So what exactly is a rubbish lesbian?

My name is Sarah, and I’m a rubbish lesbian.

Let me start at the beginning. I grew up in a small town where there were no out gay people; in fact, back in 1988, we were all still getting over the arrival of the town’s first Chinese restaurant. You were considered “alternative” if you didn’t order chips with your chow mein.

Needless to say, I had no role models growing up whom I identified with, and at that time ‘lesbian’ was an unattractive label to wear.

I dated men for most of my twenties, not coming out properly until I was 30. I didn’t exactly take to being a lesbian like a duck to water (unless the feathered friend in question was a poor swimmer with a terrible case of internalised aquaphobia).

Lesbians mistook me for straight, and straight friends gave me the affectionate nickname the Rubbish Lesbian, because I had long hair and was “straight acting” (whatever that means). By then I was living in Camden, where I did finally steel myself to go alone The Black Cap to meet women. Needless to say, it was a failure: just before closing time I was approached by a woman, but only because she mistook me for Kat from EastEnders.

Perhaps this is every gay person’s experience, but the thing that I was least prepared for was having to come out to people who assumed I was straight on an almost daily basis. My greengrocer had for years greeted my purchases with his stock phrase, “your fella’s getting looked after well.” When I set him, er, straight, his trademark greeting seemed to my self-conscious ears to have a different ring to it. As I reached for a decent sized banana and he even quipped, “she’s getting well looked after”: I was so embarrassed I never went back, which is a shame because he had the straightest courgettes in town.

I wrote this and other funny stories into a blog to poke fun at my own – our own – insecurities. It later became a column for lesbian magazine DIVA, detailing the idiosyncrasies, insecurities and joys of navigating a lesbian life. I’ve covered everything from the horror of correcting a hotel receptionist who moved my “friend” and me from a double to a twin room where we’d be “much more comfortable”, to navigating the social minefield of not being out at work, including the time I backed myself into a conversational corner with a colleague and, running out of pronouns, almost described my girlfriend as ‘it’.

The good news is that being lesbian isn’t particularly big news these days, especially in areas such as north London where people are mostly accepting. And I’ve not just had feedback from lesbian readers who readily identify with the situations I describe, but also from straight people, who, although they don’t have to come out themselves, still recognize the universal theme of social awkwardness.

So, if we’re honest there’s probably a rubbish lesbian inside all of us.