When I asked for lesbian couples to include in my artwork The Lesbian Toilet, I expected a few fictional names, a smattering of real couples, and maybe someone’s aunties from Doncaster
Instead, I was inundated with fictional couples.
Over and over again, people sent names from television and film, characters who do not technically exist and yet somehow absolutely do. They were listed with nostalgia, hope and mild trauma. It struck me that for many of us, these couples were not just entertainment, they were instruction manuals, warning signs, longing, possibility, and sometimes the first time we realised we were not broken, just gay.
This matters, not only socially but artistically, because the way we consume fictional relationships shapes the way we create, and for those of us who are a lesbian artist working in lesbian art or wider LGBTQ art, the screen has been both a lighthouse and a slightly flickering torch.
Fictional couples as first teachers
For many lesbians, television and film become the first classroom on relationships, intimacy, and possibility. We learn what love might look like, how conflict might unfoldand what tenderness feels like.
For me, my first films were Bound and If These Walls Could Talk 2. Which is quite a syllabus when you think about it.
Bound was stylish, dangerous, sexy in a way that felt deliberate rather than apologetic, and it presented two women who were not tragic cautionary tales but protagonists with agency, desire, and a plan. They were complicated, morally grey, competent. It also slightly ruined me for heterosexual thrillers because frankly they rarely involve women in tank tops whispering strategy over a pile of stolen money.
If These Walls Could Talk 2, on the other hand, gave us three eras of lesbian life, from secrecy to tentative domesticity to generational friction. It showed fear, tenderness, grief, and joy. It was the first time I saw older lesbians on screen, which felt revolutionary, because up until that point I had subconsciously assumed we either died dramatically or evaporated after 35.
When those films were my first exposure, they did not just entertain me, they educated me. They showed that lesbian relationships were not a joke or a phase or a subplot to be corrected by a man entering the frame. They were the plot.
And when fictional couples are the first representation we see, they imprint on us in ways that are profound and occasionally inconvenient. We internalise dynamics, aesthetics, archetypes. We learn that we can be soft or sharp, domestic or dangerous, funny or stoic. We learn that we can exist.
Why fictional couples flooded my lesbian toilet
The reason so many people submitted fictional couples for The Lesbian Toilet is not because they are confused about reality. It is because fictional couples feel real to us. They were present when we were figuring ourselves out. They were there when we could not say anything out loud. They were sometimes safer to love than the girl in our maths class.
When you grow up with limited representation, every on screen couple feels monumental. You remember where you were when they kissed. You remember the first time you saw two women hold hands on mainstream television and it was not framed as a punchline.
For a long time, LGBTQ art and mainstream media intersected in uneasy ways. Lesbian storylines were often subtext, coded glances, lingering shots, dialogue that could technically be interpreted as “best friends” if you squinted hard enough and ignored the lighting.
So when we did get explicit couples, it felt seismic.
Fictional couples become emotional landmarks, and when I asked for names to layer across the cubicle walls of my artwork, people were essentially offering me their landmarks. They were saying, this is where I learned something about myself. This is where I felt seen.
In that sense, the toilet became less about graffiti and more about collective memory. It is lesbian art as archive, fictional names etched beside real ones, because both have shaped us.
Representation as rehearsal
One of the reasons tv and film lesbian couples matter so much is because representation acts as rehearsal.
When you watch two women navigate attraction, conflict, intimacy, domesticity, you are rehearsing in your own mind what that might feel like. You are trying on futures. You are imagining what it would be like to say, “this is my girlfriend,” without your voice wobbling like a loose shopping trolley wheel.
For many of us, these fictional relationships were rehearsal before reality.
They modelled how to flirt, how to argue, how to apologise, how to leave, how to stay. Not always perfectly, obviously, because television drama requires at least one catastrophic misunderstanding per season, but the framework was there.
This is particularly powerful when real life examples are scarce. If you do not see lesbian couples in your family, your neighbourhood, your school curriculum, then television becomes your accidental mentor.
It also becomes a place where you can witness possibilities across generations. Older couples. Couples with children. Couples who are messy and imperfect but still together. Couples who break up and survive it. That breadth matters.
And when those images are absent, the absence speaks just as loudly.
Lesbian art and the influence of the screen
As a lesbian artist, it would be dishonest to pretend that film and television have not shaped my visual language.
The screen has often been ahead of galleries in terms of visibility. While LGBTQ art has existed for centuries, it has frequently been coded, hidden, or dismissed. Television, especially in the last few decades, has had the power to normalise lesbian couples in living rooms across the country, which is both radical and mildly surreal.
When I created The Lesbian Toilet, I was not consciously thinking about specific couples from tv and film, but the emotional weight people attached to fictional names made me realise that the artwork was in conversation with those narratives.
The cubicle walls are layered with declarations, hearts, dates, inside jokes. That layering mirrors the way media has layered our understanding of ourselves. Fictional couples are written into our personal histories. They sit beside our first crushes, our first heartbreaks, our first Pride.
