ask, and you shall receive
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We started talking a few days ago and continued talking last night about how to make sure sex is a central part of our relationship, and not just an incidental part.
What I mean by that is this:
When you first start seeing someone, it’s all about sex. Or mostly, anyway. Obviously you’re attracted to her as a whole person; she makes you laugh, you have conversations about God and past relationships and what your favorite drink is, you share an interest in music and books, you can rib on the northeast, since you’re both from there originally. But if you get right down to it, it’s about the sex. Every gesture of her hands, every toss of her hair, every sideways glance makes your heart thud and your pussy pulse. And when she touches you, even casually, accidentally, you swoon. You’re liquid in the lap of Eros.
Luckily for you and everything else in your life, this isn’t indefinite. The time returns when you can be in her presence without feeling completely dysfunctional, you can exchange emails at work without the rest of the day becoming a fluster of distraction and desire. It’s lucky for your relationship, too, because you can finally get to know and trust and love each other deeply, talk about difficult things and fun things, share stress and anxiety and joy and excitement, unwind together, and (perhaps most importantly) get some sleep. With your bodies warm against each other, of course.
But a side effect of this natural progression of a healthy relationship can be, if you don’t pay attention, that you forget about sex. Or rather, you don’t forget, but sex becomes The Thing You Do In The Bedroom When You Want To Be Intimate Or Just Want An Orgasm. It’s The Thing You Do At The End Of The Day When Everything Else Is Taken Care Of. It’s like “recess” for elementary school kids. A regular occurence, but distinctly separate from everything else you do. For kids at school, it’s workworkworkworkworkPLAYworkworkwork. For you two sexy partnered people, it’s workworkworkworkworkSEXworkworkwork.
And, YAY!, we have great sex. It’s not boring, it’s not mediocre, it’s not slowing down, it’s not tired or old or mechanical or artificial or put on or anything like that. There are days, sure, when it’s kinda like “ok we’re both super tired, let’s just make out a little and get each other off” but even those days are intimate and binding. We desire each other.
But, I guess that rather than the workworkworkworkworkSEXworkworkwork model, I’d rather cultivate a model that looks more like sEwoRXkeskoRseoSEXworsekWORKkerweX.
Um, does that make sense? I definitely still want there to be uninterrupted, undistracted, maybe even scheduled SEX time. Time when there’s nothing on our minds but fucking. And, to that end, I want there to be time for just “work” (and that doesn’t just mean “job” work, but anything else, too, like writing, or doing music, or cooking dinner, or fixing the heater, or whatever it is that we do). But I also really want sex to be integral and fully integrated in my day. So that it’s not just cordoned off into its own little section of the day. In other words: I want to practice eroticizing the daily grind.
For example: cook in a corset, garters, thigh-high seamed stockings, and four-inch heels. Why not? Rather than the more typical “I’m feeling horny, let’s do some role-playing, how about I’m your submissive wife and I cook whatever you want while you boss me around,” let’s make it “I’m feeling hungry, so I’m going to go put on some lingerie and head to the kitchen.”
Another example: get a piece of jewelry that designates a particular role, so that if I, say, wear a particular ring on a certain finger, it means that I’m sexually available the whole time I’m wearing it, and so I’ve got a constant physical reminder of “SEX!” on my body during the day. Or even a gesture, a particular innocuous gesture (biting my lower lip?) could be re-identified as meaning “I want to fuck you hard” or “I want your giant cock inside me.”
I think Sinclair’s idea of homework is a perfect example of this, too, because it sends the erotic outside of the we’re-fucking-here-and-now, extends it beyond the moments in the bedroom, and builds it into the regular structure of the day.
The reason we’re talking about this is not, I repeat, because our sex is getting boring or tired; it’s not because I want to “spice things up.” It’s because I think our mainstream culture has a way of stifling sexual energy – we’re not supposed to talk about sex in public, with anyone other than our closest friends (if even them), and sex is supposed to take place privately and discreetly. (And, hypocritically, it’s simultaneously obsessed with sex.) But that’s not what I want. I want to cultivate an active sexual energy that isn’t constrained by the bedroom door or the time of the day, and that can be nurtured and activated throughout the day by various things. That way, when I finally do get to have sex, I’m not starting at 0 (or 5 or 10) and going to 60; rather, I’ll already be going at 30 or 45. That’s a whole lot easier to manage, frankly, when I’m tired and stressed and anxious and the thought of needing to find the momentum to get from 0 to 60 is daunting.
