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BELL RINGS
LIVELY CHATTER
PA: ..please wait outside the building...
RINGING STOPS
But one thing, right?
50 of us lot get on a bus
and the whole world knows we're lesbians.
There's no mistake about it. They know what we are.
We're out of the closet, wearing what we're wearing.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
I'm saying that you're discounting and trivialising
a whole other range of sexual feelings.
BELL RINGS
Do you call yourself a lezzo dyke?
Yes.
I'm not saying, "Tell me what you do in bed,
"and why is it better and why is mine wrong?"
I... I just want to say one other thing.
ROWDY CHATTER
-..attack. -No, I don't.
I just said to you...
-Can we listen to what's being said?
MUSIC: I Hate Being In Love by Amy And The Angels
♪ I hate being in love
♪ Oo-ee-oo
♪ I hate being in love
♪ One of my friends has told me
♪ It is such good fun
♪ First you've got to see her
♪ And then you're on the run
♪ Every other weekend
♪ They ask me, "How'd it go?
♪ "Isn't it fantastic?"
♪ And I say, "No, no, no," cos
♪ I hate being in love
♪ Oo-ee-oo
♪ I hate being in love
♪ You hold my hand and kiss me
♪ You buy me ice-cream cones
♪ You also write me letters
♪ And say you miss my bones
♪ I can't say I might move
♪ I'm saying I don't know
♪ It's strange, somewhat uneasy
♪ I can't ask you, no, no, cos
♪ I hate being in love
♪ Oo-ee-oo
♪ I hate being in love. ♪
We weren't lesbians - we were dykes.
We wanted to be sexual people.
Rebel dykes were outlaws.
This was way before there were queer activists or riot grrls.
We invented it.
MUSIC: He Called Me A Fat Pig... by the Renees
It was a great time and a terrible time
to be young and queer in London.
Obviously, there was Thatcher - that was a common enemy.
Thatcher had just got in in 1979.
We're on the street, we were working class.
-We were young, we were punks, we were poor.
-We were a kind of subculture.
-We were a community,
because there were so many laws made against us.
-Politically, there was always this attempt to silence.
MUSIC: Life - No by the Petticoats
We had to ring Lesbian Line
to find out where there might be a dyke bar.
I came to London
in the mid-'70s and, um,
I didn't know any other lesbians.
There weren't any other lesbians,
as far as I was aware - I was actually the only one.
So it was very difficult.
Cos there was nowhere to go, there was no clubs,
there was... It was really isolated.
-I was living in quite a conservative town
just outside Winchester.
I had seen a woman in the town who I liked, who was
cycling around dressed all in black,
with a great chain strung across her.
And, um, obviously developed a massive crush on her.
The only problem was, she was about 15 years older than me
and she said, "Go to Greenham."
Greenham Common was a women's peace camp and, um,
you wanted to go and join and live there.
♪ We are strong, we are strong
♪ We say "no", we say "no"
♪ To the bomb, to the bomb
♪ We are women, we are women
♪ We are strong... ♪
FISCH: Women came from everywhere. Hundreds and...
Thousands of women came.
♪ To the bomb, to the bomb
♪ We are women... ♪
Suddenly, there I was with all these other lesbians
and women who thought they might be lesbians.
It was like a ready-made community.
MUSIC: Statement by the Poison Girls
It was that version of being a woman and then later,
sort of, realised that version of being
a dyke that really made me want to go there and live there
more than the nuclear protest, if I'm honest.
We were reclaiming that land
by putting women's energy into it.
We really needed to reclaim space then.
Everything seemed to be owned by the patriarchy.
CHANTING: Lesbians!
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
And I was a separatist then.
You know, I wouldn't even have had a male cat.
There were eight gates,
you know, all the colours of the rainbow,
around the base.
Orange Gate was the musicians' gate.
-Green Gate was the notorious gate of separatists.
-There was a brand of feminism
which said that you had to be a lesbian.
-Their view is that lesbianism
is a political as much as a sexual identity.
It's about giving all of your energy,
all of your identity to your sisters,
and withdrawing from men and male behaviour
as much as possible.
-After that, I moved to Blue Gate,
where there were far more younger women.
-Blue Gate was the gate nearest the pub,
so that was, like, your young drinking lesbians' gate.
-We weren't really into that sort of
Housewives For Peace kind of image.
♪ Whisky makes you frisky
♪ Gin makes you sin
♪ Brandy makes you randy
♪ And rum makes you... ♪
After school on a Friday,
I'd get on the bus and up to Greenham,
spend the weekend there
and then come back to school on the Monday morning.
So I did that as often as I could, really.
One time - I can't remember who it was said,
"Come on, come with me, let's go and get some booze,"
and just took me into the woods.
And it turns out that a group of women
had broken into the squaddies' bar, essentially,
and nicked all of their alcohol - just the lot.
FISCH: We were very politically aware
but we were also really naughty.
We just...
We took great delight in really just winding them up.
One year, they brought over this Blackbird spy plane
that had this special skin on it which meant that it could
fly at particularly fast speeds.
About six of us broke into the base one night
and threw paint at this plane, which...
The level of damage to this skin
was in the, kind of, multimillions.
They bailed us but the prospect was of, kind of,
going to prison for, like, 25 years or something.
-There was a nine-mile fence, remember,
so it was impossible for them
to control that amount of perimeter.
So you'd just go to a bit where there weren't any patrols
and you'd get your bolt cutters out and in you'd go.
So we were just crawling around in the base, you know,
planting acorns in circles on the full moon.
-The first time I had sex was in the base.
So, went in, with this woman who I fancied -
"Oh, I've never had sex before."
And it was all smoky and misty all around us.
So that was quite exciting.
ATALANTA: Some of the older women, sort of, like,
decided that they would tell us all about lesbian sex.
We were told that we had to keep our nails short
and one of the few women that was into SM, who was a vegan,
showed us how to make whips out of rubber and things like that.
So, that was a happy time.
I met loads of fantastic women
who were squatting in London at the time.
I ended up squatting in Brixton.
JO: There was a lot of empty buildings in Brixton.
Some landlords that weren't there
and just leaving their properties empty.
-I hitchhiked from Finland.
We came to London and we didn't know where to sleep.
And we walked through Brixton, with my friend Emma,
and she took us to Tulse Hill.
And she said, "Wait here," and she came back
with a crowbar hidden, like, under her jacket.
So, she broke in very quick, changed the lock and said,
"OK, here's your new apartment."
SEIJA CHUCKLES
It was good to open them up and give them some life, erm,
and we needed somewhere to live.
You know, London was different then.
It was harder to get around.
