A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of - Etheses - Queen Margaret ...

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earth haven‟t you had a shag before…” …blah, blah, blah… I knew it was, kind of,
not a great organisation, but… you know… (laughs)… erm… (l.724ff.)
This promise was soon fulfilled, as Charles recounts:
So I went to, like, one of their fund-raisers… It was in the West End… and it‟s, like,
basically, a striptease night… erm… hosted by Mat Fraser…towards the end, Mat
goes “Do any of you dare to come up here?” ...and I was sat next to this woman
called Debs who I‟d met a couple of times at the club, she was a non-disabled
woman and I‟m in the wheelchair… next thing I know I‟m on stage, stripping this
woman… as she strips me… and that was it... and then at the end everyone was
going “Aw, yeah, you were brilliant…” so I kind of started seeing Debs for a while,
and that‟s how I lost my virginity… well, that was what led to it… and that gave me
so much confidence… (l.1:733ff.)
Lola was the other participant who talked to me about The Outsiders Club. This was in the
context of having already developed an identity as somebody who wanted to challenge
conformist assumptions around disabled sexuality. However, this identity only emerged in
later adolescence and was very closely associated with rebellion against both the stifling
conditions at the residential unit and the disabled role in which she was cast. Describing
herself in her mid-teens, Lola states that
If people could hear me say this, you know, they would laugh… but I wouldn‟t
mind… I actually became scared of men… (laughs)… which is probably quite
interesting psychologically… erm… by the time I was fifteen... sixteen... I didn‟t…
I was two people… I was totally two people in conflict inside myself… you would
not believe how I was, I was completely introverted… erm… and I thought that I
had… I had no idea how I might ever deal with the outside world… I was terrified of
it… I remember, cos this place was a huge, sprawling place... to get from, you know,
the unit where we were based to physio… you were taken by porters, and... erm…
every day became a nightmare, because, of course, all the porters were men, and I
was terrified of that… but it wasn‟t even that… to do with any sexual fear, it was
just a general fear, it was weird, I was scared they were going to talk to me... the
irony of being scared of boys and men was that I would fantasise about them at the
same time… (l.1.393ff./l.1.510ff.)
The fear of boys and men Lola describes appears to be related in her mind to a fear of the
world beyond the confines of the medical unit where she passed her teens. Just as the world