language and also create a new culture where we take down the current system completely before we can start off again and not use the language that they use.

Susan: I mean a great example is the word gender, which in the 1960s used to refer to masculine and feminine and in Indo European languages. Somehow, it now means a whole lot of other things that it never meant. And when Ann Oakley started to talk about gender, she meant it as the sex role stereotypes, that had been enculturated into women and men. And that was what feminine and masculine meant and it certainly wasn't what it means today. Even editors these days, don’t know what the word gender means. 

A novel I read a few years ago had a dialogue happening in 1951 and she used gender in the way that it's used now. And then there are things like archaeologists talking about the gender of the bones. Well, you can't actually tell what the gendered so-called gendered behaviour of the bones of those people were several thousand years ago.

Babies don’t know what their gender is. Dogs care less when you fill in a form and they ask you what gender is your dog? You go, you throw your arms up in the air and say - she doesn't care, he just wants to run. 

For that reason, I mean, language is terribly important to me and I love learning languages and because I'm a poet, I also care about the way in which words are used and the way that you can use them to mean a whole lot of multiple things or very specific tiny things and I really like that. 

Suzi: I agree with you completely on the problem with this conflation of sex and gender. We're having the same problem here in the UK. 

What do you think might be the reason that people are using gender instead of sex? 

Susan: Well, I'm actually really puzzled by it. People are born with a sex. Even if they get it wrong, they're still born with a sex and you can't change that. You can't change it and suddenly say, oh, you know, he was really a dog, or she was really a horse. I mean, that would be a sort of metaphorical kind of equivalent.

 I think it's due to post-modernism. I think that's where it got its start. And in post-modernism, you can believe in a whole lot of contradictory things and feel quite content that you contradict yourself internally and externally. 

I grew up and became a philosopher for a short period of time till they kicked me out because of my In Defence of Separatism piece and I think that because post-modernism is so fluid, it's really nice to be a fluid, gender and non-binary person. And you can just be who you want to be. And it, it's so individualistic, our planetary culture has become incredibly individualistic, it just enhances that and takes it into another dimension. 

Those of us who still have our feet on the ground and that's probably 52% of the population, roughly, although there are few betrayers, it just doesn't make sense. But I think I would take it back to postmodernism and the, the whole notion of fluid identity, 

Suzi: From my point of view, as well as what you said about postmodernism, it's about being fashionable, being different because there are a lot of young people who are buying into this idea that you can choose your gender and have all these different labels attached to you. 

Susan: It’s a form of rebellion. Every generation needs to find a form of rebellion. It's just very unfortunate that this is such a negative one.

Suzi: My next question would be: What strategies can be used to challenge and change the pervasive lesbophobia that we're experiencing in Western cultures currently? The reason I've phrased it this way is because the experience of lesbians and what we call non-western cultures is completely different to what we have here. 

Susan: Yes, it is. So far as I'm concerned because I spend most of my life writing poetry and fiction, and every now and again when I feel I absolutely have to, then I write nonfiction, the way that I've chosen to mostly do that is by trying to create lesbian centric universes through my poetry and through my fiction and challenging people to read the books differently. So to take on my lesbian universe and think about it in the way in which if they were reading a book by a man, would they query anything in it, you know? But if they're reading books by lesbians with a lesbian universe, lesbian references here, there, and everywhere then that's more challenging. I've had people tell me that, that it's more challenging and that they found it difficult to understand what I'm on about. 

I've done this across several things. So that in my book The Butterfly Effect, what I did was I have a whole lot of footnotes all down one double page spread and on the other side is the poem and that's because I knew nobody would understand what I was on about, so I have all these references.

That's kind of a starting point for anybody who wants to read my work, they really should start with The Butterfly Effect because I explain a lot of stuff there.

Whereas by the time I've got to Dark Matters I'm inventing entire universes that are made up of lesbians. The reason I called it Dark Matters is because dark matter can't be perceived. It's imperceptible by all sorts of technological things. It took a woman to notice that dark matter actually existed. That was Vera Rubin. 

I'll just read you just one a couple of lines:

‘Dark matter is almost imperceptible, invisible, and yet it takes up space like a lesbian in a room full of people. She too takes up space, but who sees her visible and yet not.’

 And so I'm playing with that whole idea that it's all these lesbians in the world and nobody actually notices us. On a more serious note, there are all these lesbians in the world who are being violated, who have been tortured, murdered, raped, whatever, and there's no public outcry. 

