Maeve Marsden is a writer and performer best known for the award-winning 2016 cabaret show Lady Sings It Better. The 39-year-old opens up about growing up with two mothers, her coming out story and why marriage isn’t meaningful to her.

I was born in England to two lesbian mothers, Louise and Teresa, who met while working at a women’s refuge in London in 1977. They had three children together via sperm donors and migrated to Australia in 1988.

I have a brother three years older than me and a sister three years younger.

One of my grandfathers, Guy Marsden, passed away when I was one, and I never met the other – he wasn’t a good person. Guy, Louise’s father, was very caring and loving. Louise came out to her parents via a letter and his response was very beautiful and loving.

My mothers weren’t separatists and didn’t exclude men from our lives, but men weren’t a big feature growing up, either. In Australia, we lived in a granny flat at the back of my Uncle Jim’s house. It was Louise’s brother, John Marsden, a well-known gay lawyer, who gave her the money to buy a home in Leichhardt, Sydney, so we could be closer to our community.

John would always host a big Christmas at his house. He was an older gay man without kids of his own, and he’d buy hordes of gifts for all the children. He’d had a challenging life, attending Catholic schools and facing discrimination in the 1970s and ’80s for being gay. He was larger than life and passed away in 2006.

My brother and I had a funny dynamic; while he was older, I often spoke for him. He was supportive and always looked out for me. He would do the make-up on me and my friends when we went to Rocky Horror Picture Show screenings every Friday night.

I kissed six girls in one night when I was around 14. We all smoked weed and I came out to them. We practised on each other in a charming and sweet way. It was wholesome and supportive and I felt safe and understood.

My celebrity crushes growing up were actresses Lucy Lawless from Xena: Warrior Princess and Gillian Anderson, both common lesbian coming-of-age crushes. If you’d told teenage me that I would one day be in a rehearsal room with an actress who was in Xena, Danielle Cormack, I would have been beside myself.