Seducing the Straight Girl: College Lesbian Roommates

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These choices are homophobic,” I tell my new friend Dana. She’s technically my press handler, tasked with making sure I see the best that the tour operator, Olivia Travel, has to offer. So far, she’s more than delivered, but the weak karaoke selection — not Dana’s fault! — is a rare low point on a trip that, four days in, has already slowly but surely begun to change my life. He assured me he had no problem with gay people, and he really didn’t; the three guys running the catamaran all day were amazing. But he did occasionally seem to forget about the realities of the situation.

Everything comes together so perfectly in this chorus; Her voice, the high splashing of the high-hat, the strong strums of the guitar. The chorus leads out with the swirling sensation the guitar provides, along with the underlying bass that constantly pounds in the midst of the chaos. 2. “Conduct” from “Roses” For the last stretch of our afternoon, we were dropped on a secluded beach at Nevis, where a few of us ferried beers and our new favorite drink, the very college-esque Panty Ripper (coconut rum and pineapple juice), from shore to the rest of the women waiting in the water. One woman stuffed a bunch of beers into her bathing suit and we cheered whenever anybody pulled one out. A couple women had GoPro cameras, with which we took a lot of increasingly drunken group shots while we swam. One of them was attached to a floating handle that looked very much like a big yellow dildo, which, once somebody pointed it out, kept sending us into hysterics. This woman revealed that her college experimentation had a literal meaning because the woman who she had a relationship with was not only her roommate, but also her lab partner — so they were doing both scientific experiments as well as sexual ones together. Got it! Lynette is 53 years old, though she looks at least 10 years younger. She was born and raised in London to Jamaican parents. She’d recently separated from her wife, whom she’d been with for 21 years. This cruise was the gift Lynette gave herself in the aftermath. She was starting over. I planned to meet Dana in the ship lobby that morning so that we could wander around for a while before the event. When we set off into town together, she gently informed me that my whatever-it-was with Lynette had not gone unnoticed by the staff, who’d encouraged Dana to encourage me to spend more time speaking with other people and reporting on the ship’s endless entertainment options.

If you decide to come out to your roommate, do it on your own terms. You could choose to come out to your roommate before you even meet, so you and your roommate can begin your time together knowing this information from the get-go. However, the catch is that you don’t know how your roommate will react because you don’t know them yet. It’s possible your roommate will have a positive reaction and that the roommate-to-roommate relationship will remain unaffected. It is also possible that your roommate will react badly to the news, and you will know to switch rooms as soon as possible! On the other hand, you can mention your preferences in passing once you and your roommate already know each other, so as to not make it a big deal (that is, of course, if you don’t want to make it a big deal. If you want to make it a big deal, you can!). The downside to coming out this way is that it might be awkward to drop big news like that once you have already known each other for a long time. These are simply some ideas, do whatever is best for you and your safety. Here are some indirect ways you can begin to determine if it is safe to come out to your roommate, and here some ways to come out to your roommate. I would decide that it was over, and say so, and it would feel like a sort of death, but it would also, I knew, be the right thing to do — so much so that I’d feel it in my bones. I was captivated by what Eileen Myles told me at the time: “I know how to fight for what I want, to say no, when to wait. I’ve been in time for 65 years. I have a lot to share. That supposedly should only be in my teaching life — that’s not the case. It’s amazing on both sides to be able to share the world from different angles. It’s lively. It’s hot.” You may think that most of the women who experiment in college do it with their roommate — if it doesn’t work out it’s going to be a bit of an awkward housing situation — because the close confines may give way to amorous feelings.

