Izabella Scott’s new non-fiction book The Bed Trick: Sex and Deception on Trial (2026) tells the story of a criminal case in which a student was convicted of “rape by deception” after she falsely claimed to be a man named Kye Fortune. Scott speaks to Elizabeth Lovatt, whose book Thank You for Calling the Lesbian Line: A Hidden History of Queer Women (2025) combines memoir, history and fiction in an exploration of a volunteer‑run phone service where women called in search of both information and community. Although the London Friend’s Lesbian Line operated under Section 28 during the 1980s and 1990s and the Kye Fortune trial ended in 2017, both books show how queerness remains contested and denied – and that, despite Barclays-sponsored Pride events, it remains a risky place to be.

IZABELLA SCOTT Perhaps we could start with the risks of being in the closet, and the equal risks of being out – a double bind that structures so many queer lives, past and present. In my book, The Bed Trick: Sex and Deception on Trial, I follow a UK criminal trial and retrial where the closet sits at the centre. In 2015, Gayle Newland, a creative writing student, was convicted of “rape by deception” after her best friend, known as Miss X, said she had been deceived into a relationship with an invented man, Kye Fortune, who turned out to be Newland. But Newland told a different story. She claimed they were secret lesbians, lovers in the closet; here, Miss X’s accusation, and indeed the whole trial, was explained as a coming‑out story gone horribly wrong. I first encountered the case in 2017, when Newland was convicted for the second time. The verdicts surprised me. As a queer person, I was reading through my own experience, and it surprised me that Newland’s account of the closet – so familiar to me, so plausible – was the one the court rejected. I requested the trial transcripts, thousands of pages of court documents available under the principle of “open justice”, which became the primary source material for my book. Here, Newland’s years of being in the closet were on trial. In court, Newland described the secrecy and internalised homophobia; even after she and Miss X fell in love at university, they hid their relationship, inventing Kye Fortune as a cover story, and continuing to pass as straight friends. One of the prosecution’s most unsettling claims during the trial is that queer secrecy no longer makes sense in the enlightened 21st century: with the repeal of Section 28 [the legislation that banned open discussion of homosexuality in schools between 1988 and 2003], the Civil Partnership Act of 2004, Pride marches and gay bars, we are told the bad old days are behind us. “It is not as if we are looking back twenty, thirty or forty years,” the barrister says. Newland’s shame is no longer plausible, he argues; the closet is obsolete. Your book, Thank You for Calling the Lesbian Line, moves between your own coming out in the 2010s and the 1990s archives of the Lesbian Line. Drawing on what you found in those log books, what did the different voices teach you about the closet – the risks and safety of staying in, and the different risks and possibilities of coming out, then and now?

ELIZABETH LOVATT  The story of Newland and Miss X in your book, while completely new to me, also felt familiar in parts from the call logs I’d read from the 1990s Lesbian Line, which formed the primary document for my research. In the logbook, there are calls from all sorts of women asking for advice about coming out: everyone from pre-teens to married women, or calls seeking a safe place to stay after coming out and being thrown out of their homes. It’s easy to think such attitudes are a thing of the past but, as your book shows, shame and fear over disclosing one’s sexuality persist to this day, and many people still have a real risk of rejection, misunderstanding and harm. In my book, I trace some of the history of coming out, and the political role it played in the early Gay Liberation Movement as queer people sought greater visibility in public life, as well as equality and legal recognition. Coming out was a politically radical act – and I would argue still is – but especially during a time where you could lose your job, housing and friends or even children by simply declaring that you were gay. For the women who rang the Lesbian Line, even into the 1990s, that fear of coming out was alive, and especially so in the wake of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and Section 28. Young people were effectively cut off from queer life by their schools, libraries and families. Teachers could lose their jobs for discussing their sexuality at school. I know that we [the speakers] both grew up under its shadow. This is where the Lesbian Line could help. For many lesbians, just calling up to say, “I think I might be a lesbian,” was a hugely courageous act. Volunteers I interviewed said that speaking to another lesbian could be completely life-changing for someone. It was impossible for me not to read your book and wonder what would have happened if Newland had been able to call a helpline to talk to someone about what she was going through. The risk of coming out exists because of an assumed and enforced “norm” and helplines, like the Lesbian Line or Switchboard, offer not just advice but, crucially, connection. They are a way for queer people to know they are not alone in a world that others them. I would love to ask you about your process of writing The Bed Trick and your own acts of disclosure in this book. In my book, I shift between memoir, history writing and fiction to tell the stories of the women who called and volunteered on the Lesbian Line. I combined form and genre in part because I wanted to protect the anonymity of the callers. I also pulled from my own diary, kept when I was questioning my sexuality. I saw this as a kind of fair exchange – sharing my lesbian story alongside the stories of other lesbians from history. I wondered how you approached writing both the legal complexities of the book but also how we, as queer writers, have perhaps a harder time than most, of separating ourselves from our subjects? I think you approach both sides of this difficult case with a lot of grace, understanding and nuance, while also making clear your own personal stakes in their story.

Izabella Scott is a writer, editor and researcher. She was formerly co-editor of The White Review and co-author of Pleasure Gardens: Blackouts and the Logic of Crisis in Kashmir (2024) with Skye Arundhati Thomas.