And on that note, I’m going to go write mi’lady a dirty email ;)
A long, long time ago—back in August?—I got an email from a reader named Asha, (1) asking where I came up with the name “alphafemme” and (2) saying that before she’d even read any of my blog, she felt a click—the word alphafemme, she thought, worked really well for her, and would I be offended if she appropriated it for herself. I promised her a post on the subject, and it is woefully overdue.
Let me first address the second thing—if the word alphafemme seems like a good fit for you in your identity, and even if your reasons for finding it a good fit are completely different from the reasons I will articulate below, by all means, if it feels good to you, use it. I think there’s a huge difference between deciding that alphafemme works as an identity label for you (which I would not call appropriation), and deciding you’re also going to publish a blog under the title “alphafemme” and write about (many of) the same things I write about or telling people that you’re me (which I would call appropriation). I would guess that most people are not inclined to do the latter, but I fully endorse the former! Run away with it people!
And now I’ll go back to the first thing, which is where I came up with the name “alphafemme” in the first place. I address this a bit on my About page (which needs updating anyway), but let me go into a bit more detail here.
After the obligatory coming out identity crisis, which I think many (if not most) queer women go through at some point or other (and I think this in itself is fascinating, and I totally want to write about this too), I started grappling with that all-important question: Who Am I? And maybe I have less self-awareness than most, but it took me quite a lot of trial and error to come to an understanding of my identity that felt right. I guess that was part of what I wanted this blog to do for me, to help me go through it all and decide what works for me and what doesn’t. And while I’ve (for now) finally settled on femme as a sort of umbrella-word for how I identify, it was hardly easy to come to terms with that.
I’m sure part of the insecurity in identifying as femme was internalized sexism, that some of the fear had to do with not wanting to choose what might seem to others to be “unenlightened” or, worse, hurting feminism. I’ve pretty much gotten over that now (see my post on femininity for a discussion of that), thank goodness, and am now fiercely, comfortably, and even subversively feminine.
But another major qualm I had with identifying as femme was this fear that I somehow didn’t actually know what femme meant, and that I would be scoffed at by other self-identified femmes for identifying as such. (“YOU’RE not femme, you have short hair!” or “but I hardly ever see you in dresses! that’s not really femme!” or “femmes don’t strap on! femmes don’t do the fucking!”) In San Francisco, it seems to me like everyone I’ve met who identifies as femme fits a certain image: dyed blonde or raven black hair, porcelain white skin, bright red lipstick, fishnets, tattoos… And believe me, these ladies are smokin’, but it’s just not my look. And so I was like, well, if that’s what femme is, then I’m not femme. (There are, of course, many other femme-identified ladies in SF who do also do not fit that particular description, as I’ve come to realize. Yay!)
And yet it still appealed to me. I still felt that my mild obsession with high heeled-peep-toe pumps and my growing infatuation with cooking still somehow made femme the right word for me. But since I was still kind of hesitant, it needed a qualifier. Something that made my identity mine.
It came to me last summer when I was watching old episodes of The L Word with a friend of mine, reminiscing about the pre-Dana’s-death days of the show. Or, rather, it came to my friend. We were watching one of the episodes where Bette is dealing with the protestors to her gallery’s art show. My friend turned to me and said, “she reminds me of you, she’s such an alpha female.”
“What does THAT mean?” I asked.
“Well… you’re strong, and fierce, and driven, and you’re always on top of everything, always in control. And you dress sharply feminine, powerful. But you’re also vulnerable, I think, I mean right? Don’t you sometimes just want someone to hold you and have someone else be the stronger one?”