Around about 15 years ago, I used to belong to Amnesty International. I ceased belonging to them because they become totally useless and one of their uselessness was recognising that lesbians are tortured. They have had all sorts of campaigns around gay men, around trans people, around people from all different countries. And there are many people in many countries around the world who are being tortured. They would not run an article that I wrote about lesbians. Initially they were going to, and then somebody must have said, no, we can't do this, because I think they think their funding would stop. Because lesbians are just not good news, it would wreck their campaign.  

 Suzi: I didn't know about that I have to say. The reason that I stopped supporting Amnesty International is because of how they framed prostitution.

Susan: Yes. Well, that became a second reason after I had already stopped. 

Suzi: So now I've got another reason not to support them. So on one hand, lesbians don't get noticed, but when they do get noticed, they get noticed in a very vile way and get killed, so we can't win with them anymore.

Susan: I started thinking about all of this when I was at a World Women's Congress in Uganda in 2002, and near the end of the conference there was a session on radical feminism in Africa. I ran along to the session and it was really, really interesting. And at one stage I stood up and I asked the question, I usually try to include the word lesbian in any question I ask at a conference just to make trouble. Anyway, I did get an answer, but a woman came up to me afterwards and her name was Christine. I know nothing else about her. She said, you should be really, really careful because in this country they torture lesbians. After a few hours, I was kind of sat there in this state of shock.

I thought, I have to start doing something about this. And that was when I started writing Academic kinds of essays and journalism about the cases of lesbians who were tortured. And I have to say it was far worse than I had expected. 

Some of the first examples I came upon were from Africa. There was one woman who was raped every day until she became pregnant. And it was her parents who set that up. So there's non-state torture as well as state torture.

There was another woman who was in prison and they were torturing her and then she was raped by the inmates, so not only was she being raped by those who were imprisoning her, but she was being raped by those who should have been supporting her. 

There's another woman from Peru who says that when she says, she speaks up and she says, when I say something about my identity as an indigenous person, everybody wants to support me. But when I talk about my identity as a lesbian, they don't want to hear me. It's a deal breaker. 

And there are statements I heard from various places in the Middle East where they just can't understand why anybody would want to campaign to stop torture against lesbians because after all their vile. It's really scary. Scary and terrifying.

Suzi: It's very ingrained and I'm sorry, I failed to mention that you'd carried out research into the torture of lesbians globally. 

How do you see the combination of misogyny as well as the way that lesbians don't have any connection with men or any need for them emotionally or physically, romantically? Is it this combination that causes this deep lesbophobia in people? 

Susan: I think so. I mean, all of the different ways in which women as a group are subjected to violence, all those same ways apply to lesbians as well. 

Amnesty did do two interesting reports, one on LGBTQI, et cetera and the number of reports on lesbians was way, way fewer than the rest. So like four fifth of the book was not lesbians, one fifth of the book was lesbians. 

Part of that is the difficulty of getting the information, but that's not the only difficulty part. The main difficulty is the inability and lack of desire to actually find out that stuff because I was able to find it out and I had never done research in this area before.

Amnesty did another report on torture of women and at the end they had a three-page appendix on lesbians. And I was just so curious about that. Part of it is not seeing the torture of lesbians as part of the group of women who are tortured but also a kind of special case to be put in an appendix and that really, really bothered me a lot. 

One of the most fascinating pieces that I read was by Consuelo Rivera-Fuentes and her partner Lynda Birke. Consuelo is from Chile, and during the Pinochet regime, she was imprisoned and tortured as a lesbian. She writes about it and it's really hard, hard reading actually. It's extraordinary. But it is one of the most amazing pieces of writing that anybody can read on the subject. One of the things she talks about is where is my I? That is, where is my me? Because that gets taken away from her and every time that they punish her, they add another layer, another level of punishment because she's a lesbian and so the violence is intensified. It is a really horrible thing to have experienced in the world.

The women in Africa, who are subjected to corrective rape, they also talk about the ways in which they are vilified and yelled at and the level of violence of rape is, is really terrible. And there was something like 500 cases of corrective rape of lesbians in the Western Cape area, South Africa. And nothing was done. Nothing.  

Suzi: So the government backs this kind of behaviour or there's no punishment for it. 

Susan: That's a country where constitutionally gay and lesbians have human rights, it's, it's in the constitution that they will not be discriminated against and yet this terror is going on and women are, are being murdered and being raped and all the rest. And then not being given refugee status.

