Sleepover: First Time Lesbian Short Story

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If you or your children aren’t comfortable with same or different gender sleepovers, you can suggest daytime visits or other arrangements, he said. But there were, in fact, a number of stereotype-fulfilling boomer TERFs on board the cruise — and plenty of lesbians whose policing of gender norms took more banal forms. The woman who bought me a drink after I sang Kelly Clarkson at karaoke — a petite therapist from California with a prim gray bob — ended up being one of them. Afterward, I had lunch with Dana and some of the other Olivia staffers and asked them about it — why not make the Public Posts more prominent, MichFest style? Especially since the younger people at the first Gen O event had explicitly asked for more sex content. Olivia had run sexuality and intimacy workshops before, and at the lunch, the staffers floated the definite possibility that they will again. I know for a fact that a lot of my queer friends would be way more likely to book a future Olivia cruise, uncool as cruises might be to cash-strapped millennials, if they knew how likely they’d be to get some action. It wasn’t until the day afterward that we’d realize exactly how much of a spectacle we’d made. Lynette had been chatting with a few women the day before, more than one of whom confronted her in the cafeteria the next morning. “Everyone saw that young blonde hanging all over you last night,” she told her scornfully. “You better be careful.” Another woman caught us goofing around in the pool and reported to Lynette that we were causing a bit of a scene.

Sleepover Videos and HD Footage - Getty Images Teen Sleepover Videos and HD Footage - Getty Images

For example, are you worried that your daughter won’t be able to tell the difference between friendship feelings and sexual feelings? Between a carpeted rumpus room and a gay bar? That she will, as a result, hit on all her guests while they’re painting each other’s toenails or playing Monopoly? I know you’re not, but that’s the homophobic stereotype — the same one that kept gay people out of the military for so long — that you’d just be minding your own business and before you know it, some gay somebody would be snaking a hand into your straight cargo shorts. (Dream on, hetero narcissists.) Later, when telling friends what had happened, I did laugh about it — one told me it sounded like something pulled straight out of The L Word, which, true — but I was also a little mad at that girl, and even more so at myself for being so sloppy. The consent element there was indeterminate; I had willingly gone along with the hookup, at least for a little while, though I remain uncertain about how much I really could have consented while drunk-peeing in a bathroom the size of a broom closet.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.)

A Delightful Tale of a First Sleepover (that Happens to

I would write in my journal, the night before leaving: “There’s something so deliriously pleasurable in the idea of trusting myself enough to know exactly what I want.”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. I come from a queer universe where traditional butch/femme identities seem old-school and retrograde, second-wavey, practically heteropatriarchal. There’s a lot wrong with that perspective — for one thing, a lot of the modern queers who shit on butch/femme dynamics aren’t from the working class, where those identities were born — but it’s one I still sympathize with, especially as someone who’d previously been hesitant to claim femme identity as my own. As an older counselor and as an administrator I would eventually fall in love at camp with other counselors three more times to varying degrees of length and success. Always, the moment of mutual realization of interest, connection, or falling occurred during an earnestly camp-only activity -- while teaching a session on lantern maintenance during staff week, while boning up on my swimming with a waterfront director in a blue Speedo, wielding a whistle, and a ring of keys tied to a small flotation device that she flipped around on the end of a lanyard, or while learning group dances we would later share with the kids. I don't necessarily want to "blame it on the Bossa Nova," but if the dance fits... 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?

How parents of LGBTQ tweens and teens navigate sleepovers

Throughout the trip, Matie and Jamie would have a number of tearful conversations about trans inclusion with some older passengers who refused to accept trans women as their fellow sisters. But they also got many women to reconsider their more middle-of-the-road views on trans inclusion. “Those are the people who matter,” Jamie would later tell me, recalling her latest conversions over coffee in the cafeteria. For example, if your house has a no public display of affection rule, make sure it applies equally, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity. I crowdsourced my response by reading your question to my kids over beans and polenta. They loved the idea that you were inclined to be equal-opportunity about your strictness — they took it as a sign of respect for your daughter’s sexuality that you would extend your prohibitive instincts to include girls. But they didn’t think you should. “I mean,” my daughter said, “you could allow her to have sleepovers with just gay boys and straight girls and asexual kids, but what are you going to do? Ask everyone at the door?” 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. My son said, “It’s funny — the kind of parents who wouldn’t let you go to a co-ed sleepover in the first place? I feel like those aren’t the parents you’d come out to. So I’m sure these guys are cool, but I don’t even get the ‘no boys’ rule to begin with. They should just open it up so she can have sleepovers with everybody.” (I did have to remind him that boys are historically and actually more dangerous to girls than girls are — and then he was all sheepish, so I reminded him that I didn’t mean he was, what with his waist-length hair and gentle ways, and he nodded.)Lynette and I had only just met, but in the emotionally intense bizarro world of the cruise, where relationships of all types seemed to develop at warp speed and I was feeling enough emotion for 10 lesbians combined, I liked Lynette very, very much. A lot of it was, obviously, physical, chemical. But there were other things, too, that were harder to explain to other people or to myself. Now last night she was here for a sleepover, and my daughter came and asked me if they were allowed to take a bath together, swimsuits on. I said no, because it took me by surprise and I had an instinctive "I need to understand this better" reaction. I was a teenager once but let's face it, that was 25 years ago and a different generation. 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. I would go straight to my friend Dom’s house, not even stopping at home to shower first, where I told him that I was, indeed, having a quarter-life crisis. So I’m surprised to say I might actually travel with Olivia again, skeptical as I remain of cruise ethics in general. And that’s because of all the things that happened in the eight days I spent aboard the Summit — things I wasn’t remotely expecting.