was, I had developed a near perfect self-defence mechanism, and (my
story to myself went) escaped the fragility that several people I loved had
suffered from; in that sense, my feelings had been a blessing rather than
a curse. Being gay brought about what was for me, I thought, a simple,
bearable trade-off: to be anything like happy, and indeed to have any
chance to thrive, it was necessary for me to just care less what others
thought of me; to forge my own path, and to forego certain rites of passage
of my peers, in favour of ones I would create for myself. I took this principle
on board, and I ran with it. This robust attitude got me through school,
through university, and into work. And then, after a time, I found that being
tough and holding it together so well and not letting anything get to me
was kind of getting a little tiring. Being stronger than others was wearing
me out. I started to run out of steam, and the wheels came off, and I had
nothing more left in the engine at times, and other rail-based metaphors...
As much as the wlw aspect of my life (and it is, of course, only one part of
me) causes me to light the sparklers and hang the bunting (to paraphrase
Catherine Russell), as proud as I am of being me, and as delighted as I
am by the social and legal changes of the last few years that I just could
not have dreamt of in my teenage days in the 1990s (and I can’t imagine
how different today seems for the generations that came before mine),
being anything other than straight still can, from time to time, have its
challenges. Those are sometimes direct in nature, going to the very core
of who we are, and even emanate from people we care about; and they
can also be more subtle. They can be caused by isolation, but that in
turn can be caused by lack of representation, and lack of recognition. Not
everyone lives in London, Manchester, Brighton or any place that has a
lesbian bar the size of the one in Lip Service (but then on that last account,
does anyone?? Artistic licence ran riot there...) and even if they do, they
don’t always feel that they have the tools or energy to make their love as
wonderful as it could be, if only if they were brave enough. It’s possible
to feel alone, of course, even in a relationship, even — or especially —
one for which you have stuck your neck out, or made sacrifices. Lots of
women I know who are in a relationship have found this isn’t always a
straightforward path to that wonderful life. Sometimes, say, they and their
partner are not in the same comfort zone in terms of being out — blinds
drawn and no hand-holding in car parks, perhaps — whilst others, having
decided they’ve already acted outside established boundaries by having
female loves of their lives, struggle to cope when the relationship falters,
feeling they have nowhere to turn when the relationship on which they
have built a sense of themselves begins to fall apart at the seams. In short,
even in today’s world, for many of us, being our particular selves requires
energy and self-belief that we don’t always have in abundance, and which
it isn’t always so easy to renew.
So where does Berena come into this? In its visibility and accessibility,
Berena has brought people together who otherwise never would have