ONTD

For many people, the thrill of the recent revelation that the writer Jeanette Winterson is dating Susie Orbach is that Orbach is not some bolshie 20-year-old with tats and piercings who is declaring she’s a dyke and running off to do queer performance art in Dalston.

This is about the nice lady in your street who puts out her recycling bins, gives dinner parties, reads the good newspapers and, one day, leaves her male partner of many years and runs off with someone the bad papers would describe as a “notorious lesbian”.

Orbach, 63, the psychologist and author of the classic Fat Is a Feminist Issue, is the latest in a new wave of late-flowering lesbians, who often leave their husbands after having children together.

Check out Mary Portas, 49, who divorced her husband of 13 years in the 1990s and now lives with her two children and her glamorous girlfriend, the Grazia fashion writer Melanie Rickey. Or the 43-year-old singer Alison Goldfrapp, famous for teasing audiences into a dark sexual frenzy, who recently embarked on a relationship with Lisa Gunning, the hip film editor who worked on Sam Taylor-Wood’s John Lennon movie, Nowhere Boy.

As if to remind us that lesbian love is for ever lurking, on New Year’s Eve ITV1 presents us with Joanna Briscoe’s Sleep with Me, an erotic drama involving a middle-class woman whose relationship with her boyfriend is shattered when she falls obsessively for another woman.

Back in the 1990s, when the phrase “lipstick lesbian” was coined, Martina Navratilova and kd lang were pretty much the only lesbians anyone had ever heard of. Things are different now — and, once you have good role models, it appears that the floodgates open.

This month, in America, 62-year-old Meredith Baxter, famous as the hippie mom in the 1980s Michael J Fox vehicle Family Ties, also came out. The thrice-married actress is a big name over there, making this the biggest lesbian story since Sex and the City’s Cynthia Nixon, 43, left the father of her two kids to make a go of it with the unapologetically butch Christine Marinoni.

Last month, Baxter and the Top Gun diva Kelly McGillis (another recent midlife lezza) were spotted together on board the Sweet Caribbean Cruise for lesbians, appearing, said the National Enquirer, “very relaxed and comfortable”.

You bet they were comfortable. Just ask Jennifer, a 41-year-old divorced mother of three from Manchester. She says she often finds herself being approached by women — usually describing themselves as bisexual, and often with a man in the background they’re cheating on.

“You don’t feel like you’re being used for sex when you have sex with a woman,” she says. “Maybe it’s because women are on the same wavelength. We’re nicer to each other.”

Or ask Sarah, a 40-year-old costume designer. Her 14-year-old daughter encouraged her to go out more when she split with her husband of 15 years. She didn’t mind that many of her mother’s friends were lesbians, and Sarah soon found herself having a string of affairs.

“Hanging out with lesbians is sort of like an X-rated Malory Towers — sort of mischievous and sexy,” she says. “The icing on the cake is that you don’t need contraception and there’s less chance of getting a sexually transmitted disease.”

Sharon Stone has another take on the allure of lesbian love. Two years ago, she confessed to me in an interview that some of her best dates had been with “butch lesbians”, because they know how to take control. “Everybody is bisexual to a certain area on the scale,” she said. “I like masculinity and, in truth, only women do that now. If you go out on a date with women, then women take you. They date you. They call you up and say ‘I’m going to pick you up at ­seven’, and you don’t have to say where you want to go, and they take you to somewhere great and you can dress like a chick.”

Men, on the other hand, she declared, have become “much more ‘fem’. They don’t know who to be and how to get their life together, and they can’t make a decision, and I find that such a turn-off”.

The neurologist Dr Louann Brizendine writes, in The Female Brain, that 40-plus women get itchy feet because they stop producing the hormones that make them want to nurture and coddle needy husbands. When I first started dating men after 15 years of having relationships only with women, a straight friend took me aside and pointed out that, in reality, men were more like women are supposed to be: needy, insecure and vain.

The middle-aged, middle-class well of loneliness that is Mumsnet can vouch for that. There you find many lesbian-fantasy posts, from the “My fantasies about women have been a boon to my married sex life” type to the “I am overwhelmingly attrac­ted to a woman and my feelings are all over the place” cry for help. Stan­dard advice is to berate any would-be Orbachs with a “Shame on you” line about how bad it is to cheat on your husband and kids.

Perhaps this isn’t such bad news for “real” lesbians, because how do you know these straight girls aren’t merely looking for some exotic midlife fling? “My advice to lesbians is ‘Don’t do it!’,” says one dyke mate. “Straight women always go back to men and it’s just self-destructive for us.” She points out that one of Winterson’s other ­apparently hetero­sexual conquests, the late literary agent Pat Kavanagh, went back to her husband, Julian Barnes, shortly after she left him.

Maybe it depends on the type of late-flowering lesbian you are. Jennifer admits she is a bit of a “fence jumper”. Although she sometimes fantasises about setting up home with another woman (“It seems so much more perfect. You’d share the ironing and looking after the kids and stuff, wouldn’t you?”), she confesses that her ideal — after her recent marital difficulties — would be to “live platonically with another woman”.

It’s the “out of the blue” lesbians such as Nixon who are the most refreshing, and who often stay the course. She has said of her relationship with Marinoni: “In terms of sexual orientation, I don’t really feel I’ve changed. I’m just a woman in love with another woman.” In spring, she announced that she and Marinoni were engaged.

As for the feminist psychotherapist Orbach, the odds are looking good. Described by a friend who knows her as “serious and right-on”, she is not an unlikely candidate to run off with a woman. She certainly seems to be the one wearing the trousers in this ­par­ticular relationship. Winterson recently declared that the single thing that would improve the quality of her life would be “if I could get my girlfriend to live in the country (goodbye M40)”.

And the most tantalising thing for us onlookers is that, unlike Winterson, Orbach is keeping resolutely mum about the whole ­exciting package that is new love. Not only that — and here I speak from experience — but the double whammy of it. Because, if you’re a woman sleeping with a woman for the first time, it’s like discovering sex all over again.


Source: http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/relationships/article6964902.ece?token=null&offset=12&page=2

As a lesbian, I say YAY for everyone coming out! And Goldfrapp is in a same sex relationship? Awesome!