And oh. my. god. YES. She was so right. I think my similarities to Bette end there (I’m not a raging bitch who cheats on my lovers in order to maintain a facade of Control Freak, and unfortunately I look nothing like her), but such as they are, the similarities ring so true. And “alpha” is an excellent way of describing me. I’m confident in my intellect, and I am meticulous, in control, ambitious, and driven. But I’m not just alpha. I’m alphafemme. I’m an alpha who wants to be enfolded at the end of the day. I’m an alpha who loves to pretend I’m a 50s housewife, a la Betty Draper, but happier (I’m currently obsessed with Mad Men). I’m an alpha with soft eyes and a maternal edge. I’m an alpha, with femme. Alphafemme.
Of course, to you, it can mean anything you want it to. If it conjures anything else for you, please share!
I’ve been wanting to write this post for a while, for months, really, and then when G posted about it recently it was just the shove I needed to actually sit down and write it.
There are so many layers of femme (in)visibility to me. There’s how we’re seen (or not) by straight people, by society at large. There’s how we’re seen (or not) by fellow queers. There’s how we’re seen by fellow dykes. And how we’re seen by each other. And of course, there’s how we see ourselves. And in all of this, there’s the personal, and there’s the political.
But I don’t really know how to write about it except in terms of my own experience. And of course, my experience isn’t representative of anything except itself. But I think there are probably parallels and similarities to and “mmhmm”s and head nods from other femme-identified folks out there.
It starts with not being able to see myself. That must be at the very root of it. As a little girl, I loved to play house, and I always wanted to be the mom. I loved to play school and wanted to be the teacher. I loved tea parties and dollhouses and dresses and patent leather shoes, I loved American Girl dolls and dress-up and imagining my future wedding. I was obsessed with Queen Elizabeth II as a little girl (I had a book about her written by her nanny) and with figure skaters and ballerinas. I fit snugly into my gender box. No questions asked.
Come junior high, I decided to start having crushes on the boys in my classes. Each year on the first day of school, I would scan homeroom for that year’s candidates. I carefully weighed my options, and within 20 minutes or so had selected the object of my external focus for the year. Seventh grade: Dillon. Eighth grade: Ryan. Ninth grade: Jason. In tenth grade I started dating, but never really cared much for the guys. In fact I think I was somewhat scared of them. Touching them, kissing them, doing stuff with them made me feel weird and nervous.
I’m not going to go over my whole coming out story here, but suffice it to say it took me quite a long time to come out to myself. I started questioning that year, tenth grade. I had a friend who I was in love with, but I couldn’t quite believe it. There was no way I was gay. It just didn’t make sense. I was a girl. I was supposed to like boys. That was that.
Understanding of sexuality is so, so so tied up with gender. That’s really what makes femmes so invisible. To ourselves as well as to others. There often aren’t any outward signs that we digress from the norm. They’re all inward. And society tells us (all of us, not just femmes) all the time that the inward things? Are figments of our imagination. Depression, addiction, anxiety, sexual orientation — it’s fabricated, it’s (no pun intended) just in our minds. You can’t get an MRI that says “whoops, there’s some depression in there, we’ll have to medicate you” or a pap smear that tells you “yep, yer gay alright, no two ways about it.” So unless you look different, unless there’s some physical proof of it (whatever it is), there’s plenty of room for people to doubt you. And judge you. And feel justified in doubting and judging. Because all that stuff? It’s in your mind. So I can tell you you’re wrong.
That’s what I, as a femme, was up against. Convincing myself that, actually, no, I’m right. That gut feeling that made me ask my mom, as an 11-year-old, whether it was normal to like other girls? That was right. Even though I liked ruffles and paper dolls and the Sound of Music. It took me so. long. to learn how to trust that feeling. I guess I’m still learning, really. In my first years after coming out for good, I went through all kinds of identity shifts, trying to settle on the self-expression that felt right for me. I just didn’t think it could be that I was both totally feminine and gay. I thought I was just fooling myself that I was gay. To be honest, I sometimes still do have those moments of doubt. “How is it possible that I’m gay?”
And, dude, I’m gay. I fuckin’ love pussy. The best compliment from mi’lady is when she looks at me in wonder, after a good fuck, and says, “you’re so gay.”
In fact, I think that’s probably the best compliment from anyone. Even people who mean it as an insult. To be recognized as gay makes me puff out my chest and stand up straighter. Really. I just want to belong here. I want people to know that I’m a member of the club. Sometimes, I do get some sort of signal, a wink maybe, and I just about die, every time. Especially when it’s the older, butch lesbians, in their late 30s and 40s. A wink from them is so gratifying. Not transgressive, not presumptuous, not inappropriate. Affirming.
