Lesbian Sleepover & Slumber Party Handbook: Games Girls Play

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Monday, fun day! The most popular day of the week for 18-to-34 year olds to watch porn is Monday. I believe—through sheer, un-researched and unfounded speculation—that this is because you have the worst sex of your life between the ages of 18 and 34, and that most of that bad sex happens on the weekend. So come Monday, come. Like you know you need to. It’s basic self-care. When we boarded, Dana introduced me to the adorable boomer-millennial pair in charge of Olivia’s Solos Program, which caters to women (single or partnered) who decide to go on trips alone. I got my own Solos dog tag and a pink Olivia bracelet to signify my newbie status. I come from a queer universe where traditional butch/femme identities seem old-school and retrograde, second-wavey, practically heteropatriarchal. There’s a lot wrong with that perspective — for one thing, a lot of the modern queers who shit on butch/femme dynamics aren’t from the working class, where those identities were born — but it’s one I still sympathize with, especially as someone who’d previously been hesitant to claim femme identity as my own. But there were, in fact, a number of stereotype-fulfilling boomer TERFs on board the cruise — and plenty of lesbians whose policing of gender norms took more banal forms. The woman who bought me a drink after I sang Kelly Clarkson at karaoke — a petite therapist from California with a prim gray bob — ended up being one of them.

I was hesitant for a couple reasons. The first was that they’d slept with someone else, just once, when they were on a solo vacation, before we’d agreed to any sort of open-relationship terms; I felt like they’d forced my hand. (It’s hard for me even now to say they cheated on me, though that’s precisely what they did.) The second reason was that I’d watched some of my friends in long-term relationships experiment with nonmonogamy, only for the experiment to end in disaster: Somebody, inevitably, fell for somebody else. I would write in my journal, the night before leaving: “There’s something so deliriously pleasurable in the idea of trusting myself enough to know exactly what I want.”The wet sounds I'm producing makes a bit of shame fill my body as I realize that it hasn't been more than four minutes and I'm acting like a bitch in heat.

That’s absolutely true—and you can add “straight and cisgender” to “white” and apply this idea to queer representation in books as well. Most definitely, yes. As I said, I only really saw lesbians on screen for the first time when I was 14 or 15 - despite my first same-sex crush being when I was eight years old. That meant six years of feeling completely alone. I thought I was the only person in the whole world feeling like that, and also, that what I was feeling was wrong, because it did not fit in with the norm. There were no points of reference for me to identify with. My daughter is 14, and she has a very close friends, also 14, who is often at ours for sleepovers and my daughter goes to theirs too. I sort of know her family, we're not close or anything but they seem like normal good people and their daughter is a nice, well mannered girl.After my partner came out as nonbinary a couple years ago, I felt even more confused and guilty about my conflicting desires to both lean into my own womanhood and flee from it. I knew my partner’s identity was its own independent, beautiful thing, something that was entirely their own. But I still wondered — as people around me whom I loved began to move away from the genders they’d been assigned — what I should be doing, if anything, about mine. When my partner jokingly warned me, before I left for the cruise, not to fall in love with a hot older butch — seriously, we joked about this — I thought, Fat chance. Not only because I had no intention of falling in love with anyone else, but because I thought hooking up with hot older butches would remain the stuff of my fantasies. We’re both confident in our sexuality. There was never going to be any drama afterward of us worrying what our hookup meant and if we’re lesbians now or whatever. Me and my friend are both pretty confident in our sexuality and how fluid it is. For others, this kind of experience might be pretty intense and confusing, but not for us. The day it was voted in was the best day of my life. I don’t think there will ever be a day like it again. The city was euphoric: strangers were hugging each other and people were dancing in the streets. I don’t think I saw one unhappy face the entire day. Leaning against the front of her stand with my arm rested in front of me I smartly reply, "Aw, come on Gi Gi! You know I would never leave you hanging like that!" She raises an eyebrow in skepticism, "Not for long at least," I finish a little sheepishly.