I promised everyone that we would meet on the next LLV trip, be it a hotel takeover or a cruise, and that next time we wouldn’t wait so long to get to know each other. His confidence and muscular body were all the convincing I needed to accept his offer, and I did not regret it when I was moaning in ecstasy in his room a few hours later. 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. As an example of that communication and trust, here's a story one couple we met early on shared with us: 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 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. Then somehow, all of a sudden, years passed. We became two professionals in our late twenties, living in our dream apartment on the top floor of a Brooklyn brownstone. We weren’t allowed to have pets, but, like good millennials, we had plenty of plants, and interests outside of each other: my roller derby, their ultramarathons. We were busy, stable. Happy enough.

Stay Connected

No one says the word “lesbian” all night, with the exception of one girl who asks me, “Are we not supposed to say the ‘L-word’ here?”

I took care of boys — like my partner, like the person I’d dated before them, even like my cis college boyfriend — because I loved them, and that’s what you do for the people you love. I think there was also a part of me that liked tempering my fastidious long-term planning, my conventionalism, my seriousness with their wild spirits, their rejection of every social expectation. Queer bois, with their embrace of pleasure above most all else, in their refusal to adhere to the rules of heteropatriarchal capitalism — why grow up if it means becoming a cog in the machine? — seemed to embody a radical queer ethos I admired, and maybe felt the slightest bit jealous of. My husband and I kept things quiet as well, reinforcing our love for each other with a sunset blowjob on the balcony.

Must Read

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. I’m watching a Silicon Valley CEO being led around the room on a leash. His wife is in the next room, where a jewellery designer is getting comfortable with three men who definitely aren’t her husband. I’m part of the LA swinging community and at these parties, anything goes. For a few hours everyone can forget the stresses of juggling normal life and live judgement free. There are couples who’ve come together and some who’ve come alone (though always with their partner’s approval). That was the appeal for me - the ability to explore your sexuality whilst also maintaining an open, trusting relationship. I ask Moon what she thinks of the party. The Skirt Club events, she says, are providing femme, bi curious women their own space to experiment. “It’s a safe place to explore without it having to ‘mean’ anything about their identity,” she says. “I don’t think the parties are gay, per se. Just as I don’t think fooling around with someone of the same sex is necessarily gay. The words we have to describe sexuality are too frail to contain the dynamism of the human experience.” Other stringent restrictions of no men, no pictures, no telling and no pressure mean the club generally gets new members “by word of mouth”. A couple days later — after getting my serious lesbian conversations out of the way — I was about 14 rum punches deep and drunk-dancing on a catamaran.

Throughout the trip, Matie and Jamie would have a number of tearful conversations about trans inclusion with some older passengers who refused to accept trans women as their fellow sisters. But they also got many women to reconsider their more middle-of-the-road views on trans inclusion. “Those are the people who matter,” Jamie would later tell me, recalling her latest conversions over coffee in the cafeteria. 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. In just two years since starting its secretive, sexy and luxurious private parties in Sydney, the Skirt Club — the all-female sex club for lesbian, bisexual and “plain curious” women — had seen its membership swell to 600. So at 7:30 on a Thursday night, Courtney and I arrive for the party at a club in the South of Market neighborhood. It’s cold and drizzling, the kind of weather that’s more encouraging of Netflix and chill than sexual adventures. A male bouncer lets us past the door into a bar area warmed by tungsten glow and furnished with afghan rugs, ample seating on red velvet-covered chairs and inexplicable, charming typewriters. Women mill about the room.What I didn’t expect was everything else that would happen to me — and is still happening to me — thanks to this one little week in my otherwise pleasantly uneventful life. By 10:30, the party is winding down.Before I leave, a woman named Sonja tells me the story of her first same-sex experience with a female friend. They both identified as straight at the time, so the first time they made out with each each other, they figured, “This isn’t gay.” Then they had sex. “But we said, ‘We’re not gay!’ And we kept doing it and saying, ‘We’re still not gay!’ Then one day we realized – we were totally gay,” she says.