Love Me Harder (Lesbian Roommates, Sorority)

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For most couples, it takes clearing out the scar tissue from past hurts, learning how to communicate and be heard, and gaining conflict-healing skills, first. 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. 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. On a humid July afternoon, months after that conversation, we were watching a movie together. It was one of those days when you skip classes because it’s so hot that you don’t dare to step outside. I always took a bath before having lunch, and I was preparing to go to the bathroom when she asked me nonchalantly, “Do you still want to draw me?” 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.

At the Gen O meetup, the hairdresser mentioned that most of the paying customers on board are older women who’ve had an extraordinarily difficult time navigating life as lesbians; they deserve a space, she said, to fully be themselves. Maybe Olivia could do a specific queer-plus trip for trans people and gay men? Being in a space with “someone who looks like a man,” she said — horrifying me, Jamie, Matie, Dana, and a bunch of others — “can cause these women so much trauma.” It is easy to worry and focus on the things going wrong rather than the things going right. When we worry, we are draining ourselves, leaving us tired and weary. And that is exactly what the devil wants. He whispers in our ears all the negative aspects of a day, which can easily lead to anxiety and worry. Be strong and try to focus on the positive things. It’s better to focus on at least one positive thought amongst a thousand negative ones instead of focusing wholly on the negative. On the flip side of the coin, if you are the LGBT roommate, please do not feel forced to come out at all. If you do decide to, make sure it is safe and it is what you want. Finally, seek out a community and resources to help support you through your college experience.Later in the week, Tisha Floratos, the vice president of travel for Olivia, told me that she and her staff think about this a lot. “We’ve talked about how we begin to promote inclusivity while also preserving our core: that this is a company for lesbians. We don’t publicly, historically, say that we’re trans inclusive, but we’re always welcoming to our trans guests.” I just don’t understand some of these women,” she said, looking around the room at the joyful group of dancing lesbians. “Why do they insist on making themselves so ugly? I’ve never gotten the whole butch thing.” Whenever I think about life, I think about how we are always told to “stand out” from the crowd. Erin is one of those rare people that I think actually does that. She has an incredible personality and a great sense of humor, but aside from this, she’s just different. I think “coming out” helped her to really establish herself and her uniqueness. Remember that the room is just as much yours as it is theirs, and you have the right to feel comfortable in your own living space. Don’t be afraid of your roommate’s questions

Yes, we took a shower together. We did not have sex. The thought of touching her never crossed my mind although we stood next to each other for thirty long minutes under a shower. Of course, we have established that you are under no obligation to explain yourself or to answer anyone’s questions, especially about your personal life. However, your roommate will likely ask you questions once they find out you are LGBT. Questions might make you feel uncomfortable, like you are being interrogated or targeted. However, I want to encourage you to think about these questions in a different way. If your roommate is asking questions, it likely means they care and are trying to understand you better. If they did not care, they would not ask any questions. On the other hand, questions could mean your roommate is trying to accommodate you. This might be the first time they live with an LGBT person, so as long as they are respectful with their questions, try to be patient with them. This communication will help them realize that LGBT people are more similar to them than different. Although you don’t need to give an explanation to anyone, if your roommate is asking respectful questions, I would encourage you to be patient with them and answer their questions. I would tell my therapist everything in one fell swoop, and I’d be so relieved and grateful when she seemed genuinely happy for me. It was bad enough that the prison institution took ownership of my body―that I was caged and stripsearched on a regular basis and had already been sexually harassed by male guards.”

And Michelle and I have found that to be true. In some ways, we know each other incredibly well, and there’s a lot of comfort in that. In other ways, we keep changing, and life keeps throwing us new challenges to respond to – and that keeps our relationship alive and interesting. An entire side of showers would be off-limits thanks to this person’s -ahem- bowel movement on the floor. An entire floor of girls had to share two showers that weekend. This person then moved their games right to the middle of the bathroom where you could be brushing your teeth staring at someone’s digested breakfast. It was disgusting and an experience that truly bonded the floor of girls for life. Honestly, though, I hope whoever was the culprit is doing well and has curbed their appetite for public pooping. 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.) Lynette is 53 years old, though she looks at least 10 years younger. She was born and raised in London to Jamaican parents. She’d recently separated from her wife, whom she’d been with for 21 years. This cruise was the gift Lynette gave herself in the aftermath. She was starting over.

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. 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. I was captivated by what Eileen Myles told me at the time: “I know how to fight for what I want, to say no, when to wait. I’ve been in time for 65 years. I have a lot to share. That supposedly should only be in my teaching life — that’s not the case. It’s amazing on both sides to be able to share the world from different angles. It’s lively. It’s hot.” Similarly, I would encourage you to seek out resources. One place on your campus where you can find resources and a community is your school’s LGBT center. They will be able to connect you with people and places you can connect with. If you live in a dorm, another person who could point you to resources is your resident advisor (RA). This is the person you will go to about housing-related issues and questions, but I’m sure they will gladly point you in the direction of some helpful resources. When you have a community and resources, life at college will be much easier.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. She plays the drums, loves cars — like, posts-on-car-forums-level loves cars — and follows tech news. She cares about clothes and buys a lot of hers vintage. She just got a tattoo commemorating Liverpool, her beloved football team. I was scared of so many things, and worried about, as usual, lesbian stereotypes — moving too fast, feeling too much. And I said so. It was one of our talents that week: saying absolutely everything that was on our minds, and processing until we felt we couldn’t possibly process anymore — at least, of course, until the next night. My freshman year of college I lived in suite-style dorms where I shared a room with one guy and a bathroom with another room of two people. This story is just one example of the shenanigans that went on in that dorm.

I would decide that it was over, and say so, and it would feel like a sort of death, but it would also, I knew, be the right thing to do — so much so that I’d feel it in my bones. To me, Olivia was getting the chance to spend an afternoon with a 73-year-old who’d worked for 11 years as a bartender at my favorite lesbian bar in Brooklyn. Olivia was hearing an American explain U-Haul jokes to a confused, elderly Australian woman. Olivia was my long talk with Lynette about anti-trans feminism in the UK, and being impressed with her easy command of they/them pronouns — yet again proving my worries about older lesbians wrong.

When my partner jokingly warned me, before I left for the cruise, not to fall in love with a hot older butch — seriously, we joked about this — I thought, Fat chance. Not only because I had no intention of falling in love with anyone else, but because I thought hooking up with hot older butches would remain the stuff of my fantasies. Before I left, I talked to a few of my reporter friends about it, just in case a hookup opportunity should present itself and I decided to partake for, um, research purposes . We decided that my Olivia story fell in some sort of weird journalistic in-between, just like my own job does. I sometimes do reporting, but I’m not strictly a reporter; I’m a writer, editor, and cultural critic. Plus, I wasn’t assigned this story to go and passively report out what everybody else was doing on the cruise; I was supposed to immerse myself in the experience (while, of course, disclosing to anyone I spoke with that I was writing about the trip). And the thing a lot of women on the cruise were looking to experience was, yes, getting laid.