Hello and welcome to Series 2 of Out with Susie Ruffle.

I hope you're all doing well and I am so looking forward to sharing this new

series with you.

I've spent the last couple of months squirreling away creating it

and I have a collection of wonderful

interviews with some incredible people from the LGBT QI community and I want to thank you

for listening and for being part of it. I've been genuinely blown away by the amount of emails,

tweets and gorgeous comments and ratings I've received on iTunes. I'm so

delighted this little show created in a cupboard in my flat during a worldwide pandemic has been so important to so many of you.

From people within the queer community and our allies, thank you so much.

Now usually at the top of the show I share some listener stories. However, lots of you have

asked me if I'll share my story. Well, you're all very nosy, but I am willing to do it.

So I guess I'll start when I realize that I felt different. I always felt like an outsider,

sometimes without even knowing it. It was in a French class in year eight,

when I realized that I'd been staring for a girl for almost the entire lesson

that I realized I might not be straight.

The following years of me wrestling with these feelings

brought me a lot of sadness and also a lot of shame.

I was so desperate to be like my friends and when I went to college I met a girl like me and we

embarked on a secret romance. We'd often, I'm sure you can hear me smiling,

we'd often get the train to Brighton just so we could hold hands where no one knew us.

But later that year I was accepted into drama school in London and I decided in my teenage mind that I couldn't be an actress and be a lesbian. So I decided to be straight. I even got a boyfriend and moved in with him for a while but I could never

...