by Gina Yashere
I continued being a reasonably happy tomboy and didn’t think again about sexuality for several years. But I always found myself drawn to particular types of characters. In my favorite book of Enid Blyton’s The Famous Five series, the horsey, short-haired, active female character George was the one I identified with most. In Little House on the Prairie, it was the rough-and-tumble Laura Ingalls I liked the best, and in the movies, I liked the girls who were scrappy and as powerful and strong as their male counterparts. I had no time for the damsels. I loved the old musicals as a kid, and Calamity Jane was my hero.
Calamity Jane, the ultimate tomboy, played by Doris Day in the 1953 movie of the same name, was everything I wanted to be. She could fight, she rode horses, she shot guns, and she was uncomfortable in dresses, but she was still pretty enough to get the man. Even as a tomboy, I knew I was still expected to get married at the end. At school, I wasn’t popular, and boys didn’t look at me. I concentrated on being the loud, funny one and helping my friends get boyfriends while not really having interest myself. At that time, I believed my lack of interest was because I was concentrating on my education. I was a late bloomer, and anyway, everyone knew I wasn’t allowed to hang out with boys, so even if a boy had been interested, there would have been no place to hide for illicit love-ins, unless we skipped classes. And I never skipped classes.
My first inkling of my lesbianity occurred when I was around fourteen years old. Looking back, it was obviously my first girl crush, but at the time, I had no idea. She was my biology teacher, Mrs. McInnis, a petite, soft-spoken Scottish woman who often joked about how her husband was over six feet tall, a full foot taller than her. I found myself vying for her attention all the time, but in the most disruptive ways possible. I constantly talked back to her, made loud jokes in class, and generally made a nuisance of myself. I thought I was just showing off how rebellious I was in front of my sometimes friends, who often egged me on in my terrible behavior. In hindsight, I didn’t know how to articulate what I was feeling and was willing to do anything just to get her attention.
She’d often become extremely exasperated and throw me out of her class, but I still looked forward to biology, though she must have dreaded every time she saw my name on the roster. My grades in biology were too high for her to have me permanently excluded from the class, so the poor woman suffered at my hands for several months.
One day it all came to a head. She pulled me out of the classroom. “Okay,” she began, “I don’t know why you hate me so much.”
Huh? I was genuinely confused. I’d really just thought it was a little banter that sometimes I took a little too far. “I don’t hate you!”
“Well, can we call a truce, please?” she asked me.
“Okay.”
We shook hands, and I became one of her best students.
The next few years passed by uneventfully on the sexual-awareness front. At around age seventeen, boys began to show an interest in me, and though I enjoyed the attention at long last, being reassured that I wasn’t ugly or abnormal, I didn’t start reciprocating any interest until after I had returned from France. I had traveled alone to another country and had had a relationship of sorts with an older man, so I felt I was ready for the big leagues. I had a few flirtations with boys that I mostly enjoyed, but I felt no real attachment to any of them.
There was Ewart, a young British Caribbean guy who chatted me up outside a library near my home in Williams Close. He rented a room from an old white man in Watford, a town some fifteen miles northwest of Central London. I took a train to see him, and he was my first kiss and dry hump, in a stale ’70s-style bedroom while the old man slept downstairs. I saw him twice, then decided he wasn’t worth the train journey. And there was John, the Irish boy who asked me out with a Valentine’s Day card, which he hadn’t signed but had left sticking out of my locker at our weekend job at Sainsbury’s supermarket. He was my longest relationship with a guy. We dated for about six months, but we never had sex. We were both virgins, and he seemed quite relaxed with where we were sexually. He was the boy I defied my mother for, sneaking to a nightclub with him after work on the night of my eighteenth birthday. I never felt totally comfortable seeing him, as I was afraid of my mum’s reaction to me having not only a boyfriend but a white one at that! I hadn’t even told my friends who worked with me at Sainsbury’s.
