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Day 1 in Puerto Vallarta: GAY CRUISE!!!!!!!!!!!
(Camera was aiming straight up at the sun in this one so I couldn’t see the screen at all… hence it being off-center. Sigh.)
When we were looking at lesbian things to do in Puerto Vallarta, Diana’s Tours was one of the only things that was listed for lesbians. It’s a full-day cruise around the Banderas Bay in a private yacht, including open bar, breakfast, snacks, snorkeling, swimming at a gorgeous private beach, lunch (mmm grilled talapia…) on shore, and the leadership of the amazing Diana, a tough butch Montreal transplant who one day 13 years ago came to Puerto Vallarta for vacation and decided to stay. (Would I had the courage to do something that impulsive!) So mi’lady and I thought “sweet! LESBIANS! and Diana can give us tips on lesbian nightlife!” (since none of the guidebooks, even in the gay sections, had anything at all to say about a lesbian nightlife).
We were wrong. We showed up at the dock the first morning (after confirming at breakfast at the (gay) hotel that we were the only women in the entire establishment), promptly spotted Diana, and were greeted with “You must be Alphafemme and Hr’lady! Welcome!” at which point we realized we were, in fact, the only women on the cruise as well.
Which was fine, of course. Gay guys are a ton of fun. We had a blast that day, and it was totally refreshing being around a group of 20 people with the knowledge that not one of them was checking us out. Plus all the guys were like “omg! lesbians! omg awesome! yay diversity! omg!” and so we felt very embraced.
But honestly, I don’t know that we would have felt as welcome, and might have felt somewhat out of place, if the leader of the tour hadn’t been a lesbian. Somehow, the fact that she was a lesbian validated our presence there. If the leader of the tour had been a gay man, though, and then we’d shown up to all the other passengers being gay men, we probably would’ve felt that we’d somehow not gotten the memo. That they only said they were a gay and lesbian tour in order to sound inclusive, but really, they didn’t actually mean it. Really, it’s just a gay guy party.
And as it turned out, there really isn’t anything for lesbians in Puerto Vallarta. Diana’s Tour is really about the lezziest thing you can do. We asked Diana whether it was just a low season in terms of lesbian tourists, and she said no — her cruise occasionally has a few women, but is mostly gay men. The gay hotels are all male-owned and phallocentric (for real — our hotel had pictures of penises EVERYWHERE). The gay bars and dance clubs are all populated entirely by gay men. The gay beach is a male meat market. “There’s one bar that’s lesbian-owned,” Diana told us, “but none of the clientele are lesbians.”
Where are all the ladies? I think there’s this devil’s spiral thing happening. Lesbians in general are not as affluent as gay men (24% of lesbians live in poverty, compared to 15% of gay men, and lesbian couples are much more likely to be poor than gay male couples–see this Williams Institute report). So financially, it’s not as smart to market to lesbians, because they have a much lower spending power than gay men. (Socially, too — and this is less measurable, but I would guess still a factor — I think lesbians and women are just taken less seriously than gay (and straight) men as decision-making consumers. Also, (white) gay men are just taken for granted as the picture of Gay.) And so gay destinations market to gay men, almost de facto. They include the “and lesbian” tag just to be inclusive, but when push comes to shove, marketing to both gay men and lesbians is hard — we’re different after all! — and so gay men get the push. We dykes get the shove. And then as a result of that, we don’t travel to gay destinations. We know they won’t be oriented to us, so we stay home. Or go into the woods. Or just go to straight places, where we won’t be completely irrelevant as the only women. Invisible, maybe. But not irrelevant.
I see two solutions:
1) “Gay and lesbian” has to start really meaning gay AND LESBIAN. If they’re going to cater to lesbians, cater to frickin lesbians! Show some tits and pussy! Blast M.I.A. and Tegan & Sara and Melissa Etheridge! Have women-specific events! Ladies nights! Anything!
and,
2) DYKES NEED TO GET OUT MORE. The end.
Note: I recognize that I am extremely lucky to be in a demographic that can afford leisure travel, like a trip to Mexico. I think, though, that this point easily transfers to a more general one: white gay men are the face of gay. And it sucks.
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.
