one day my mother came home from university and informed me that lots of her lesbian friends there had crushes on me. i laughed and asked her what she said. her answer mortified me. she told them that i was into hunky men and wasn't interested in women at all.

i was aged thirteen at the time, and this event had a profound effect on me. i remember lying down on my bed and having a think about my sexuality. i asked myself, "could i be a lesbian ?" and tried to figure out the answer. i decided that if i was a lesbian i'd know about it by now. i would be fancying women, having crushes on women, adoring female pop stars instead of male ones. and i definately wouldn't fancy paul young !

about a year later, i remember asking myself the same question again. i suppose i was "just testing" to see if anything had changed. i tried to imagine what it would be like being a lesbian. i thought, i would kiss women - well that couldn't be so different from kissing a man. and i thought, i would have sex with women. well, i tried and tried to imagine having sex with some of my school friends, but it just didn't feel right. then i tried to imagine having sex with a woman i knew, who i really liked.

oh my god ! it was gorgeous. it was perfect. it was everything i'd ever wanted !

what i realised was that i'd had a crush on this woman for a long time, but without knowing it. the fact that she was a woman had confused me, thrown me off. but when i finally thought about how much i liked her and what i wanted to do about it, well, my life changed forever.

from the age of fourteen to sixteen my tastes in pop music and my sexual orientation changed completely. i now thought almost exclusively about women instead of men as lovers. there was only one doubt in my mind: what if i was wrong ? what if i wasn't really a lesbian ? how could i tell ? i knew i'd never really know the truth until i'd kissed a woman.

during this time, i also dropped a lot of hints about my sexuality to people i could trust, and talked in gender non-specific a lot of the time. i obviously gave myself away quite a bit, because my aunty gave me a pamphlet about gay liberation. my mother also came home from an anti clause 28 (section 29) demo and gave me the sticker off her coat. i suppose people were trying to make it easy for me to come out.

on thursday 23rd december, 1988, i was out with my mother and some politicos and a woman called kate who'd been in the lesbian group at the university when my mother was there. when it came to giving xmas kisses at the end of the night, my chance finally came. kate and i kissed, a nice long xmas kiss, and things just got out of hand ! i mean, i never meant to snog her, other wise i wouldn't have leant over my mother to do it ! events just took their natural course.

i went home with my mother that night, and on the way home she bought me a fish cake and told me that she didn't believe in gay and straight. she said that we all had our own sexuality, and that was that. it was a while later before she told me that she'd had a relationship with a woman when we were all little kids. i'm sorry to say that i don't remember it at all.