I’ve spent up enough time and energy proving myself to myself, you know? I don’t have much leftover to try to prove anything to anyone else. So I don’t try, not much anyway. And for the most part, I don’t let the invisibility get to me. But those moments of visibility are all the more precious because of it.
Mi’lady isn’t butch. (If she were, there’s no way in hell I would call her mi’lady.)
She’s not femme, either. Not particularly. Not the way I am. She doesn’t really fit into any sort of butch<–>femme spectrum at all. Maybe she’s androgynous, though somehow I’m uncomfortable with that word too to describe her. We talked about it a bit on Sunday, and didn’t really come up with a label that fit her precisely. But what she definitely is is a dyke.
I guess her gender energy is somewhat akin to Shane from The L Word. (Though I know Shane was commonly referred to as butch, I really don’t think she was, or at least not in the way that I understand butch.) Mi’lady isn’t quite the same sort of aloof player that Shane was portrayed as, and she’s much more outgoing and free with her emotions. Allows herself to be more vulnerable than Shane’s character. But she has a similar posture, a similar sort of slightly disheveled look, a similar style. Another stylistic reference would be Tegan & Sara — she’s got a sort of punkish female androgyny–tattoo, skinny jeans, chucks, indie t-shirts, black eyeliner.
And I wouldn’t say our relationship feels particularly butch-femme, either. It’s not that clearly defined. In some ways it does feel very butch-femme. I’m very much a nurturer, in that I’m constantly doing little domestic things. Cooking, tidying, grooming, both for me and for her. I’m a multi-tasker and I’m very attentive to detail. I like things just so. In that regard I can be a care-taker of her. Because she’s disorganized and rumpled and a bit chaotic and kind of messy. Not at all detail-oriented. She’s fantastically creative, and I help keep her grounded. In a femme way.
She is a nurturer too, in a different sense, maybe in more of a (dare I say?) butch sense. She’s always “big spoon,” and we almost always fall asleep that way, with her enfolding me in her arms. She’s very affirmative with words, telling me often how sexy or beautiful I am or how much she likes what I cook or how hot those heels look, in a way that affirms and strengthens my femininity. She was the one who pursued me from the get-go, bold and a risk-taker to my subtle flirting.
But in otherways, we’re not very butch-femme. Sexually, for example, we have great sex in which she’s more dominant and I’m submissive, and great sex in which I’m more dominant and she’s submissive, and great sex that doesn’t have bottom/top roles at all. I love strapping on and fucking her with a cock (she loves it too), and don’t particularly care for the reverse (she’s open to it if I want it but isn’t insistent on it). And aside from the ways I articulated above, there isn’t really any other way that our relationship feels gendered. We’re both women.
I wonder, in a way, whether I’m most suited to a butch, considering the extent to which I think I’m really femme. For example, mi’lady doesn’t really have (or at least hasn’t at any point articulated, to me or to herself) a matching and inverted fantasy of being a “protector” and having a “wife,” the way I’ve got this fantasy of having a protector and being a wife. But… I love her. She makes me laugh, she helps me move beyond details and be flexible, she motivates me to break out of my comfort zone a little bit and then gives me room to go back in, she challenges me. And really, I don’t think it’s necessary for our fantasies to match up. I think as long as we’re willing and able to work out the kinks and figure out our dynamics and make sure we’re both giving what we’re able to getting what we need, then we should be ok.
And, you know, she really does love it when I cook for her :)
It was the best welcome home she’s ever had, she said.
