Lesbian Visibility Week

Today is the last day of Lesbian Visibility Week (26th April to 2nd May) so I'm celebrating it! 🎉🎊🎉🎊🌈

All week I've been wondering where are all the lesbians? In the UK they are invisible. Surely a programme like Loose Women should have a lesbian on the core line-up panel! I haven't seen a lesbian on the programme (unless it was when I blinked) which is why I don't watch it anymore. I just checked to see if I'd missed a lesbian on Loose Women but no, no sign of one. All they seem to have managed so far is either joking about it or chatting to an actress who has played a fictional lesbian character. Pathetic really and highly unaware, given that they are supposed to represent all women in an inclusive way and discuss topical issues from a variety of perspectives and in a respectful manner. They do discuss relationships but it's invariably about heterosexual ones, which is frankly out of touch with society. There is such a thing as same-sex marriage, so why isn't Loose Women covering it? 🤔

Being inclusive and having diversity is all too often ridiculed and dismissed as if it is some strange notion. In the UK, it is over-politicised by Conservatives and labelled as being PC (politically correct) or Woke, usually as a way of degrading non-discriminatory and inclusive approaches. Since when was not being rude and prejudiced a bad trait? Multiculturalism has been around a long time and something teachers had to be aware of back in the 70's. So it's not new! People of all political persuasions should be socially inclusive and aware - it's not some Left-wing notion! And left-wing or Centralist notions should not be under constant attack - we can't have just one ideology and politics completely dominating a country! The Conservatives have been in power for over a decade and general elections are years away. It merely seems as though the UK has had more changes than it has because the Conservatives keep swapping around their PM. 100% of their women PMs are kicked out rather than voted out and Cameron just randomly stepped down. Now we are after Boris Johnson - if he were to be kicked out over his Tory wallpaper funding, we'll have a hat-trick! 

America is far from perfect but they've managed to have a diverse, inclusive, representative panel for their equivalent all-female talk show, The View. Over the years they have been far more racially diverse, with women from Asian, Hispanic, Arabic, Black and Eastern-European Jewish backgrounds. And at least they are somewhat inclusive of women who have same-sex relationships and marriages, namely Rosie O'Donnell and Raven-Symone Christina Pearman. 

Loose Women is on the same TV 📺 station as the well-loved gay presenter, Paul O'Grady (ITV) who I'd love to see more often on TV but nevertheless - where's the lesbian equivalent to him or Graham Norton? Graham Norton has a prominent evening talk show but a lesbian has never held that position! Or anything even approaching that. Lesbian women are not visible anywhere, and a token few doesn't cut it - the only household lesbian names on British TV, for a long time now, are the amazing Sandi Toksvig, Sue Perkins and Clare Balding. After them, we have a yawning gap - where's the following generations of lesbian general entertainers/presenters? We need more lesbians of the same ilk as them, who present neutrally, without peddling some political or religious ideology with it - we don't want a Trump-like UK! 

TV is not the only field lacking lesbian visibility - indeed, all fields are, be it: pop music, classical music, dance, theatre, behind the scenes jobs e.g. sound, lighting engineers, art, fashion, literature, film, magazines in general, newspapers, philosophy, academia, medical profession, politics, economics/finance, business, well just professions in general. Sport has a few 'out' ones but it's patchy while tennis is getting worse for lesbian visibility. 

I need a magnifying glass 🔎 to find visible, 'out' lesbians in all walks of life and professions! Time for all this to change which is what Lesbian Visibility Day and Week is about!

#LesbianVisibilityDay #LesbianVisibilityWeek 🌈 #lesbian🌈 #thisisme