An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Series Q)

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A couple women had GoPro cameras, with which we took a lot of increasingly drunken group shots while we swam. But after meeting Lynette, I saw how much pride she took in her butch womanhood, which wasn’t some androgynous nowhere zone — femininity’s absence — but a whole universe unto itself. Olivia was the extraordinary comfort of feeling so seen, and so loved, by a group of strangers who, by the time we docked in gray, rainy New Jersey, felt more like my family.

This week, we want to celebrate the diversity and lived experience of lesbians worldwide, and help us all feel proud of who we are. 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. Eight years ago, I was sitting next to my mom on a plane avoiding eye contact at all costs before sputtering out 'just so you know Ma, I’m pretty gay'. Lynette knew I was in a relationship, which she respected, and she wasn’t pressuring me to make any decisions — let alone major, life-altering ones. 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.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? The BBC-produced show tells the story of Anne Lister, England’s first “modern lesbian,” as she begins an on-and-off romance with her IRL wife-to-be, Ann Walker. As I walked around the ship, which holds over 2,000 passengers, it was already clear that the average woman here was a couple decades older than me. e. a scrappy young lesbian who looks really good in a hat, in this ensemble reboot based off the Armistead Maupin books of the same name. Starring out Latinx actress Monica Raymund as Jackie Quiñones ,a National Marine Fisheries Service agent on Cape Cod, Hightownis the type of show that makes you hold your breath until you compulsively finish each episode.

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.We did our own thing during the day: I went to events like Olivia’s joint programming with Sapphire Publishing to see one of my literary heroes, Dorothy Allison, speak about the future of lesbian storytelling.

The girl who sat next to me spent the whole lesson telling me it was really weird that I had women on my pencil case. Seeing everybody swap out their board shorts and tourist tees for suits and gowns, I felt overwhelmed with care for all these women; most of us, when we were actually in high school, didn’t have the opportunity to dress according to our gender presentations or have women as dates on our arms. Last year, I wrote up a BuzzFeed News/Whitman Insight Strategies poll in which we found that lesbians make up only 16% of the LGBT population in the US; younger women are much less likely than older women to identify as such. When we met, we’d been two postgrad dirtbags, drinking beer out of paper bags in the park on weekday afternoons, sleeping on air mattresses and in hallways.Many members of the group say they have experienced violence at the hands of family members who became suspicious about their sexuality. I’m a long-term kind of planner, while my partner was more likely to fly by the seat of their pants.

Prepare to have the show’s eponymous ditty stuck in your head after every episode of this period dramedy. I had plenty of my own domestic faults, to be sure: I can be disorganized and forgetful; I suck at trash duty; I despise doing dishes or cleaning out the fridge. That’s why lesbian visibility days are so important: it shows the diversity of our community, from the incredible and ground-breaking, to the beautiful every day.Family home life in the leafy mock-Tudor suburbia of Isleworth, West London, was unusual … but not to her.