And it was dirtier, it was meaner.
-Especially in south London, at that time,
there was still quite a risk of being gay-bashed.
-It was easier to be nocturnal,
so that the straight people didn't ever get to see you.
-In those days, people were very homophobic,
so there'd be always people shouting remarks
and here's this very obvious dyke walking through Soho
with my shaved head and my big boots.
And suddenly, the same guys
were giving me lots and lots of money to see my body.
It was kind of nuts.
-Always had, like, a legal and illegal part,
and it was quite sleazy places.
You did have to really look out for yourself.
-I would take my speed and I'd share it with my friends
and we'd go tramping round the city centre of London at night.
I felt like it was my city.
Then there was that whole twilight zone -
literally the twilight zone - where it was evening,
you'd woken up, they were all coming home from work,
and that's when things happen. That's when...
Yeah, stuff happened on the streets.
The chances are, you probably were gonna get
your head slapped about.
And so it was dangerous just to be who you were in those days.
MAJ: You didn't want to get spotted on the streets.
You would drop hands at certain moments.
At least two of my friends were cut on their face,
because they'd been identified as dykes.
So I ended up... My mum was a nurse,
so that qualified me to do butterfly stitches,
which I made out of...
I don't know - gaffer tape, probably -
and fixed a scar on her face.
YVONNE: I kind of, like, was getting grief.
Homophobia and racism.
My first six months in London,
I went to a few political meetings.
They had some sort of conference
at the South London Women's Centre in Brixton,
which I was invited to, as a black woman.
And when I got there I was like,
"Oh, God, this is so serious."
A lot of discussion around Greenham Common, for example.
And I'd just come out the army -
do you think I was mentioning that to anybody?
Saturday night, I'm not having a workshop
and I'm not having a hug-in.
I just want to cut some shapes on the dance floor.
I just want to go and say "hi" to people.
-There weren't that many places for a young lesbian to go.
When I came out about 1986,
there was something like
three or four bars or clubs that I knew of.
There was Gateways.
And I think there was, like, that Kenric Society for,
you know, the rich women of Kensington and Richmond
which, obviously, didn't apply to me.
You'd get your dole on Thursday
and you'd spent it by Friday night.
We made our own entertainment, really.
I used to DJ when I was in the army, out of desperation.
I knew a good party.
We called it Sistermatic.
And the club was run by four black women -
four very, very different black women - and before we knew it,
it'd kind of blown up into this amazing party.
We played a lot of lovers rock,
reggae and dance-hall sort of music.
And we took it on a journey,
so we played house music in its early format.
Well, I did.
And, yeah, between me and Lorna,
who was one of the other DJs in the collective,
we could play from ten o'clock till ten o'clock next morning.
I started to see a rise
in the number of Asian women that would come.
Lots of different younger black women coming through.
So, we had a whole scope of people
dancing to the same sort of music.
You had your, kind of,
Greenham-Common-looking feminist.
You had your, kind of, S and M dykes on bikes kind of thing.
And there was quite a few of them.
MUSIC: Sister George by Sister George
Let's see those Black Widows tattoos.
LAUGHTER
Hi!
FISCH: The lesbian motorbike group was the Black Widows.
There was about - I don't know - 20 of us, 30 of us.
And, um, we used to go on runs.
We've all got crash helmets, so nobody can tell who we are.
You know, and you see people going, "Oh, my God!"
Then we'd get off our motorbikes,
take off our crash helmets and it's like... "Oh, it's women!
"Let's go!"
A lot of the motorbiking lesbians I'd met
used to go to the Bell so, obviously, I went to the Bell.
-The Bell was the only truly mixed place
for lesbians and gays, you know.
The Bell... I mean, the Bell was crazy.
Glue-sniffing. Drugs.
Too much booze.
Fights.
There were skinheads there but I...
I think the thing was, cos I had a Mohican at the time
and I used to work out a lot, I had a stance.
You know, I had an attitude.
And there were some beautiful women there as well,
so it was just like, "What's not to like?"
People like Sinead O'Connor would go there
and nick our style. Yes, she did.
TRILL: Wednesday night, it was meant to be women's night.
I remember the very first time we went,
it was completely dead.
The music was just bland and awful.
So we thought, "We can do better than this -
"let's try and get a night here and get some second-hand vinyl
"and, you know, be creative."
The Sleeze Sisters, the monumental Sleeze Sisters,
Trill and Pom.
They played everything that I wanted to hear.
One of the first serious bands I was in, Mouth Almighty,
one of our first gigs was actually at the Bell.
There were loads of lesbian bands on the scene.
How could I could I forget the Brixton legends that were
the Sluts from Outer Space?
MUSIC: Queer Riot by Sluts from Outer Space
"Dykes get a lot of trouble cos we don't suck their dicks.
"Why don't we get together and throw some fucking bricks?"
♪ Dykes get a lot of trouble cos we don't suck their dicks
♪ Why don't we get together and throw some fucking bricks? ♪
A - you couldn't be a woman in a band.
B - you couldn't be a women-only band.
C - you couldn't be lesbians.
So, you know, on all commercial fronts, we were fucked.
But we didn't care - we just did it.
♪ Queer riot
♪ We want a riot
♪ Queer riot
♪ Want a riot of our own. ♪
That's the first time I came to London, just to find a band.
We got to organise this big concert
in the Fabrik in Hamburg, which is this big music venue.
They said, "This doesn't actually exist.
"There aren't women bands to play there."
And I said, "You must be joking.
"We will find them, bring them here and they will play."
So, I came in December 1986.
I mean, on this Monday evening
is kind of when my life really totally changed.
It was... It was amazing.
I met these Finnish women that were visiting.
Seija was telling me she wanted to start
this women's S and M club in London.
I was really fascinated with the idea
and I was also very fascinated with Seija, I have to admit.
She was very gorgeous-looking.
Tall. They were wearing this uniform - caps,
these long military coats, big boots and very...
She was very passionate about her ideas and I loved that.
We had already been running a club called Extasy in Finland
since 1985, doing the kind of things
with arts, pornography and SM.
And we always mixed those three things together.
There were lots of trans people there and lesbian mothers
and there were bisexuals and androgynous people,
like how we called ourselves.
It was kind of, like, a really open queer group
and it attracted people who were artist-minded
and who were really free. Free in their will.
BAYA: She was an artist but she wanted to also
bring sex into art or art into sex.
MUSIC: Primal Bond by Tapanda Re
Chain Reaction had had a real build-up
from women all over the place. Some were saying,
"Oh, no, you don't want to go there.
"Don't... You know... Dodgy lot of women."