After all my thinking and processing last week about my femmeyness, I allowed myself to just revel in it. I spent all day Sunday preparing for her to come home. I booked a Zipcar to pick her up at the airport when her flight came in at 6. (Typically we would just take BART, and I had told her I would meet her to help her carry her stuff home… the car was a surprise!) I got my nails done in the morning (fingers and toes!)–short, a little bit squared, bright red polish. Paraffin wax, so my skin was silky smooth. I’d gotten a fresh legs and bikini wax on Saturday, so that I’d be ready and smooth for her. I planned out Sunday evening’s meal, bought the necessary ingredients on Saturday, and brought them over to her place on Sunday afternoon to begin prep before her flight came in. AND, on Sunday morning after the manicure and pedicure, I went to my favorite lingerie boutique in San Francisco, Dollhouse Bettie (they specialize in vintage and pinup lingerie), to make sure her welcome home would be *extra* special. (Dollhouse Bettie’s website doesn’t have a link to the piece I bought, so I found a link to it elsewhere instead. It’s got gorgeous detailing, and I got nude seamed nylons instead of black ones because I really wanted the basque to speak for itself. With these shoes and my full-sleeve black leather gloves from Doncaster, this is a stunning get-up.)
And it was such a wonderful day, from start to finish. Waking up and knowing that I was going to be getting my nails done, going lingerie shopping, cooking, and seeing/fucking mi’lady for the first time in a week was such an amazing feeling. I don’t think there’s anything I’d have rather done on a gorgeous Sunday. Seriously. And it all went off without a hitch.
The only thing I think could have gone smoother was cutting the pumpkin. Pumpkin soup was one of my menu items (and as SOON as she saw it she was really, really excited… she loves pureed vegetable soups), but I’d forgotten how ridiculously hard it is to cube and peel a raw pumpkin. SO HARD. I wrestled with it for a good hour. But it was so ridiculously worth it. It was really, really good, if I do say so myself. And the recipe is really simple — really all that’s in it is pumpkin, onion, a tiny bit of garlic, bay leaves, a bit of orange rind, butter, vegetable stock, and a tiny bit of milk. I garnished it with fresh chives. And that’s it. The best part though? Was mi’lady telling me that the pumpkin soup she’d had earlier that week at an upscale restaurant in Boston with a client “wasn’t even half as good as yours. Well okay, maybe half. But seriously, only half!”
The other menu item was risotto with leeks, spinach, white wine, and a little bit of plain yoghurt. I love cooking.
The best part of everything was that she just felt adored. I love that. Love it. It turns me on and makes me stand up straight. I’m doing what I do best, what I love to do. Fuck yeah. From getting picked up by me at the airport in a car, to having dinner planned and prepared to the AMAZING fucking hot sex we had, it was the best welcome home she’d ever had. And I’m responsible for it :)
Whoopee! I’m going to Mexico!
Wednesday is my birthday. Wednesday is also the day that mi’lady and I hop on a (direct) flight from San Francisco to … Puerto Vallarta! Yesterday, in preparation, I got a pedicure, and my toes are now painted a suitably tropical color. Late August is not, I must say, the best time to be going to the tropics. We’ll be there until Sunday (short and sweet) and the current weather forecast predicts thunderstorms every day. Ha. Coming from the bay area, though, thunderstorms are a rare commodity, so even if we do get them every day, it’ll be out of the ordinary and worth flying south for.
Plus, if it rains, it’ll just mean we’ll have to have more sex!
Speaking of sex, we’ve now each read one of The Topping Book (me) and The Bottoming Book (her). We do plan to swap and each read the other as well, but it’s a good start. We’ve talked about it some, and plan on talking about it (and doing other than just talking, ahem) some more while on vacation. We’ve both agreed that there are things we really like about the books and things we really dislike.
We like that they have made us think about how vital communication is to having satisfying, gratifying, and truly consensual sex. If I’m going to top her in a way that works, I have to first know what she wants from me, what turns her on most, what she thinks it means for me to top her, what it means to her to be submissive, what her limits are, et cetera. And conversely, she has to know what I want from topping, what it means to me to be a dominant, what expectations and needs I have from topping, and what turns ME on. I mean, right? It sounds obvious, talking about what you want. But really, it’s a lot to talk about. Certainly we’ve talked about our sex before–we talk about it all the time in fact. We generally talk afterwards about what worked and didn’t work, whether it was good, how it felt… We communicate during sex as well (and I find it to be absolutely a necessary part of good sex). But neither of us has really thought to really sit down, maybe even with pre-thought-out notes (!!), or even a pen and paper to jot things down, and truly discuss and understand each other’s desires, fantasies, and needs. I’m really, really excited about doing that.
