Joined in 2023 
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63 About this deal
Aunt Doris wanted to take me to lunch. At a real restaurant, she said, not a teenage hamburger grease-pit. After that, she wanted me to take her for a ride in the wooded hills around College Town. Aunt Doris wasn’t terrified by the nightmarish possibility of being impregnated. Male and female fluids didn’t disgust her. She was just being sensible, I thought, but the rubbers from Hollywood made me sad anyhow. Since then, Ms. Jillinghoff has worked her editor’s mojo on at least half a dozen stories. Most of these have been posted; a couple more will hopefully make their appearance soon. Please join me in extending hearty thanks to Jacqueline for her willingness to take on an incredibly useful but unglamorous job that doesn’t pay.
In the office, nothing changed. Both of us swore not to tell anyone else. I dodged questions from friends about my relationship status like bullets - the lies were worth it for the delirium I felt when I was with her. I’m determined to do something showstopping, but our offerings are comically limited. No Sheryl Crow, no Michelle Branch. Not even “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” 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. 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. I would worry about which of the many friends my ex-partner and I shared I would lose in the dyke divorce. I’d have to come to terms with the fact that I can’t control how other people feel, can’t hold out for universal approval. Though I would also seek constant reassurance from my closest friends that I wasn’t a bad person for putting myself first, for a change; that, even after blowing up my life, they’d keep on loving me.
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. Before I left, I talked to a few of my reporter friends about it, just in case a hookup opportunity should present itself and I decided to partake for, um, research purposes . We decided that my Olivia story fell in some sort of weird journalistic in-between, just like my own job does. I sometimes do reporting, but I’m not strictly a reporter; I’m a writer, editor, and cultural critic. Plus, I wasn’t assigned this story to go and passively report out what everybody else was doing on the cruise; I was supposed to immerse myself in the experience (while, of course, disclosing to anyone I spoke with that I was writing about the trip). And the thing a lot of women on the cruise were looking to experience was, yes, getting laid. 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.) Stars shone from their usual places. Constellations don’t really exist. Constellation stars are millions of light-years apart and can’t see each other. My Aunt Doris is one of them.
Be present with your partner and take your time.’ She adds, ‘Make sure you are clear on consent. And then explore and have fun!’ Communicating with your partner Communicate with your partner first. Talk about what you want to try, what you like, and any fears or concerns you have,’ she advises. But how do you tell your partner what you like?
Helpers
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. 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.
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). The hysteria of nighttime at a wedding - everyone an inflated version of themselves, like bubbles close to popping. Things always happen at weddings. This is what I told myself the next day - this is how I wrote it off when Sarah* and I had sex. We were acquaintances, really, rather than friends. She was my best friend Steven’s* girlfriend. Steven and I had known each other since university. We’d spent our year abroad together, living out a silly, sepia-tinged Italian fantasy - ' che bello! che dolce!' - and then graduated and moved to London and ended up with a circle of six or seven close friends.I missed my husband desperately. (I still do.) But, I realized that whatever I did couldn't affect him. He was gone. I owed it to myself and to him to be healthy and careful, but my private life was up to me. I became more open and much less judgy. At the Gen O meetup, the hairdresser mentioned that most of the paying customers on board are older women who’ve had an extraordinarily difficult time navigating life as lesbians; they deserve a space, she said, to fully be themselves. Maybe Olivia could do a specific queer-plus trip for trans people and gay men? Being in a space with “someone who looks like a man,” she said — horrifying me, Jamie, Matie, Dana, and a bunch of others — “can cause these women so much trauma.” Aunt Doris showed up at the wheel of a cherry-red custom convertible. She had a white scarf around her hairdo, big sunglasses. She looked like a movie star from Hollywood, which is exactly where she drove from. She parked liked she never really learned to drive. Maybe she’d been drinking. When she stepped out of the car, she went from Hollywood movie star to dorm room smoker babe. Aunt Doris was 50 pounds lighter than the last time I saw her, but none of the weight loss was from hips, keister or bosom. The pounds took 10 years with them. Suddenly I was extremely glad my Aunt Doris had come to see me. 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.
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