Naughty Girls in the Office (Office Lesbians Book 1)

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In the office, nothing changed. Both of us swore not to tell anyone else. I dodged questions from friends about my relationship status like bullets - the lies were worth it for the delirium I felt when I was with her.

He lived in Cheyne Walk, and would pass by the Gateways to get to the King’s Road. “And my mum would be outside, taking deliveries, doing the laundry or whatever, and she said that he used to stop and talk quite often. There was always speculation about the relationship between her mother and Smithy. On her death bed, her daughter finally asked her about it. “I said: ‘People always ask me, Mum, and I hate to ask you but were you and Smithy lovers?’ And she said: ‘Everybody always assumed that Smithy was madly in love with me and that I was playing her along. But no we weren’t, and the reason for that was that Smithy didn’t want it.’ Her husband reacted surprisingly well too, suggesting that they enrol in therapy to help both of them exit their long-standing relationship. I took this as my cue to make a commitment and said I would move to the suburbs to be with her and her three children, once her husband had moved out. Like this article? Sign up to our newsletter to get more articles like this delivered straight to your inbox.

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Neatly, it was a story in this newspaper about The Killing of Sister George and the club that persuaded Gina’s mother to explain. I’d come out when I was 17 and been disowned by my parents. I’d moved to London and been in and out relationships and casual flings. She was 40 and had been married for 10 years, with three children under the age of 10. The agency we worked for also represented her husband, an esteemed writer, so I knew I absolutely couldn’t go there.

To know that I could finally come clean to my worrisome friends felt liberating beyond belief. I didn’t care about sacrificing my youth to move to outer London with a swarm of forty-somethings. All I wanted was to be with her full-time, and for it to be out in the open that we were together. So I wouldn’t let her kiss me good-bye, or hello, or leave the office with me. We couldn’t go to office parties together. Couldn’t stand too close. Couldn’t tell any of my friends. When my parents called and asked who I was dating, I said, after a pause, nobody at all. We lived as a family. Smithy and my mother were both with my father when he died – all holding hands and taking care of him.” The first time it ended, after a few months, was at a restaurant. We were with co-workers and I got up to leave. She asked me not to go. Then she asked louder. And then we were on the sidewalk, clutching, scratching, arguing, for everyone to see. “I’ll never be enough for you,” she said, her way of saying that me keeping us secret had been keeping her ashamed. Because we didn’t always have that. There was a time when we were out of favour because we weren’t ‘the right sort of lesbians’.” The club was subjected to demonstrations by the likes of the Gay Liberation Front who disapproved of the secrecy of the club, at a time when women could lose their children for being gay. The indomitable Gina Snr’s response was to call the police on them.When the club closed, Gina was very sad but knew that she couldn’t take it over by herself. The documentary Gateways Grind is a way of restoring its history, which is enmeshed with her own, and to see her parents again.