Do you remember your first? DIVA editor-in-chief Roxy Bourdillon reveals how one secret, sapphic kiss transformed her life forever
WORDS BY ROXY BOURDILLON, IMAGES BY GUSTAVO FRING AND COTTONBRO STUDIO
Oh my god, this is really happening. Cassie is kissing me. Me. Muggins. The mug-meister. Being snogged senseless by a fit girl. Am I dreaming? Quite possibly, because this is batshit-bonkers. Can I pinch myself without destroying the vibe? I hope her parents don’t come home early. Did she lock the . . . flipping heck, that feels good. Is this even legal? Probs not. This is way too much fun to be legal, but I’m here now. What’s the saying? When in Rome . . . let Rome snog your face off?
The first time Cassie kisses me, it is without a doubt the most exciting thing that has ever happened in my life. Ok, so my day-to-day routine is hardly a nonstop rock ‘n’ roll thrill-fest. I don’t get my kicks hooking up with groupies and chucking tellies out of hotel windows. I’m a 13-year-old lass from Leeds, not Jarvis bloody Cocker. The edgiest thing I’ve done to date is incur a library fine for an overdue Baby-Sitters Club book. By contrast, with her mischievous grin and penchant for innuendo, Cassie seems to promise adventure. In the context of my own mundane existence, the Cassie kiss is wild. It is Most Definitely Something.
It hasn’t come completely out of the blue either. We’ve been building up to this watershed smooch for some time now. I’m talking months of snuggling up at sleepovers while we watch romcoms about straight people falling in love. Cuddling turns into massages, turns into lengthy back rubs to Madonna’s Ray of Light album, turns into this moment right now: this kiss. The kiss. The kiss of no return. The kiss that blows my world up. The kiss that changes everything.
We pull apart and look at each other. I feel nervous. She seems bold. Neither of us says anything. Our mouths meet again and it is soft, soft, soft. And slow. So slow. So this is how it starts. This is who we are when no one is watching.
It’s the late 1990s and, like Tamagotchis and low-slung jeans with a little bit of thong peeping out, heterosexuality is everywhere. We’re in the age of Britpop and boy bands, lads and ladettes. Same-sex weddings won’t be legal for another 15 years, gay people are banned from the armed forces and the only real-life lesbian I’ve heard of is Sandi Toksvig. When the broadcaster came out four years before, in 1994, she received death threats so serious she had to go into hiding. The only place queerness exists in my life, it is safely locked away.
At 13 years old I am, as far as anyone can tell, as poker straight as my hair, which is naturally curly but beaten into daily submission courtesy of my new Babyliss flat irons. SYMBOLIC. I wear train-track braces on my teeth. I have a paper round, a pink inflatable armchair and a pet tabby called Whisky. Whisky is one of my closest confidantes and certainly the male who knows me best. In a cruel twist of fate, I am a cat person with a severe allergy to cats, so ours is a love that brings me out in a rash. I will go on to find that relationships with men can have this effect on me. The rest of my skin is pale and blotchy but, excitingly, I have recently discovered fake tan and now my palms are an alarming shade of orange. As you can tell, I am extremely cool. Like every other teenage girl in the 1990s, I know all the words to Never Ever by All Saints and Let’s Get Ready To Rhumble by PJ & Duncan. I am low-key concerned about the Millennium Bug and extremely concerned that I am not thinner, prettier and less of a buffoon. And, also like every other teenage girl in the 1990s, ever since birth I have been indoctrinated by the patriarchy.
When other people are around, Cassie and I do what all the other girls do. We obsess about boys. When you’re a teenage girl, boy-knowledge operates as social currency. Boys are the go-to conversation topic for rapid female bonding. Cassie and I are no exception as we perform the familiar rituals of girlhood. We study magazines like Sugar and Bliss, memorizing tips on how to make a lad like you (two coats of Rimmel lip gloss, laugh at all his jokes). We play Dream Phone, a board game marketed to pre-teens where the objective is to sit by a fake fuchsia phone and literally wait for some guy to call. We compile lists of our top ten crushes. All of them are men, many are fictional: the tall one in Hanson who looks so cute when he “MMMBops”, the local paper delivery boy who we have never spoken to but who, this one time, waved at us, the male characters in the cartoon version of Beauty and the Beast. Cassie favours built-like-a-brick-shithouse Gaston, while I prefer the cheeky, non-threatening charms of Lumière, the talking candlestick.
Time passes, we survive Y2K and Operation Covert Lez Off is still going strong in the twenty-first century. Our clandestine rendezvous, cunningly disguised as innocent slumber parties, are a regular occurrence. The only upside to the complete lack of gay representation in the media is that no one suspects a goddamn thing. We can hide in plain sight, no need for an alibi. If she was a he, we’d never be allowed this much unsupervised one-on-one time. Lesbian invisibility is our super-power and our kryptonite.
This is an extract from What A Girl Wants: A (True) Story Of Sexuality And Self-discovery by Roxy Bourdillon, published by Bluebird, Pan Macmillan, and available now in paperback, hardback, audiobook and ebook via THIS LINK.
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