 Although Millicent Gaika did manage to get refugee status as a result of corrective rape. That was 2010 and I'd been doing research in this area for seven, eight years, something like that and that was the first time I'd seen an email by and about a lesbian who had been tortured and who had been subjected to corrective rape who was finally getting support. It went out virally probably over Facebook and she did generate a lot of support but that took a very long time. In the meantime, women are killed and raped and nothing happens. Yeah. 

Suzi: It’s a form of violence against women only with an added layer of homophobia to it. 

On the subject of transgenderism, how do you view the right wing politicians backing feminists on the subject? 

Susan: Well, I don't actually think that they back them.

What I think is that they are opportunists. They like to have other people saying things that make them look a bit better. And the same thing has happened in the area of reproductive technology. The right wing has occasionally come out with some good statements, but their reasons for saying things are utterly different and we cannot allow them to appropriate what we're doing. 

They will say it differently and they will have different reasons and their reasons for rejecting the transgender agenda are totally, totally different from the reasons that lesbians and women and girls have of not wanting to be sharing bathrooms with trans people who are still men.

Suzi: Their reasons are very much different from ours and once this issue is resolved, hopefully resolved and we retain our rights to sex-segregated spaces, I think they'll pitch us by the wayside, and carry on being anti-abortion, anti- liberation of women, anti-anything really. They're still lesbophobic as far as I can see. 

Susan: The left are not much better, there's a whole lot of groups of men, political men, who don't want women to be autonomous, don't want women to be in control of our sexuality or in control of anything really and left wing men do that.

In Uganda, it's a socialist prime minister who's running the country. In Russia. it's a communist. In the West it's a whole heap of idiots, most of them right wing at the moment. Then there are the market fundamentalists. They only want to make a profit out of us. In the Buddhist countries they’re no more sympathetic to lesbians, really, either. In India you see the Hindus having a go at lesbians. There is not a political position that is really friendly to women, that is a big mainstream one. In Turkey we have Erdogan and he is not exactly friendly to lesbians. 

Suzi: Well, he's the guy who said that women shouldn't be laughing aloud in public. 

Susan: Yeah, lesbians out having a good time. 

Suzi: Going back to what we were talking about in terms of corrective rape, what's happening in Western cultures right now in connection with the transgender agenda? You've probably most probably heard the term, the ‘cotton ceiling.’ What are your views on that subject?

Susan: I don't actually like the word hate speech, but that's what it amounts to.  It's a vilification. It's an inability to recognise that lesbians are lesbians because we love women. We want to have sex with women. No, we don't want to have sex with somebody who calls themselves a lesbian but still has a penis. Or even if still doesn't have a penis, but actually grew up male and so forth. 

The whole cotton ceiling stuff is just horrid and it's like the chest feeding and the front hole and all of those other language things that have been put out there that is so insulting. I mean, that's the other thing. It's such an insult. 

The other thing is that lesbians have been very fine politically in terms of all sorts of different things that need to happen around the world and there are very few organisations that have come out in support of lesbians. Ever. I can't think of one. but I'm prepared to listen if somebody can come up with one. 

And this whole revamping of language to get rid of mothers, to use words like pregnant persons. That's put into a new law that's being voted on in New South Wales about abortion which is terrible because abortion is an important when it is safe and it is inexpensive and is there when needed and one hopes, it happens rarely but the women who have fought to change laws on abortion are now being pushed out because they're been written out of the law.

I know that George Soros and some others are probably funding a lot of the trans politics that's going on they seem to have an endless amount of money and endless influence, especially around new laws. That really bothers me. 

Suzi: There are various grassroots groups that are working to increase lesbian visibility in the UK currently and to affirm, rebuild and nurture lesbianism and lesbian culture, to voice the concerns of women-loving-women in the current political climate. 

How do you view these movements and what do you think can be done more? 

Susan: Well, when I first joined the Women's Movement in 1973 the first thing I did was I went and volunteered at the Women's Liberation Centre. That was a real eye-opener for me. I then went and did a very short period of volunteering at the local Refuge, which was the first in Melbourne, called Halfway House. And then I joined the Rape Crisis Collective. So within about six months of joining the Women’s Liberation Movement I was involved in this and this and this.