And then other women saying,
"Oh!" You know, "You've got to go, you've got to go."
FISCH: I knew you had to wear a dress code
and I had a leather jacket
and I had Dr Marten boots.
So I thought, "Oh, that'll do."
So I went and, you know, I paid my pound and I got in
and I was just so scared of meeting anybody
and I thought it was gonna be...
You know, I didn't really have an understanding
of what happened there.
We would arrive at about nine o'clock.
I think we opened about ten.
And we would have our tool of choice,
which was a roll of black bin liners, and then we would
cover up all the windows with black bin liners.
That was all the decorating we did,
was just covering up the windows.
There was a back room, where... That was almost like
a culture of its own, actually, the pool room.
Sometimes you'd wander in with your rubber dress,
trying to attract a butch's attention.
-Everybody was very busy, of course, coming there
and looking very cool in their leathers,
and finding people to have sex with.
But the cabaret was a bit like the highlight.
I had seen maybe one Monty Python film
and when I saw the first cabaret at Chain Reaction,
that's what it reminded me of.
It was so bad it was good.
We had things like mud wrestling - yes, I did that.
THEY YELL
CHEERING
Baby-oil wrestling - yes, I did that.
Spaghetti-hoop wrestling - no, I didn't do that.
Spaghetti, which we haven't actually forgiven Baya for.
-Spaghetti? -Spaghetti.
BAYA: I could just really fancy
having ketchup poured all over me
and have it, sort of, run over me.
I thought that'd be quite theatrical.
-I got to be the person who did a lot of the cabarets,
because I was quite excited about getting fucked in public.
My name, in those days, was Jane Campbell,
and I was known as Jane, Jane, Queen of Pain.
When I was a kid, I had behavioural stuff
about attention seeking.
They used to call it attention-seeking behaviour.
And, you know, I was actually quite a lonely kid.
But anyway, it developed into a kind of sexuality,
and I was very ashamed of wanting sex all the time.
You know, that slut-shaming thing that goes on about,
if you love sex there's something wrong with you.
And, yeah, I just got loved and all my friends
were really accepting of it and indulgent of it,
and I learned to love it myself.
Love that part of myself.
I was crucified to a cross,
er, tied to a motorbike, er...
It was just thrilling. My eyes popped.
A lot in leather. Just really sharp-looking.
You were allowed to be butch and femme,
but not in the old-fashioned '50s way,
which is kind of the image we had behind us.
Depends how far we go back but there was that whole...
pre-Chain Reaction thing which was really, kind of,
about butch and femme and looking like
a straight man and a straight woman.
Because if you were able to pull that off,
you could walk past a homophobe and they wouldn't clock you.
So what that was the idea behind butch and femme.
Especially if you wanted to be a bit tarty,
you were better off with a really, really butch woman,
because then you really did pass for straight.
I could wear lipstick and I could be girlie.
I could wear heels
but I wasn't buying into
the straight world at all.
Which I would never have done.
So, yeah, it felt like a freeing.
DEL: There were very few safe spaces.
And at Chain Reaction,
it was a space for femme dykes to be femme.
Another thing about Chain Reaction
which was very different for lesbian clubs of the time
was that it was trans-inclusive.
Little did I know that, you know,
some years later I would identify
as both trans and intersex.
ROZ: I mean, this was the '80s.
Trans people identified as lesbian or bi,
tended to be very deeply in the closet about it -
both because of getting access to surgery
and drugs from the gatekeeping doctors,
and because people were led to believe
it was unacceptable on the scene.
Compared with every other lesbian scene in London,
Chain Reaction was comparatively accepting
of trans women.
The same month that I actually transitioned,
The Transsexual Empire was published in London,
which was demanding the expulsion
of all trans people from all women's spaces.
So, having a place to go
where being trans wasn't...
an absolute no-no...
..was very, very cool.
Chain Reaction - I don't know how long it lasted, but...
maybe it was only a couple of years or so. But it really...
It really created an incredible bond between us.
We hung out together...
in a big house.
MUSIC: Soray by Tapanda Re
LULU: There were three houses of lesbians,
all, you know, like, almost in a row.
-There were just lesbians stuffed into every room.
There was, like, I don't know, maybe about six rooms
but there'd be 18 people living there.
There'd always be a menagerie of animals.
Rats, terrapins, dogs -
everything.
Cats, obviously.
It was a real creative time. I mean, everybody was...
You know, people were either taking photographs
or, you know, writing or making art or doing theatre.
The scene was...different.
It was a lot more intimate.
DEL: Everybody sleeping with everybody else.
FISCH: That thing in The L Word,
where they've got that big chart at the beginning -
they nicked that off us. That was our idea.
It was like a lesbian soap.
And there was one woman on there who was incredibly cute
and she pretty much slept with everybody,
and so they make this big chart with her name in the middle
and then, like, arrows going off
to all the people she'd slept with
and then all the people they'd slept with.
We loved each other and then we loved people
who loved our lovers,
so why wouldn't we want to shag them as well, then?
DEL: Jane and I had exactly the same taste in butchness.
So, really, I had great fun for years
playing "nab that butch".
You know, Jane would see, and if Jane saw me
being interested in somebody, you know,
we had a real fierce friendly competition.
She usually won.
We loved each other.
It was one big happy shaggy family.
BAYA: Originally, I come from East Germany.
When I was 17, my family escaped to West Germany.
My father, he had real problems in East Germany.
He was put in prison as a political prisoner
for two and a half years.
I knew if I stayed on my own,
I would have a lot of repercussions of them escaping.
I found it really difficult to fit in in the West
and I had quite a...
My parents left and lived somewhere else.
I was on my own, and feeling quite lonely.
When I came to London, I was single for quite a while.
What really saved me was the women that I met
and who I made friends with.
That became my family.
That was something that was lasting.
There were people...
that loved me and that I loved.
-Our birth families had rejected us, basically.
So we would get together at Christmas...
This one Christmas, I think we had 26 women
for Christmas dinner.
BAYA: So, we'd wake up in the morning,
everybody would be in jimjams and we'd have Bucks fizz.
-I think we all got drunk before 11 o'clock.
-Mountains of presents that we all just gave each other.
We spent all day just unwrapping presents
and, of course, we'd have to have a turkey.
Baya fisted the turkey and everyone watched.
Had this enormous turkey.
It was so big, it wouldn't fit in our tiny little oven.
Probably had taken some acid in the afternoon
to go with the buck's fizz. And then about eight
in the evening, everyone went, "Oh, my God -
"we've got a turkey. We need to put it in the oven."
So I started, you know, mixing the apples,
onions, breadcrumbs, stuffing.