At that time, though there were plenty of instances of Black guys dating women of other races, it was extremely rare for Black women to do the same. I had never seen it with my own eyes, and being the first frightened me. I swore John to secrecy, and we pretended not to know each other at work, while I spent many evenings eating pizza with his parents and younger brother and sister. I eventually grew tired of trying to find time to sneak and see him, and I wanted to get back to an easier life, of work and study, and not spending our entire time together fearing we’d be seen. Our dalliance fizzled out.
After John, I concentrated on work and hanging out with my new crew of friends. I’d met Maggie, Antoinette, Nasima, and Tucker while working evenings and Saturdays at Marks & Spencer, and I stayed friends with them afterwards. We all enjoyed the same types of music and fashion, and we dreamed of traveling abroad together—particularly to the States—and set about saving to do just that. In the early ’90s, Soul II Soul hit the charts in the UK and the US with such hits as “Keep On Movin’” and “Back to Life.” They were also an extremely successful sound system and ran popular club nights in London, the biggest being a Friday night residence at The Fridge in Brixton.
As I mentioned before, this club was my favorite. It was iconic, having been at the forefront of several music genres, from punk to trance to dance to techno. It was a huge venue that had previously been a movie theater and was easily recognizable by the full-size fridge that hung as a banner from the ceiling. After I had gone to that first nightclub with John, I spent the next few years on a nightclubbing rampage. And The Fridge on Soul II Soul’s Friday night was the place to be. The line to get in used to stretch around the block every week.
Soul II Soul played an eclectic mix of soul, funk, reggae, and the latest hip-hop, to which we spent hours doing the Running Man, the Wop, and every dance move we’d spent the previous weeks copying from Yo! MTV Raps and practicing in front of our mirrors. Seeing as I was the first of my group of friends to purchase a car, I would drive all the way from North London to South, pick them all up, spend forty minutes trying to find a space near the biggest club in South London on a Friday night, then we’d wait in line, often in the freezing cold, for up to an hour and a half to get in, but boy was it worth it. As well as spinning, Soul II Soul—steered by their founder, Jazzie B—often invited artists they met on their tours to do sets at the club. I saw Public Enemy, KRS-One, De La Soul, Jazzie B, and N.W.A perform there.
Every week was also a fashion parade. At the time, I sported Leisure Curl on my head, which was similar to the now much maligned Jheri curl, but dryer. It didn’t leave the huge greasy patches on your pillow but achieved the same moist-looking curls. I would shave the back and sides of my head to make it look more edgy. Denim dungarees, Doc Martens, and bomber jackets were the accompanying style. This look had originally been the uniform of punks and skinheads, but it was then co-opted by the gay community and left-wing skinheads, who wore the uniforms in defiance of its racist connotations. Somehow it made it across to regular street wear, as an alternative to the baggy jeans and white tee hip-hop style. That became my style. Doc Martens were cool and comfortable, and those soles were so thick and the leather such good quality, they lasted for years, which was great when you were fashionable on a part-time supermarket-worker budget. Bomber jackets were quite reasonable to buy, and the fashion was to cover them in badges. The more badges you had, the cooler you looked. The Superman insignia was a popular one, as well as a sheriff’s badge, which was odd, as we didn’t have the same sorts of sheriffs in England, but the badges seemed to be relatively easy to come by. Every kid’s cowboy ou
tfit had one. Being as competitive as I was and always wanting to stand out, I searched far and wide for my badges. From market stalls to antique shops, from army-navy stores to car boot sales. My jacket was a bejeweled marvel. It wasn’t till years later that I realized some of those badges were actually lesser known Nazi symbols. I had been so focused on filling the space on my bomber jacket, I hadn’t researched what I was pinning to it. Blind fashion.
When I became immersed in the Soul II Soul scene, I began to move towards hip-hop in my music tastes and style. Soul II Soul was a mixture of a kind of beatnik style and hip-hop. Their motto was “A happy face, a thumpin’ bass, for a lovin’ race!” And their style was categorized as Funki Dred, which was a head of dreadlocks but with the sides of the head shaved. I loved the style and emulated it. I grew locs, and then I also shaved my head at the sides. My mother was furious. “So you are wearing your hair like those Jamaicans?” Dreadlocks were synonymous with Rastafarianism, a religion with origins in Jamaica. Proponents of the religion grew locks, ate vegan, and smoked weed—everything that was anathema to my mother. But at this time I was working, driving, and paying Mum rent, so my life was very much my own. I reveled in this freedom.