One of the things that both of us disliked about the books, on the other hand, was that they seem very geared to people in some defined BDSM “Scene” whose goal it is to “Play” with other individuals who are also in this defined “Scene.” Mi’lady and I are monogamous and are not particularly interested in having “Playdates” with others, certainly not at this point and I’m not sure about ever. If our relationship ever evolves in that direction, then sure, I’ll consider it at that point. But I don’t think that that direction of development has to be a given, and that exploring BDSM with a partner has to involve this sort whole sort of BDSM culture. I don’t want to really go to dungeons, or have sex in front of an audience, or switch partners all the time. To me, sex and romantic love are very connected, and I don’t know that I want to try to unconnect them. (And additionally, I tend to only feel developed romantic love for one person at a time.) But the books, to me, seemed to implicitly enforce this idea that in order to do BDSM the Right Way, you have to be willing to open yourself up to this whole new way of contextualizing sex. And it’s not that I’m not open to it. I’m certainly very open to it on an intellectual level. But it’s a culture that just doesn’t feel like a good fit for me. And I just don’t agree with the notion that if you’re interested in BDSM, or if you identify as Kinky, then you must also somehow belong to this Culture-Capital-C.
Anyway… hmmm. I’d like to develop those thoughts some more later. When I’m not at work, haha. In any case, though, I’m sure you’ll hear more on this, if nothing else in the form of a full vacation report!
This is a meme borrowed from greg. I couldn’t resist because it has SEX in it. HA!
1. Boxers, briefs, hipsters, bikinis or none? Boxers post-sex, hipsters the rest of the time.
2. Last book you’ve read or are now reading? I’m in the middle of two books. (1) Brideshead Revisited (Evelyn Waugh). Good book, but the only edition of it I could find anywhere has the TV miniseries pictures all over the cover. Number one way to deter serious readers from a good book? PUT PICTURES FROM A TV MINISERIES ALL OVER ITS COVER. (2) Lolita (Nabokov). Read it before, hated it. So I’m reading it again to try to convince myself of its “literary merits” and ignore the sleazy pedophilia. Harder than it sounds.
3. When did the realization hit you that you’re a lesbian? Well, technically, sophomore year of college when I fell in love with my ex-girlfriend. (See my National Coming Out Day entry for the deets on that story.) But, really, it was in fifth grade when I had a huge crush on Joanna Eastmond. She moved to South Dakota the following year and I have no idea what’s happened to her. She’s Mormon though. So I think it’s safe to say that would’ve gone nowhere.
4. Give us some details of your first lesbian sexual relationship: Oh my god, eye-opening. Just, wow. I had no idea it was possible to get that wet, to be that turned on, to feel so explosively sexual. We were each others’ lesbian firsts, so we got to do the whole exploring-everything-because-it-was-all-brand-new thing. SO MUCH FUN!
5. Rate your sensitivity level from 1 (low) to 5 (high) for your hurtful feelings: Probably 4. I’m pretty sensitive. But then there are times when I’m surprisingly not sensitive, and then people will apologize to me for something they thought probably hurt me because I usually am sensitive, and I’m all like “what? what’d you do? I didn’t know you did anything.”
6. Name the farthest place you’ve traveled to from home: I guess Hawai’i was technically the farthest from my then-home (upstate New York). Greece (the island of Evia) is the furthest from my current home (San Francisco) (though at the time I was living in Germany!).
7. Ever get caught “doing it”? Or explain the most embarrassing if you’ve had many: Never been caught “doing it”, and the only time I’ve ever been caught hooking up at all was last winter, at mi’lady’s holiday party at her house. She calls me into her room in the middle of the party and we start making out madly on her bedroom floor (at this point we’d been dating for all of like, 3 weeks) and after maybe 10 minutes her best friend knocks on the door and then just BARGES ON IN! Like the knock was just a protocol? I don’t know. So we look up at her like deer in headlights, and she looks terribly flustered, goes completely red, and is all “OMG” and backs out of the room in a confused hurry. We mostly thought it was pretty funny.
8. What is your biggest accomplishment? Hmmm. Somehow I don’t feel all that accomplished. I guess it would be finishing my undergraduate honors thesis in philosophy, and getting magna cum laude on it. That felt pretty good, especially since as late as November of that same year I wasn’t sure I’d be able to finish it.
