Angela C. Wild
Angela C. Wild is a political artist, lesbian feminist activist and writer. Her work focuses on promoting lesbian visibility and culture, defending women-only spaces, and challenging compulsory heterosexuality. She is a former founding member of Get The L Out and the author of Lesbians at Ground Zero — the first research on the ‘cotton ceiling’. She is the creator of Wild Womyn Workshop, a shop for radical feminist activists. She lives and works in Wales.
She is a committed direct-action activist and has co-organised some of the most visible campaigns for lesbian rights in recent decades.
Her art, often collective or co-operative in nature, spans conceptual work, illustration, intervention and installation, reclaiming space for women in the public, political and symbolic sphere. Frequently invoking witches and goddesses as alternative archetypes of female power, her work offers counter-narratives to patriarchal representations of women, reclaiming women’s history, imagery and imagination. Her practice embraces the radical power of irreverence toward oppressors, encouraging women to reassert the power of naming and to refuse being defined or silenced by men.
Her writing appears in the anthologies Spinning and Weaving: Radical Feminism for the 21st Century and OutSisters, InSisters, Lesben, and in the magazines Screech and Rain & Thunder. Her visual work has featured in the Banner Culture exhibition and book by the British Textile Biennale and is archived at the Archives Recherche Culture Lesbiennes in Paris.
Edited by Angela C. Wild
What if heterosexuality wasn’t innate, but enforced and expected?
Can sexuality change?
Can any woman be a lesbian?
Bringing together women across cultures and generations – from lifelong lesbians exploring their experiences through a lesbian feminist lens, to women consciously leaving heterosexuality behind to embrace lesbianism – I Wish I Was a Lesbian addresses those questions and more. Once understood as the cornerstone of patriarchal control of women, any current political analysis of heterosexuality is now buried under an avalanche of essentialist ideas that serve to invisibilise its political nature and de-radicalise feminism. From autobiographical and theoretical essays to poetry and artworks, I Wish I Was a Lesbian defies taboo and silencing and reopens the conversation. It challenges the notion that heterosexuality is the natural and inevitable fate of most women.
There are many forces keeping women in heterosexual relationships. The latest is to accuse lesbians who have had previous relations with men of being ‘not real lesbians’, ‘pretenbians’ or ‘bisexuals’. But the idea that lesbians are ‘born that way’ is not based in either reality or science. There are no lesbian genes or lesbian brains. For women currently rejecting men and saying they wished they were lesbians but don’t know how to get there, this book offers a vital tool for political reflection and consciousness raising. It invites women everywhere to connect the personal with the political and to ask themselves the most radical question of all: “What is heterosexuality – and do I really want to be part of it?”
5 MAY 2026 | ISBN 9781922964304 | Paperback | 152mm x 229mm