As I was stuffing the turkey, I just so tripped out.
As if I was in a different galaxy,
where having sex with a turkey
was a perfectly fine thing to do. It was weird.
MUSIC: Wrapped Up In Sex by Mouth Almighty
SEIJA: It was like our little own fantasy world.
♪ I have got
♪ No, no, no regrets
♪ I don't need
♪ A permanent lover... ♪
We were decorating only with black plastic, you know,
and all black stuff. So I had this idea that tonight
I'd do something really nice and soft
and I went to Waterloo flower market in the morning
to pick up flowers that had been left on the floor.
And we had a huge amount of flowers
and we took them to the club and we were putting them up
everywhere, when we heard a knock on the door.
They were all covered in the face -
we couldn't recognise them.
With sticks and bars and shit.
And they had crowbars and axes.
Mashing up the bar,
hitting some of the women who were there,
and just screeching about violence against women.
And, finally, the woman behind the bar,
she started screaming out really loud.
It was an organisation called Wavaw.
Women Against Violence Against Women.
It was a group called Women Against Women
Who Are Into Sadomasochism.
It was like, er,
Lesbians Against Violence Against Women
standing outside.
And they would sit outside the club
and hiss to everybody who came in.
MUSIC: Life - No by the Petticoats
♪ All those people in the dole queues
♪ All those businessmen in the... ♪
I was brought up as a socialist -
I was never to cross a picket line.
I had to cross my first picket line
because they were trying to stop us from going in.
And I knew some of those women.
So, the women that I took to Greenham
ended up being some of the women
that picketed Chain Reaction on the first night.
One of my performances did get stormed, actually,
by some of those women.
I had my friend in the audience,
who came and volunteered.
She had to pick things out of a bag and I would say,
"How would you like me to use this you?"
But she was blindfolded, you know, and had to touch things,
and ended up with her on all fours, tied up,
and hot wax started and it just went absolutely crazy.
Because a whole load of women stormed the stage,
trying to beat us up.
They didn't realise it was a whole set-up - that it was
playing with this idea of, how far can you push things?
And almost putting a mirror up to oneself and others.
Then there was a huge debate, with some of the other women
saying, "What the hell are you doing? You can't go and
"attack women for this. You don't know even the context."
I understood that they perceived SM
as aping or copying domestic violence relationships.
SEIJA: That there is blood in your hands
and there's a man in your head and you're violent.
When we were beating each other and cutting each other,
it took the power away from that thing.
Somehow we felt much more like we could survive a beating.
Even though I knew a lot of these women
were sweeties underneath, very often there was
a kind of callousness displayed.
DEL: I had ideological political differences
with some of the women in Chain Reaction
who wanted to enact Nazi fantasies
or wear Nazi uniforms to the club.
And that was the line you do not cross.
I did not want to be part of that
and I argued fiercely against it and I won.
TYPEWRITERS CLACK
We got denounced in the London Women's Liberation newsletter,
for wearing instruments of torture and Nazi regalia,
which was, like, a little over the top.
Never worn a swastika in my life, shout at people who do.
But, you know, we got denounced
for wearing a Muir cap and a biker jacket.
A hugely political thing, wearing a leather jacket,
as a lesbian.
You were a Nazi if you did.
MUSIC: Rococo Subversive by Sister George
CHANTING
CHEERING
We at Chain Reaction, on the contrary,
work towards a mutual and equal power exchange
based on the principle of consent.
Lesbian S and M is a woman's right to say "no"
and her choice to say "yes".
DEBBIE: There was a great big talk about the lesbian scene
and sexuality, and we went down -
the Bell dykes and the Chain Reaction dykes -
in our leather and Muir caps
and, you know, chains and what have you,
and sat there clanking away in the seats,
listening to people talking about how wrong S and M was.
ANDERSON: Despite attempts at sexual repression,
both within and outside the gay community,
Chain Reaction continues to be successful
because we encourage women to explore their sexual fantasies,
to be themselves and to make each other feel good.
We work to create an atmosphere
that is safe and non-judgemental.
Everybody had completely
lost their sense of humour by this time.
Lesbian dykes are being told that they're fascist
and they're perverted and they're male oriented.
I mean, that's what needs to stop
and I think that's what we need to talk about.
Linda Bellos, I think it was,
said that if she saw a black woman with handcuffs on
it reminded her of slavery and she thought that they were
diminishing themselves and their ancestors.
And at that point, I was, sort of,
getting nudged by people sitting next to me,
and I stood up and I was like, "Well, I'm black
"and I wear a leather jacket and I've got chains, so..."
And then I sat down again.
So, that was my...
My immense contribution to the conversation.
But, you know, I think even just that little thing
did actually make a bit of a difference because,
you know, it just showed that you can't generalise
and you can't say that
what I believe has to be what you believe.
As far as I know, my experience of women involved
or defining themselves as S and M
or interested in exploring role-play and sexuality
in general, are absolutely anti-racist,
anti-sexist, anti-fascist and...
What we're doing, basically,
is trying to play with all these symbols -
and they are symbols, and they are very powerful symbols -
of oppression and violence,
as opposed to being, ourselves, oppressive and violent.
It's not "anybody can do anything to anybody
"whenever they like, whether it's violent or not".
It's not about that. It's a very structured thing.
There are certain rules within that anarchy.
The issues about S and M and lesbians really arose
because of arguments within feminism.
And those happened right from the '70s upwards.
When I came out in the mid-'70s,
I felt like I was a bit of a second-class lesbian,
cos I was a lesbian out of lust and not out of politics.
I have quite a lot of vanilla sex.
-What is vanilla sex? -Um...
-What is it? -What is it?
Well... I don't know. Maybe you should define what
vanilla sex is, cos you say you're a hot vanilla dyke.
I think it's fantastic that you're a hot vanilla dyke.
..a lovely ice cream or a...
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
I just wanna say one other thing...
CHATTER DROWNS SPEAKER
..attack.
No, I don't. I just said to you...
Can we listen to what's being said?
That's basically what the whole lesbian scene was
around the '80s. It was a...
hugely homogenised view of lesbian society,
in which you had to be wearing pastel colours and dungarees
and going to Greenham and wear Birkenstocks.
And we did not want to do that.
That's why we were the rebel dykes, you know.
We wanted to do what we wanted to do.
We came out of punk.
You know, we came out of art school. We were musicians.
We were artists.
We didn't want to do, necessarily,
what everyone else wanted to do.
You don't look like a bunch of dykes -
you look like a bunch of poofs.
CHEERING
That kind of "every woman can be a lesbian",
which started as a political theory,
ended up as a kind of rule of thumb, and then we started
making more and more rules for ourselves
about what you had to do to be a proper lesbian.
