Lesbians In Bed: Reading Haikus

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At first, sitting alone on the catamaran heading out for my snorkeling excursion, I felt shy again, and wished I had Dana or Jamie and Matie at my side. One of the guys running the boat, a youngish dude with dreads, took pity on me and brought me a glass of water. He asked me if I was staff on the cruise, noting my friendlessness, and I told him I was a reporter. These gender norms can directly contribute to distrust of a victim's claims, says Lisa Langenderfer-Magruder, co-author of a recent study of LGBTQ intimate partner violencein Colorado. "When someone is confronted with a situation that doesn't quite fit that major narrative, they may question its validity," she says. All of this amounts to a culture in which most research on partner violence focuses on heterosexual relationships. "So, in some ways, we're playing catch up." Gershon: [The Wachowskis] knew every angle, every cut. They came from doing graphic novels so they really had it in their heads. Stephanie Trilling, manager of community awareness and prevention services at the Boston Area Rape Crisis (BARCC), observes that for her queer female clients who have been assaulted by women, the first hurdle is simply understanding the assault as rape. Since this scenario is rarely portrayed in the media or in educational programming, "it can be especially challenging to identify their experience as violence," she says. "Many people have a difficult time believing that a woman could be capable of inflicting violence on another person." Scissoring is another hotly debated topic. If you’ve ever watched lesbian porn, you could be forgiven for thinking scissoring is all women and vagina-havers do when they have sex with each other. In truth, some queer people love scissoring and do it regularly, others say it doesn’t work for them and it’s not part of their sex lives. Oral sex

Processing is the tendency to overanalyze and overdiscuss every aspect that can be analyzed or discussed. When it comes to relationships, it turns out this works in lesbians’ favor. According to a 12-year study by John Gottman of the University of Washington and Robert Levenson of the UC Berkeley, gay and lesbian couples are excellent communicators who use fewer “controlling, hostile emotional tactics” when fighting, such as belligerence, domineering, and fear. “The difference on these ‘control’ related emotions suggests that fairness and power-sharing between the partners is more important and more common in gay and lesbian relationships than in straight ones,” Gottman explained. I actively choose to identify as a lesbian and a dyke, as well as a queer. I have found love and community unlike anything else I’ve ever known in what still exists of lesbian culture, despite all external (and, TERF-wise, internal) attempts to exterminate it: the art, the literature, the physical spaces. Plus, most importantly (and most obviously), the word “lesbian” quite literally describes what I am: a woman who loves women in both a feminist way and a super-gay way. But after meeting Lynette, I saw how much pride she took in her butch womanhood, which wasn’t some androgynous nowhere zone — femininity’s absence — but a whole universe unto itself. (She wore a different suit to dinner every night.)

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I would sob in a car to uptown Manhattan, where my friend Alia would take me in her arms and tell me it was all going to be OK. 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.

Later in the week, Tisha Floratos, the vice president of travel for Olivia, told me that she and her staff think about this a lot. “We’ve talked about how we begin to promote inclusivity while also preserving our core: that this is a company for lesbians. We don’t publicly, historically, say that we’re trans inclusive, but we’re always welcoming to our trans guests.” Before meeting Lynette, she of the multiple grooming products, I’d gotten used to dating people whose own beauty routines consisted of, if anything, 3-in-1 body wash. They tended to gently poke fun at me for all my feminine trappings: the 20 minutes I’d spend each day on my serums. I’m a little ashamed of how, over the years, living beside various permutations of my partners’ easy masculinity, I’d defend my own femme rituals with I’m-not-like-other-girls insistence: Hey, at least I don’t shave! At least I barely wear any makeup! My frivolity was never out of hand. And I prided myself for that, for the ways in which I deliberately limited myself.As a queer woman myself, I was mostly concerned that the two female characters ate a whole plate of spaghetti without brushing their teeth before commencing intercourse. Gershon: There was one take that all four of us were like, "That's the one." It was like a real love scene. You didn't see a boob. You didn't see anything; it was all suggested. It really played on our face more than anything. Part of the reason why is no doubt what anti-trans lesbians (unreasonably) fear: More and more young people are realizing that they identify as a gender other than the one they were assigned at birth — and more and more young people are realizing they’re attracted to people of two or more genders. But even though there are plenty of trans and nonbinary lesbians, and plenty of cis lesbians (like me) who don’t think that “lesbian” should be defined exclusively as “cis woman who’s only attracted to cis women,” our identity still hasn’t been able to shake the sexist, classist, and anti-gay stereotypes of lesbians as uncosmopolitan boomer TERFs, sporting Tevas and cargo pants covered in cat hair. What I didn’t expect was everything else that would happen to me — and is still happening to me — thanks to this one little week in my otherwise pleasantly uneventful life.

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. To me, Olivia was getting the chance to spend an afternoon with a 73-year-old who’d worked for 11 years as a bartender at my favorite lesbian bar in Brooklyn. Olivia was hearing an American explain U-Haul jokes to a confused, elderly Australian woman. Olivia was my long talk with Lynette about anti-trans feminism in the UK, and being impressed with her easy command of they/them pronouns — yet again proving my worries about older lesbians wrong. I would move into a house with some friends in Brooklyn, where a room had just magically opened up. There’d be a dog, and a yard. It would feel like a sign. (I’d start getting really into signs.)It overwhelmed me, just then, the sudden force of my wanting. I wanted my own big, strong butch. Someone who wasn’t looking for someone to help them grow, because they’ve done most of their growing already. In the spirit of lesbian camp bonding, I told my new crew about my situation — nonmonogamous, not sure how to feel about it — which seemed to pique the interest of beer bathing suit girl, because she would soon afterward follow me into the impossibly tiny bathroom, bursting in on me mid-pee.