It’s been almost twenty years since I last saw her. But I still have the sketch I made—a shy girl with fierce eyes that dared people to do the unthinkable.

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 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.While Aunt Doris was in the middle of telling me how she and my mother got their first apartment together with no deposit or key fee, I asked if she wanted to dance. Dancing without music works fine. Aunt Doris was a good dancer. She used to shake it like crazy at my mother’s parties. But that night we just held on. She stopped talking about old times with my mother and I was glad. There was plenty I didn’t want to know. Like who my father was. Long list of names to choose from. I had a feeling that’s where her story was headed.

I'm a 22 year old girl and I'm very bi. I have had like this sexual crush on my aunt who is 47 for a about 2 years. She has these beautiful huge ** and I always wanted to see them. I would make comments to her occasionally and my Mom would tell me to stop. My aunt would just laugh and kind of tease me. 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.

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I'd been my husband George's caregiver as he'd succumbed to cancer. Sex hadn't been a part of my life for a long time. I was too worried about him to think of much else. I felt like I had no sexuality. 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.

Okay, that’s the latest from us. Thanks in advance for your patience while we weather this out, and for reading this. We love you all. 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. She’s a true Pisces — romantic and dreamy and always processing. (My Capricorn groundedness makes us a good match, allegedly.) She’s known she was gay since she was 5 years old. Her mom still prays that, someday, she’ll find herself a good man.Best of all, we now have something that Juicy Secrets has sorely needed – an associate editor, which we’ve gone without since the disappearance of our old friend Poppabear, who was last heard from over two years ago. It was rough going for a while after that. One weekend she was at our house and my Mom was grocery shopping and my aunt was in the shower. I went to her room to wait for her to see if she wanted to watch a movie. I sat on the bed until she came out of the shower. She was wearing a towel when she came in to the room. We all go through phases in life when we are curious about a lot of things—a girl may be curious about the body of another girl, but that doesn’t make her a lesbian, even if they take a bath together. I never wanted to know why she wished to see me naked. We never chose that moment to step into the bathroom of a girl's hostel together. We did it because we were curious.