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 try to separate my feelings for Lynette from my feelings about wanting someone or something different in general — out of a desperate desire to feel some sort of control over my choices — and concede that was pretty much impossible. 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. Buoyed by what she found, Nella began connecting with women online. Women like her. Women who soon became her closest friends.

I would move into a house with some friends in Brooklyn, where a room had just magically opened up. There’d be a dog, and a yard. It would feel like a sign. (I’d start getting really into signs.) 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. Another difficulty is that very few lesbians shared testimonies about their experiences during this time. This is partially because the topic of sexual relations between women remained taboo for decades after the Nazi era. 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.”

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Lynette and I had only just met, but in the emotionally intense bizarro world of the cruise, where relationships of all types seemed to develop at warp speed and I was feeling enough emotion for 10 lesbians combined, I liked Lynette very, very much. A lot of it was, obviously, physical, chemical. But there were other things, too, that were harder to explain to other people or to myself. Over 10 years later, same-sex rape on college campuses is just starting to be quantified on a national level. Haven, an online sexual assault and awareness program that logs sexual assaults directly from students, works with self-reported data from over 800 colleges and universities. Haven had never compiled a report on undergraduate women who have been assaulted by women, but teamed up with MarieClaire.com to reveal new information: While the number of reported sexual assaults by women was low compared to assaults overall (only about 2.5 percent), the most striking difference came down to the likelihood of survivors to report the incident: 30 percent of women assaulted by another woman told no one, compared to 25 of women who didn't report an assault by a man. The Nazis did not systematically prosecute or persecute lesbians solely because of their sexuality. Under the Nazi regime, there was no official law or policy prohibiting sexual relations between women. This is unlike the case of gay men.

But she still hoped there would be a way out of it. She prayed. She meditated. She became angry with herself. When you want your account to grow, you’ll want to start with the first thing people will see – your actual account. You should have sexy profile and cover photos, and a writeup that greets your fans, describes yourself, and lists the type of content you enjoy creating. This is mandatory – there’s no sense growing your account if people aren’t interested when they find it. 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. 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.

When she came out to herself, Leila began to look for other gay people. She doubted there would be women like her in Burundi, but she searched videos on Facebook and YouTube seeking lesbians in other countries.