9. What is your major weakness? Relying on other people too much for my own sense of self-worth.
10. Do you normally keep your ex’s as friends? Nope. Never have. Once I move on, I’ve moved on. My college girlfriend and I are I guess “friendly acquaintances” now, but I just can’t do the friends thing.
11. Have you gotten your heart broken more or have you broken more hearts? Well, above-mentioned college girlfriend totally broke my heart after two years of dating — she broke up with me right before I was moving to San Francisco to be with her. (Luckily SF is a place anyone would want to be regardless of relationship status.) That sucked, and I lost about 25 pounds in two months (and people, I was only about 135lbs to begin with) and cried every single day and was miserable and alone. And then slowly but surely, I started getting over her, and several months later I found mi’lady, and then I broke my ex’s heart, because it turns out she’d been still in love with me the whole time and was harboring hopes of getting back together and was heartbroken when I told her I was with someone else now. Karma, y’all. So I think I’m even — heart broken once, one heart broken.
12. Ever cause any divorces? I certainly hope not!
13. Ever participate in a ménage de trios (three some)? No, and can’t say I’m really itching to either. I think I’d be overwhelmed.
14. Are you a boobs, butt or legs woman? OMG BOOBS. My tongue is hanging out of my mouth like a dog about to get a treat just at the thought of mi’lady’s. Mmmmmmmmmm.
15. Muffled or loud? Oh, loud, absolutely. I can stifle if necessary, but oh my when it’s good I just can’t be shushed…
16. Name the most unusual place(s) you’ve “done it”: Well this isn’t exactly an unusual place, but it shows my unusual skill, haha. I was driving down to LA with mi’lady, I was driving, remember, and while I was driving, I fucked mi’lady in the passenger seat. That was really, really hot, because I had to keep my focus on the road so I couldn’t look at her and couldn’t touch her aside from the fucking, but she was writhing and wet and groaning and trying not to be too obvious to cars passing us on either side… Okay I’m getting wet just typing it. And I’m at work, totally not a good place to be turned on. …. Other unusual places: bottom of a slide at a playground at night (we slid down on our backs with our heads first, and fucked with our heads hanging off the bottom edge of the slide), at the symphony (that took some skill, we weren’t even in a box! we had coats on our laps and had to be reeeeeally really covert), in the back of a cab (poor cabbie, I’m sure he knew what was going on), in the back of the car while my ex’s sister was driving and her husband was in the passenger seat (that was just rude, I feel bad about that now), in the fitting room at Target while trying on swimsuits…
Okay I need to stop writing about sex, because it’s way too distracting at work. And I’m NOT EVEN GOING TO SEE HER TONIGHT! Though I shouldn’t complain, we had sex three times last night. Well, maybe I should count it as all one time, since it’s not like we got up and did other things in between, but each time we were going to stop and then just couldn’t. We got this new toy, see–a rabbit vibrator dildo in a harness. Mi’lady has never been able to come internally, so we thought maybe with a vibrator and with some clitoral stimulation at the same time it might be possible. Oh BOY was it possible. Watching her come like that was insanely hot; since she’d never come that way before she was just so shocked and overwhelmed and a bit confused and her body had this whole reaction without her fully realizing what was going on. She just looked so completely vulnerable and at the mercy of this feeling. So amazing. But then afterwards she needed more, she needed another orgasm in order to feel full and completed. And then she needed another… Oh man. So, so good.
Okay now I REALLY need to stop writing about sex.
I was interviewed for the blog project Coming Out Stories yesterday, check it out here!
Today is National Coming Out Day.
COME OUT COME OUT WHEREVER YOU ARE. (The Wizard of Oz, by the way, was one of my favorite movies as a little girl. I think I was in love with Judy Garland. And is it just me, or are there queer subtexts to it? Anyway.)
In honor of it, I will tell my coming out story. Which is not, just to warn you, terribly exciting. But since it is National Coming Out Day, and since I hope that people all over the US today are talking about being queer and knowing people who are queer and all those sorts of things, I will do the same. And maybe my coming out story, undramatic as it is, will add yet another voice to the mix of those who came out unproblematically, without even really having to, well, come out of anything.