Again, being the personality that I was, I needed to differentiate myself from all the other Funki Dreds, so I bleached my dreads white blond. Then I bleached my eyebrows to match. I looked like a damn Q-tip, but I didn’t care! My style of clothing became a mixture of the funky, beatnik style and the Kangols, sneakers, gold chains, and leather puffer jackets of the hip-hop scene of the late ’80s and early ’90s. I liked the large door-knocker earrings made fashionable by Salt-N-Pepa, the hugely successful female rap duo. I would often spend a Saturday afternoon shopping for the latest gear in the West End and turn up at The Fridge the following week proudly sporting Adidas sneaks.
But I wanted to go to the States, the land of Yo! MTV Raps and my hero, Downtown Julie Brown. I had been a fan of hers ever since I’d heard her distinctly British accent coming at me from one of my favorite American TV shows, Club MTV, which she hosted for several years in the late ’80s. She had made it out of the UK and was living the life I dreamed of in the US. I wanted to be her so badly! These were the days before the internet and Wikipedia, so I had no idea how she’d done it, but I was determined to at least get to the States, and I would work out a plan of action from there.
All this was while I was still working at Otis. In the UK, most jobs come with a minimum of four weeks paid vacation per year, but my engineering job at Otis had come with five weeks, so I saved four of them for my trip to the country I had dreamed about visiting since I was a child. That’s right, with my new crew of friends I began to plan a month-long visit to America. I couldn’t wait. We all saved hard for over nine months to pay for those flights, and to make sure we had enough cash to buy up all the gold and sneakers we could fit in my three suitcases. Yup. Back in the ’90s airlines let you carry three suitcases at no extra cost. I had one case with the clothes I would wear on the trip and two empty ones for all my US booty I’d be bringing home to show off at The Fridge.
In early 1990, our ragtag gang of young female hip-hop fans flew to the States for our first girls’ trip. First stop was Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Tucker (her first name was Jennifer, but Tucker sounded cooler) had an auntie who lived there, and we were going anywhere we could get free accommodations. Tucker’s auntie also had a house with a pool! For a bunch of working-class girls from London, this was the ultimate in luxury and Americanness. It was the dream. When we arrived at the house, we marveled at the size of the place. Looking back, it was a regular ranch-style three-bedroom, single-level house, but to us at the time it was a palace. And did I mention it had a pool? Tucker’s auntie even had a waterbed. We’d never seen those either. She looked on, bemused, as we jumped and rolled around on it like a bunch of toddlers. I thought she must be a millionaire. In fact, she was a nurse who had emigrated from the Caribbean in the ’70s. Nurses seemed to have a much better lifestyle in the US than in England, that was for sure. No British nurse had a pool in her backyard and a bed you could swim in. We immediately dumped our suitcases in our respective rooms and dived into the pool, where we spent the next four days.
When it came time to explore Fort Lauderdale, we discovered that the main pastimes were going to the beach, the mall, and the movies. That was it. Fort Lauderdale was mainly occupied by old white people, so we were in completely the wrong place for the hip-hop parties we’d envisaged. There was no way we were accidentally bumping into Big Daddy Kane in any of these sleepy cul-de-sacs. We went to the beach, the mall, and the movies on rotation for two weeks. We saw Ghost three times, Problem Child, Chucky, and every 1990 movie that was out. Fort Lauderdale was boring. Even the pool and waterbed no longer entertained us. We had a glass vase engraved with our names during our final trip to the mall, and we presented it to Tucker’s auntie to remember us by. We thanked her profusely for putting us up, and we left early to go to New York, to stay with another of Tucker’s aunties, who lived in the projects in Brooklyn. She definitely did not have a pool.
