I’m raring to go at the “Lesbian 45+ Speed Dating Night”. There are 30 women sitting at a table in a Hackney bar called La Camionera (Spanish for female truck driver). Opposite each of us sits a “date” that we talk to for four minutes. Then a bell rings and we move on to the next woman. On the table are bowls of paper strips bearing conversational prompts, if the going gets tough.
I’ve already felt “la flèche” for two women in the room – that moment when you look someone in the eye and the arrow of desire hits you. Racine’s heroines were often hit by passionate “flèches”, submerging their reason and dragging them towards fabulous ruin and destruction. My arrows tonight come from one woman who looks like Marianne Faithfull in a deconstructed mini skirt and another who looks like a Lebanese Anita Dobson from Eastenders.
Right now I’m sitting opposite a woman in her late 60s who bears an alarming resemblance to Ann Widdecombe. But she has a different voice and a great story about going to the Gateways in Chelsea, the longest-running lesbian club of all time, which opened in 1931. “I was at the bar sitting next to a huge woman – tall as Brigitte Nielsen. She kept buying me drinks and then I noticed she had a very large Adam’s apple.”
Ann says she momentarily passed out. “I woke up in this soft place. My face was wedged between her breasts!”
It is a timeless truth that whenever two or three lesbians are gathered together, they will moan about how rubbish the lesbian sex scene is compared to the gay male one
A young person today would probably use different language to recount this story. The new cutting-edge way of saying “lesbian” is the German-originated acronym FLINTA+ meaning “Female, Lesbian, Intersex, Non-Binary, Trans and Agender”. I’d come across it the previous weekend at a FLINTA+ event in South London called the Dyke Market at Space Station Sixty-Five. The demographic spanned from willowy women with glossy pre-Raphaelite hair and lumberjack shirts, to gothy young trans women, to elders from the radical 1980s SM dyke scene.
Yet it is a timeless truth that whenever two or three lesbians are gathered together, they will moan about how rubbish the lesbian sex scene is compared to the gay male one. “Yeah,” lamented one young woman in a T-shirt that said Raging Dyke. “They sell sex toys here but where’s the sex?” “Yeah,” said a twenty-something Canadian. “We should have an app called Grind Her.” She was alluding to the gay male app Grindr, which finds you convenient sex in a bush ten minutes away, so you still have time to get back to your seat for the second half of Don Giovanni.
The Raging Dyke informed me there were parties for queer women, but with loads of forms you have to sign first. Endless stuff around boundaries. “It’s like, No TERFS, no SWERFS [Sex Worker Exclusionary Radical Feminists]. It’s just too much.”
This is my terrible secret: I’m not sure I do want sex in a bush
Back in Hackney, the bell rings and it’s time for me to move on to a new woman. This one is in her late 50s and Spanish. She has a very intense gaze. She asks how I find the London lesbian scene. I confess I haven’t been here for six years. I’ve been living in the California desert. For three of those years in a cave community.
“What did you do in the cave?”, the Spanish woman wants to know. I think for a bit. “Nothing,” I say. “Nothing!” she gasps. “This is very interesting!” This is my terrible secret. I’m not sure I do want sex in a bush. The experience of living in the desert really slowed me down and opened me up to the idea of spirituality. I haven’t had sex for two years, something that would have shocked me when I was younger.
Back in my cave, I did dream of getting intimate with women again. But now I’m in the UK, I’m not sure what kind of intimacy I’m after. Added to all this is the complication of looking 60 in the eye. Whenever I’m gathered with two or three women these days we’re normally talking about HRT.
My next date is a stern Russian. “What is your perfect Sunday?” she barks from a conversation prompt slip. I find myself thinking of my early morning ritual of stretching, doing an oracle card, choosing what I will eat for breakfast. I start to say this, but revealing details about my personal daily rapture suddenly feels too intimate.
The following date introduces herself as a “Somali Pirate”. She’s a beauty with a glint in her eye. “Did you meet the famous writer yet?” she asks. “She’s famous for chick lit. She’s a multi-millionaire!” The Pirate had apparently matched with her on Tinder a few months earlier. “She told me to google her. She’s married to some banker. She wrote about me on her Instagram. Said I made her feel nervous.”
Which one is she? I wanted to know. But the bell rings and I’m on to my next date. Luckily, it’s time for Anita Dobson. She’s draped in gold jewellery and I kind of melt into her eyes. I have absolutely no problem thinking what to say to her. She talks in a posh north London Jewish accent about how she’s a nomad too. She used to live in America but now she’s back here. She even knows some people I know in the California desert. My imagination is on overdrive. In the course of four minutes, I’ve spent the rest of my life with her. I can’t believe it when the bell rings after about ten seconds.
I say the party should be renamed “lesbian elders’ speed dating night”
When an interlude comes, I adjourn to the outside garden to sit with Marianne Faithfull and the Somali Pirate. There’s a good vibe going on. We’re all finally loosened up. “I think it should be 50+ speed dating night,” says Marianne enthusiastically.
I say the party should be renamed “lesbian elders’ speed dating night.” When I was recently in Mexico writing about indigenous treatments in spas, I met a Nahuatl elder called Chimali Walsh who said that 57 is the age when you become a respected abuela.
Marianne Faithfull says the best lesbian sex she’s seen is in the 1974 film Je Tu Il Elle by Chantal Akerman. “It goes on for ten minutes,” she recalls. “Some male critics say it’s boring, but it’s so real. All that tussling around on the bed for ages.” I make a note to watch it. Then she announces she has to go. She writes her number on the back of some of the word prompt strips and democratically hands them to everyone. I do a goodbye mash-up consisting of the traditional French bise on both cheeks mixed with the American weird hug/cuddle thing.
“You’re trouble,” Marianne Faithfull tells me, flirtatiously. Then I see that Anita Dobson is also leaving. We have another intense, melting conversation while I imagine us yachting around the world on our continuing adventurous life together. When I hand her my phone number, she looks slightly guilty and says, “I’m actually a writer too.” And then the multi-millionaire chick-lit writer vanishes into the night. Will she write about me, or will I write about her?
I go back into the yard resolving to get a proper snog before the night’s out. The Somali Pirate meets me in the eye. Shall we go to the bathroom, bro?” she asks. Inside, I recall that some of the best experiences of my life have happened in bathrooms. The first time I kissed a woman was inside a bathroom at a lesbian bar in New York called the Cubby Hole, in 1987. The floor was black with grime and there was a squashed joint serendipitously lying on it, which was responsible for what happened next. A kiss can be more memorable than sex.
The Somali Pirate has ethereally soft skin. My cheek explores the landscape of her face then finally my lips brush hers. Back and forth we go: softer, harder, all very slow. Lips closed, then open. To enter inside? Another cave. Slippery as a snake, a silver snake gliding through fresh green grass.
Sex artist Annie Sprinkle told me once that menopause was the reason she became more experimental with the idea of what sexual pleasure was. “I used to like hard sex. Fist-fucking. But now playing footsie under the sheets… can do it for me.”
A bang on the bathroom door brings us back to reality. When we emerge, only Ann Widdecombe is left in the room. The Somali Pirate invites us both back to her flat. I’m wavering. “Come on, bro,” she urges. “You only live once.”
Stephanie Theobald is an author and journalist known for her work around alternative feminism and latterly, living in a cave. She lives near Joshua Tree, California. Her road trip memoir “Sex Drive” is out now in paperback
