Amy

Amy, 29 years old, identifies as lesbian female. In a relationship of 6 years with her partner who identifies as a lesbian female.

This photo is mainly about the normality of it that I wanted to get. It’s just a normality in terms of there is nothing completely wild or particularly interesting about it. It is just a boring everyday relationship between two people who are in a relationship and love each other and have a little dog and just live this pretty chilled life. When you take that out of the house, it becomes some kind of odd dirty little secret, because you don’t want uninvited attention. And why does my and my partner’s gender suddenly mean that people feel that they’ve got this right or ability to comment on it, when it wouldn’t even enter their mind to comment on it, if it was a straight couple? I think that’s kind of the thing I wanted to highlight; same-sex relationships are not all raging, you know, massive like stereotypes, that we’re constantly on the go or that I’ve constantly got eight gay people constantly in my house and that’s how we live, you know. A lot of people do have their own families, and families they make in the communities, and the vast majority of people are really boring in a good way. It doesn’t mean anything different to be in a same-sex relationship. It can be just as boring as your mom and dad’s! Just taking those two people in the picture, putting them outside doesn’t change who those two people are, but the perception on them does change and that’s uncomfortable. It becomes a spectacle, it becomes something to look at.  

I really do look forward to a point where it’s common enough that people stop batting their eyes, and I kind of want to be part of that and have aspirations to be someone who doesn’t give a crap, you know. But we still have got some time to go, but, yeah, definitely getting better.