But that's become very difficult now because nobody wants to have women run, women organised groups anymore. We did it, I think, out of desperation because there were no such things. I have this hope that, as there seems to be a bit of a rise in interest in feminism and even in radical feminism, then perhaps this will start to happen again.

A lot of the women's bookshops have, have closed. A lot of women's publishing houses hit the dust in the mid-nineties and a whole lot of other things that women were doing. I was involved in two women's circuses, that was a lot of fun. one of them was completely not destroyed, but a big problem came up when a man decided he wanted to join. 

Now in a women's circus, in any circus, you have to absolutely trust the person you're with. This circus was set up to work with women who had been victims of sexual assault. Some of the balances we did involve sticking your head between somebody's legs. Now that's a very intimate kind of thing that you don't want to particularly do with somebody who is a trans person.

The other thing in the nineties, it destroyed a project which was called the Lesbian Building in Sydney. They had the money to buy a building. They bought a building, and then the hoo ha started and eventually they had to sell because it divided the community.

I really, really hope generating more interest, generating excitement, generating rebelliousness, can bring young women back into the movement and inspire them to do crazy wonderful things.

Suzi: But the question of funding hanging, obviously that can be sorted out? 

Susan: Well, we didn't have any funding. We didn't have any funding for the Rape Crisis Centre. We just did it. At the end of 1974, which was the year I was first involved. The next year 1975, which was the International Women's Year, and we had huge arguments about whether we should accept funding or not that was huge discussion. I can't actually remember precisely, but I think we rejected the idea of funding, but a lot of women's groups accepted it.

Just in the last month or so, a whole lot of new women's groups have come into existence in order to fight the new proposed laws. So things are happening.

Suzi: Once women do start speaking up, other women find the courage to also say, this is not acceptable, whether they're lesbians or not, it's affected a very being of females in this world.

On working as groups, how did you find was the best strategies to work together with all the differences that women have personally and other things that might come up support-neds, 

 How did you manage group work in the sixties and seventies? If you don't mind me asking? 

Susan: It depends a lot on the group. The rape crisis group was the one that I had the most to do with, so I'll talk about that. We used to have collective meetings. We were rostered on one or two nights a week depending on our availability. We answered phone calls, we made decisions about who would go and sit in a courtroom to listen to a rape case and be there to support the woman if necessary. There were a whole range of different things, and each of us had different skills. Some of us had no skills when we started and gradually developed them. Sometimes we'll be interviewed by the media, and again, that was who available. 

We learned as we went. We didn't have any rules and I think that that was something that was probably important because we were inventing a new way of running services for women. None of us knew what we were doing. We made it up in the same way in the women's group I was at university. We had no idea. 

Within a year we were on the student representative council. We had four of us there, we just went in and did it. 

And the same, you know, when Renate and I started Spinifex. We pay the bills, we get to make the decisions, but we also have a number of women working for us, and we try to keep as flat a system as possible. That's how we work and that's kind of come out of that way of working for me in the early seventies. I really haven't changed in lots of ways. I've got more skills now than I had back then. I had lots of enthusiasm back then. Lots of enthusiasm to learn. 

Suzi: Experience does count for a lot. Definitely. And if you have the passion for something, the rest will come, I guess. And I see your point about not having rules because it was something new to everybody who was involved.

 Do you think there are any principles that we should abide by as radical feminists from are working together?

Susan: I think as much as possible, collectivity is a good thing providing it doesn't become a sort of subterfuge of things, an informal way of doing things.

I think in a collective; you have to be very aware of the power struggles between different people because they do happen. Publishing is a really different kind of group to be in from a service, from a rape crisis centre, they're all very, very different.

There's another group in Melbourne called the Matrix Guild, which was formed to set up housing for older lesbians because of course there is no such thing in the government policy for older lesbians, they're operating on a collective basis. and they, they have to have some sort of governance principles because they're raising money and need to do things like that. So there are certain structures they need to work within but nevertheless, there is a kind of collectivity about it. But of course they're all the old 1970s feminists. They know what a collective is.

Suzi: Non-hierarchical,

Susan: And aware of the power struggles now and again, and all of that. But, you know, that's okay, you learn. 

In Australia, the indigenous people who've been here for something like 65,000 years they insist that you have to come to total agreement. Well, it's slow but in the end, if everybody is convinced that that's the right course of action, then that's the thing to do. 

I think that that's a fairly good principle to follow. 65,000 years is worth taking some notice of, I think.

Suzi: To be slow and study handed in making decisions together, yes.