For me, the hardest part was coming to terms with it myself. I was 12 when I had my first sexual dream about a girl, and I put it out of my mind. I was in junior high when I fell in love with the girl I called my best friend, but I never admit it to anyone, even myself, except in the form of excruciating journal entries in which I said such things as “please, God, send me a guy to prove I’m not a lesbian!” and “I think I might be in love with Alyssa, but I think she’s in love with Erin and no one will ever love me.” I was tortured. And the fact that three of my best friends came out to me (not publicly came out) and dated each other convinced me that I wasn’t really gay, I was just gay by association. They were rubbing off on me. So I put it out of my mind.
Until I started dating guys. I didn’t like kissing them, and I didn’t like the sex, and I figured I was doomed to bad sex with guys who cared about me but not enough to give me orgasms. They were good guys, but there was something missing.
Then I went to college–women’s college on the east coast. Why did I go to women’s college? Certainly NOT because I wanted to date women. I almost didn’t go to women’s college because I was afraid I’d never be able to date, I’d never meet guys. But there was something about it that I just fell in love with, when I visited as a prospective student, so off I went. And within two weeks, I was out.
There was no defining moment, at least not that I remember. I was just watching and absorbing everything around me, and it wasn’t making sense anymore, being straight, identifying as straight. It just didn’t work. There was no grand announcement, no “Guess what? I’m GAY!” Because people were still starting to get to know each other, so it could just be something that was part of me right from the outset, when people got to know me.
I didn’t come out to my parents and family until my sophomore year of colleg. And then it was a phone call home that went something like this:
“Hey Mom!”
“Hi honey, what’s new?”
“Well I’m dating someone new!”
“Oh really? Who?”
“Her name is Stella.”*
“…”
“Mom? You there?”
“Alriiiiiiight. You do know that it’s a hard life for gay people, right? I’m worried about you.”
*Her name wasn’t really Stella.
Et cetera. She went into the whole it’s-hard-to-have-kids thing and the people-will-discriminate-against-you thing. DUH. And the is-this-a-phase thing. And my dad is STILL doing all of that. Sigh. But my brother and sister (both younger) were remarkably unconcerned and my parents try. They do try. My mom will send me newspaper clippings and links about gay and lesbian issues. “Thought this might interest you,” she says. Yes, Mom, because all things Homo interest me. But she’s trying. My dad generally avoids talking about it.
I’m not out to my grandparents. They would have conniptions and would probably disown me. And would probably then die of heart attacks. I have no plans to come out to them ever, unless I’m getting married/civilly united/domestically partnered and they’re still around. They’re 90, though, so I’m not too worried about that. I love them, but they’re ridiculously conservative and it’s not worth it to me to try to change them at this point. Or to make them hate me.
And with other people, like friends or employers or co-workers, I don’t come out. I just let it come up. It’s no big “so, you should know I’m gay” thing, it’s a “so I have a funny story, one time my girlfriend and I were blahblahblahing” etc.
I think coming out is slowly becoming obsolete. I think eventually, queers won’t have to come out any more than straight people come out. We won’t have to brace ourselves. Eventually, I think that will be true. I think more and more, especially in urban areas, this is already the case with young people. Sexuality is becoming more of a non-issue. I have hope for the future in this regard. But for now, coming out is still important, so important, for everyone everywhere, because the more visible we are, the more people will know we’re not going anywhere. We’ll become rooted in the American Consciousness. And the more people who know queers and love queers, the more we’re not going anywhere. You know? So, today, on National Coming Out Day, COME OUT!
I’m working on my roommate. She’s super gay, but has trouble saying it. She has trouble saying “I’m gay.” “I’m a lesbian.” “I’m queer.” I think today she might say it. Because it’s NATIONAL COMING OUT DAY.
Also, in honor of the day ‘n all, consider donating money to Equality for All to defeat Proposition 8 on Election Day. We’ll be so sad, so defeated, if it passes, if California constitutionally bans same-sex marriage. We’re so close. But right now, polls indicate that those who want it passed are leading by 5-7 points. So we need help. Just something to consider.
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