Lesbian Training at the Space Force Academy: Book 4 of the Pansexual Adventures of the Starship Panoply

Product Information

What I didn’t expect was everything else that would happen to me — and is still happening to me — thanks to this one little week in my otherwise pleasantly uneventful life. I would sleep in Alia’s bed that night and accidentally pat her butt in my sleep, my mind clearly deluding my body into believing I was still on the cruise with Lynette. Alia would very nicely not be weird about it. Stephanie Trilling, manager of community awareness and prevention services at the Boston Area Rape Crisis (BARCC), observes that for her queer female clients who have been assaulted by women, the first hurdle is simply understanding the assault as rape. Since this scenario is rarely portrayed in the media or in educational programming, "it can be especially challenging to identify their experience as violence," she says. "Many people have a difficult time believing that a woman could be capable of inflicting violence on another person." I said: ‘What?’ And she said: ‘Lesbians! You know, women with women.’ So I was, like: ‘Really? Really?’” One said: "I f*****g love you so much. All I want to do is to be with you for the rest of my life. I love you."

Lesbian feminism presented one way for women to free themselves from both male domination and heterosexism. Its analysis of society was based on two central claims. The first was an assertion that heterosexuality encompassed much more than a form of sexual desire, that it also functioned as an institution that supported male supremacy and female subordination. Romantic love, familial structures, traditional gender roles, and even the U.S. economic structure reinforced heterosexuality, making it compulsory and leaving its putative normalcy unquestioned. At the same time that heterosexuality helped perpetuate the subordination of women, it reinforced the benefits that women could gain from participation in partnerships with men, which gave them added status and economic privileges. The threat of losing those advantages kept women from challenging the status quo and acting in ways that might jeopardize their status. As one of the first lesbian feminist groups, the Radicalesbians, argued in a 1970 essay, “The Woman-Identified Woman,” women were called lesbians (pejoratively), regardless of their preferred partners, when they dared to act as if they were equal to men. Fear of being labeled a lesbian acted as a powerful deterrent against women’s push for equality as well as constraining the development of solidarity among women.

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. Mr Mason claimed the affair had been invented by the mother, who was angry when her daughter's tennis career faltered. There’s a reason for every one of those letters in the LGBTQI acronym. Each group fought tirelessly to be recognised as vital members of a community that is expanding. As activists and allies, it is our responsibility to educate each generation about the torchbearers that preceded them and to name their unique identities. By taking the time to name who we are and our contributions to society, we have a chance of finding that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I took care of boys — like my partner, like the person I’d dated before them, even like my cis college boyfriend — because I loved them, and that’s what you do for the people you love. I think there was also a part of me that liked tempering my fastidious long-term planning, my conventionalism, my seriousness with their wild spirits, their rejection of every social expectation. 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? — seemed to embody a radical queer ethos I admired, and maybe felt the slightest bit jealous of.

The night before I left on the cruise, two of my best friends got married. Watching one of my friend’s dads talking at the wedding dinner about how much he loved his daughter and her new wife, I teared up a little and said something to my partner about it: “This is actually pretty nice, huh?” But they wrinkled their nose at me. They’re not a fan of weddings — the pomp and circumstance, the big, grand displays of public affection. Eventually, once we’d reboarded the boat after our snorkeling, I did start talking with a few of the women I met at the Gen O mixer earlier that week, and it only took a couple of drinks for us to become the best of friends. In my relationship, I often worried that I was taking on the femme role to my partner’s masc — the Wendy to their Peter — in ways that weren’t always positive or healthy. My partner got frustrated when I mentioned what I thought were our gendered roles; they thought I was projecting straight bullshit into a queer space where it didn’t need to be. We were lesbian and nonbinary dykes; we were supposed to be beyond gender. During the Weimar era, Germans publicly challenged gender and sexual norms. This was especially true in big cities such as Berlin, Hamburg, and Frankfurt am Main. Weimar’s Lesbian Networks and Communities It overwhelmed me, just then, the sudden force of my wanting. I wanted my own big, strong butch. Someone who wasn’t looking for someone to help them grow, because they’ve done most of their growing already.Afterward, I had lunch with Dana and some of the other Olivia staffers and asked them about it — why not make the Public Posts more prominent, MichFest style? Especially since the younger people at the first Gen O event had explicitly asked for more sex content. Olivia had run sexuality and intimacy workshops before, and at the lunch, the staffers floated the definite possibility that they will again. I know for a fact that a lot of my queer friends would be way more likely to book a future Olivia cruise, uncool as cruises might be to cash-strapped millennials, if they knew how likely they’d be to get some action. The desk review and interviews conducted for this report finds that when LBQ+ experiences of violence are discussed and documented, it is most often as a sub-violation of broader LGBT rights abuses or, less frequently, a sub-violation of women’s rights abuses. This conceptualization presents LBQ+ women as merely a variation on a theme that was not built for them. It perpetuates their marginalization for two main reasons: Governments around the world should abolish sexist laws and create protocols that explicitly protect the rights of LBQ+ people.

The other problem is they could always suffer repercussions or another rape, or sexual assault. They might also have to travel 300 or 400 kilometers to make a report. 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 said that Lyte warned she would get her thrown out of the prestigious Lawn Tennis Association academy if she told anyone.Gina says she feels “immensely proud and impressed by the work and the commitment [behind the documentary] and still astonished by the interest and love that people have for the Gateways and how they remember it. After my partner came out as nonbinary a couple years ago, I felt even more confused and guilty about my conflicting desires to both lean into my own womanhood and flee from it. I knew my partner’s identity was its own independent, beautiful thing, something that was entirely their own. But I still wondered — as people around me whom I loved began to move away from the genders they’d been assigned — what I should be doing, if anything, about mine. Donors should fund LBQ+ rights organizations and LBQ+ led movements for environmental, racial, economic, and migrant rights.