The Skirt Club was founded by Ms LeJeune in the UK in 2014. The aim, she says, was to promote glamour, performance “and much more — away from the prying eyes of men and facilitate one night of consensual experimentation: no consequences, no questions”.

As an example of that communication and trust, here's a story one couple we met early on shared with us: With the balcony door open, I watched the landscape cruise by while he used his mouth to bring me to orgasm. I switched positions on the couch, so he was behind me, making sure he got to take in the pleasurable view while experiencing his own pleasure. After a morning of topless photos on the beach, we invited a friend to our room for a threesome. She had suggestively asked to help celebrate my husband’s birthday, and he was more than happy to unwrap this gift. Certainly someone’s been singing its praises. Ahead of its first Melbourne event Skirt Club Melbourne already had 100 members.There is nothing like getting out of the rut that is everyday home life and moving into a space designed to maximise fun and pleasure to bring a couple closer together. Saturday I approach a pretty, shy girl at the bar named Mona. She tells me that she grew up in a religious, sheltered household. She’s only ever dated men, and never really identified as bisexual, even though, she admits, she probably is. “I guess no one ever asked me,” she says. Then she looks at her card and asks if she can give me a spanking. 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. 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. In my relationship, I often worried that I was taking on the femme role to my partner’s masc — the Wendy to their Peter — in ways that weren’t always positive or healthy. My partner got frustrated when I mentioned what I thought were our gendered roles; they thought I was projecting straight bullshit into a queer space where it didn’t need to be. We were lesbian and nonbinary dykes; we were supposed to be beyond gender.

The night before I left on the cruise, two of my best friends got married. Watching one of my friend’s dads talking at the wedding dinner about how much he loved his daughter and her new wife, I teared up a little and said something to my partner about it: “This is actually pretty nice, huh?” But they wrinkled their nose at me. They’re not a fan of weddings — the pomp and circumstance, the big, grand displays of public affection. 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. The pleasure on his face was palpable as we gave him a blowjob together, as was the pleasure on ours when he took turns going down on us. The session ended with him taking her from behind while burying his fingers in me, leaving all of us sweaty and breathless.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. Many people spent today taking it easy, enjoying their time in paradise and resting up for the final day on the ship. 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 husband and I spent the morning on a private, nude island near Raiatea with a group of swingers, getting full body tans while letting husbands and wives take turns playing with my naked breasts. 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.