pride

The first I knew of it was seeing the big shiny billboard in Camberley, the close-up of sweaty hips in a shiny thong. I didn't approve, not through any kind of general decency, more because the blatant sexualisation of those poor little lesbians - bless 'em, they just want to get along and here we are exploiting them for the benefit of hetero men.

Forgetting, of course, that straight guys aren't the only demographic in society who like watching girls make out.

The next thing I knew, my bisexual girl-who's-my-friend-type-girlfriend was telling me about watching it with her lesbian more-than-friends-type-girlfriend and I was searching YouTube for The L Word back episodes and, despite not falling into either of the demographics in question (I am, as far as I can discern, neither a lesbian nor a straight male) LOVING IT.

Shit, I thought, I actually really like this show. Boy was my face red.

Despite my embarassment, my recent boyfriends haven't seemed to mind, in fact they've seemed practically euphoric about having a girlfriend who postively encourages them to watch what they see as girl-on-girl porn with them.

But I was starting to wonder. As my third term at uni began to take an undeniably butch turn (what with the haircut, the steel capped boots, that picture of me kissing Catherine), a supposedly straight girl staying up late to download yet more of season 2 off of YouTube became more and more suspicious.

Unfortunately, Philippa, Tim and everybody else who thinks I'd look good in rainbow stripes - I wasn't experiencing a change of heart. Much to my surprise, it wasn't the sex that kept me watching, it wasn't even my not entirely honorable crush on Sarah Shahi that kept me watching. Turns out I was in it for the gay. The absolute, loud and proud, unashamed gayness of it.

You end up watching some sexed up TV show and suddenly there's butches and femmes and bitches and benders and transgenders and men who don't want to be women, just lesbians - and how do you go about being a liberal then, when you can't help but flinch because you know you really should disapprove? Because someone once said you should disapprove.

I used to just skirt around it. You know, 'it', the gay thing. On the one - the things I'd always believed about tolerance and freedom. On the other - everything that church said was right. Everything that everyone around me seemed to think was right. Tricky, huh?

I remember two men at church, stood before the congregation with entirely straight arms around each others' entirely straight shoulders, proclaiming that they could not, would not support the appointment of John Jeffrey, the first openly gay bishop. It was that word, 'openly', that got me. Finally someone had the stones to stand up and come out in the clergy and he was being denounced.

No one had ever denounced me that way. With all the history I brought along to church with me I had never once even considered that these beautifully accepting people could actually say, gently and with no malice, that the way this person was made was just not suitable.

I did what everyone does when they can't handle the facts and went into pious, evasive denial for three years, which is how long it took me to realise that I didn't believe this, I couldn't pretend to and I was sick of being told to.

For me, it's the flinching. Greer wrote that you can't truly know your own femininity until you've tasted your own menstrual blood. When I read that the thought of it made me flinch, because she's talking about a deeper, more primal view of womanhood than the sterilised mass media will ever let girlies see.

And when I watch The L Word, which, let's face it, is barely scratching the surface of alternative identities and lifestyles, I flinch. I flinch when I see the transgender doing his moustache and binding his chest, I flinch when I see the butchest middle-aged woman dancing with the skinniest femme because these are so far beyond my experience thus far.

Trust me, that doesn't make me glad, or righteous. It shames me. This androgyny, this diversity, this is just another kind of peopleness. Another little bit of humanity that I have so little understanding of because of the alternating fear, pity and disdain that has been bred into me for people who do life differently from us.

It makes me flinch because it's alien, not because it's wrong, and at some point during this infatuation of mine I started to feel real anger for the first time. Not the generalised, I'm angry because it's wrong anger that I used to have, but a real fury that there are people who still seek to say that diverse is less, that difference is wrong.

Because it's not just about gays and straights, it's about every different kind of person and lifestyle, about trying to prescribe one way of being above another. And it's not just Christianity either. It's the American dream or British stiff upper lip or anything that tells you that there is a certain person you have to be to be accepted.

If you watch it, if you can get past the lady-on-lady antics and the frequent and lusty swearing, maybe you'll only disapprove, but that's fine. It's not really about the show, it's about a whole new kind of epiphany, about the beliefs I'll stand behind, and the ones that I won't.