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. To me, being a lesbian in 2022 is about coming up from the basement, smiling at one another in lesbian spaces, having hipsters steal our haircuts and plaid shirts, yummy mummies steal our diets, and getting to hate on the L Word (yet watch it religiously) a second time around! I loved grabbing her waist by the belt loops, loved playing with the silver cross she wore around her neck. Her forays at fictional lesbian cocktail bars, dating and breaking up with a woman for the first time, and running for office, are both relatable and aspirational, and, most importantly, very binge-worthy. 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.

Before Elvira performed we were welcomed by Tisha, Olivia’s VP and our cruise director, who greeted the “ladies of Olivia” and announced a few of the events coming up over the next few days, including a meetup for the “Older, Wiser Lesbians,” or “OWLs. I made my way up the tiny laddered chute to the deck, bouncing against the walls like a pinball, and immediately moved as far away from the bathroom as possible. Especially since the younger people at the first Gen O event had explicitly asked for more sex content.

I remember one maths class when I had a new metal ‘Friends’ pencil tin featuring a photograph of the whole crew sipping milkshakes.

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. I would text Lynette and my lesbian group chat at the airport before my red-eye flight, suddenly struck with the reality that this was all actually happening. While the diversity of queer, female experiences is far from being comprehensively captured on TV screens, these lesbian TV shows are a great start. Nonmonogamy, then, seemed like a sort of part-time solution to much deeper issues I wasn’t yet ready to grapple with.And were it not for this story, there’s no way I would have voluntarily set foot on a cruise ship again. In 2009, the government signed into law a new criminal code penalising same-sex relations between consenting adults.

It can still be hard: the world over lesbians remain some of the most vulnerable people in societies that deny, erase, punish, forcibly attempt to convert, fetishise, and condemn. I would move out of an apartment that I adored, that I’d almost single-handedly furnished, that I thought I’d live in for years to come. According to everyone’s awkward intros, they were from all over the country: Denver, San Diego, Seattle, Nashville, Houston, New York. 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.of Burundi’s 11 million-strong population have access to the internet, and almost all of them are based in Bujumbura. Chicago-based comedian Abby McEnany slipped under the radar until her semi-autobiographical half-hour sitcom debuted on Showtime in December 2019. I had only a vague idea of what to expect when I boarded the Celebrity Summit in April for a weeklong excursion to the Caribbean. 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? When I went to other people’s houses I would find them extraordinarily suffocating and conventional.

She’d spent so long in more queer-oriented spaces, convincing herself for 15 years that she didn’t need lesbian-specific community.But I’ve also felt caught between two seemingly competing currents: the lesbian heyday of generations past and what it looks like it’s shaping up to be — a queer, genderfluid, no-labels sort of future. We learned from the girl who’d stuffed beers into her bathing suit — the self-appointed class clown of the catamaran — that she was desperately in love with a married woman, but otherwise conducted herself like a classic lesbian fuckboy. The first was that they’d slept with someone else, just once, when they were on a solo vacation, before we’d agreed to any sort of open-relationship terms; I felt like they’d forced my hand. This was Dana’s first Olivia cruise too, though she’d been working for a while as the company’s content strategist.