THE GIRL GUIDE
When I was a teenager in a small town in the mid-1970s, lesbianism was something you had heard of in a theoretical kind of way, but there were no openly ‘gay’ (the word was just changing its meaning then) women that one knew of, never mind girls. So I knew what I was – for I definitely wasn’t interested in boys, and had been masturbating to pictures and fantasies of female film starlets and pop singers – but there was no outlet, no way to meet like-minded people. Sadly, the internet was still undreamed of! At long last, soon after my sixteenth birthday, things changed. I had been in the Girl Guide movement for many years, starting in the Brownies, and now was one of the older girls in our group. We had three adult …