“There’s endless fascination with sapphic intimacy, but far less comfort when lesbians get to define it for ourselves”
BY LEE BEATTIE, CEO AT JOHN DOE
Our campaign for Lovehoney focused on sapphic pleasure got banned during Lesbian Visibility Week. You couldn’t make it up.
I’ve worked in PR long enough to know that not every campaign lands exactly how you imagined it would. Sometimes an idea gets watered down, sometimes the wrong people don’t get it, and sometimes you find yourself explaining a joke to a room full of people who were never going to laugh.
But when our latest campaign for Lovehoney, centred on lesbian pleasure, was rejected by mainstream media buyers during Lesbian Visibility Week, it did feel especially pointed. Not just professionally, but personally.
As a lesbian, and as CEO of John Doe, Lovehoney’s UK PR agency, I was genuinely proud of what we made. It didn’t feel tokenistic, overworked or like someone had dusted off the annual rainbow template and called it a day. It felt familiar. Funny. A bit cheeky. And, most importantly, focused on speaking directly to the community it was aimed at.
The campaign took the form of a series of optician-style eye tests, using lines like “We are so much more than scissoring” and “Femme girlies like to strap in too” to bring real lesbian pleasure into focus. They weren’t written to shock people. They were written because they reflect actual conversations, actual humour and actual experiences. The kind of nuance that tends to disappear the moment lesbian intimacy is flattened into either a punchline, a performance, or something people would simply rather not think about at all.
Which is why the rejection felt so ironic.
We’re in 2026 and people are still, broadly speaking, googling and asking – how do lesbians have sex? I have personal experience of this. There’s endless fascination with sapphic intimacy, but far less comfort when lesbians get to define it for ourselves. People are happy for it to be implied, projected onto, or misunderstood – just not articulated too clearly in public.
And yet we live in an advertising landscape that is hardly prudish. Sexual suggestions are everywhere. Desire is everywhere. Innuendo is basically an industry standard. But there’s still a very obvious line around what gets deemed acceptable, and that line is still generally drawn along heteronormative ones. The moment lesbian sexuality speaks in its own voice, without being softened, translated or made more palatable for heterosexual audiences, it suddenly becomes “unsuitable”.
One of the best parts of this campaign was getting to work with people who just got it. No awkward translating, no watering it down, no pretending the whole thing was somehow too niche to understand. Jo Connarty, Global PR Lead at Lovehoney, said it brilliantly: “Lesbian realities can often be dismissed by the wider world. Even the word ‘lesbian’ itself can flag moderation in the public domain. That needs to change – the censoring of our creative sums the issue up. In a world where sexually suggestive images are commonplace, as long as they’re hetero-normative, we can’t publish a few words that reflect real – and under-represented – lesbian points of view.”
And that, really, is the whole problem.
We weren’t trying to put anything graphic into the world. We were using words. Wryly. Tastefully, even. And yet somehow a few lines hinting at actual lesbian experience were apparently more difficult to accommodate than the endless stream of straight-coded sexual advertising everyone has long since agreed to ignore.
And yet, a campaign designed around visibility couldn’t be visible in one of the most public advertising spaces we have. That contradiction says plenty.
It also reinforces something many of us in the community already know: visibility is never passive. It doesn’t just happen because there’s a designated week for it and a few brands update their social templates. It has to be pushed for, protected and, quite often, fought for – especially when it challenges what people are comfortable seeing.
What I will say is that the story didn’t end with rejection. The budget that would have gone into a media space we weren’t allowed to occupy was redirected into spaces that actually serve the community: LGBTQIA+ venues and organisations including La Camionera, Gal Pals and the London LGBTQIA+ Centre. If mainstream platforms didn’t want to make room for lesbian visibility, it felt only right to invest in the places already doing that work, day in and day out.
That redirection matters. Mainstream representation still matters too, of course. Visibility is political. But there’s also something powerful about backing the organisations and spaces where lesbian visibility isn’t treated as niche, risky or up for debate. It’s just understood. Lived. Celebrated.
Of course, I’d rather this campaign had run exactly as planned. I’d rather we weren’t still having to navigate these kinds of barriers in 2026. But in some ways, the outcome has sharpened the message.
But if there’s any clarity to come from this, it’s that the issue hasn’t gone away. If even subtle, non-explicit language can still be deemed too much when it reflects lesbian reality, then there is clearly still work to do. So we’ll keep doing it.
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