Someone mentioned getting a brochure in the mail after they’d given Olivia their contact info years ago (“You guys must be running the lesbian mafia”).

I would tell my partner that I cared about them deeply, and the past five years were among the best of my life. The relationship didn’t last long but one thing was clear: Niya now knew why she was not attracted to men.As Sophie Gilbert put it last year, in a piece for the Atlantic about Sharp Objects on HBO, “For some reason, and despite all assurances from reporters to the contrary, Hollywood is stuck on the idea that female journalists are having sexual relationships with their bosses, their sources, or both. I’d never considered before that being a femme with a butch partner needn’t be some inequitable hetero horror show, but instead could be something imbued with incredible queer comfort and power. Neighbors, family members, and friends sometimes disapproved of and thus denounced the women involved to the police. Later that night, at dinner in the dining room with Dana, Jamie, and Matie, we debriefed about the Gen O meetup, Elvira’s set (which was, in fact, very funny), and the seemingly age-old problem of how to heal lesbians’ intergenerational wounds.

At one point, she joked that people in my life might assume I was having a quarter-life crisis if we were to get together, because of all the different boxes I’d be checking at once: “Black, 53, divorced, British. Lynette knew I was in a relationship, which she respected, and she wasn’t pressuring me to make any decisions — let alone major, life-altering ones. Under the Nazi regime, there was no official law or policy prohibiting sexual relations between women.This was Dana’s first Olivia cruise too, though she’d been working for a while as the company’s content strategist. I was scared of so many things, and worried about, as usual, lesbian stereotypes — moving too fast, feeling too much. She has a way of focusing her attention on me when I’m speaking, like I’m the only other person in the world. Thanks in part to the battered women's movement of the 1980s and the growing awareness of the current rape culture in the United States—from assaults on college campuses to abuse within relationships—we've been hearing a predominantly heterosexual story. This is partially because the topic of sexual relations between women remained taboo for decades after the Nazi era.

Sex ual relations between women was a crime in the Nazi-annexed territories of Austria and the Czech lands of Bohemia and Moravia.Plus, I’ve never really believed postfeminist arguments about how lipstick and high heels can be Empowering™ — cynical messaging that has primarily benefited the men who want to fuck us and sell us things. She watched films featuring same-sex couples and read a lot of reports on lesbian, bisexual and queer (LBQ) communities.