My partner was patient and kind. But as time went on, they got frustrated — understandably — and they suggested, as a reparative measure, that we open up our relationship. 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. He assured me he had no problem with gay people, and he really didn’t; the three guys running the catamaran all day were amazing. But he did occasionally seem to forget about the realities of the situation. She says she was forced into marriage, but wonders if “forced” is the right word. “Can you even force someone who has no rights to begin with?” she asks. And that’s how it remained for a long time: a sore spot of a secret. I couldn’t think about it too closely because, like pressing a bruise, it made me flinch with discomfort. I’d consigned it as much as possible to memory until last year when Steven told me that he planned to propose.

Despite their desire to keep their relationship private, the women had documented their lives in “dozens and dozens” of photo albums and audio cassette tapes, some of which are featured in the film. The couple preserved their love letters but had ripped their signatures off in case the notes were ever found, said Bolan. While putting the documentary together, Bolan said he discovered an old suitcase in the couple’s basement filled with videos of their lives on 8 mm film. The clips of Donahue playing baseball and the couple visiting Donahue’s family on their Canadian farm are included in the documentary. Not many people can say that they don't know a single person in a relationship who met on Tinder. Countless success stories are told on Reddit when someone asks about where to meet other lesbians. You know the drill: Add pictures, set an age range, and fill out a bio as seriously and extensively (or not) as you want. While the matching isn't exactly strategic, it's definitely the app that'll help most with scoping out the most lesbians in the vicinity. If you need a little help sorting through your options, Tinder's latest matchmaking feature allows your friends and family to recommend matches to you.US government records say that a lesbian couple was arrested in 2012 but released. Other than that, little else is documented.

But even though I’ve been out for years now, I’ve still never spent much time around older lesbians. The lesbian bars and events I frequent in New York — the gay capital of the world! — are almost overwhelmingly populated by young people. The older women I did meet tended to be coupled up. I knew that hot older butches, even single ones, were out there, in my city and beyond, but I didn’t know where to find them. As a woman from a country like hers, Nella says her rights were already diminished. And as one of the 2% of Muslims in a majority Christian nation, she felt even more marginalised. 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. It sounds shallow to imply that, in the beginning, I fell for her simply because of her style, her stuff. But what attracted me was the care and attention to detail she demonstrated via a lifetime’s accumulation and curation of these things. Together they made up the way she wanted to be seen in the public eye, the way she wanted to move through the world. She was not a boy but a full-grown butch who, at 53, was confident in who she was and what she wanted. We started talking,” says Niya, “Then one day, in the middle of a deep conversation, she turned to me and said, ‘I like women’.”

A note on what didn't make the list

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. I had a lot of empathy toward her. She had a rich inner life and she didn't have a lot of outlets," Sevigny told The Advocate about Lizzie, who's depicted as being an avid reader and a patron of the arts. She’s a true Pisces — romantic and dreamy and always processing. (My Capricorn groundedness makes us a good match, allegedly.) She’s known she was gay since she was 5 years old. Her mom still prays that, someday, she’ll find herself a good man. Leila thinks domestic abuse in families where a woman is suspected of being lesbian or bisexual is a big cause for concern. The group has heard of abuse as a result of sexuality but it is impossible to verify. Often women withdraw their stories for fear of what might happen to them. The first time I heard my Aunt Terry say she was gay, it hit me,” Bolan said. “Hearing it from an 88-year-old was a profound experience.”

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.It was thrilling, and cathartic, to have such a deep, generous conversation with three smart women about a question that’s been at the center of my personal and professional life for nearly five years now: Can lesbians, and women in general, survive the gender revolution?