The building she lived in was reminiscent of my Bethnal Green home. So this was “the projects”—just an American way of saying “council flats.” They had the same piss-smelling elevators, dark, foreboding corridors, and guys hanging in the stairwells, except this time no white skinheads, just young Black dudes catcalling as we walked by. I didn’t care. I was in New York! Every day my friends and I got up early and spent the day buying stuff to fill our suitcases and eating McDonald’s apple pies. Yes, we had McDonald’s in England, but for some reason in 1990 the British outlets were still frying their apple pies. We had discovered McDonald’s baked apple pies on our second day in New York, and our belief that the US was far superior to the UK was confirmed. What bullshit had England been passing off as Micky D’s? This was the real deal. We ate McDonald’s pretty much every day after that. I estimate that I consumed fifty baked apple pies in those two weeks.
We hit every shopping spot we could. All the department stores we’d seen in American movies, like Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s, but the real scoop was finding where to get the best hip-hop gear. I’d heard Canal Street and Delancey Street mentioned in a few rappers’ songs and interviews, so I already knew where we needed to go to pick up gold dookie chains, Gucci link bracelets, door-knocker earrings, and name rings. Everyone in the US back then had gold rings and matching necklaces with their names in cursive. The jewelers in England hadn’t worked out how to do those yet and were still struggling with the two-letter initial rings; furthermore, gold was much cheaper in the US. We bought everything! Canal Street was for the gold, and Delancey Street was where to get good leather jackets. There, I picked up a leather puffer jacket with a fur collar and goose-down feathers that I’d seen worn by some of my favorite rappers in their videos. By that time, they were less fashionable in the US but still über cool in England. Because of that, I was able to get this coat for just $160—£80! I couldn’t believe it! The US was a nonstop half-price sale! We got sneakers on Broadway—Adidas shell toes with fat laces, and the new kid on the block back then, Reebok Pumps, a shoe with a pump in the tongue that you pushed to inflate and provide extra hold around the ankle. It was the most expensive shoe out at the time, going for $170, and I bought two pairs. These shoes had definitely not made it across the pond yet, so we would be going back to England with clothing and knowledge from the future, like fashion time travelers.
Before broadband internet, mobile phones, and streaming media, there was always a large time delay between the US and the UK when it came to fashion and movies. When a movie came out in the US, the film reels were sent over to the UK via carrier pigeon six months after its US general release. Six. Months. Okay, I may be embellishing with the pigeon, but it really was that long before we got to see US films in Europe. So going to the States, watching all the movies, and buying up the swag gave us the best bragging rights and upgraded our social standing tenfold.
We shopped, went to every tourist destination, and soaked up every New York experience we could think of. We saw the 1960s All for Freedom singing group Sweet Honey in the Rock in the parkland area that surrounded the World Trade Center. We marveled at the Empire State Building. We got motion sickness on the Staten Island Ferry. We got lost in Central Park. And one day in Washington Square Park, while wandering around to work off the McDonald’s baked apple pies, we stumbled on an impromptu show.
Two guys stood in the middle of a crowd that had gathered around them. They had no instruments, did no tricks. They just talked. They told funny stories, and had the crowd enthralled. I had no idea what this was, but it excited me. Little did I know, I had attended my first stand-up performance. Looking closely at one of the men, my excitement tripled. I’d just seen this guy on the big screen the week before! It was Rick Aviles, the guy who murders Patrick Swayze in Ghost! I pulled out my trusty Kodak 110 camera and prayed I had enough film left on the roll to get a couple of snaps. I then threw up another prayer, that when I sent them off to get developed a few weeks later and waited with bated breath for them to come back, I wouldn’t end up with thirty-six pictures of my finger. This was the best trip ever. We were bumping into movie stars!
After the days spent sightseeing and shopping, the nights were spent hitting as many parties and clubs as possible. We loved the twenty-four-hour subway, and we rode the graffiti-stained cars at night, completely unafraid. We wanted to see how our dance skills stacked up against the Americans’. We went back repeatedly to a multilevel club we found in the Meatpacking District, a place called Mars. Each of its four floors had different genres of music: hip-hop, house, reggae, and rock. We had learned about this club from a bunch of cool kids we’d become friendly with at the McDonald’s on Broadway. They had told us that Mars was the place to be any night of the week. Those apple pies led us to many adventures.
