Before Stonewall: Jacky's Interview Clip 1 of 4
From the collection of
From the collection of
Byron-esque Jacky, preferring books to boys, takes a blue-stocking approach to sexuality yet still gets the hots for a classmate, with kissing and light operetta.
Jacky goes from studious swot to finding her lifelong partner in this entertaining and insightful extract from a longer interview. More interested in books than boys, Jacky was a voracious reader, even reading about homosexuality, though there was never any mention of that subject in the family home. Seeing herself as a 'Byron-esque' figure, Jacky felt somewhat detached from society, thinking that her sexuality was something rather special.
Striving to gain an intellectual understanding of her sexuality, Jacky admits that a class dimension was important in that process. Though the gay characters she came across in literature always came from the upper class, Jacky herself, though attending a 'posh school', came from a working-class family. From the age of 14, Jacky had an 'affair' with a classmate, which she describes as holding hands and becoming 'D'Oyly Carte groupies'.
Unusually, Jacky also 'came out' to one of her English teachers, who though not gay herself, greatly influenced the teenager. However, Jacky and her 'amour' also feared that they would be expelled from the school should their relationship ever be exposed. That relationship, however, did finally end when Jacky got a place at St Anne's College, Oxford. After a brief dalliance with a 'boring boyfriend', Jacky decided that she'd gone too far into lesbianism to ever be straight and was looking, sub-consciously, for someone more suitable. Then she met Jane and they've been together ever since.
Born into a working-class family in 1945, Jacky was a bright girl who would eventually study at St Anne's College, Oxford. Here she met her lifelong partner, Jane.
Jacky remained in academia while Jane became a teacher and lived in both London and Oxfordshire until both retired. Together, they've written lesbian fiction under the pen name of Jay Taverner.