Observations on lesbians

''Dip me in chocolate and throw me to the lesbians," sings the chorus in Jerry Springer: the opera. As lines go, it's hard to beat. Gets a laugh every time. And indeed, why wouldn't it? After all, in a theatrical enterprise not short on schlock and taboo-breaking, the image carries a cartload of intimations, both pleasurable and painful. What a vision of sexual excess: being cov-ered in chocolate and, oh, the delight of having it licked off by those so skilled in the art. But - oh the terror - by lesbians, no less! The writers are having it both ways.

They are not alone. Any modern playwright hoping for an easy laugh has only - in an otherwise unrelated context - to drop the word lesbian into a line and you can be assured, copper-bottomed guaranteed, of a snigger or two.

What is it that makes lesbians automatic butts of comedy - but also so dangerous that computer firewalls are now programmed to censor the word and all offending copy around it - even when it is being used in a perfectly legitimate way? "Lesbian" apparently now equates with pornography.

When and how did such a definition develop in a society where almost anything goes, and where commerce courts the pink pound so assiduously?

Something very strange, too, is going on, when a perfectly conventional, immaculately performed play about the history of gay men and women, taken from the experiences and memories of ordinary people, fails to attract a single reviewer from any national paper, or even from among the lesbian and gay press. Clare Summerskill's Gateway to Heaven is an exemplary testament, humorously self-deprecating in recalling what it was like in the 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s, before gay people achieved the freedoms that were so hard-won, but then so taken for granted.

Lesbian invisibility has a long track record. Paradoxically, it sometimes provokes intense voyeuristic interest. For a short time, lipstick lesbianism was very hot news; Madonna planting a kiss in public titillated and excited. But lesbians who look like lesbians (whatever that means) have always brought out the bigotry in people. Drop the tincture of associative "lesbian" into any "straight" gathering and you can immediately feel the subtle personal shrinkage.

Yet if there was one thing that stood out in Summerskill's collected memories, it was how often lesbians turned out to be married women - mothers, wives, teachers, aunts, grandmothers. That has been said a thousand times. What is sad is that the prejudice still holds. What is not permissible, or even worthy of a moment's consideration in our overheated, celeb-obsessed society, is understatement or honest modesty. In Summerskill's Gateway to Heaven, patriarchy wasn't mentioned even once.

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