One of my first jobs was as an agony aunt on the teenage magazine, Jackie. Apologies to the more “mature” readers among you – I don’t want to burst your bubble but the truth is, I was Cathy and Claire. They came as a pair on this gig. I’m also someone who stayed in a heterosexual marriage for 25 years before coming out at the age of 46. It got me thinking. After years of handing out advice on love bites, lost love and loneliness, what words of encouragement could I have offered myself and the many others like me? Here’s what I’ve come up with.
Life is not black or white.
When it comes to sexuality, there is no right and wrong. Think of it as a giant Farrow and Ball colour chart. There truly are 50 shades of grey – or gay, in this case. OK, you may feel a little like Elephant’s Breath today, but Light Gray might be just around the corner. What I’m trying to say is, wherever you find yourself on the sexual spectrum and whatever shades you match together, it’s your choice and your right.
I’ve always been a very logical person and I tried to use that logic to define myself way too early. But perhaps with good reason. By the age of 12, I knew that I liked girls. I also knew that I was from a Catholic, working-class background and it was the 1960s. There were no openly gay people in the tower blocks where I lived and there were certainly no lesbians in my Scottish/Irish family. Though I always had my suspicions about Aunt Margaret. She was married, but had a liking for Capstan Untipped and singing Cigareets and Whisky and Wild, Wild Women at family parties. Telling anyone that I needed time to explore my sexuality just wasn’t an option. I would have had as much chance of them understanding my feelings as I would have had of missing mass on Sundays or getting a pair of Levi red tabs.
So I put all thoughts of Valerie Singleton and Julie Andrews to one side and strode firmly to the straight end of the spectrum.
And there, apart from a few studenty Sapphic snogs I stayed. I met and married a wonderfully warm and funny man. A free spirit like me. We climbed mountains together and travelled the world before settling down to a life of domestic bliss in a big house full of books, bikes and two children. To everyone who knew us, we seemed the perfect family unit. The only problem was, deep inside I was slowly, secretly sliding along that spectrum.
Once it’s out of the box, it won’t go back
Coming out, whatever your age or circumstances, isn’t easy. But there comes a point when those nagging voices in your head won’t give it a rest. No amount of retail therapy and red wine will stop them. You know what you need to do, but like cleaning out the shed or going to the gym, you keep putting it off.
The first step is coming out to yourself. I mean, truly accepting who you are. It’s more than those secret, safe, fantasies that are on continuous play in the dark backrooms of your brain. It’s more than watching Desert Hearts when no one else is home. It’s looking yourself square in the eye in the mirror and saying out loud, “I am a lesbian”. Trust me, those four little words are the key. Once you’ve managed to get them past your lips, there’s no going back.
Life is strange, isn’t it? I mean, I stayed married all those years for love. Love of my husband and children. Then it was love that made me leave them. The scenario may seem scarily familiar to many. I fell for a colleague. Ten years younger than me, she was relatively new to the company and had been out to everyone since her teens. It was love at first sight for me. A coup de foudre as the French say, a lightning bolt. Our affair, as passionate and tempestuous as it was, was indeed the conductor for my new life. I knew I had to be with her and to do that meant admitting to myself and then to my family that I was gay.
I won’t even attempt to sugarcoat this – telling my husband and kids was the most harrowing and stressful thing I’ll ever do in my life. My mum just couldn’t find it within her social worker soul to support me. My lover was optimistic and naive enough to think that we could all just transition instantly into a neat, nuclear family. I was alone, all alone in a guilt-infested sea of shocked, angry faces and hurt. So I tried – for my husband’s sake, my children’s sake, my mum’s sake, everyone’s sake but my own – to go back. Three times I returned to a puffy-eyed, walking-dead existence in a spare room. It didn’t work.
You gotta have friends
Friends are the glue that gets you through life. Good ones stick with you through thick and thin. Friends are the middle ground between family and insanity. Acceptance and support from them is pretty much all you need to get through this. To finally open your mouth and let those words tumble from your lips in a tangled torrent is such a relief. Hearing them reply, “Yeah, we kinda knew, now get to the bar, it’s your round,” tells you all you need to know about why you love them.
Coming out so late in life was an excellent if rather drastic way of de-cluttering my address book. It sorted the wheat from the chaff – or the naff, in this case. To be honest, most of those who fled the scene could best be described as acquaintances. A few names hurt, though. Mutual friends my husband and I had known for years. They just didn’t know what to say, so said absolutely nothing at all.
My closest friends, on the other hand, worked overtime. They were there to mediate when my husband was still too hurt and angry to talk to me directly and there to distract me when every head in the office did a synchronised swivel in my direction when the news broke.
They gave me food and fags but, mostly, they gave me hope. “Kid, you haven’t killed anyone, you’re not going to jail,” one said, as she passed the tissues. I hid most of my family troubles from my girlfriend. Her previous partners had all been husband-free and their baggage seemed cabin-sized compared to mine. I didn’t want to worry her pretty little head with it all. Besides, it seemed to put her in a bad mood. No, our time together was to be all shiny and sparkly.
