Her husband reacted surprisingly well too, suggesting that they enrol in therapy to help both of them exit their long-standing relationship. I took this as my cue to make a commitment and said I would move to the suburbs to be with her and her three children, once her husband had moved out. To know that I could finally come clean to my worrisome friends felt liberating beyond belief. I didn’t care about sacrificing my youth to move to outer London with a swarm of forty-somethings. All I wanted was to be with her full-time, and for it to be out in the open that we were together. Since that first cruise in 1990, a four-night stay in the Bahamas, Olivia has established itself as one of the leaders in the LGBTQ+ travel industry. The company offers a range of all-inclusive vacations, from cruises carrying as many as 1,400 guests to small riverboats, alongside resorts and safaris. The entire ship or resort is hired out for each trip, a strategy intended to ensure guests feel free to be themselves. “The most important thing Olivia does is create an environment where women come and feel stronger when they leave,” says Judy Dlugacz, president of Olivia Travel, who’s been there since the beginning. Last year, Olivia Travel ran more than 30 trips, including to a resort on Providenciales, in the Turks and Caicos archipelago, and from Berlin to Budapest on a riverboat cruise.

straight or heterosexual (89.4% of the population aged 16 years and above in both England and Wales) The remaining 3.6 million people aged 16 years and over (7.5%) did not answer the question on sexual orientation. We are responsible for carrying out the census in England and Wales, but will also release outputs for the UK in partnership with the Welsh Government, the National Records of Scotland (NRS) and the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA). The census in Northern Ireland was also conducted on 21 March 2021, whereas Scotland’s census was moved to 20 March 2022. All UK census offices are working closely together to understand how this difference in reference dates will affect UK-wide population and housing statistics, in terms of both timing and scope. Response rate He lived in Cheyne Walk, and would pass by the Gateways to get to the King’s Road. “And my mum would be outside, taking deliveries, doing the laundry or whatever, and she said that he used to stop and talk quite often.I said: ‘What?’ And she said: ‘Lesbians! You know, women with women.’ So I was, like: ‘Really? Really?’” We have not provided glossary entries for individual sexual orientation categories. This is because individual respondents may have differing perspectives on the exact meaning. Usual resident A summary by Welsh Government of Census 2021 data about sexual orientation and gender identity in Wales. The overall number of people in England and Wales who identified with an LGB+ orientation was therefore 1.5 million (3.2% of the population aged 16 years and over). Finding a liner to host hundreds of lesbians was another challenge. “No one wanted to charter a ship to us,” she says. One agreed, only to pull out. In the end, Dlugacz found a Greek family cruise line. She recalls a heartwarming exchange with the captain when he – to reassure her – asked her where Sappho was from, the ancient poet having written of her love for women. “I hesitated,” says Dlugacz, “and he said, ‘The isle of Lesbos [from where the word “lesbian” is derived], and that is where I am from. So there will be no problems on this ship!’” In February 1990, the first Olivia cruise set sail.

Experimental Statistics on sexual orientation in the UK in 2020, using data from the Annual Population Survey. Dlugacz wrote to the Olivia Records mailing list. She advertised a four-night cruise to the Bahamas and needed six hundred women to do it. It sold out. When she offered a second cruise, the same thing happened. “There was so much discrimination against women, and lesbians in particular, that we wanted women to feel free to come out and be themselves,” says Dlugacz. Sitting in meetings with her at the prominent literary agency where we both worked left me feeling weak. Usually never short of things to say, in her presence, I’d marvel at her ability to drain all quips from my mind, leaving my mouth bone-dry. But I knew the cliché and I refused to succumb to the stereotype of being the young, ambitious 25-year-old who screws the boss. Neatly, it was a story in this newspaper about The Killing of Sister George and the club that persuaded Gina’s mother to explain. Olivia Travel has built up a loyal customer base, particularly among professional women aged 30 and older. Photograph: Courtesy of Olivia TravelLives and properties are endangered by the spark of the action of the Youth in James Town and the President, Prof. Atta-Mills is once again called upon to show clear-eyed and decisive leadership to spare the lives and properties of both Youth across the nation and the LGBT community. Since the gays and lesbians are known medically to be imbalanced in the composition of the brain chemicals, Psychotherapy centres should be established in strategic areas to help practitioners. Interactive map tool that visualises Census 2021 data on different topics down to a local authority area and neighbourhood level. Instead, at the first of those 15th anniversary concerts, in Seattle, Dlugacz marveled at the energy of the 2,000-strong crowd of women. “I’m going: ‘How can I stop doing this?’” she recalls. After the show, a woman came up to her and suggested doing a concert on the bay. It was this conversation that sparked Dlugacz’s idea to transform the Olivia brand into a travel company. Such joyful moments very nearly didn’t happen. In the late 80s, Dlugacz was on the cusp of shutting down Olivia Records, the California-based independent label she’d co-founded with a collective of nine other radical lesbians, which boldly celebrated lesbian relationships at a time when mothers risked losing custody of their children by coming out. As Cris Williamson, a founding member who still performs with Olivia, remembers, at the time “lesbians were losing their jobs, their children, their incomes”.