I grew up as a lesbian in the 80s in the UK. Very homophobic society, didn't know any other gay people. There were a few gay people in the public eye but mainly men. Gay people were mainly talked about in relation to AIDS and Clause 28 (which was being brought in to stop the "promotion" of homosexuality in schools.) It was seen as pretty common to either have to hide your sexuality from your family or to be disowned and thrown out of home. I eventually realised there were gay groups and a gay community out there in the cities and that if I worked hard at school and got to university there were gay groups there and that was my escape to find my people. It was pretty common for gay people to have to leave the area they grew up in and start a new life (I'm reminded of the video for Bronski Beat's Small Town Boy which sums up that era).

Because of having to wait until I was 18 and could get to uni, I didn't really have much contact with other gay people until the early 90s, when I came out onto a scene which was very male-dominated (and sometimes hostile to lesbians) - but I also met some great people - gay men and lesbians - and it was such a relief to meet other people like me and finally talk about all this stuff I hadn't been able to talk about all these years. (There was no internet back then - or it hadn't reached me - so I'd just had to keep it all to myself and also had limited access to information about other gay people). The gay scene was focused around clubs and bars. There was some political activism which was about lesbian and gay rights - There wasn't really a link between lesbians and feminism that I saw (I lived in two different UK cities during the 90s) which I think was different to 10 years previously.

Things tended to be labelled lesbian and gay - occasionally the B would be added but that wasn't standard, although there were some bisexuals around. I'm pretty sure I'd never seen the phrase LGBT and hadn't encountered any trans people (although of course there were plenty of gender-non-conforming people - butch lesbians, drag queens etc). A few years later (early 2000s), I used to go to a bar which some transvestites also frequented - everyone was clear that these were straight men with wives who just liked dressing up for a thrill but who would get hassled in straight bars if they went out like that. No one minded them being there but they weren't part of our community, we didn't mix (other than being polite in the queue for the bar) and they didn't insist they were lesbians and that we needed to include them in our group and sleep with them. Transsexuals were rarer and were regarded as a different group from transvestites.

In the 2000s, the internet and the media have had more of an influence. Bisexuality and the idea of sexual fluidity have come to the fore and been presented as morally superior (hearts not parts, I fall in love with the person not the gender). Then the whole trans thing, which has changed massively even over the last few years.

We have certainly made legal progress and progress in terms of visibility since I was young and I think regular people are more accepting - or at least it's less acceptable for them to be openly abusive - but I think the queer movement is the backlash and where the lesbophobic attitudes are coming out - from people who aren't lesbians but have latched on to trans and queer identities. The LGB community wasn't perfect but it was where I felt at home and part of a community in a homophobic world but that seems like the most hostile environment for lesbians these days.