Stephanie Theobald
BODY LANGUAGE
In the steam room, a tanned 22-year-old is relating the story of a pick-up she had recently. “She suddenly pulled out these needles and handed them to me!”
“What sort of needles?” echoes a voice from the other end of the room. “You know, for piercing. She wanted me to put them through her nipples!” General gasps and murmurings roll from the mists, followed by a chorus of “Go on” and “What happened next?”
What happened next was that she “put the needle through one and it was like, whoosh, amazing, then I put the needle through the other and it was like, whoosh!” And then, unfortunately, the steam gets overbearing. Dehydration levels go through the roof, the warm lager and red wine in plastic beakers strewn around the floor prove inadequate thirst slakers and one has to exit rapidly, tantalised as to whether the “whoosh” referred to the spurting blood or ensuing orgasm.
The good thing about the ongoing lesbian revolution is that everything new that happens can be deemed culturally and politically significant. The fact is that lesbian liberation has reached the point at which women in London can now live like sleazy gayboys on Mondays at Flirt and dirty old men on Tuesdays at Loose, a female-only pole dancing night. For the rest of the week, they can act like 1970s bimbos by rehearsing for two lesbian beauty contests. (Not just one lesbian beauty contest, but two!)
Naturally, the concept of mindless hedonism for lesbians – a kind of gayboy scene for gaygirls – is still in its salad days and female reactions are bound to be different from male ones. Everyone has a gay male friend who will moan, in a bored voice, about how awful gayboy saunas are (the groping hands, sordid goings-on) – so awful, they have to keep going back.
But if there is an element of Sodom and Gomorrah to the lesbian sauna, it is more Sodom and Gomorrah meets the netball team. There is some lechery, but mostly there is that all girls together messing around at the back of the class sort of spirit.
Still, how life has changed for lesbians since the 1970s when the backdrop to lesbian politics was flickering candles, bobbly jumpers, Joan Baez soundtracks and sex in the back seat. Such codes of practice were inevitable as lesbian feminism was just starting up and you have to make the rules before you can break them – but the rules seemed to stay in place for an inordinately long time.
Tuesday nights at Loose in Soho is hosted by Chrystal, a Polish/Swedish bisexual dancer who struts around the stage in Gucci spikes and diamant. She has a cute thing going with her index finger and lips, a sexy little kiss she gives audience members who are adventurous with the dollar bills they place in various straps, belts and folds.
Kai, who runs women-only sex shop Shh!, says this is where she sends her “curious” customers, “the ones who respond to all those lesbiany fashion ads”. For them, she says, it’s the perfect place to go. “You don’t have to do anything. You can interact with other women just by putting dollars in their crotch.”
The woman behind this transformation of lesbian nightlife is Kim Lucas, who started out with the Candy Bar three years ago and went on to open Loose and Flirt. But the new scene is not just in London: Lucas will open a Candy Bar in Brighton in July and Manchester has a women-only bar Vanilla. Lucas recently joined forces with the management there to organise the lesbian holiday – a two-week, all-in package for lesbos.
Yet while there is much to be grateful for, not all in the lesbian garden is rosy. Outside London or Manchester, a lesbian is hard-pressed to find much on the entertainment front. Like male homosexuals in the 1930s, many lesbians are still trying to suss out the secret handshake that gives them access to the wonderful lesbian nirvana they’ve been reading about in Vogue.
Steph Kay from Vanilla says the trouble with lesbians is that they tend to stop going out once they have found a partner, whereas many gay men in couples have long abandoned the heterosexual model of life- long fidelity. This is good news for the clubs. Non-monogamous coupledom has its dangers but it also keeps gay men together for longer than many lesbian couples who often remain for a long time in bad relationships simply because they fear not meeting anyone else. The lesbian pool is so much smaller, they reason, and therefore there are less places to go out. The vicious circle, in short.
Still, over at Flirt, the alcohol and dehydration seem to be doing the trick on the loosening-up front. The Israeli Daryl Hannah-lookalike, who hasn’t had sex in a year, has got off with the Chinese-American in the jacuzzi’s volleyball game. Then the tanned 22-year-old comes and sits on my lap, saying, like a brazen gayboy: “Can I kiss you, then?”
I mumble something about having a girlfriend and she says: “Just a quick one?” By now, you figure, there would have been an orgiastic pile-up in a gayboy sauna and you start thinking again about cultural and political change, about the dyke dollar and such, and you end up making a snap lesbian decision. “Well, OK then, but only for a count of 10.”
“Ten?”
“Ten.” And so the pioneering work begins. “One, two, three, four, five.”