And there started to be all these rules
about what you did and didn't do in bed.
Penetrative sex was wrong, and any kind of
dominance and submission games were wrong.
Any kind of role-playing was wrong.
And that's where the hatred of SM dykes
by the mainstream lesbian feminist movement came from
and it was never the twain shall meet.
And it came out of really genuine concerns in things
like Women's Aid and stuff like that about male violence
but it got transmogrified into,
essentially, the lesbian sex police.
-There was this joke back in the day
that the authentic version of lesbian sex
was holding hands in 20 passionate positions.
Because it was the only way that you could possibly
remove all inequality.
You can't go around telling people
who they're allowed to have sex with
or how they're allowed to have sex.
LISA: I think there were quite a lot of women
who got labelled S and M dykes
who probably did very little S and M activity in bed.
But I swear a lot of people joined in
cos they were having more fun.
♪ Does it fuck you off
♪ When dykes strap on?
♪ "They're taking over our clubs!"
♪ Does it fuck you off?
♪ Drag king! ♪
I honestly believed that we could actually win
fights and battles and it was up for grabs.
They were not gonna take it from us
and they were not gonna tell us what to do.
So I think the anti-censorship battle
was one of those battles that they weren't gonna be able
to tell us what we could and couldn't read.
Particularly when it was about our own sexuality
and our own identity.
And, unfortunately for the radical feminists,
they picked the wrong side
when they went against pornography
and they went against people's own sexuality.
They were just, like, so off message.
Because the bottom line was,
"We love women. We really love women."
-Quim was a lesbian magazine
for dykes of all sexual persuasions.
The first issue was on penetration
and we asked questions about
what your experience of penetration was.
Cos at the time, it was a bit of a no-no.
Obviously, a lot of us were doing it
but there was a whole politics around it.
So we thought, well, we'll just say,
"What is it for you? How does it feel for you?"
And the idea was to give everybody
their voice and their say.
When I first came out,
and first, you know,
found out about dildos, essentially,
we were lucky if we could get black rubber dildos.
But they always had balls on them.
So, of course, all the lesbians would chop off the balls.
And they were really quite ugly. And then, of course,
you couldn't keep them held in very well.
So there were always chopped-off, lobbed-off bits.
And then when I moved to San Francisco,
my first dildo, I bought at Good Vibrations.
And not very hygienic but it was a leather one.
But it didn't have balls, so it was the first one
we'd ever seen that didn't have balls.
So that was my first one.
Then, of course, coming back to London.
And Ky Hoyle, who is the MD of Sh!,
she is also a rebel dyke
and Sh! was born out of this period when we were saying,
"We don't wanna be dictated to
"about how we should be having sex.
"We don't want people to tell us what to do.
"It's women's right to decide on their own sexuality."
And very much that we don't want penises.
You know, we do want penetration
but we don't want penises.
So, Sh! started making dildos -
ball-free, un-penis-like dildos -
which sort of revolutionised, really.
Lesbians then could actually finally
get hold of things that they wanted.
MUSIC: Wrapped Up In Sex by Mouth Almighty
With my girlfriend at the time,
I ran the first mail-order sex-toy business
by lesbians for women, we always said.
And it was called Thrilling Bits.
Which was terrific, because I was able to stand up on a chair
at places like Fallen Angel and go,
"I'm one of the women with Thrilling Bits."
We imported terrific stuff from San Francisco,
which was a bit hairy because customs didn't like it.
And so, we had to name all these things,
because we weren't gonna give them the names
they had in the straight catalogues,
which were all really sleazy.
So we named them after famous lesbians
or women we thought ought to be lesbians, were icons.
So, we had a Dusty. We had other things like that.
And our sense of humour got the better of us again.
And so we called our smallest,
most inoffensive vibrator
the Sheila, after Sheila Jeffreys,
a radical feminist separatist, who went through the roof.
One of the things we sold - and we sold quite a lot of -
were dental dams, and they were actually squares of latex
and you were supposed to use them for cunnilingus.
So if you were going down on your girlfriend,
you would put this between you and her
and it was the equivalent of a condom,
except they were thicker than condoms,
they used to come covered in medical talcum powder,
so you had to wash them before you went anywhere.
People tried to manufacture, sort of,
little harnesses for them, like those things you used to have
with sanitary towels in the '60s.
It was these strange harnesses.
People tried all those things
but it was completely pointless,
cos it's very, very, very difficult indeed
to pass HIV through cunnilingus.
But we weren't entirely certain about that at the time.
Like, people used to put them
on their coffee tables as discussion.
I was actually running this business at the same time
that I was helping to found the Stonewall Group,
as we called it then - Stonewall now.
And we would have meetings in my living room
and I remember one time, we'd just had a shipment of stuff
from America and we got out the dental dams
and the lesbian-porn magazines -
On Our Backs and all that stuff -
and showed it to everyone who was there.
And Stonewall was mixed - lesbian and gay -
and I remember the group passed this dental dam around,
pretty much in two fingers from one to the other.
And, God bless him, Ian McKellen looked at it,
stretched it, pulled it about and went, "May I?"
"Do what you like with it." He just pulled it to his mouth
and stuck his tongue through it,
and experimented with how it would actually be to use it.
And I just thought, "Oh, God,
"I wish I had a camera at the moment."
You know, one of our great stage actors
having fun with a dental dam.
I had started photographing queer dyke life in 1982.
Love Bites was created by a kind of sexual performativity.
Instead of performing what was actually going on in the clubs,
because we all wanted that to be a safe and private space,
instead, we kind of created sexual happenings.
We created, like, a lot of interest and intrigue
in what we were doing, and we were performing for each other.
At the time, the sex wars were raging.
They were trying to exclude us.
The radical lesbian separatists did still have
quite a lot of power at that time.
SOPHIE: Many book shops wouldn't stock it
because they thought it wasn't feminist.
And our argument was that we were women
and this was our lives and we were feminists,
and we may be experimenting with sexuality
but that did not mean we weren't feminists.
When Love Bites came out in 1991,
they successfully excluded Love Bites
from gay-and-lesbian book shops -
in Silver Moon, Sisterwrite and Gay's The Word.
When the book shop was opened,
we were a lesbian, gay, feminist book shop.
It was different from gay book shops in the past,
which were book shops for men,
where they could go and get erotic material.
And this was a book shop set up by socialists
and it was about ideas.
So, gay politics and biography and history and coming out.
And it wasn't about selling erotic magazines
and we didn't sell them.
You have to remember, this was also the era
when Gay's The Word book shop in London
was raided and seized.
