My university seminar had just finished, and I was standing in line at the refectory, grumbling about a man who had suggested any woman who disagreed with him must be a lesbian. “Well, I am a lesbian so I don’t know what he’d say to me,” said Denise Marshall. It was the first time we’d met. I was enchanted.
This was early 1992 and I’d been pretending to be “straight” for quite some time. I didn’t ever use the word lesbian. If my sexuality had been spoken about at all – which it definitely wasn’t – I would have used the word gay.
To meet a woman so out and so absolutely gorgeous … well … I was hooked. I didn’t know, of course, just how far my life would go with the funny, red-haired woman in a duffel coat, but we were friends immediately, laughing at both being from Tottenham, just up the road from the Middlesex University campus in Enfield, when all around us were people from proper “up north”: Tracy from Manchester, Wendy from Bradford, John and his twin from somewhere “not London”.
We were funny and flash in our north London cockiness. We thought so, at least.
Denise was profoundly political, a feminist and socialist to her core and deeply delighted by her life as an out-and-proud lesbian activist. Every Thursday afternoon, while the rest of us sat around smoking, Denise would go off to work with a group of Kurdish women who needed housing. I didn’t even know what Kurdish was at the time.
For the next three years, Denise held court after lectures and many people listened. Me most of all. She hadn’t been around heterosexuals for many years, she said. She had been a development worker for Stonewall, helping to set up housing projects for vulnerable young lesbians and gay men. University was full of straight people. She was fascinated by them and it made her fascinating. She also knew from our first meeting that I wasn’t being true to myself. She didn’t say so directly. But because she presented being a lesbian as a beautiful privilege, she made me realise I could live differently.
Denise organised a group of us to go to the May Day rally in 1992, and soon we were all reading her two favourite books: The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell and Sour Sweet by Timothy Mo. She taught me about feminism, class oppression, the importance of caring for our communities, of working to right wrongs. Pretty soon I was out of the closet, and with Denise’s encouragement I went to Gay Pride, had some fine fun flings with fabulous women, and my life took off. Denise was an education in herself and I spent every moment I could with her.
My secret life faded and I found liberation in living honestly. Our friendship deepened, I moved in as Denise’s lodger, and then one day, it all changed. We became lovers.
This was 1995, and Denise had become the manager of a women’s refuge. I had graduated as an English teacher and the internet had just arrived. Like the rest of the world, we had no idea what that dial-up tone would mean and where it would take us. We had no idea what becoming lovers would come to mean either, but our love was wild and wonderful, and neither of us had ever been happier. It was a golden time of feminism, lesbianism, freedom and hope. We adored each other.
Ten years later, not long after I became a headteacher, I collapsed one day, insanely tired following an Ofsted inspection. An emergency brain scan led to a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis. I had to retire from my job, and was told I would soon need a wheelchair. It felt like my life was over. But it wasn’t. I still had Denise.
She became CEO of Eaves, a feminist charity specialising in support, advocacy and research into all aspects of violence against women. Eaves changed policy and perceptions around trafficking through its Poppy project, and the work was respected worldwide. Funding was cut with the advent of the coalition government in 2010, and Denise was heartbroken. But she was a force of nature, and kept the Eaves projects going, as well as writing two novels, travelling the world for adventure, playing poker and using social media with a political passion.
In August 2015, our life together ended. Denise died of stomach cancer, and Eaves closed two months later – a double devastation. Through sickness, diagnosis, treatment, pretty much up to the end of her life, Facebook had been Denise’s link to the outside world, and in those early minutes, hours, days and weeks of grief it became mine too. Posting on Facebook was my way of not drowning, because online, there were friends. Real friends; people I’d actually met and who knew Denise. I would write, sometimes in the dark, desperate hours of insomnia, and someone would be there. Facebook saved my life. Denise’s final post asked friends to look after me, and they did.
By the time of my first birthday without Denise, I had posted some 60,000 words. She was loved by so many and she was missed so much, personally and professionally. People told me it helped to read my posts, and that message helped me. One day, two friends brought a manuscript around, made up of the posts I’d written, and from there this became an actual book and my life changed again.
Now I am a published writer who has a life that includes people I really don’t know but who now know me. Sort of. The book is an out-and-proud story of lesbian love, feminist fire and a universal recognition that everyone can be stronger for longer with a bit of kindness and compassion. It is about surviving the swim across the oceans of grief and finding hope in the heartache. It is about love.
The moment I met Denise Marshall, I found my life’s passion – working to end violence against women and girls – and I took the first step on the path to living openly and happily as a lesbian, as who I am. Because of Facebook, I have been able to survive the greatest loss of my life. Along the way, I’ve tried to live according to a mood and a mindset I call Hahalala – health and happiness and love and laughter all. This outlook and expression came to me after my own recovery from sickness. Although Denise would often roll her eyes at my cheeriness, she too was an optimist and she loved and believed in the concept.
In the last days of her life, I asked how she had done it all, how she was still managing to raise a smile, how we were all going to survive without her. She smiled the smile that enchanted me the first time I met her, in that refectory queue, 23 years earlier. “It’s a case of having to, my darling,” she said.
A moment that changed me: meeting my late love Denise, who gave me the courage to come out | Lisa Alabaksh