Lesbian art does not exist in a vacuum. It is porous. It absorbs what culture gives us and reshapes it. If television offers us complexity, joy, humour, ordinariness, then we carry that into our work. If it offers us tragedy as the default, we may find ourselves pushing back against it.
From subtext to centre stage
There was a time when lesbian relationships were relegated to subtext, whispered in code, suggested but never confirmed. This had its own kind of tension, a secret language that some viewers recognised and others missed entirely.
But subtext is exhausting.
When couples moved from the margins to the centre of the story, it altered the cultural landscape. It told audiences that lesbian relationships were not just decorative or provocative, they were narrative drivers.
This shift has ripple effects beyond the screen. When young viewers see couples treated with seriousness, humour, and depth, it validates their own feelings. It makes it easier to imagine a future that is not framed as a problem to be solved.
And for those of us creating LGBTQ art, that validation expands what feels possible. We can depict domestic bliss without irony. We can depict conflict without implying doom. We can show two women doing the washing up and make it meaningful rather than tragic.
Representation does not solve everything, obviously, but it does widen the lens.
Humour as resistance
One thing that fictional lesbian couples have increasingly offered is humour. Not humour at our expense, but humour from within.
There is something deeply healing about watching two women banter, flirt awkwardly, negotiate whose turn it is to cook, without the joke being that they are lesbians. The joke can simply be that they are human.
Humour has always been a tool in lesbian art, a way of resisting erasure and caricature. When tv and film reflect that humour back to us, it creates a loop of recognition.
My own work leans into dry, slightly strange humour because that is how I process things. When people submitted fictional couples for the toilet artwork, there was often a wink in it, a shared understanding. We all remember that scene. We all collectively gasped. We all rewound it, probably.
That shared humour is community.
Learning what not to accept
It would be dishonest to pretend that all representation has been positive. For years, lesbian couples were disproportionately subjected to tragic endings, abrupt breakups, or storylines that suggested happiness was temporary at best.
Those patterns also teach us something, though perhaps not what writers intended. They teach us to be wary. They teach us to critique. They teach us to demand better.
In that sense, fictional couples do not just model relationships, they model industry bias. They reveal whose stories are considered expendable.
For viewers, especially young ones, repeated tragic narratives can shape expectations. If every lesbian couple you see ends in disaster, you may internalise the idea that disaster is inevitable.
This is why joyful, stable representation matters. Not because it needs to be saccharine, but because it needs to be varied. Straight couples get every possible genre, from romcom to thriller to mundane domestic drama. Lesbian couples deserve the same breadth.
Visibility and the future of lesbian art
We are in a moment where representation is broader than it was when I first watched Bound on what I suspect was a slightly dodgy VHS tape. There are more shows, more films, more platforms. There is more space for nuance.
That does not mean the work is done. Representation still fluctuates with trends and budgets and executive decisions made in rooms we are not in. But the baseline has shifted.
For emerging LGBTQ artisit voices, seeing complex lesbian couples on screen can be catalytic. It can affirm that our stories are not niche, that they deserve scale, funding, distribution.
It is a loop.
Why this matters beyond nostalgia
It would be easy to frame our attachment to fictional couples as nostalgia, as sentimental over investment in characters who were written by strangers. But that framing ignores the structural context in which many of us grew up.
If you are starved of representation, crumbs feel like a feast.
Now that there is more variety, the stakes are different but still significant. Young viewers today may have access to more lesbian couples on screen than ever before, but they are still absorbing messages about whose love is centred, whose is sidelined, whose is monetised.
As audiences, we are more critical. As creators, we are more ambitious.
When I asked for names for the artwork and fictional couples were mentioned, it was not because real relationships are less important. It was because fictional couples were often the bridge to real ones. They were the proof of concept.
They told us that this kind of love exists, that it can be complex, messy, passionate, ordinary.
So why do tv and film lesbian couples matter?
They matter because for many of us they were first.
They were first kisses we saw that felt like ours. First arguments that mirrored our own. First glimpses of a future that did not involve pretending.
They matter because they taught us vocabulary when we had none. Because they modelled tenderness and conflict. Because they sometimes got it wrong and taught us what we would not accept.
They matter because they expand the field in which lesbian art and LGBTQ art can grow. They make it easier for a lesbian artist to create work that is not defensive or apologetic, but expansive and playful.
They matter because when I asked for names to cover a toilet cubicle in fictional graffiti, people responded with characters who had held their hands through adolescence, through coming out, through heartbreak.
That is not trivial. That is cultural architecture.
In the meantime, we will keep watching, keep critiquing, keep creating. We will keep drawing our names and theirs on every available surface. We will keep expanding the archive.
Because representation is not just about being seen, it is about learning how to see yourself.
And sometimes that starts with two women on a screen, in a scene you replay more times than you would ever publicly admit, quietly realising that the future might include you after all.