Corrina Gordon-Barnes
Coach & Trainer @ The Hobbs Consultancy
To mark Lesbian Visibility Week last week, we asked one of our amazing coaches, Corrina Gordon-Barnes, to reflect on her experience when it comes to lesbian representation in both her life and the wider media. Enjoy!
"Growing up, I didn’t know any gay women.
Or rather, I didn’t KNOW that I knew any gay women. Those around me who – in retrospect – may have been gay were spoken about by my family in unflattering terms. The spinster aunt, for example, was sneered at for being unmaternal; my Year 6 teacher was mocked for being unfeminine.
The lack of lesbian visibility made my own sexual orientation invisible even to myself.
And now here we are in 2023 with decades of civil partnership, equal marriage and advances in family-making options behind us. My wife and I just celebrated our daughter’s 1st birthday. We gathered some of our favourite people together in an idyllic community garden, and amid lavender and a little hut for chalk drawing, everyone sang Happy Birthday to our grinning baby girl, and shared vegan chocolate brownies by the side of the pond. It was one of those halcyon days where I felt we truly had a village around us.
“Did I tell you?” my friend Jemma said quietly to me at the gathering, as we stood watching her teenage daughter swinging my toddler son round by his arms, him squealing gleefully. “She‘s just come out as gay. So I’m extra glad she has you two in her life.”
Jemma’s daughter, 16, is growing up with my wife and me as two of her mum’s best friends. Our family normalised, the conversations we enjoy are never about our sexuality, but instead about the Great British Bake Off and the trickiness of school friendships.
My wife and I take our kids to a community swim session every Saturday morning. The late-teen lifeguard, Bryony, watches us laugh and splash as a family. “I won’t be here next week,” she tells us. “I’m meeting my girlfriend’s parents for the first time.” “They’ll love you,” my wife reassures her, before blowing bubbles under the pool water with my son.
At our son’s new preschool, we check with the teacher that diverse families are celebrated and she goes to great lengths to show us their impressive selection of LGBT+ friendly books. We only have Mama, Mummy & Me at home; we clearly have some library-building to do!
My wife and I are real life. The media is slowly, yet importantly, catching up. The world of the screen is still vastly heteronormative, but there are tiny whisps of fresh air, if you know where to look. Peppa Pig, after 18 years on air, has now featured a classmate – Penny Polar Bear – who has two mummies. In the CBeebies show Our Family, if you hold out till Season 5, you’ll find an 11-minute episode about five-year-old Henry and his Mummy, Mama and little sister, and the focus isn’t on sexual orientation but on the kids eating corn-on-the-cob as if their teeth were lawn mowers.
What would I love next in terms of visibility? A same-sex love story taking centre stage in a Disney movie would be most excellent. Our son loves to stomp around the lounge belting out Let It Go – would it be too much to ask for Elsa’s love interest in Frozen 3 to be a woman?"