Elizabeth Lovatt is a writer of fiction and creative nonfiction. Her debut book is Thank You For Calling the Lesbian Line (2025).

When it came to writing my book – this very lesbian story of setting up a Lesbian Line, by lesbians, for lesbians – I thought, who else but a lesbian could tell it?

IS Your notion of “fair exchange” really speaks to me. When I began researching The Bed Trick, my own queerness was the first point of contact with the case and with the history of queer criminalisation. What struck me was how the court struggled to read queer life: the uneven use of the charge of “rape by deception”, the pressure on Newland to narrate herself legibly and the way her “messy” account of sexuality was taken as evidence against her, rather than as evidence of how hard it is to tell such a story in hostile spaces like police stations and courtrooms. I thought of the scholar José Esteban Muñoz’s point that “queerness has an especially vexed relationship to evidence”; queer lives rarely fit neatly into the kinds of facts the law is prepared to hear. At the same time, I felt an affinity with Miss X. Rape complainants are routinely disbelieved. I have previously been a complainant myself, so I felt I knew the gravity of walking into a police station alone to file a report. I also felt conscious of the ethical dilemma of writing about real lives and the question of how to approach a criminal trial, which essentially becomes true crime when taken as the subject of a book. I was thinking about how to cover the trials without reproducing either the sensationalism of earlier coverage or the violence of the process itself. Memoir is not my natural starting point, but in this context it felt necessary to disclose my own stakes, and to acknowledge that any interpretation I offer is shaped by my own experiences, desires and blind spots. In terms of form, I tried to develop what might be called a “counternarrative mode”. The Bed Trick pays close attention to the machinery of the trial – the charging decision, the arguments from the Crown, the failures of the defence – while also moving in and out of both Newland’s and Miss X’s perspectives, drawing on the transcripts, which included a log of text messages and other records. The records are accusatory and incomplete, shaped by rules of evidence, so I worked both with and against them: reading them closely, imagining what sits just off the page, but always returning to the fact that these are real people whose lives and futures remain entangled with current law. Your own book does something parallel but distinct: you write into the Lesbian Line logbooks, conjuring scenes and voices from fragmentary notes. I would love to hear more about how you navigated speaking for the anonymous callers, including what the archive omits or mishandles – such as what volunteers overlooked, or were unable to hear. How did you decide where to draw the line between protection, projection and solidarity?

To not share the truth of what I found would be an erasure of our history, an erasure of the messy way that progress and change are made

EL I always held onto the idea of truth over reality, in that I would tell the true stories of the lives of the women – or at least the snippets I could see – who rang the Lesbian Line, but not their real stories. I used fiction to bridge the gap between what I knew from the logbooks, my research and interviews, and then combined it with what I could never know because that real call is lost to time. Using fiction in this way is not something new, I was leaning on others who have done this kind of work before me: writers like Audre Lorde, whose biomythography Zami: A New Spelling of My Name plays with the concept of rewriting a life story, as well as work by the scholar Saidiya Hartman, who operates within a framework that she describes as “critical fabulation” to tell “the story from inside the circle” of the lives of Black and queer people “lost” in archival and official records. So when it came to writing my book – this very lesbian story of setting up a Lesbian Line, by lesbians, for lesbians – I thought, who else but a lesbian could tell it? And so, I did. The rest was straightforward, I would simply be honest about what I found in the log books: the transphobia, the biphobia, the racism, the frustration of the volunteers at times – I was as honest about that as I was about all the brilliant parts. The inability, at times, to really listen to the needs of the callers is part of the story of the Lesbian Line. There is a moment in my book where one volunteer simply refuses to hear from a South Asian caller that the lesbian community is exclusionary to lesbians of colour. The volunteer effectively says, “That’s not my experience, so it can’t be true.” That was 30 years ago, but when I spoke to young South Asian lesbians as part of my research, they said the exact same thing to me.  It felt important to highlight what has changed, and what we still have to work on as a community. But writing the book, I couldn’t help but think of a line from Carmen Maria Machado’s In The Dream House, where she says of her abusive ex-partner, “For fuck’s sake, stop making us look bad.” There is a sense, and maybe you felt this too, that in writing about issues in our community, we put ourselves at risk of exposure. But for me, to not share the truth of what I found would be an erasure of our history, and an erasure of the messy way that progress and change are made. It was a risk I was willing to take.

IS That worries me too: what it means, as queer people, to tell these “bad” stories about queer life. In The Bed Trick, I do exactly this: putting the spotlight back on a “bad” story about closeted friends who had queer sex, willingly or deceptively, and end up in a criminal court. Something has gone terribly wrong, a profound misreading of each other that is so intense that 12 strangers from the outside are asked to decide on the facts. But for me, this story is already public – the trials made it so. It is fixed in legal records and news headlines: the women have been judged in ways that felt ultimately homophobic. The legal stories and media narratives were so far out of kilter with the story I discovered in the transcripts and my own experience of queer life. Writing the book is an attempt to offer another perspective, a queer perspective that takes seriously the mess, the doubt, the parts that do not fit easily into law. Perhaps this is also the hope: that these “bad” stories, told differently, might open up room for queer lives to be seen and understood on their own terms. .