The case eventually collapsed in court
but the police were trying to say things like
The Joy Of Lesbian Sex was inherently pornographic
and things like that.
Stuff that would not have been pornographic
amongst heterosexuals was definitely pornographic
if it was lesbian.
On Our Backs was a lesbian publication from San Francisco
and it was essentially mostly soft -
a little bit, occasionally, of hard - porn for lesbians.
On Our Backs was definitely a banned publication.
I started as photographic assistant
and I went in there, sort of,
on this mission to kind of change the look of it a bit.
I felt like...
the style of the photographs and the women
was a bit old school and I wanted to, kind of, you know,
get the newer, younger generation
that was out there involved.
LISA: It featured, actually,
some of the English S and M dykes,
and it was run partly by English women
who'd gone out to San Francisco.
And that's where I first met my London dykes, actually,
and it was very early on in my employment there.
And I first met, er,
Seija from Finland.
She came into the office one day
and she had with her Baya and Aphra.
And I saw these women and I was just kind of like,
"Whoosh! Who are they?
"OK. Pictures. I want to take pictures with them."
I was, at the time, still back and forth between here
and San Francisco and I still had On Our Backs.
So I was working with Del La Grace.
I love worked on Love Bites.
I'd met Del in San Francisco
and I interviewed Del for On Our Backs.
We became really good friends
and we've worked together ever since.
JIM: One of the books that we didn't stock at the start
was Love Bites when it came out.
We were worried about it and we took legal advice -
we had a big meeting about it.
Cos there were a number of images in the book
that we thought could make us liable to prosecution.
But I have to say, Sisterwrite,
which was the women-of-colour book shops,
were the only ones who were honest enough to say,
"We disapprove of the content.
"We do not support, you know, lesbian SM."
And we did this whole performance march
against the censorship of Love Bites.
I wasn't too worried about the obscene-publications squad.
There was all sorts of rules, archaic rules,
you know, to do with how erect a dildo can be.
It can only be... It has to be less than 45 degrees.
Really weird stuff.
I didn't expect to find myself in court
for an over-45-degree dildo.
It was an awful distraction, all of that stuff,
because, really, we wanted just to get on with the creativity -
exploring of what we were doing.
FISCH: And I think that started the realisation that this was
a backlash against people for their sexuality.
There was always this attempt to silence.
The Aids activism was...
"Silence equals death" was one of the slogans that we used,
because nobody recognised us
as a community
and having a voice at all.
-Act Up is the Aids Coalition to Unleash Power
and it's an Aids activist group, which I got involved in
after going to the '87 march on Washington
and seeing the Names Project be unfolded
and just standing there for hours,
hearing name after name after name.
In Act Up, we wanted to talk about women and Aids.
One of the things that was happening on the women's scene,
on the dyke scene, is that there was becoming a, sort of,
faction that was saying,
"Well, you know, we're lesbians - we don't get Aids,"
who became very judgemental.
And so we needed to talk about behaviour -
that the virus was, you know,
passed by behaviour and not by identity, you know.
It was great, because it really did get people
talking about the nuts and bolts of,
you know, what we did.
You know, lesbians use IV drugs.
Lesbians are strippers and sex workers.
Erm...
And something that very few people talk about, but...
lesbians sometimes sleep with gay men.
And, you know, with men. But also with gay men.
The proximity - um...
And in those days, you know, drugs, party -
you know, things happen.
But I think particularly with sex workers it was an issue,
because there was...
From one faction, there was this whole attitude that,
you know, if you slept with men in any way, shape or form,
you were not a lesbian.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Up until then, lesbians are not seen as particularly activist
and the gay-male scene was split between activist gays,
who all wore loads of badges and did gay volunteering
work for Switchboard or Friend or whatever,
and scene queens who went to Heaven and all those things,
and none of the groups got together.
And lesbians didn't mix much with gay men
and the two types of gay men didn't mix much.
Section 28, as well as HIV, brought us all together.
CHEERING
Section 28 of the Local Government Act
said that local authorities were not allowed
to promote homosexuality as a pretend family relationship.
And these are the sort of things
that made us rebel dykes. It wasn't we just woke up
one morning and goes, "Oh, let's be rebels."
We actually had things to rebel against.
My girlfriend in the late '70s, early '80s -
she'd left her husband to come and live with me
and brought her baby.
He took the baby and he never came back.
And we were both very distraught.
Like, "What's going on?"
This solicitor who we hired took the case to court
and the judge ruled in his favour
because we were lesbians!
That's why we were rebels.
Children who need to be taught to respect
traditional moral values
are being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay.
-To have Margaret Thatcher's government come up with an idea
that your relationships were pretend
and that you should be silenced,
you shouldn't be allowed to be spoken of -
it was a really outraging feeling.
It was, you know, quite celebratory in the '80s.
There was a lot of fun and pleasure in it
and we'd moved on a lot, I think, from the kind of
'50s or '60s sense of people feeling a bit apologetic
about their sexuality, to feeling great about it.
Hi! We're all gay - it's great, innit?
LAUGHTER
We went on a lot of matches against clause 28.
It was horrifying, because I had so recently been at school
and then clause 28 was coming to really stop even teachers
being able to respond to a child
who might be in real danger.
Even if you've got nice parents, it's hard to come out.
So a teacher is the next port of call
and they weren't allowed to even listen
or even respond in any positive way.
It was just hor... We knew that it was dangerous.
We knew already that people killed themselves
because they needed to come out.
And then the government was telling teachers
that they can't be themselves.
It's relationships.
You can't start by being covered up
and being restricted and being scared.
-It was quite a pernicious idea
within this Local Government Act
that the promotion of homosexuality
should be outlawed in schools.
And in particular that schools should not be able to teach
what they called a pretended family relationship -
that having two lesbian mothers, for instance,
was actually a family,
but they were saying that's not a real family.
It felt like it was mainly gay people fighting it.
There were straight people fighting it
but I didn't feel like the media was supporting the fight.
Erm...
Yeah, it felt quite scary,
like that we weren't going to win.
We were talking to ourselves by the '80s.
We were completely self-referential,
internal looking. We weren't capable
of talking to anybody we didn't agree with.
We weren't capable of the grand gesture
and the thing that happened with Section 28
and the abseilers was that the grand gesture came back
and the grand gesture came back led by lesbians.
SUSANNAH: And I think for us, that came very naturally.
That was the kind of... I think, part of, in a way,
the training camp that Greenham Common was for activist women
and for activist dykes at that time.
Greenham was very much about that,
about doing physical things -
cutting fences, blockading, entering the USAF base,
pushing at boundaries and stepping over boundaries
and making quite symbolic actions that, you know,
were headline grabbing as well.
