One woman, my soon-to-be-friend Jamie (not her real name; she asked that I withhold her identity due to the sensitive nature of her work), told the group that she’d taken her first cruise with a partner, hoping to “slow down and be bored. Adepero Oduye is brillaint as a 17 year old Black lesbian embracing her identity and trying to start her life. Alice Wu's followup to Saving Face, which we'll see later on the list, is a queer high school retelling of Cyrano de Bergerac and is one of the best movies of 2020. Then, on the cruise, she met a bunch of older women who “have had a harder time than we could dream of, and yet they’re so free.

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.

png%3Fwidth%3D2000%26height%3D1500%26coordinates%3D0%252C0%252C0%252C238%22%2C%20%221000x750%22%3A%20%22https%3A//rebelmouse. png%3Fwidth%3D1245%26height%3D700%26coordinates%3D0%252C39%252C0%252C341%22%2C%20%221200x800%22%3A%20%22https%3A//rebelmouse. png%3Fwidth%3D1245%26height%3D700%26coordinates%3D0%252C0%252C0%252C380%22%2C%20%221200x800%22%3A%20%22https%3A//rebelmouse. png%3Fwidth%3D600%26height%3D300%26coordinates%3D0%252C0%252C0%252C426%22%2C%20%221245x700%22%3A%20%22https%3A//rebelmouse.

png%3Fwidth%3D1245%26height%3D700%26coordinates%3D0%252C23%252C0%252C357%22%2C%20%22300x%22%3A%20%22https%3A//rebelmouse. png%3Fwidth%3D750%26height%3D1000%26coordinates%3D30%252C0%252C120%252C0%22%2C%20%2235x35%22%3A%20%22https%3A//rebelmouse.png%3Fwidth%3D600%26height%3D600%26coordinates%3D0%252C0%252C0%252C50%22%2C%20%22210x%22%3A%20%22https%3A//rebelmouse. When I woke to the gorgeous sight of water and sun outside my personal patio, I felt a little sad and a little lonely.

The three of us were, for the first few minutes, the only people in the room — we’d commandeered the nightclub during daylight hours — but slowly, a crowd of around 20 other people trickled in. png%3Fwidth%3D1000%26height%3D750%26coordinates%3D0%252C0%252C0%252C238%22%2C%20%221200x400%22%3A%20%22https%3A//rebelmouse. png%3Fwidth%3D600%26height%3D400%26coordinates%3D0%252C0%252C0%252C300%22%2C%20%221200x800%22%3A%20%22https%3A//rebelmouse.png%3Fwidth%3D1200%26height%3D400%26coordinates%3D0%252C79%252C0%252C471%22%2C%20%22600x300%22%3A%20%22https%3A//rebelmouse. I generally expected to meet some nice older ladies with interesting life stories, to explore the tensions of intergenerational lesbian culture and the fraught future of lesbian spaces, to laze about on a beach in the Virgin Islands and get to say I was swimming and sunbathing “for work. The second reason was that I’d watched some of my friends in long-term relationships experiment with nonmonogamy, only for the experiment to end in disaster: Somebody, inevitably, fell for somebody else. 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.

In the video posted by YouTube personalities Bria and Chrissy, four straight women were filmed kissing other females and discussing their sexual preferences . I met a girl who introduced herself to me, danced nearby me and sometimes with me, and started a conversation. We decided that my Olivia story fell in some sort of weird journalistic in-between, just like my own job does.

Plus, I wasn’t assigned this story to go and passively report out what everybody else was doing on the cruise; I was supposed to immerse myself in the experience (while, of course, disclosing to anyone I spoke with that I was writing about the trip). Dana was at the mixer, as well as another staffer, Ingrid, a cheery femme redhead and Olivia’s program manager. png%3Fwidth%3D1000%26height%3D750%26coordinates%3D0%252C0%252C0%252C238%22%2C%20%22600x%22%3A%20%22https%3A//rebelmouse.