Elizabeth Lovatt on Calling the Lesbian Line, Crying Over Archives, and Continuing Conversations
Words: Alara Demirel
I was born in 1996 and met my first lesbian online — somewhere between MySpace glitter packs, fan forum signatures, and chat windows I wasn’t technically old enough to be in. I came out as bisexual at eleven, because that was the only word that vaguely sounded like me. It held — for a while. But by twenty-five, something wasn’t clicking anymore. I read the CompHet doc on Tumblr and thought, “Oh. That’s what that was. Classic.”
I grew up in Türkiye, somewhere between the Middle East and Europe, where you’re not sure if you’re being watched or just romanticising the surveillance. My childhood split in two: the looser, lighter early 2000s, and the slow, quiet suffocation that followed — when the air started feeling heavier, censorship crept in, and public life grew narrower for anyone who didn’t quite fit the national family photo.
My own family didn’t fit either. It was like a pair of misfits got married and created a new kind of misfit — me. I had safety, in that early-2000s way. A door I could close, a decent internet connection, and just enough privacy to Google “girls kissing” and then delete my history like it was state evidence.
My parents had gay friends but all cis men. When I came out, I asked, “No lesbians? Not even by accident?” They stared at me like I was pitching a sapphic reboot of The X-Files. So no, I didn’t grow up around lesbians. Which is probably why the book Calling the Lesbian Line hit like it did. I shipped it to my ex-girlfriend’s flat in Stuttgart. She brought it to me in her tote bag. (Lesbian cliché? Obviously. But also: DHL with feelings.)
I read it. I sat with it. I kept thinking about it. Obviously, I had to talk to the person who made me cry over a phone line I never even called. It felt like Jennifer’s Body started a Substack and accidentally wrote about me.
FILLING IN THE BLANKS, SOFTLY
Elizabeth found the logbook in an archive box at Islington Pride. She didn’t know it then, but it would shape the next five years of her life. “There was this whole other lesbian world I was totally unaware of growing up,” she said. She wrote an imagined call between herself and the women at the line—and kept going from there.
The logbook offered fragments, not stories. Most callers didn’t leave names. “I wouldn’t have been able to contact them even if I wanted to,” she said. Inspired by Saidiya Hartman—the scholar known for her method of “critical fabulation,” which uses speculative narrative to fill in the silences of the archive, especially around Black lives—, she used fiction to bridge that distance—not to reconstruct lives, but to get closer to what lesbians were living through.
One early story still stays with her: two teenage girls being bullied after a crush confession. It was the ’90s, Section 28, a UK law that banned schools and local authorities from “promoting homosexuality”, was in force. “I was quite jealous of their confidence,” she admitted. In her retelling, she gave them a hopeful ending — not to rewrite the past, but to leave space for something better. “School doesn’t last forever.”
NO ARCHIVE WITHOUT A SELF
Including her own story wasn’t just a narrative choice, it was a matter of fairness. “If I was going to be sharing the lives of other lesbians,” she said, “I should also share something of my own.” She came out at twenty-eight and felt like everyone else had already arrived. “You only saw the end of people’s stories,” she told me. She wanted to write from the middle — the messy, questioning part we rarely talk about.
The book began as her MA dissertation, but she never wanted it to stay academic. “I wanted to create an accessible book,” she said. Her references jump from Judith Butler to The Watermelon Woman, Tracy Chapman to Leslie Feinberg. “I didn’t want to discount anything in my grab-bag approach.” Humour, she added, helps subvert straight expectations. It wasn’t just a stylistic choice. It was part of the archive.
The ’90s, she said, were full of movement but tightly restricted. Queer lives couldn’t be named in schools, and lesbian mothers were seen as a threat. Still, there was momentum. The lines helped spread word about dyke marches, protests, and mutual support, especially during the AIDS crisis, when lesbians stepped in to care where the state wouldn’t. “You could go to a different lesbian event with a different woman every night,” she said. It was chaotic, a little messy, and apparently, alive.
NO DIAL TONE, STILL CALLING
Today’s queer internet still echoes those calls. “Scrolling TikTok, I see young lesbians still say they feel lonely,” she said. “They don’t know how to find others, or if their identity is allowed to change.” The medium has shifted — we’re no longer dialing, we’re broadcasting — but the need hasn’t.
The internet once felt full of promise: a democratic space for queer connection. “We broadcast our entire selves publicly online,” she said, “where we have little control over who views our content and how it is used.” But not everyone can log off. “Deleting social media might be fine for one person,” she said, “but for others it could risk cutting them off from their queer friends and chosen family.”
THE ETHICS ARE IN THE EDIT
She didn’t take the responsibility of telling others’ stories lightly. “To not tell these stories risked them being forgotten,” she said. All names were changed, and most began from just a phrase. But silence wasn’t neutral. The book also makes space for what’s uncomfortable: racism, transphobia, ableism—present in the logbook, and in the community. One reader told her a story in the book that mirrored her own—and thanked her for naming it. That moment, she said, made everything worth it.
NOT NEW. JUST LOUD NOW.
We ended with music. “We’re not a trend,” she said, when I asked about the sapphic pop moment. From Ma Rainey to Tracy Chapman to Chappell Roan, lesbian music has always been there — just not always visible. She loves the current wave, though she joked: Pink Pony Club came out too late for her wedding.
I’M STILL LISTENING
The conversation ended. But closing the tab felt weird, like ghosting a feeling mid-text. Elizabeth turned scraps into signals, fragments into vibes. No names, no callbacks, just lesbian energy suspended in time. Honestly? Kinda hot.
Maybe that’s what queer history is. Not a timeline, but a glitch. Perhaps a group chat that never really dies. Anyways, I didn’t grow up with a line. I had fanfiction, desktop folders named ‘misc’, and the vague feeling that someone out there got it. Apparently, so many did.