We were quite conscious of that - the way to use the media
and grab headlines in that way.
It was actually loads and loads of women who'd never been
seen before, absolutely livid at this legislation.
SUSANNAH: We had a meeting at my flat in Clapham
to talk about direct action
and where we wanted to go with it next.
There was a debate in the House of Lords coming up
and the first idea we had was a bit more ambitious -
we wanted to hijack a boat and board the Palace of Westminster
from the river, sort of storm it from the river.
And, you know, we were seriously talking this through
but there was issues of the tide times
and where we were going to get this boat and everything,
so it was maybe a little bit ambitious.
And then I think we were...
I think the TV might have been on.
We were reminded of the way the House of Lords is, where
there's the public gallery above where the lords sit.
And so, we had this idea of abseiling in, or sliding in.
A couple of people went... Sally and Janet, I think,
went up Clapham High Street
and bought a couple of washing lines,
and we kind of chopped those into four
and then we wrapped them...
Like, four of us had them under our jumpers
or whatever, wrapped around us.
We were queueing to get into the House of Lords
for this debate, so Paula was kind of shouting out,
"Are you a lord? Are you a lord?
"Can you sign us in as a guest
"to come into your guest gallery?" And before too long,
one guy said, "Yes, OK, I'll take you in."
So, he signed in four or five of us
and we went into this side gallery, which was lucky,
actually, because the visitors' gallery is significantly lower
than the public gallery.
So, we were sitting there and the debate was going on
and I can't... You know, it's a very adrenaline-y thing.
I can't honestly remember much about it now.
But got these ropes out, tied them to
the little wrought-iron balcony and pitched over.
I kind of got rope burns going down this nylon thing
very badly to the floor,
and then other friends who were in the public gallery
were shouting and, you know, kicking off and everything.
Their security moved quite quickly.
They held us in there for a good number of hours.
We didn't get charged with anything at all.
They could have charges within their own bylaws
but I think they just thought, "Let's get rid of them."
And this actually caused a huge stir, because it was
the first time that a lot of gay men had seen lesbians
involved in direct action
and doing something that was for everybody.
It was lesbians who became the outrageous activists.
SUSANNAH: The invasion of the Six O'Clock News at the BBC
was another high-profile action that we did.
I didn't actually go in there but I was, kind of,
involved in the thinking about it.
Red and Stella in particular, who'd been on the abseiling,
and then various other dykes
who hadn't been on the abseiling
but were really, really keen to do some more direct action
around Clause 28, came together in a new group
for activists and we started to plan.
It was helped by the fact that one of the dykes
had a friend who worked, I think, as a runner in the BBC
and passed us a floor plan,
so that they had an idea of where the studio actually was
in this massive TV Centre.
There was quite a lot of hair-raising bits
of being on completely the wrong floor.
I seem to remember they had to, sort of,
lock themselves in the toilet for quite a long time.
They were a bit more organised this time -
they had T-shirts with "stop the clause" on.
I think they had to go and strip off
and get their T-shirts in place.
But, anyway, they kind of pulled it together, as we know,
cos we do have the film footage of that.
And they got into this studio and padlocked themselves
to the bottom of the desk,
which is why they couldn't so easily get rid of them,
and you could hear these muffled voices
from under the desk.
The Six O'Clock News from the BBC,
with Sue Lawley and Nicholas Witchell.
Good evening. The headlines at six o'clock...
In the House of Lords, a vote is taking place now
on a challenge to the poll tax. Tory rebels have said...
-This is about rights for lesbian and gay people.
-..the tax is unfair and unpopular.
-Stop Section 28. -And I do apologise
if you're hearing quite a lot of noise in the studio.
-Stop the clause. -I'm afraid that we have rather
been invaded by some people that we hope
to be removing shortly.
In the meantime...
And Sue Lawley holding it together very well.
I think we all have to agree she did a masterful job there,
whereas Nicholas Witchell,
who then went on to be the royal correspondent,
you know, he got stuck in off-camera...
Get off me, you arsewipe. Stop section 28!
..helping the security guards to squash them
and get on top of them.
-And direct action is important.
With one thing done by half a dozen people,
you can be on the Nine O'Clock News
and reach the whole country,
and make a point.
And, you know, sometimes it doesn't work,
but when it really works, by God it works.
And it was horrific and yet, looking back, it was the thing
that brought us all together and founded
what has since become one of the most successful
lesbian and gay movements in the world.
Because it really pissed a lot of people off.
People really became aware of how oppressive
the Tory government were becoming.
Lots of people came out and said, "This is not on."
Then there was far more marches,
far more demonstrating,
and it became very hardcore with the police.
And round the same period was the poll-tax riot.
We were pretty much doing a riot a week, I think,
at some points. There was a lot going on
where we were protesting and agitating, really.
About 1990, I kind of got bored of the party lifestyle.
You know, I wanted to do something,
yeah, bit more challenging. I mean, it was fun
but I just got bored of it. You know, we didn't have...
You can't do the same things for years on end.
ROZ: I moved on.
There was a point where I dropped out of
the Chain Reaction collective.
DEL: She was pretty much excluded - not exactly
for being trans but that was a factor that was used.
It was weird because, like, nobody would actually say
what I'd done and most people just got the idea
I'd done something and it was awful.
Maybe Roz slept with the wrong person.
In the end, all of the fights
and the debates within feminism absolutely got me down
and in the end, I left London because it just did my head in.
I tried to find a squat in Amsterdam.
It was fucking freezing.
Every day, I would take an acid tab.
I just lived in this completely psychedelic, fucked-up world.
I ended up getting arrested on some demonstration.
I still, to this day, don't know
what the demonstration was even for.
And it was actually during those three days
in the police station when I, sort of, detoxed off drugs
and realised this wasn't a very good idea.
MAJ: After being a traveller for about a year,
which didn't really work,
I found myself in Women Only Space.
So, it's a rural women-only community.
It was bought and paid for by some of the women
coming from Greenham.
I don't want to say exactly where it is,
because it's kind of like a women's refuge.
People went on and became famous artists,
famous film-makers,
lecturers, journalists, barristers, nurses.
All sorts of things.
DEBBIE: A few months after Mouth Almighty split,
I actually got my first job
as an indie guitarist with the band Curve.
I saw them on the telly on the Monday,
answered the advert on the Wednesday.
I went to the audition on the Friday
and was in the band by tea-time. So, that was good.
ROCK MUSIC PLAYS
At least, I hope that nowadays for young people
it's much easier to be what they are.
