The Lesbian Checklist

May has definitely been the month for friend’s birthdays. Friend number 1 was invited to go shopping for some new clothes for her celebration party and I tagged along to help her choose something. As we perused the isles, friend number 1 gravitated continuously towards the blacks and greys of her usual attire. It made me think back to when my wardrobe hung the full spectrum of blue, until I decided that enough was enough and banned myself from buying anything more of my favourite colour.

“These red shirts are nice” I tell her, “check is very in at the mo and the colour goes well with your blond hair” I reassure her. She agrees. “I feel like a proper lezza now I’ve got a check shirt” she tells me with a smile.

Out and about in the local dyke bar and I bump into friend number 2. “How’s you, how was your birthday?” I enquire. She points out her new blue check shirt.  “A gift from my gay mate, he didn’t want me feeling like I didn’t fulfil the prerequisite for a lesbian” she laughs.

It made me think about a lesbian checklist and what else might be on it. A few weeks back with the unusually hot sunny weather that bathed Britain, I was on Brighton beach with some mates for a BBQ. I was asked to get the barbie going. “I don’t know how?” I informed them, “I’ve never had to do it before, someone else always does it.” I had a number of eyes stare back at me in utter disbelief. I remember feeling inadequate in that moment and that if I was straight, no-one would have thought anything of it.

It made me remember an online test by Channel 4 called the ‘Gay-O-Meter’ which declared me only 36% gay. It mocked my result by asking ‘How does a straight acting girl ever manage to get a date? Any more girlie and you’d have to be straight! I put my ‘gayness’ failure down to my lack of DIY skills, never having shaved my head and being really bad at pool!

At least I reassure myself, I can put it all down to being a femme, after all, we can’t all be butches can we?! At a pride event with some mates, there’s another test for me to prove my lesbian status – this time as a femme. You have to squeeze this instrument and it gives a reading. What did I come out as.....yes I failed even that falling into the ‘oh dear’ category!

It seems that when it comes to a lesbian checklist I’m doing rather badly. An irony when I'm considered one of the gayest girls in Brighton for the work I do within the LGBT community here. I was once even turned down by a girl because my life was 'too gay'!

Whilst out shopping for all the necessary May birthday cards I needed, I get distracted by the array of jokes, feel good slogans and pretty pictures and more specifically, a card detailing a ‘Birthday Gayness Test’ involving a pink cat.

Results declared that according to my choice I was ‘super-gay’! Phew! Relief washes over me. I ponder whether, as a lesbian the result was because I liked cats or simply because it was pink – or were they covering all bases within the word ‘gayness’by using a pink cat?!

Hey, what does it matter, the main thing was that I passed - I feel redeemed again!