Grey and gay: Kay’s story
Throughout her teens and early twenties Kay Jenkins was attracted to women. But she married young and quickly tried to bury her fears by having a child
She remembers how, in the 1960s, although women did not live in the same fear of being caught having sex as men did, words like “dyke” and “lesbian” were shouted as abuse. Agony aunt Marjorie Proops echoed a widely held view when she wrote: “I, like most other heterosexual women, prefer not to think about lesbianism.” It was in this climate that Kay fell in love with a woman. “I worked as a photographer and I was away from home on a job. The woman was an old friend – I’d always had close emotional relationships with women – and suddenly it turned into something more. “It felt momentous but also the most natural thing in the world.” She pauses, looking around the room of her Victorian north London house, where pictures of her grown-up son Barney are displayed. He was three at the time and Kay knew how much society would disapprove of her leaving her husband for another woman – and much more so because she was a mother. She says: “He went mad when I told him. I assumed it was just jealousy but then I realised the fact I was gay was significant. He immediately rang my oldest friend and said ‘do you realise your best friend is a lesbian?’” Her worst fear was that she would lose her son. Her husband said he would go for custody: “There had been a number of high-profile custody cases in which husbands had been given the children because it wasn’t considered right for them to grow up in a lesbian home. “I got the name of a solicitor with some experience in this and she advised me ‘don’t admit anything’.” But the thing she believes really swung it was that her husband was foreign and not even European. “Of course I was glad to have my boy but I was shocked when my solicitor said: ‘The judge will probably prefer to award custody to a lesbian than a foreigner’.” Written by Angela Neustatter
This article was created: 13 July 2006.
This article was last edited: 14 December 2006.
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