As I was to discover, femmes often are not interested in domesticity and are looking for an equal relationship. With this being the case, the less-officious, gender-neutral ‘gay’ has become something of a safe haven.

However, as ‘gay’ slopes towards its grave as a schoolyard insult, it’s tempting to wonder whether ‘lesbian’ might have won a similar fate, had activism not centred around the de-facto male-focused word ‘gay’. Varsity is the independent newspaper for the University of Cambridge, established in its current form in 1947.In the late 1980s, 64% of the British public thought that homosexuality was “always wrong”; in 2013, when attitudes to sexual identities were last reported by NatCen, that was down to 22%. This is a very good thing for companies keen to jump onto the pride month marketing bandwagon, who both exploit and propagate the notion of ‘gay as norm’. We are therefore almost entirely reliant on advertising for funding and we expect to have a tough few months and years ahead. We appreciate now that both gender and sexual orientation are not either-or propositions; that they are, rather, continuums that are much more fluid than I was led to believe as a child and young adult.

Half the women in it were dead – Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Anne Lister – but reading DIVA made me realise that lesbians and bisexual women had actually existed in every time and place – they had always been here, and they had survived, and I would too. A nymphomaniac, recently arrived at an all girls psychiatric hospital has caused quite a stir among the patients. The problem is, upon closer consideration, using the same label for gay men and women has proven more harmful than first appears. The buzz about lesbians made it easier for DIVA to get attention in the mainstream press, but the point was that it was by, for, and about queer women.Grey is supposed to have said that she went into plastic surgery a celebrity and came out anonymous. I presume that many of my readers, both today’s young “queer” women and others, may not know (or know that they know) any lesbian femmes, even though the identity is still evolving and vibrant.