The Ministry of Lesbian Affairs (NHB Modern Plays)

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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. Per the rules of our loose nonmonogamous agreement, I FaceTimed with my partner about what was happening on the cruise, first telling them about the catamaran girl and then, in so many words, about Lynette. I suspected, even early on, that I was about to break our most important rule of all: Don’t fall in love with anybody else.

There are many harmful myths surrounding vulva-to-vulva sex that are steeped in ignorance, homophobia and stereotypes that it is important to unlearn. My partner was patient and kind. But as time went on, they got frustrated — understandably — and they suggested, as a reparative measure, that we open up our relationship. 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.)It's more than a kind of first love. It's a first everything: first friendship, first real companion, intellectual companion. There's a trust from the first moment they look at each other, that this person understands me. And in a way that they've never had before," Waterston tells The Advocate.

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 And remember, ‘All people are individuals. So some people with vulvas will hate penetration and others will love it. Some will love oral sex and others won’t like it. You cannot make assumptions about what people will like sexually based on what kind of genitals they have.’ Safer lesbian sex Cleanliness 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’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.” For now, though, Olivia’s brand remains quite wholesome. On the first night there, I witnessed a marriage proposal (“Do you think they just met?” joked a woman at my table; “That’d be a record”). Tisha, the cruise director and VP, met her wife on an Olivia cruise. And she emphasized to me that it’s a place where many women go to fall in love — which certainly does happen.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. I had a lot of empathy toward her. She had a rich inner life and she didn't have a lot of outlets," Sevigny told The Advocate about Lizzie, who's depicted as being an avid reader and a patron of the arts. 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.”

As am I. Representation always matters, whether it's in the Halls of Congress or at your local independent theater. Queer women deserve to have their queer female sex represented on screen, without it devolving into typical pornographic tropes: shaved vaginas, sorority sisters, giant jiggly boobs, foot-long dildos, scissoring, a well-hung neighbor guy who just "pops in" for a threesome, etc. There's absolutely nothing wrong with any of these erotic ingredients, per se, but it's formulaic and not particularly representational of most queer sex. Part revenge tale and part redemption song, Lizzie took years for indie darling Chloe Sevigny ( Boys Don't Cry, Big Love, Love and Friendship) and out writer Bryce Kass to shepherd to the screen. Although there were several iterations along the way, the final version of the film about the ax killer from the tiny town of Fall River, Mass., couldn't have come at a timelier moment. A film that shares a lineage with the queer true crime-based films of the '90s like Heavenly Creatures and Sister My Sister, Lizzie is a fresh take on the "murderous lesbians'" trope. The movie also fits right in with the #MeToo era, with Lizzie and her maid/love interest/co-conspirator Bridget (Kristen Stewart) literally bashing toxic masculinity in the face. The Funny Girls, though, is interested in their similarities rather than their differences. “Both women had this determination,” he explains. “They’d heard the same thing from their mothers: you’re terrible-looking, get a job, get a husband. But they were determined to make their dreams come true. Streisand may be an egomaniac but she also needed so much self-belief during the period when the first part of The Funny Girls is set because she was sleeping on friends’ couches. Rivers was supposed to be this Jewish princess and here she was, divorced before she was 30 and going out into this very male comedy world. They both overcame the dream slayers.”

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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 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.” He assured me he had no problem with gay people, and he really didn’t; the three guys running the catamaran all day were amazing. But he did occasionally seem to forget about the realities of the situation.