She plays the drums, loves cars — like, posts-on-car-forums-level loves cars — and follows tech news. She cares about clothes and buys a lot of hers vintage. She just got a tattoo commemorating Liverpool, her beloved football team. I would tell my therapist everything in one fell swoop, and I’d be so relieved and grateful when she seemed genuinely happy for me. I would worry about which of the many friends my ex-partner and I shared I would lose in the dyke divorce. I’d have to come to terms with the fact that I can’t control how other people feel, can’t hold out for universal approval. Though I would also seek constant reassurance from my closest friends that I wasn’t a bad person for putting myself first, for a change; that, even after blowing up my life, they’d keep on loving me. Remember that the room is just as much yours as it is theirs, and you have the right to feel comfortable in your own living space. Don’t be afraid of your roommate’s questions It was only after a few days that we discovered what was going on—we were being called the lesbian couple. Someone in the hostel might have seen us stepping out of the bathroom.

“Black Widow” from “Are You Listening?”

I was scared of so many things, and worried about, as usual, lesbian stereotypes — moving too fast, feeling too much. And I said so. It was one of our talents that week: saying absolutely everything that was on our minds, and processing until we felt we couldn’t possibly process anymore — at least, of course, until the next night.

Unfortunately, people have a very specific image of what an LGBT person is due to stereotypes (for example, that they are into fashion or going out to bars). If you do not know many LGBT people, you might be tempted to apply these stereotypes to your roommate. Don’t do this! Instead, remember that your roommate is an individual person with a unique personality and set of likes or dislikes. Even if they do happen to match some stereotypes, focus on getting to know your roommate instead of making inferences about them based on the stereotypes. On the flip side, if you are the LGBT roommate: Do not feel pressured to come out if the environment is unsafe I come from a queer universe where traditional butch/femme identities seem old-school and retrograde, second-wavey, practically heteropatriarchal. There’s a lot wrong with that perspective — for one thing, a lot of the modern queers who shit on butch/femme dynamics aren’t from the working class, where those identities were born — but it’s one I still sympathize with, especially as someone who’d previously been hesitant to claim femme identity as my own. Throughout the trip, Matie and Jamie would have a number of tearful conversations about trans inclusion with some older passengers who refused to accept trans women as their fellow sisters. But they also got many women to reconsider their more middle-of-the-road views on trans inclusion. “Those are the people who matter,” Jamie would later tell me, recalling her latest conversions over coffee in the cafeteria.

I actively choose to identify as a lesbian and a dyke, as well as a queer. I have found love and community unlike anything else I’ve ever known in what still exists of lesbian culture, despite all external (and, TERF-wise, internal) attempts to exterminate it: the art, the literature, the physical spaces. Plus, most importantly (and most obviously), the word “lesbian” quite literally describes what I am: a woman who loves women in both a feminist way and a super-gay way. A lot of people have actually been waiting for that moment, and it’s one of the most exciting parts of their entire college experience. Why? Because it’s an opportunity to either explore their romantic orientation, or benefit from the romantic freedom and the approach that many people have to intercourse while in college. Not to mention that many of these “experimenting” moments are often viewed by the rest of society as very normal, and are therefore something that comes with little or no judgment — that said, the fact that people’s romantic choices are still judged in 2017 is ridiculous!

It is hard to do life alone, especially in college. For that reason, I would recommend that you seek out a community. Your community will be a source of support and encouragement for you. They will remind you that even though you might feel alone, you are not. There are many other college students going through the same thing you are. You will be able to offer your support to them, too. It will be a great way to make friends! When I kissed Lynette goodbye at our appropriately miserable reentry to the real world — Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan — I still wasn’t exactly sure what the hell I was supposed to do next.

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. (She wore a different suit to dinner every night.) That night, Matie and Jamie convinced me (against my natural inclination to avoid live entertainment) to go to the evening’s scheduled attraction, a comedy set by Elvira Kurt. Before Elvira performed we were welcomed by Tisha, Olivia’s VP and our cruise director, who greeted the “ladies of Olivia” and announced a few of the events coming up over the next few days, including a meetup for the “Older, Wiser Lesbians,” or “OWLs.” (“Date me, OWLs!” Matie whisper-yelled next to me.) 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.”