Annika left yesterday morning, early, before I got up to go to work. We didn’t get much sleep–we had sex most of the night and talked intermittently. “We’re a funny sort of friends,” she said, naked, tangled up in me, her head resting on… my shoulder? collarbone? chest? There really ought to be a name for the nook someone rests their head in, under your chin, in front of your neck, the place you put your hand when you say the pledge of allegiance. Anyway, “we’re a funny sort of friends.” And there we were, post-sex, having spent five days fucking and hanging out, but not falling in love. We are a funny sort of friends. The sort of friends who laugh and have fun together, talk about each others’ lives, listen actively, share forthrightly, are honest and genuine with each other. Also the kind of friends who find each other sexy, who flirt with each other, who make out and fuck. But… also the kind of friends who act like a couple? Who cuddle and kiss and pet each other and go on dates? Don’t those things generally mean you’re more than friends?
It’s strange. The first time we met, she was visiting with her friend, Becky, my roommate’s on-again-off-again lover. That first time, though, I was already occupied with another girl. Annika and I had one conversation, just one. But I thought she was hot and when Other Girl came and went, and turned out to be a married woman who picked me to fall in love with (”It’s not all women, I’m not gay, it’s just you!”) and then became all puppy-dog on me, and then when Annika came back to visit again with Becky the following weekend, that’s when Annika and I hit it off. The whole weekend (which turned out to be a four-day weekend… I even missed work) she and I were together, which involved a whole lot of making out, a whole lot of getting drunk, sleeping on the floor of a hotel room with 8 other people, and then finally, the last night, having amazing sex in my bed at my place (while my roommate and Becky, coincidentally, were having sex in their room).
And I thought that was that. But then Annika came back to San Francisco, to visit. This past weekend. Three weeks after she was here the last time. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been attracted to someone smarter than me,” Annika told me. “Smart is sexy.” (I don’t think I’m smarter than her–she’s pretty fucking smart herself–but I do think that one of the things that made us click was that I could be intellectual with her. I could talk about philosophy and gender theory and she thought it was hot. I like that in a woman.) So she came back, for five days.
I was nervous. I’m not in a place right now where I want to be in a relationship. With anyone. I don’t want to be in love. I want to be single, I want to be exploring sexuality, I want to be connecting with lots of different people, and being open to lots of different possibilities. It’s not that long ago that my Ex and I broke up and we had a pretty difficult relationship at the end. And I’m just done being miserable, done living for someone else. I need to learn how to live for myself before I get involved with anyone else. So having Annika come back seemed like a major thing that I wasn’t sure I was ready for.
And I’m still not sure what to make of it. “I’m not really looking for anything serious,” she told me. Phew. But what on earth is our connection about? It’s so odd. I’m not in love with her, and I don’t know if I ever would be. But we had really good sex (interestingly, with her, I was a consistent bottom–very unusual for me; “I felt the urge to hold you, heal you,” Annika told me (why? is what I want to know), “I just assumed you were a bottom, didn’t you assume I was a top?” I did, actually, assume she was a top, so I may have just been playing along with that–also interestingly, she said she’s not usually a top–what’s up with the switcheroo?!) and really good conversations, really good chemistry. We acted like a couple the whole time. But I’m just not feeling the idea of getting serious with her.
And that’s kind of a first for me. Feeling good about just having a casual non-monogamous fucking thing going on. We’re a funny sort of friends, I guess. And it works. She left to go back to Seattle yesterday morning, kissed me gently before tiptoeing out and running off to the airport, and I haven’t felt a particular urge to talk to her or call her. But I also do still want her in my life, and she’s thinking of moving here in January. So what will happen then? Will we keep fucking? Decide to call it quits and be friends? Decide to step it up and date? Who knows.
What I do know is, I’ve learned something about myself. That it’s possible for me to have sex–awesome sex–with women I am not in/soon going to be in a committed relationship with. That I can do it without overanalyzing, getting nervous and self-conscious, and feeling vulnerable. And maybe part of my reluctance to think of getting at all serious with Annika anytime soon is that, hot damn, I want to do this some more!
(Camera was aiming straight up at the sun in this one so I couldn’t see the screen at all… hence it being off-center. Sigh.)
