Wow,” she said slowly, moving her lips like this was her big glamorous close-up in a silent movie. “Look at you. My little boy’s a handsome man.” 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. 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.” If you have masturbated and spent time exploring your own body, use the knowledge you have gained of what feels good to direct your partner. And remember, ‘All people are individuals. So some people with vulvas will hate penetration and others will love it. Some will love oral sex and others won’t like it. You cannot make assumptions about what people will like sexually based on what kind of genitals they have.’ Safer lesbian sex Cleanliness

But we were not prepared for what followed. Next day as we reached college, we knew something was different. Did people stare at us for a little longer than necessary? Did the girls stopped talking when we reached the stuffy common room? We had no idea. To know that I could finally come clean to my worrisome friends felt liberating beyond belief. I didn’t care about sacrificing my youth to move to outer London with a swarm of forty-somethings. All I wanted was to be with her full-time, and for it to be out in the open that we were together. Aunt Doris looked slightly haggard in the morning. Not hung-over. I knew what hangovers look like. Aunt Doris asked me to drive her to the nearest airport, about two hours away from College Town. There was a 7:30 flight for Los Angeles. She said she had to be on it. She had appointments in Tinseltown. Important appointments she couldn’t afford to miss. For the last stretch of our afternoon, we were dropped on a secluded beach at Nevis, where a few of us ferried beers and our new favorite drink, the very college-esque Panty Ripper (coconut rum and pineapple juice), from shore to the rest of the women waiting in the water. One woman stuffed a bunch of beers into her bathing suit and we cheered whenever anybody pulled one out. A couple women had GoPro cameras, with which we took a lot of increasingly drunken group shots while we swam. One of them was attached to a floating handle that looked very much like a big yellow dildo, which, once somebody pointed it out, kept sending us into hysterics. A week before graduation, I got a phone call from Aunt Doris. I hadn’t heard from her in a long time. She said she was coming up for a visit. Nobody else ever came to visit me at College. I braced for first-degree embarrassment.I was the one who seemed to stress this rule the most. I warned my partner about it all the time: Don’t leave me. But they were confident that they’d always love only me; with other people, they assured me, it would only ever just be sex. 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. It could be fun. It could be hot. Another friend said something I took to heart: that as women, we can claim our pleasure without shame, that our sexuality is a gift to be proud of. The idea that we "should" only have sex within the context of a serious relationship was an antiquated judgment to be disregarded. And I agree, despite being raised conservatively by a widowed father who taught me that nice girls say "no." 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.

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. And that’s how it remained for a long time: a sore spot of a secret. I couldn’t think about it too closely because, like pressing a bruise, it made me flinch with discomfort. I’d consigned it as much as possible to memory until last year when Steven told me that he planned to propose. The first time I thought that Olivia might actually stand a chance at survival was Sunday, the first full day of the cruise, when I attended the welcome mixer for “Generation O,” which is how Olivia refers to its precious few millennial and Generation X clientele. As I walked around the ship, which holds over 2,000 passengers, it was already clear that the average woman here was a couple decades older than me. But it turned out that there were a few other twenty- and thirtysomethings who’d managed to find their way to Olivia. She cut me off. Of course I wasn’t ready. Of course the idea of having children and being a man scared the living shit out of me.

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. In the spirit of lesbian camp bonding, I told my new crew about my situation — nonmonogamous, not sure how to feel about it — which seemed to pique the interest of beer bathing suit girl, because she would soon afterward follow me into the impossibly tiny bathroom, bursting in on me mid-pee. 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. However, don’t make the mistake of thinking there’s anything close to a surplus of these stories! Not only do many incredible LGBTQ+ stories remain as-yet untold, but when you think about it, there are hardly any of them in the mainstream when compared to straight, cis narratives — which is why it’s such good news that this trend doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. Read the best new LGBTQ+ stories right here