Susan: And occasionally there are emergencies you need to respond to and then you do that so you need to be a bit flexible, but the really with long-term important things you need to make long-term, important decisions. 

Suzi: Again about group working: As women, we carry a lot of trauma for different reasons, whether it's childhood abuse, being sexually abused, or violence from men and domestic violence as we call it. 

How can we support other women as well as ourselves and help ourselves and others self-reflect and heal? 

Susan: It's very hard. It's very hard. But Judith Herman's book, Trauma and Recovery is the best thing that I've read on that. And what she does is she draws an analogy between the sort of PTSD that soldiers returning from war suffer and a comparable PTSD that women in violent relationships or women who've been raped suffer.

And she says you have to treat them the same way you actually and she goes into a whole process of recovery steps for doing that. I think Judith Herman's book is fantastic, and I think everybody who is trying to support women in that situation should read it because it is, it is such an important book. It was written in the nineties and the most recent edition of 2015, and she has various stuff to account with that change.

So I, for me, that would be my main suggestion. Get out and read Judith Herman. 

Suzi: I'll be doing that. Definitely. I'll be suggesting it to other women too.

As well as the trauma that we carry, there are differences in our backgrounds, such as class differences, although white women don't want to face up to it most of the time, there's a lot of racism, whether it's overt or unconscious.

 I understand your main strategy was to seek out marginalised artists and writers with your publishing house.

How do you go about finding different works and how do you select them and how do you engage with the audience?

Susan: Well, it's hard to know really, because sometimes we just get fantastic manuscripts from women and because we can't do a lot of publishing in any one year, we range somewhere between four and 10, once, I think we got 14, that was far too many so let's say we do six in a year. That means we have to be very, very careful about what we decide to publish. 

A couple of years ago I received a manuscript out of the blue about Women in the Northern Territory who were putting together a book about traditional child rearing practices. I was absolutely blown away by this book. I didn't know any of the people associated with it. And eventually I asked, you know, why they came to us and they said, because you do good books and you are feminists. 

Sometimes we know women who are writing really good books, and so we say, can you send it to us? sometimes we know of a book that's gone out of print and we approach the author and we try to get the rights for the book, and so we're able to bring the book back in. 

So it's a whole range of different ways but we don't publish very many in a year.

I think this year we might have six or seven and that's about right. 

Suzi: Do you have a quarter for different types of literature?  

Susan: No, last year we did three poetry books. That was a lot. That was the only time we did 3 poetry books in a year.

 But, we had 10 books last year, so there was a bit more space to do that. We did more non-fiction last year, but we had a couple of novels as well. It’s about having a bit of a mix, non-fiction will generally sell a bit better than fiction, but it depends on who the author is.

When it comes to fiction the author isn’t really important, but it's also, is this a book that's going to survive? We'd like to publish books that are still here in a hundred years. People like Virginia Woolf didn't know that she was going to become that famous and she had a press of her own too.

Suzi: Over the years you've built up a reputation clearly, which is well deserved, and people know about you and they send you their works. When you were first starting out, I presume you must have gone out to seek out authors? 

Susan: Not very much. In the first year, we experimented with our own books because we didn't know what we were doing. So three of the four books we published in the first year were written by Renate and I and another one by a friend. We didn't know if we would last beyond a year.

In the second year we had a book from Canada and we had a cartoon book, we had Nonfiction Canada, we had a fabulous, beautiful book of photographs which is the only time we've done a beautiful book of photographs, because you can do that in your second year and you can't repeat it but you learn as you go what works and what doesn't work. And I had worked at Penguin in Australia, so I had a little bit of training there for what to do, but I only knew about editing and publishing. I didn't know anything about marketing. I didn't know anything about production, anything about sales or finance. Renate knew about non-fiction. 

We had good networks for books. But we had to really train ourselves in all the things we didn't know. 

Suzi: So you didn't ask a man -

Susan:  No, of course we have to deal with printers and things like that. But basically, nearly all of the people we've worked with on our way through are women. Our designers are women. Our type setters are women. Our proof-readers are women. But mostly the printers are men. And the distributors often 

Suzi: You're sorting out the important stuff. 

Susan: If you want people to do things for you, then you have to have a good relationship with them. So I'm never rude. I'm never rude to men. Unless they rude to me. 

Suzi: I was being a bit cynical -

Could I ask you about how you came to write Dark Matters as dedicated to three women? One of you who you mentioned already.

