For DIVA, the author writes about growing up in a religious community, coming out as bisexual and penning her upcoming novel Tart
BY BECKI JAYNE CROSSLEY
“Let’s talk about the word gay.“
A snigger ripples around the tent. I’m 10 years old, it’s the summer of 2002, and I’m sweating in a marquee on the Isle of Wight while my church’s youth group leader smirks over saying “gay”.
“When I was young, it used to mean happy,” he continues. “Then it meant… some kind of ‘relationship‘.”
More titters. I join in, because that’s what you do when you’re 10 in the early noughties and pointedly not making eye contact with your own queerness in the hope that it will go away.
“And now it seems to mean something is bad!” he says, referring to the classic playground call of “that’s so gay” for anything slightly subpar. “It used to mean you were happy, then… a bit weird… and now it’s something else again.”
I can’t remember why we were discussing the word gay – I’m sure it linked back to Jesus somehow, it usually did. But two decades later and I still remember the exact phrasing and specific intonation over the words “relationship” and “a bit weird”.
At that point, I didn’t even know the word bisexual, or that liking more than one gender was a thing. What I did know was that a girl who thought they might fancy girls was strange, maybe even dangerous. Thank goodness I still fancied boys, so that settled that. I put any deviant feelings I was noticing in a box and kept it firmly locked until my early 20s, when I finally cracked the lid to see what might be inside.
Growing up in a community – even an overall loving, supportive one – where coming out wasn’t an option meant losing a lot of years to performing heteronormativity. It wouldn’t be until the end of university that I’d start to examine the feelings I’d first had as a pre-teen – and only after a few years of being exposed to media and communities that acknowledged, yes, being bi is totally a thing.
Like a lot of queer people, I still feel a strange kind of grief over the time I lost pretending to be something I wasn’t. Wishing I’d had something to tell me what I was feeling wasn’t wrong or scary, to counteract the general attitude towards queer people while I was growing up.
It’s out of this wish that Tart began. When I started writing, I wasn’t sure if its core message was still relevant. In 2025, I’m saddened to know it very much still is.
While the book tackles issues of homophobia (and by extension biphobia) in small, religious communities, it was also incredibly important for me to include as much queer joy as possible. It’s as crucial as it ever was for young people to access queer stories they can see themselves and others in, helping them navigate the world with more confidence and compassion. Tart is a letter of hope to my teenage self, and hopefully can be the same for others too.
Tart by Becki Jayne Crossley is out 14 August 2025, published by Bloomsbury YA
DIVA magazine celebrates 31 years in print in 2025. If you like what we do, then get behind LGBTQIA+ media and keep us going for another generation. Your support is invaluable.
✨linkin.bio/ig-divamagazine ✨
