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As a teenager I competed in canine sports, I have multiple dog-themed tattoos, including portraits of my current dogs. Speaking of which, and a little bit more about me and my animal obsession: My partner Kestryl and I have been together ten years and are parents to a (not so) small menagerie of critters. I was captivated by what Eileen Myles told me at the time: “I know how to fight for what I want, to say no, when to wait. I’ve been in time for 65 years. I have a lot to share. That supposedly should only be in my teaching life — that’s not the case. It’s amazing on both sides to be able to share the world from different angles. It’s lively. It’s hot.”
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.
7. Food is simple with dogs most of the time.
The one exception (aside from humans) occurs right on Old Macdonald’s Farm. About 6% of male sheep court and breed other males , and refrain from breeding receptive females. 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. It was thrilling, and cathartic, to have such a deep, generous conversation with three smart women about a question that’s been at the center of my personal and professional life for nearly five years now: Can lesbians, and women in general, survive the gender revolution?
Lesbian pugs jostle for attention with frisky Italian greyhounds, male lions appear to “mate” in the Serengeti and, inevitably, bonobos are filmed doing, well, what bonobos do, this oddly assembled but ultimately rewarding documentary which asks: “If sex is purely to reproduce, why do so many animals engage in homosexual behaviour?” Insightful, but did we really have to endure so much footage of grim greyhound sex to get the answers? Mike Bradley D-Day 75: The World Remembers 6.30pm, BBC Two
8. You can multi-task
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. I would feel horrible, hurting a person I cared for, even though I was certain they wouldn’t be able to care for me in the years ahead in the way I needed them to — someone who I suspected, ultimately, wanted different things. How do you justify leaving a perfectly nice relationship, taking a blind chance that there might be something better for you out there — even if you’re right? I was scared of so many things, and worried about, as usual, lesbian stereotypes — moving too fast, feeling too much. And I said so. It was one of our talents that week: saying absolutely everything that was on our minds, and processing until we felt we couldn’t possibly process anymore — at least, of course, until the next night.
To humans, humping in public is considered a big no-no. So when our dogs start mounting each other in public, it can cause us to feel embarrassed and confused about why our beloved fur babies are engaging in such uncouth behavior. 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. I don’t care,” Lynette said, shrugging. She told me she’d lived on this earth for 53 years. She knew what she wanted. And now it was my turn to figure that out for myself. 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.” I asked him if he liked what he saw and he told me he had fantasied about seeing me do something like this but never thought I would do it, then he told me that the dog probably needed some satisfaction himself.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.
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