I have to wear knickers, which he can see the urine coming through, and I put towels under my butt, but that’s about it. The Killing of Sister George is one of the greatest and most grotesque of all lesbian crossover films. 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.

But I still wondered — as people around me whom I loved began to move away from the genders they’d been assigned — what I should be doing, if anything, about mine. After my partner came out as nonbinary a couple years ago, I felt even more confused and guilty about my conflicting desires to both lean into my own womanhood and flee from it. Lying in bed one night, talking about a hypothetical world in which we could be together outside the dreamy vacation twilight zone we currently occupied, Lynette scooped me up in her arms, kissed my neck, and said, half joking, half serious, that she’d happily be my big, strong butch. After deplaning and bumbling my way through the cruise check-in, I crashed in my quarters for a two-hour hangover nap.As for the volunteers, one is markedly nervous about the upcoming experience, but all three are totally open and honest about what they're about to do. Later that week, we’d have a couple long dinners, just the two of us, indulging in the obscene number of courses you’re afforded during a cruise meal and bonding over the strange particularities of being a professional homosexual. One remarks, "All of my girlfriends, including myself as well, do this," as she grabs Stevie's breast, making a good point about what is socially acceptable touching between some people.

At our evening activities, Jamie was frequently flagging, via colored handkerchiefs placed in her back pocket. It sounds shallow to imply that, in the beginning, I fell for her simply because of her style, her stuff.And we have plenty of reasons to avoid cruises: Operators exploit their workers; passengers experience alarmingly high rates of sexual assault; and the ships destroy the environment, disrupt local communities, and generally disgorge terrifying crowds of oblivious and often racist white people into historic ports, where they can cause a few hours’ worth of chaos before sailing off to their next destination. When I kissed Lynette goodbye at our appropriately miserable reentry to the real world — Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan — I still wasn’t exactly sure what the hell I was supposed to do next. 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.

Annette Bening and Julianne Moore tear up the straights-can’t-play-gay rulebook as long-term married couple Nic and Jules, who hit midlife parenting and partnership problems. Director Károly Makk sensitively juxtaposes this tender but doomed love affair with the high hopes and bitter suppression of the Budapest Spring. Less funny, though, was the fact that our respective romantic competitors were not the only ones who noticed us.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. Definitely there's incontinent pads or puppy pads you can use, they're disposable and you can just throw them out. 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.

In tracking the key films of lesbian cinema, we’ve restricted our list to films available on DVD or for streaming in the UK. But they were confident that they’d always love only me; with other people, they assured me, it would only ever just be sex. On Thursday, as our week at sea was coming to a close, everyone was encouraged to dress up in our fanciest gear for dinner, and later, dancing. I grew up Catholic, so I feel like there is a lot of guilt associated with exploring your own body," one of the volunteers states, echoing the idea that because the world sexualizes the body in all situations, touching yourself -- and especially other people -- is always considered sexual.

According to everyone’s awkward intros, they were from all over the country: Denver, San Diego, Seattle, Nashville, Houston, New York. When I boarded the cruise at the end of April, my partner of nearly five years and I had been experimenting with nonmonogamy.