Time with my friends on the other hand was more snivelly and snotty as they became my sounding boards and legal advisers. They persevered and pieced me back together again. And just when I was ready to climb right back on to that goddamn wall … that’s right, the girlfriend dumped me
Beware the second adolescence
There’s no instruction pack issued to lesbians. If there were, it would be like one for flat-pack furniture and bits would inevitably be missing. No, rather appropriately, this investigation requires leg work. If your experience to date has been gleaned from box sets of The L Word, Lip Service and Orange is the New Black, you need to get out more. Enjoyable as those shows are, it’s time to sideline the stereotypes and be prepared for lots of Sapphic socialising. Meeting and talking to other women – hearing their coming out confessionals and their falling-in-and-out-of-love stories is crucial to your own development
OK, newly single and ready to mingle. I imagined myself as part of this huge, welcoming rainbow gang. Everyone would love me and I would think they were all utterly fabulous. That was bound to be the way it rolled, wasn’t it? Er, not quite. I lived in a town with only two gay bars. Better than none, I hear you say and I quite agree. However, playing pool and wearing Jack Wills polo shirts seemed to be prerequisites at both. The girls were really warm and funny and friendly but we all knew I didn’t fit in. Hell, I didn’t even like Jägerbombs.
It was time to find a photo I could delete my ex from, write a profile of which Dorothy Parker would be proud and try online dating. What followed were two years of amazing adventures. I’d love to tell you more, but I’m saving the saucier bits for my book. Suffice to say, I bumped into lots of eye-poppingly interesting characters and listened to some incredible stories. I met a vegan who was immediately offended by my leather shoes; a lady who wore only black as a protest against the injustice women face throughout the world; a performance artist who wanted me to dance naked in a field; a witty, generous scientist who took me to Milan for the weekend and a rather foxy lady whose ex had left her for someone in Desperate Housewives.
The penny dropped … there were a heck of a lot of different sorts of lesbians out there. It wasn’t one big, happy family. Some fascinated me, some just plain scared me. Some thought I was interesting or funny or attractive and some kept checking their watches and couldn’t wait to finish their flat whites. The fact was, it was a whole lot of fun finding this out.
This is probably a good point to mention something important that no one warned me about – the second adolescence. In retrospect, I suppose it seems perfectly logical. I’d gone through the heterosexual adolescence, but, in my late 40s or not, I wasn’t being allowed to skip the lesbian rite of passage.
Some of you cynics out there might think I’m just using this as a rather elaborate excuse for behaving like a tit. In my defence, I’ll say that I’ve done quite a bit of research on the subject and a lot of women I’ve talked to agree with me. Those of us more mature “coming outers” suddenly find ourselves acting like teenagers again.
Thinking back on those early dating days can still give me a bigger hot flush than the menopause. Guzzling too much wine, talking too loudly, propositioning women who patently didn’t want to be propositioned, I was out of control and needed to be taken in hand. Luckily there was someone around the corner willing to do that ...
And breathe ...
Like them or loathe them, The Beatles pretty much nailed it when they wrote, All You Need Is Love. If friends are the glue that holds us together, love is most definitely the fuel that keeps us motoring on through this emotional M1 they call life. From the moment you feel those first, faint, tickly butterfly flutterings everything else just seems to fall into place. Finding love isn’t always easy, but it is out there ...
So, nine years later, I’m sitting here, cup of Earl Grey in hand, wondering, “When did it all go right?”
The answer is just over five years ago when a dating site called Pink Sofa and the stars conspired to bring a very special woman into my mixed-up life. Our first date wasn’t promising. She said I just puffed and preened and talked at her for hours. I thought I was being the flirty, charming player. She hung in, though, because her instincts told her it was all just a rather frightened facade. God bless those instincts.
She has brought class, calm and consistency into my life. She makes me laugh, she makes me think outside the box and, every so often, she makes me stop and smell the roses. Like 10% of the British population we are a LAT (Living Apart Together) couple – and it works. We spend some of the time in the buzzing heart of Edinburgh’s pink triangle area, where she lives, and some in the genteel, tea-and-scones vibe of the seaside village I call home. Like us, it’s the perfect combo. I have finally found my anam cara, my soul mate.
The other crucially important person in my life is my daughter. Throughout this whole painful process she has been my constant. Wise far beyond her years, she has never wavered in her support for me and my sexuality. She steeled herself against the cruel whispers in the school playground and the fact that I suddenly wasn’t around to read her a bedtime story. She never missed a visit to see her crumpled mum in a series of soulless rented flats. A couple of years ago, we had our Bette Midler Beaches moment. Tears and mascara running down both our faces, she told me that I was the bravest person she’d ever met and her hero. She is unequivocally mine. The three of us have formed our own divine sisterhood. Carousing through the New Town together, squabbling over film quizzes and discussing her dating dilemmas – we are a family. She tells me that it is wonderful to have two mums.
My life however, is still a work in progress. There’s major repair work going on behind the scenes. Fences to be repaired, bridges rebuilt with my son and ex-husband. But if this journey has taught me anything, it’s that patience and good karma are the keys. So, onwards and upwards, kid.
Gayle Anderson will appear in The Agony Aunt Story: Sex, Lies and Love Bites on BBC4 in February
This response by Gayle Anderson’s former husband, Alex Anderson, was appended on 2 March 2015.
I am Gayle’s ex-husband and I would like to set the record straight. Gayle’s coming out was nothing like she has portrayed. Gayle had asked if her girlfriend could come on our family’s summer holiday to Spain because she was going through a tough time. The girlfriend had become a friend of the family and the villa we had booked was more than big enough, so I agreed. As the holiday progressed, it became more and more apparent that something was not right. And by the end, it was obvious what was going on. I did not confront Gayle in Spain for the kids’ sake but I did when we got home. After a few hours, she admitted her feelings for her friend. I told her to leave and she did. Gayle told me a few months after the holiday that the affair had been going on for a couple of years. I still find it hard to believe that anyone would take someone they were having an affair with on their family’s summer holiday. I do regret that Gayle has felt the need to put this sad and unhappy time in a national newspaper. I was quite happy that the people who matter in this sorry mess knew the truth, but as Gayle has dragged this into the public domain I felt I had to tell it as it is.
Alex Anderson
