ABSTRACT
Tamsin spent the early years of her working life as a schoolteacher, a bookshop manager, an arts administrator, a vision mixer in an artists’ TV studio, and a freelance illustrator/cartoonist. Oh, and as an “enthusiastic” heterosexual. It wasn’t until her late thirties that she fell in love with a woman and decided that a lesbian life suited her much better. At around the same time, prompted by the ignorant and inhumane response in Britain to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, she signed up for an MSc in gender and social policy and joined Bristol Polytechnic (later to become the University of the West of England) as a researcher on an AIDS education project. She was never sure which was more traumatic – becoming a lesbian or becoming a social scientist! Almost two decades and more than ten books later, she became the UK’s first Professor of Human Sexuality, an honorary member of the Gay and Lesbian Association of Doctors and Dentists, and became internationally known for her work on the political and personal aspects of lesbian identity and sexuality, the social and cultural issues surrounding AIDS, and the complex relationship between sexual behaviours, identities, and wellbeing. She died from an aneurysm in 2006.