Susan: I mentioned Christine and I mentioned Consuelo and I mentioned an unnamed woman in Australia who did not wish to be named.

It started, well, this woman in Uganda spoke to me in 2002. A few months after that I read Consuelo’s piece, which had been published in 2001. I knew the Australian woman who was a friend and I had had conversations with her about what had happened to her and so I really started seriously writing it in 2003/4. 

At that point, I had no idea where it would go. And wrote the prison thread first, because I knew that had to be part of the story, but I didn't know enough about the characters who were going to come to do anything more than that. And then as I wrote, other characters appeared like Mercedes appeared fairly, fairly early on. She was certainly there by 2006. 

Desi popped up a bit later and I thought, yes, this is great because she's a completely different voice. She's not part of that generation. She's learning about the world and as well as there's things that she doesn't know that she has to learn as the story goes on and then she also takes a trip off to Chile and Argentina, which really opens her eyes to what's been going on there, a kind of side story, but a key part of the side story of Dark Matters relating to torture, particularly in Chile. 

I took a trip to Chile and Argentina too, because I also needed to know more. At that stage, I didn't know which country my character Mercedes would come from but when I got to Chile, it was really obvious to me that it had to be Chile. 

Part of that is that Chile has a very similar kind of colonial history to Australia, whereas Argentina, it looks towards Europe, Chile looks towards the Pacific. And so we share different things particularly around the politics of indigenous people and colonisation and so forth. That's quite different from Argentina. 

That came very late actually, because I couldn't afford to go, but I did eventually get a grant which made it possible right at the end I got a grant, which made it possible for me to do that. 

Suzi: Was that from an arts foundation?

Susan: No, it wasn't. It was the Australia Council, which is like the British Council. 

Suzi: I understand from your publications to date that you are very passionate about creating lesbian centric universes, like you mentioned portraying real lesbians and giving accounts of what's actually happened.

Thinking about what we see in mainstream culture today, if you were to make a TV program about lesbians, what would you like to be the focus, except of course, the subject that we've been talking about, violence against lesbians. Would you use that medium yourself? 

Susan: I think one of the great things about Gentlemen Jack, which I've not seen, but I've read about, is that it is very surprising and it surprises straight people who just assume that lesbians didn't exist until the 1960s when clearly lesbians did. And of course we all know that lesbians have been around for thousands of years, probably tens of thousands of years, if you look at some of the archaeological finds.

 I don’t know what I would do. I think something that makes people sit up and go, oh, I didn't know lesbians were like that and doesn't play to stereotypes, you know, they're always going to be probably a few stereotypes, but they have to resist that as well.

TV relies on stereotypes to some extent so it's hard to have a TV show without them. But any TV show that really makes people sit up and think, and one that says, well, this woman being portrayed on here is not really very different from me. Or She's not very different from my sister or my mother or my niece. You know that sort of thing. And I think that that is what's important. I mean, lesbians are human too. 

Suzi: Indeed, we need to give accurate, wholesome portrayals of lesbians. Of course, our sexuality is part of us that we will not let go of and that this define us to a certain extent. But we are people with many facets after all.

Susan: I was in India earlier this year. I got invited to the Chennai Writers Festival to talk about lesbian which was really surprising to me. I mean, I did try to get invited, but I didn't think it would happen. Anyway, it did happen, and what I realised after a while was that it was easier to invite me to be there as an outsider, and I could say a whole lot of things that a local lesbian would find very difficult to say.

I was able to say: Making a decision to be a lesbian is the best thing I ever decided. my life turned around, it became much more interesting, much more exciting, new worlds opened to me – 

 I had this little row of young lesbians sitting in the front and they were sitting there and they were smiling and cheering and they were very excited to hear somebody say that. It's great to have an opportunity like that where you can say what sound like slightly crazy things to some people but you have the chance to do it because you're not a local.

Suzi: You used your platform of being a lesbian as an outsider because they didn't feel safe enough to say that themselves probably. 

Susan: And I had a lot of fun. Somebody said I had a future as a stand-up comic, now that has never, ever come to me as possible lifestyle. But anyway, I managed to make them laugh, being a lesbian at the same time as laughing. Now that's good. 

Suzi: May I ask about your journey to being a lesbian? How did you discover yourself to be a lesbian and what was the reception? 

