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. Working-class Johnny can’t believe that this doctor’s daughter wants him, and his attitude is not one of conquest; it is always of gratitude and tenderness.

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.

Such an androcentric ‘normal’, extended to represent the whole community, is equally seen in the rainbow flag which dominates Pride, and all the rainbow-branded merch that entails. We are therefore almost entirely reliant on advertising for funding and we expect to have a tough few months and years ahead. The series promises to be as controversial as Channel 4's Queer as Folk, which drew complaints for its portrayal of the sex lives of a group of gay men. A new student at an all girl's catholic school finds herself as the center of attention of her insatiable classmates. uncorrupted girl left on campus, she'll be forced to watch and tempted by the unspeakable acts committed by the other girls.

There's nothing better than a compilation of steamy tales about the joys of the pole and slits, just waiting to get your pants down. But I look back now and realise that DIVA was as much a part of my growing confidence as the queer club nights and the snogs and the alcopops. This is definitely a queer film in the current sense, disrupting normative gender roles and heterosexuality. Dial-a-Diva met its demise a few years ago, after a period when the internet, and then social media, shook everything up: suddenly we all could escape the confines of the village or town in which we might still feel like the only gay, and connect with others around the world.From the early scene when Baby purposely spills water on a sexist jerk and walks away, you know that she is gutsy and determined. One woman commented that ‘lesbian’ sounds “a bit slimy”, whilst multiple wrote that the word evoked “disgust”. As I was to discover, femmes often are not interested in domesticity and are looking for an equal relationship. DIVA was urgently wanted, though – a number of lesbian, and lesbian and gay, magazines launched in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but none of them had the kind of distribution network that DIVA was able to borrow from its brother publication, Gay Times. A nymphomaniac, recently arrived at an all girls psychiatric hospital has caused quite a stir among the patients.

It's set in a medical office, with a dumb story set-up (that's designed to establish a Part 2, no featured here) prior to doc DeVille humping her receptionist Kenna. 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’.In spite of this situation, we are going to look at inventive ways to look at serving our readership with digital content and of course in print too! Tonight in the lesbian retirement community where I spend the winter I was flipping the TV dial and happened to come across a rerun of Dirty Dancing, a 1987 film set in a Jewish Catskills resort. It stars April O'Neil sort of playing herself, shooting a girl/girl scene with Jenna Sativa and then interviewed by ubiquitous crew member AJ Bucks. Although I have ideas but not certainties about why I grew up, despite relentless opposition, a mannish woman who wanted intimacy with other, mostly feminine women, I can’t remember a time when this wasn’t true.