Kinky lesbians in the sauna

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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.” I was the one who seemed to stress this rule the most. I warned my partner about it all the time: Don’t leave me. But they were confident that they’d always love only me; with other people, they assured me, it would only ever just be sex. Lynette and I had only just met, but in the emotionally intense bizarro world of the cruise, where relationships of all types seemed to develop at warp speed and I was feeling enough emotion for 10 lesbians combined, I liked Lynette very, very much. A lot of it was, obviously, physical, chemical. But there were other things, too, that were harder to explain to other people or to myself. When the club closed, Gina was very sad but knew that she couldn’t take it over by herself. The documentary Gateways Grind is a way of restoring its history, which is enmeshed with her own, and to see her parents again. Even if your sense of direction is as hopeless as mine, it is not hard, as I discovered, to find Kotiharjun, Helsinki’s oldest and only remaining public traditional wood-fired sauna. Google Maps said I could go to the Helsinki University Metro station and take the M1 towards Vuosaari; get off at the Sörnäinen station in the bohemian Kallio area; and then walk a few minutes to reach my destination. I’m always disoriented when I get out of any underground station and almost invariably start walking in the wrong direction. This time too I bumbled along, trying to find Harjutorinkatu, the street on which the sauna is located.

When I kissed Lynette goodbye at our appropriately miserable reentry to the real world — Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan — I still wasn’t exactly sure what the hell I was supposed to do next. Neatly, it was a story in this newspaper about The Killing of Sister George and the club that persuaded Gina’s mother to explain. It was only after a few days that we discovered what was going on—we were being called the lesbian couple. Someone in the hostel might have seen us stepping out of the bathroom.

I would tell my therapist everything in one fell swoop, and I’d be so relieved and grateful when she seemed genuinely happy for me. For women who want a different brand of "witty chat" Skirt Club offers a monthly women-only sex party with speakers and performers, as well as a chance to network. "Sex is certainly on the menu but it's not the sole focus," says founder Genevieve LeJeune. Anna, who is "straight but bi-curious" had her first experience with a woman at Skirt Club. She says, "I tend to find lesbian places too threatening — and at parties where men are there, being with a women feels like you're performing for guys." At Skirt Club, Anna played Spin the Bottle, did the Guided Touch Tour ("you wiggle and say hello with your bum") then went into the "playrooms." She says, "I was a bit overwhelmed but I gave it a go and never wanted to leave. For days after, I craved women's bodies. I’d always liked men's hard bodies, but this made me appreciate women!"

The first time I thought that Olivia might actually stand a chance at survival was Sunday, the first full day of the cruise, when I attended the welcome mixer for “Generation O,” which is how Olivia refers to its precious few millennial and Generation X clientele. As I walked around the ship, which holds over 2,000 passengers, it was already clear that the average woman here was a couple decades older than me. But it turned out that there were a few other twenty- and thirtysomethings who’d managed to find their way to Olivia.It’s been almost twenty years since I last saw her. But I still have the sketch I made—a shy girl with fierce eyes that dared people to do the unthinkable. It is presented by Sandi Toksvig, who recalls her own visits to the club, and has interviews with former members. It is sharp, snappy, sassy and sexy – oh, and of course, very sapphic, too. The Gateways Grind, we learn, was a particularly popular dance there where tightly meshed groin action became literally orgasmic. Bonding is built into an Olivia trip, which, I realized soon enough, is basically like grown-up lesbian camp. “It’s funny, because on a normal cruise, you’re trying to spend as much time as you can away from other people,” Jamie would later put it. “But we’re all here precisely because we want to be around everybody else.”

