Before meeting Lynette, she of the multiple grooming products, I’d gotten used to dating people whose own beauty routines consisted of, if anything, 3-in-1 body wash. They tended to gently poke fun at me for all my feminine trappings: the 20 minutes I’d spend each day on my serums. I’m a little ashamed of how, over the years, living beside various permutations of my partners’ easy masculinity, I’d defend my own femme rituals with I’m-not-like-other-girls insistence: Hey, at least I don’t shave! At least I barely wear any makeup! My frivolity was never out of hand. And I prided myself for that, for the ways in which I deliberately limited myself. I love that place," says Julio LaFleur, who hired Summer as consultant and mentor for her own Hot House, a five-year-old women's sauna in Seattle. Quiet Hot House caters to regulars--lesbians, gardeners, athletes, artists, and performers--but think naps and yoga, not friendly chitchat. "People come for physical and emotional healing," Julio says. As a result, "we have no windows, no sound--you can't tell if it's rainy or sunny, day or night." Summer's and Julio's bathhouses are West Coast riffs on the Japanese sento, ladled with free-floating feminism, New Age spirituality; and feminine attraction. In a similar vein, Chicago's women-only Thousand Waves Spa just smells better--and is more relaxing and affordable--than most American spas. Two lesbian martial arts instructors own this place, and unlike Hot House and Osento, which are straight-friendly but very queer-popular, Thousand Waves is the sort of place that seems totally queer, though it might just be your imagination. TWS's massive subterranean relaxation room, filled with Nordic-style wood, photos of water, and veiled blue sleeping cushions on low benches, is like some kind of women's dormitory in heaven. It's easy to spend a long time here, and you should, because unlike in San Francisco, you can't just turn your face to the sun afterward and run out in a T-shirt to some lesbian tattoo parlor. Wait until your hair dries. I'm not about to put Kissing Jessica Stein in this category, because it's too weak of a queer film to be even considered. There's also Mulholland Drive, which had some very brief hot queer moments relative to its era (2001). Heavenly Creatures (1994) served the queer goth community particularly well. Sadly, that community is relatively small.

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. Neatly, it was a story in this newspaper about The Killing of Sister George and the club that persuaded Gina’s mother to explain. 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.” 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.MLA style: "Soak it up at the lesbian bathhouse: a new generation of dyke-friendly saunas bursts on to the North American scene.." The Free Library. 2005 Regent Media 27 Nov. 2023 https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Soak+it+up+at+the+lesbian+bathhouse%3a+a+new+generation+of...-a0133014824

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. 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.

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In the heart of Benidorm Old Town´s gay scene. Best time is end of afternoon. Two levels of Hot Action plus Huge Spa, Sauna and Steam Room.

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 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? Bonding is built into an Olivia trip, which, I realized soon enough, is basically like grown-up lesbian camp. “It’s funny, because on a normal cruise, you’re trying to spend as much time as you can away from other people,” Jamie would later put it. “But we’re all here precisely because we want to be around everybody else.” I said: ‘What?’ And she said: ‘Lesbians! You know, women with women.’ So I was, like: ‘Really? Really?’” APA style: Soak it up at the lesbian bathhouse: a new generation of dyke-friendly saunas bursts on to the North American scene.. (n.d.) >The Free Library. (2014). Retrieved Nov 27 2023 from https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Soak+it+up+at+the+lesbian+bathhouse%3a+a+new+generation+of...-a0133014824

The jacuzzi

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.

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. I don’t care,” Lynette said, shrugging. She told me she’d lived on this earth for 53 years. She knew what she wanted. And now it was my turn to figure that out for myself. It’s been almost twenty years since I last saw her. But I still have the sketch I made—a shy girl with fierce eyes that dared people to do the unthinkable. For now, though, Olivia’s brand remains quite wholesome. On the first night there, I witnessed a marriage proposal (“Do you think they just met?” joked a woman at my table; “That’d be a record”). Tisha, the cruise director and VP, met her wife on an Olivia cruise. And she emphasized to me that it’s a place where many women go to fall in love — which certainly does happen. 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.Part of the reason why is no doubt what anti-trans lesbians (unreasonably) fear: More and more young people are realizing that they identify as a gender other than the one they were assigned at birth — and more and more young people are realizing they’re attracted to people of two or more genders. But even though there are plenty of trans and nonbinary lesbians, and plenty of cis lesbians (like me) who don’t think that “lesbian” should be defined exclusively as “cis woman who’s only attracted to cis women,” our identity still hasn’t been able to shake the sexist, classist, and anti-gay stereotypes of lesbians as uncosmopolitan boomer TERFs, sporting Tevas and cargo pants covered in cat hair. 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 would write in my journal, the night before leaving: “There’s something so deliriously pleasurable in the idea of trusting myself enough to know exactly what I want.” I left Hot House feeling silly for thinking I was going to be mauled by sweaty dykes. I also left feeling ridiculous for having put my "beauty armor" on for nothing. But most importantly, I left feeling virtuous, blissful, and clean.