Susan: I did go to a boarding school because where I grew up was in the country and at the local school you had to leave at 15, it didn't go any further, so I went off to boarding school. Now, you know, we shared rooms and we all jumped into another's bed. So I knew about this kind of thing. We practiced kissing on one another for the real thing to come later but actually in my time there, I did not think of myself as a lesbian. It actually didn't even occur to me that that would be a possibility. 

I did fall for another woman in my first year out of school, but again, I just thought, you know, I'd fallen for her. But this was just a very intense friendship. 

So when the women's movement came along, wow, all these possibilities opened up and that's what made it possible for me to decide to be a lesbian.

Clearly I was on my way, perhaps, but not, not consciously. It wasn't something that I thought was me. I mean, people had called me a tomboy, but, you know, I wasn't particularly tomboyish. I wanted to climb trees and ride my bicycle and you know, do those things.

I insisted on doing everything my younger brother could do. I had to do it. But that was just being a girl. 

Suzi: Did you consider saying that you were exploring? 

Susan: No, I wouldn't have even said that. No. I had no awareness. I didn't know the word lesbian for a really long time. I was probably late teens before I knew the word lesbian. Now, this was the late sixties and I was a bit protected probably in a sort of way. It wasn't really until after I left school and then went to university and joined the women's movement that it actually occurred to me that this might be a good thing to do because I looked around and I saw the lesbians were really having a lot more fun.

Suzi: Did you have relationships with men before?

Susan: Yes, I can't say they were wonderfully successful.

I mean, they weren't terrible, but they weren't successful. But I learned a lot about patriarchy through those relationships and what men expected and so forth. So, yeah. That's kind of how that was. It wasn't very exciting. It wasn't anywhere near as exciting as falling for women turned out.

Suzi: So you said you decided to become a lesbian. Do you mean you were recognising the feelings you had or did your feminist politics inform your decision in some way or help you see things more clearly? 

Susan: Probably combination of those things, but it was a decision, you know, I didn't get kind of swept off my feet kind of thing, but my politics informed it and the feelings I had for women informed it. And then the two kind of came together. 

 Suzi: Would you say that you're a political lesbian? 

Susan: Well, political lesbians doesn't really have relationships with women, and that's not the case for me.

I've had a series of relations with women. I'm political and I'm a lesbian and I would call myself a lesbian feminist and I'd call myself a radical feminist. I call myself a woman. 

Suzi: So the definition of political lesbian to you is a woman who says that they're a lesbian but doesn't practice lesbianism.

Susan: Yeah. That's how used in it was used in Australia in the mid-seventies. 

Suzi: Okay. And it's not used these days at all?

Susan: Not really. 

Suzi: Okay. Lesbian feminist does describe politics and the combination of your sexuality, so I guess that's equivalent of political lesbian in the UK terms. I would say. 

Susan: Okay. 

Suzi: There are different opinions on this, so just interested to see your point of view on it. 

Last but not least on lesbians in the UK.  I've found lesbians wanting to have lesbian visibility out there with lesbians from different backgrounds, lesbian mothers, lesbians who come out later in life. But at the same time, they're very wary of how they're going to be portrayed and what the motivations of the TV media company is basically.

So we want as lesbians to be seen as the way we are with all the differences between us and to be seen as people. And treated with respect. There is a platform available, yet there is obviously and understandably a fear of being ostracised because, for example, with lesbian mothers, they would want to know about their children, where they live and things like that.

And women, understandably, are not completely comfortable with that information being available nationally, possibly internationally to people view this. So how can we use this platform or use other platforms to our advantage? 

Susan: It's kind of difficult because I absolutely understand why lesbian mothers would want to protect their children because their children can then be bullied at school or whatever. 

It's one thing for a 30-year-old woman to stand up and say, I'm prepared to do this, but that has consequences. And it may have consequences for lesbians who come from different backgrounds where perhaps it's not so easy to be an out lesbian, different cultural groups, et cetera, it's complex and I'm sure the TV program will have to deal with, that.

 Beyond wanting to protect some close people, I think the thing you can do is to be forthright, pragmatic, humorous sometimes, serious other times so that one, portrays a total human being, but you know it’s going to be different for every woman who participates and every woman who's going to have really different challenges. it's not simple not by any means. 

Suzi: It's been wonderful speaking to you. Thank you very much for being so generous with your time. It's really lovely speaking to you. 

Susan: Well thank you. And thanks so much for your thoughtful questions. I really appreciate it.