Nicola

The golden age of queer sf is 20. Or maybe it was the 1970s. Or perhaps it was in France. It's all relative, like the notion of ‘queer’ itself.

My golden age began in Scotland, when I was 20. My girlfriend and I were sleeping on a friend's floor, travelling about a bit, absorbing life – and lots of hash. A woman handed me a book, saying, ‘I hear yeez like the wee aliens and shite. Have ye read any with gur-uls before?’ I have a vague memory of glancing at a blue-ish cover before returning to the serious business of reducing my brain to a microdot. But at some ungodly hour of the morning, I opened the book – Sally Miller Gearheart's The Wanderground – and fell into it.

It blew me away. For a 20-year-old escapee from Catholic World, where the consensus was that I was going to hell, it was visionary dynamite. Under the sunlight of story, the essentialist feminist theory I'd read but not embraced flowered into a magical paradise.

The early 1980s were a time when I was being thrown against the wall by members of the Special Patrol Group, and harassed by local plods simply for being a dyke, when many women I knew were at Greenham Common fighting for world peace (and I was just fighting). The Wander- ground explained to me how and why the Bad Men would get their comeuppance. I hadn't even realized I needed validation, but suddenly here were women like me rising above their challenges, being wise and kind and strong and, more to the point, victorious.

I began an indiscriminate, desperate search for lesbian sf. I vacuumed up the output of Onlywomen Press (Caroline Forbes's The Needle on Full, The Reach and Other Stories edited by Lilian Mohin and Sheila Shulman, etc.), moved on to The Women's Press (Josephine Saxton, Jody Scott, Sandi Hall, Lisa Tuttle, Rhoda Lerman), and then Virago (Zoë Fairbairns). I loved them uncritically.