Varsity is the independent newspaper for the University of Cambridge, established in its current form in 1947. They don’t slurp open-mouthed kisses and hump in offbeat locations and positions, as in today’s conventional representations of heterosexual lust. The buzz about lesbians made it easier for DIVA to get attention in the mainstream press, but the point was that it was by, for, and about queer women.

During the course of our conversation, one reader asked me to place face-down the old issues I had brought with me as aide-mémoires, so great was the sense of anxiety these 20-year-old cover images still provoked. The ultimate collection of high-quality, uncensored and highly explicit lesbian erotica available anywhere. The femme lesbian looked more feminine in dress and mannerisms, but she had antipathy toward aspects of the conventional female role, and she was attracted to butches. Half the women in it were dead – Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Anne Lister – but reading DIVA made me realise that lesbians and bisexual women had actually existed in every time and place – they had always been here, and they had survived, and I would too.From the early scene when Baby purposely spills water on a sexist jerk and walks away, you know that she is gutsy and determined. Needless to say, young girls first discovering their same-sex attraction are hardly clamouring to identify with this hyper-sexualised world of scissoring, threesomes, and dispassionate ‘orgasms’.

One woman commented that ‘lesbian’ sounds “a bit slimy”, whilst multiple wrote that the word evoked “disgust”. The series promises to be as controversial as Channel 4's Queer as Folk, which drew complaints for its portrayal of the sex lives of a group of gay men.In an unprecedented turn of events, she is allowed to conduct an "art therapy" session in which she will be the model. Mr Davies, who was behind the acclaimed TV adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, added: "Men are going to love it. It centres on Nan (played by Stirling), a lesbian male impersonator working in the world of Victorian music hall. I presume that many of my readers, both today’s young “queer” women and others, may not know (or know that they know) any lesbian femmes, even though the identity is still evolving and vibrant. However, as ‘gay’ slopes towards its grave as a schoolyard insult, it’s tempting to wonder whether ‘lesbian’ might have won a similar fate, had activism not centred around the de-facto male-focused word ‘gay’.

In fact, despite lesbians’ active involvement in the feminist movement, prominent activists like Betty Friedan were highly lesbophobic themselves. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. The problem is, upon closer consideration, using the same label for gay men and women has proven more harmful than first appears. This tide of male-centred, ostensibly ‘gay’ media sweeps gay women’s own, lacking representation neatly under the rug.This pride month, if we are to be truly proud, it seems about time that lesbian love is reclaimed in its own right. Such an androcentric ‘normal’, extended to represent the whole community, is equally seen in the rainbow flag which dominates Pride, and all the rainbow-branded merch that entails. But I look back now and realise that DIVA was as much a part of my growing confidence as the queer club nights and the snogs and the alcopops. Nowadays, gender equality has progressed considerably, but the old, lesbian stereotypes still haunt the popular psyche.