Lesbians In Bed: Reading Haikus

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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. Gershon: It was like the four of us having sex. It was like: "Foot! Wall! Head!" It was so choreographed. The camera [is] moving around, and you have one wall go up, another wall went down. 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.

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. Jamie mentioned that she’d previously passed on an Olivia cruise when she saw that a speaker booked for the trip was Lisa Vogel. Vogel, the creator and producer of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, shut down the lesbian feminist women’s gathering in 2015 — closing its doors entirely, after 40 years as a safe haven of living lesbian history, rather than allowing out trans women to attend. For a lot of millennial queer women, myself included, MichFest is the perfect example of something beautiful and sacred we would have loved to take part in — something we’d be forever thankful for — if only, if only, they hadn’t seen trans women as the enemy.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’m loose and light and a little sleepy from my second Corona and a blossoming sunburn. Sure, I say, why not, thinking all the while: If any other 27-year-old lesbians could use a self-esteem boost, all they need to do, clearly, is get themselves on an Olivia cruise.

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Tilly: [The rating board] said, "It looks like they're really doing it." And the [Wachowskis] go, "Let me get this straight. If the girls weren't such good actresses, you wouldn't have a problem?" They were embarrassed, and they said, "Yes." The night before I left on the cruise, two of my best friends got married. Watching one of my friend’s dads talking at the wedding dinner about how much he loved his daughter and her new wife, I teared up a little and said something to my partner about it: “This is actually pretty nice, huh?” But they wrinkled their nose at me. They’re not a fan of weddings — the pomp and circumstance, the big, grand displays of public affection.