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. I would try to separate my feelings for Lynette from my feelings about wanting someone or something different in general — out of a desperate desire to feel some sort of control over my choices — and concede that was pretty much impossible. 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. As a queer woman myself, I was mostly concerned that the two female characters ate a whole plate of spaghetti without brushing their teeth before commencing intercourse.

I also love the way Sebastián chose to shoot it. It was storyboarded. All the wetness, the spitting in the mouth, the pubic hair, the vaginas, but also leaving some of it to the audience to imagine. Where is the other woman’s mouth, where are her fingers? It was important for him to focus on our faces to really capture that desire. There’s something very spiritual about their sex. I’m really proud of it." I tried to tell myself that lesbian bed death isn’t real, all the while heartily blaming myself for our increasingly diminished sex life. I was the one who never really felt like initiating, or at least not with anywhere near the regularity we’d had as a hormone-crazed new couple. I assumed, at best, that all passions cool somewhat over the years; at worst, I thought something might be wrong with me.Later, when telling friends what had happened, I did laugh about it — one told me it sounded like something pulled straight out of The L Word, which, true — but I was also a little mad at that girl, and even more so at myself for being so sloppy. The consent element there was indeterminate; I had willingly gone along with the hookup, at least for a little while, though I remain uncertain about how much I really could have consented while drunk-peeing in a bathroom the size of a broom closet. Mum cried. I cried. We convinced ourselves it was a phase. She asked me to make an effort to be be ‘normal’. I said I would.” There was always speculation about the relationship between her mother and Smithy. On her death bed, her daughter finally asked her about it. “I said: ‘People always ask me, Mum, and I hate to ask you but were you and Smithy lovers?’ And she said: ‘Everybody always assumed that Smithy was madly in love with me and that I was playing her along. But no we weren’t, and the reason for that was that Smithy didn’t want it.’ Many members of the group say they have experienced violence at the hands of family members who became suspicious about their sexuality.

In 2016, her husband found out about these conversations and her marriage broke down. He vowed to keep her sexuality a secret from the wider community for the sake of their children. Two years later, Niya felt she had to tell one person in her immediate family. She chose one of her brothers. 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. An often-cited report by Human Rights Watch in 2009 spoke with only 10 members of the LGBT+ community and only one lesbian was interviewed. The BBC has spoken to dozens. The T-shirts are important because printed on each one is a discreet, matching symbol. It’s an in-joke – a sign of their identity and independence. Something only they understand.I was less confident. But perhaps it wasn’t that I didn’t trust my partner; it was that I didn’t trust myself. For so long, I’d put off the possibility of us opening up our relationship because — try as I might to be cool and aloof and whatever about casual hookups — I typically like sex best when the person matters to me. The city, with its colonial-era Art Deco buildings surrounding a market, a football stadium and places of worship, sits on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. 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. Relieved, Leila put her months of infatuation down to a phase. It had been a one-off crush, with one woman.

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. I would hug my landlady, crying again because she was crying for me. Because we didn’t always have that. There was a time when we were out of favour because we weren’t ‘the right sort of lesbians’.” The club was subjected to demonstrations by the likes of the Gay Liberation Front who disapproved of the secrecy of the club, at a time when women could lose their children for being gay. The indomitable Gina Snr’s response was to call the police on them.For anyone who may find themselves in a similar situation to me – I would urge them to consider their own circumstances and take their time, understanding that their feelings are real and valid, and that they aren’t alone. There are many harmful myths surrounding vulva-to-vulva sex that are steeped in ignorance, homophobia and stereotypes that it is important to unlearn. 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. I would sleep in Alia’s bed that night and accidentally pat her butt in my sleep, my mind clearly deluding my body into believing I was still on the cruise with Lynette. Alia would very nicely not be weird about it.