I would tell my partner that I cared about them deeply, and the past five years were among the best of my life. I wouldn’t trade them for anything. But I also felt like we had come to a crossroads, and we weren’t facing the same futures. I had tried so hard to see myself in their dreams, but now I was having dreams of my own. And I didn’t think I saw a future, even a part-time one, in Montana. At dinner, we wondered why we couldn’t have both: explicitly lesbian spaces that also explicitly love, and welcome, trans and gender-nonconforming people. Our identities shouldn’t be opposed, but in communion with each other: butch and femme, trans and cis, lesbian and queer. Besides being a genuinely considerate movie with some thoughtful meditations on religion and culture, it has the added thrill of having super erotic sex scenes, made possible because: I planned to meet Dana in the ship lobby that morning so that we could wander around for a while before the event. When we set off into town together, she gently informed me that my whatever-it-was with Lynette had not gone unnoticed by the staff, who’d encouraged Dana to encourage me to spend more time speaking with other people and reporting on the ship’s endless entertainment options. I just don’t understand some of these women,” she said, looking around the room at the joyful group of dancing lesbians. “Why do they insist on making themselves so ugly? I’ve never gotten the whole butch thing.”

Clubs

Some people will walk around the maze waiting for Leonardo DiCaprio or Matt Bomer to show up. They may eventually manage their expectations and settle for something else. Others will continue their quest for the unobtainable. But as we’ve already established, sometimes the anticipation of what you might find is the most fun part. That might be why some seem so reticent to do anything. Also, some people like to watch and not participate. Elton John insists that that’s how he survived the 80s. Sauna etiquette is not complicated. To start with, there’s usually gender segregation unless it’s a private family sauna. Then, there’s the nudity. Squeamish foreigners sometimes wear bathing suits to the sauna but that is considered an oddity. And there’s the matter of löyly. Normally, in a public sauna, those sitting at the topmost benches are the ones in charge of splashing water on the stove. It’s hottest up there so they decide when to make it hotter. We didn’t even know how we became friends, let alone best friends. Attending anatomy classes together and spending long hours over big fat books inside an eerie library decorated with skeletons brings people closer. It helped that we both came from a small town and were staying in the same hostel. One day I told her how much I love drawing and would like to sketch her. She stared at me for long before agreeing to be by muse. But that came with one condition—she wanted to see me naked. She thought I wanted to draw her nude (and I didn’t correct her). At the old town end in front of the Don Cesar café. Find it by heading down to the beach from the square where the Queens and Bears bar is located.

Ted married an Italian actress, Gina Cerrato, in 1953 (they had a daughter, also named Gina, a year later) and the couple ran the club with Gina’s right-hand woman, Smithy, a former member of the US Air Force from California. They turned it into a women-only venue in 1967. After Ted’s death in 1979, Gina kept the club running but its last night was in 1985. She died in 2001. In my relationship, I often worried that I was taking on the femme role to my partner’s masc — the Wendy to their Peter — in ways that weren’t always positive or healthy. My partner got frustrated when I mentioned what I thought were our gendered roles; they thought I was projecting straight bullshit into a queer space where it didn’t need to be. We were lesbian and nonbinary dykes; we were supposed to be beyond gender. Eventually, once we’d reboarded the boat after our snorkeling, I did start talking with a few of the women I met at the Gen O mixer earlier that week, and it only took a couple of drinks for us to become the best of friends.

What’s it like in a gay sauna?

Later, when telling friends what had happened, I did laugh about it — one told me it sounded like something pulled straight out of The L Word, which, true — but I was also a little mad at that girl, and even more so at myself for being so sloppy. The consent element there was indeterminate; I had willingly gone along with the hookup, at least for a little while, though I remain uncertain about how much I really could have consented while drunk-peeing in a bathroom the size of a broom closet. I settle for some Kelly Clarkson, and after my screechy but enthusiastic rendition of “Since U Been Gone,” five (!) different women approach me, complimenting my performance. One of them tells me her friend thinks I’m really cute, and could she buy me a drink? The first time you step into a gay sauna can be an unnerving experience. What exactly are you supposed to do when you’re inside? And what aren’t you supposed to do? Alternatively, you may be so familiar with a particular gay sauna you’re written into the fire instructions. Then somehow, all of a sudden, years passed. We became two professionals in our late twenties, living in our dream apartment on the top floor of a Brooklyn brownstone. We weren’t allowed to have pets, but, like good millennials, we had plenty of plants, and interests outside of each other: my roller derby, their ultramarathons. We were busy, stable. Happy enough.