365 Days of Winging It: How we started Scottish Lesbians
Scottish Lesbians is one year old, and we thought it was time for a bit of reflection on the last year.
Scottish Lesbians was started by two of us; middle-aged lesbians with a lifelong commitment to lesbian rights and feminism, but who had been out of the loop regarding campaigning for many years due to other personal commitments. We had been keeping up with the situation facing lesbians, the erasure of all our spaces and the groups fighting back, but it wasn’t until early 2022 that we had the headspace to start thinking about what we, personally, could or should do about it.
We set up a Twitter account and started with a single tweet, on May 6th, 2022:
What we thought might happen, at best, was that a kindly lesbian would send us a quiet message letting us know about an existing underground network of lesbians in Scotland. What we got instead was a flurry of messages from Scotland and beyond – women wanting to know if we had groups in their areas, women asking if we were just for Scotland, more established campaigners wanting to offer support or to know who we were before they could signpost others to us, and women looking to find out if we were trans rights activists trying to get hold of their details.
Although we had no grand masterplan when we launched Scottish Lesbians, and we had some expectation-setting to do, we were always committed to seeing it through if it seemed that a group like ours was needed. We had a fair bit of impostor syndrome going on (Scotland clearly already has some extremely effective lesbian campaigners) and a steep learning curve ahead of us. We both come from frontline professional backgrounds so, right from the start, our aim was to be contactable and to try to see who else was out there and what we could achieve by working together with other lesbians.
So what has that meant over the last year? We’ve had lots and lots of Zoom meetings with women who contacted us, some of which have been cathartic two-hour long chats where we all just said the things that we don’t get many chances to say. We’ve had to learn how to set up online spaces where we could all keep in touch and share information. We’ve joined up with friends from organisations like Scottish Feminist Network to protest self-ID in Scotland and men in women’s prisons. We’ve been to lesbian-specific events like Lesbian Strength in Leeds. We got a Scottish Lesbians flag made up, and contact cards, and we’ve gradually built up the confidence to ask if we can promote our group when we go to things.
We’ve carried out qualitative research into lesbians’ experiences of coming out. We got over seventy detailed responses to our research, and we’ll be making our findings available later in the year. We had a lot of support from individuals as well as lesbian groups in getting our study information circulated and although the link was freely available on Twitter, we had only one protest response, and even that was polite.
As we reach the one-year mark, we’re now in the fortunate position of knowing other lesbians who want to help with the organisation of Scottish Lesbians and increase our reach. We can’t stress enough how glad we are to see our network grow and develop and to know women who can add to Scottish Lesbians in ways that are outside our own areas of expertise.
Without going into too much detail, here are a few of the things we are focusing on at the moment.
- Increasing our political representation as lesbians in Scotland
- Addressing the failure of funded archives to capture information about current and recent lesbian campaigning
- Doing some social stuff – to friends who’ve heard us say, ‘we’re not Peter Stringfellow’ – well, we’re still not Peter Stringfellow, but we do recognise the direct value of getting to know each other and build friendships
- Networking, supporting other groups and projects and getting ready for the terrifying world of public presentations (this is only one of us, to be fair, and not the one who’s writing this Substack)
We hope it’s obvious by now, but if you are a lesbian who has seen any of our stuff on social media, wondered what the group does or thought about getting in touch, please do!