And I think it's taken these 30 years to develop,
that people can start feeling more comfortable
in the way they feel inside.
YVONNE: I'm about to start a new club,
which is about all women welcome.
It means queer folks, it means non-binary.
You know, when I hear my nieces and nephews
talk about their experiences
with gay and lesbian young kids...
..that's when I kind of go, "We've moved on."
The trouble is that we've gone so far into the mainstream
and we're so respectable now
that we're losing all our sharp edges and we're losing
our ability to be the rebels.
MUSIC PLAYS, WHISTLES BLOW
One thing I find most amusing is about SM,
because it was very secretive in the '80s.
And it's taken all these 30 years to become
something, like, of a normal thing.
And now you see these books like 50 Shades Of Grey
and it's a normal thing.
You know, anybody does it
and they discuss it in the workplace.
I can have sex in private now and still enjoy myself!
Yeah, and in the end, it isn't two groups, is it?
-No groups are homogeneous. -No.
But the thing about us as SM dykes
was that we were ostracised from the lesbian community,
and so we formed a family around that.
And, you know, 30 years later, we're still friends
because there were so very few of us
that felt we were really interested in sex
and being positive about sex.
SEIJA: It was like a real energy
of what people had they wanted to say
and they wanted to explore.
And that's maybe why it continued after the clubs
and after the movement,
that people took it in their lives and they continued.
Every Tuesday, we took over a gay men's club in Vauxhall.
We started the UK's first ever lesbian S and M night,
Chain Reaction.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Yay!
We wanted what the gay men had access to -
places to have sex.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
ROCK MUSIC PLAYS
The show I'm doing now is my perspective
of gay pride from the viewpoint of a rebel dyke.
There's that whole thing of just being...
Always challenging, always challenging the norm,
challenging what's expected,
and getting power from doing something else.
And, you know, I've been called "sir" my whole life!
And so I thought, "OK, I could probably be a drag king again."
Funnily enough, the drag-king community very much reminds me
of the rebel dyke community,
because we're a minority and we've got each other's backs
and that's a really, really lovely feeling.
MUSIC: Remember Me by Mouth Almighty
YVONNE: We, as older lesbians,
have paved the way so younger people can come along and have,
kind of, like, the freedom that they've got now.
Not that most of us have any clue...
In the same way I have no clue about all the previous,
you know, older lesbians that had gone before me.
It's very necessary that this story gets told,
because we all stand on the shoulders of giants.
And if the women hadn't started Gateways,
we would never have started Chain Reaction.
But this story has been, so far, unsaid.
So I'm very happy that it's finally been documented.
MUSIC: Skirt by Nightnurse
LISA: I don't want to be a straight gay,
which is how we used to refer to people like that
in the '80s. For me,
the whole point of gay liberation,
the whole point of coming out,
is to come out as yourself.
Whatever that is, wherever it leads you,
you should be yourself.
And rebel dykes in the '80s did that at a time
when there were really far too many people,
both inside the movement and in the general public,
all trying to tell us how to behave.
DEBBIE: And, you know, we had to fight long and hard
to find our place but, you know, we did.
I mean, look at lesbian society now.
That's cos we did that.
We did that. Be thankful.
♪ I met a girl and she didn't have a heart
♪ But I never really found out till the morning
♪ I let her take me home
♪ Even though I knew the signs
♪ I know it wasn't smart but I'm not sorry
♪ What can you do with a girl that has no heart?
♪ We kept each other up until the morning
♪ So, even though I knew
♪ She was trouble from the start
♪ I stayed another night and I'm still yawning
♪ Having no heart
♪ You never need to care
♪ You don't have to satisfy
♪ It is the ones
♪ You know you'll never have
♪ You always want too much
♪ End of story
♪ I met a girl
♪ She never had much time
♪ She always had to rush out in the morning
♪ So, even though I knew
♪ We were a million worlds apart
♪ I stayed another month but I'm not sorry
♪ Having no time
♪ You never need to care
♪ You don't have to justify
♪ It is the ones
♪ You know you'll never have
♪ You always want too much
♪ End of story
♪ You can have it all
♪ Practising freefall
♪ Then you pay the toll
♪ In the morning
♪ Having no heart
♪ You never need to care
♪ You don't have to satisfy
♪ It is the ones
♪ You know you'll never have
♪ You always want too much
♪ End of story
♪ I met a girl
♪ She never had a heart
♪ I should have known it from the start
♪ We were a million worlds apart
♪ Well, I know it wasn't smart
♪ But I'm not
♪ Sorry. ♪
MUSIC: Trouble by the Well Oiled Sisters
♪ You don't know the trouble I'm in
♪ And you don't know the trouble I've seen
♪ Talking to myself
♪ I'll drink to kill the pain
♪ Knowing in my heart that I won't see you again
♪ I'm in trouble
♪ So, please come home
♪ Please come home
♪ I'm in trouble
♪ You're so cold
♪ You can't meet my eye
♪ You laugh too loud
♪ You calculate and lie
♪ Looking at the stars
♪ I'm waiting for a sign
♪ If I don't lose my nerve
♪ Then I'm gonna lose my mind
♪ I'm in trouble
♪ So, please come home
♪ Please come home
♪ I'm in trouble
♪ You don't know the trouble I'm in
♪ And you don't know the trouble I've seen
♪ Living in the past
♪ I'm thinking about us
♪ Counting out my change
♪ And I'm getting on that bus
♪ I'm in trouble
♪ So, please come home
♪ Please come home
♪ I'm in trouble
♪ Yeah, please come home
♪ Please come home
♪ I'm in trouble
♪ I'm in trouble. ♪
MUSIC: Remember Me by Mouth Almighty
♪ Well, your love left much to be desired
♪ You were everything but not enough
♪ Each tear you shed is just another lie
♪ Behind each smile, a sullen scowl
♪ Remember me, remember me
♪ Won't you remember me
♪ Oh, remember me, remember me
♪ Won't you remember me
♪ The lies you told to pass the time
♪ Well, I became accustomed to
♪ But I no longer need your closeness
♪ You ripped the wellness from my soul
♪ Remember me, remember me
♪ Won't you remember me
♪ Oh, remember me, remember me
♪ Won't you remember me
♪ Don't call me or call, call around
♪ To say you've seen the inner void
♪ And leave with your dead-hearted smile
♪ Another while
♪ Just a little bit more
♪ Oh, remember me, remember me
♪ Won't you remember me
♪ Oh, remember me, remember me
♪ Won't you remember me
♪ Oh, remember me, remember me
♪ Won't you remember me
♪ Oh, remember me, remember me
♪ Won't you remember. ♪