Representation: a thread. Recently, I have been seeing young lesbians on here discussing the dearth of butch lesbian characters in tv and film. And I remembered how Finn Gallagher broke my heart. Back in 1988, the BBC had a new detective show. Pearl and Finn were young women...

in contemporary Britain, solving cases and being cool. Pearl was black, Finn white; they were clever and courageous and the plots were gripping. This was them. I bought the novel that came out. I was a proper fan. And, of course, I read Finn as a lesbian. That was so precious...

to me. All through the first season, she had no love interest and so I became sure. (In those days, that was a common indicator that a character was gay.) And then, of course, the inevitable happened... Finn fell for some man. This was not long after my first girlfriend had...

dumped me for a bloke. My self-esteem was low, a narrative was settling in my head that no woman would ever really take me seriously as a romantic choice. And then Finn Gallagher did that... I cried real tears of rage and frustration. It mattered to me that, whatever...

was hurting me, there were other lesbians out there doing lesbian lives. But they took Finn from me. I felt let down. I felt like the world agreed that I was not a possibility, that girls like me were not real, that, in the end, it was always about heterosexuality. Now...

there is more diversity in TV characters, and that’s great. But, from what I see and hear, girls and young women still don’t have nearly enough butch lesbian representation. Girls need to see lesbian lives. They need to know that it’s perfectly possible, real, to be a lifelong...

lesbian. And, vitally, I think, they need to know that being a butch lesbian is something a woman can be. It doesn’t make her a man, it doesn’t mean she’s failed at attracting a man. It doesn’t doom her to misery. It is fine. Sometimes I wonder if Finn was a lesbian character...

and someone, somewhere, pressurised a writer to take that from her. If they did, I wonder if they knew what that loss meant to young, lesbian me? It does matter. That’s why I want to write lesbians until I die. And I will.