College Lesbian Life: The First Night

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LGBT friendly colleges are critical for the safety and well-being of gay, lesbian, trans, and nonconforming young people all over the nation. For decades, colleges and universities have been at the vanguard of culture, whether that meant protecting artistic expression or giving young people a forum to voice their political views. But the best colleges for LGBT students can truly be a matter of life or death. Discrimination is still endemic: 40% of homeless youth identify as LGBT; in adult life, unemployment is 13% for LGBTQ workers, and 16% for trans workers. LGBT friendly colleges provide a safe space for queer young people, while helping prepare them for a workforce that is still frequently hostile. Searching Out the Most LGBT Friendly Colleges It sounds shallow to imply that, in the beginning, I fell for her simply because of her style, her stuff. But what attracted me was the care and attention to detail she demonstrated via a lifetime’s accumulation and curation of these things. Together they made up the way she wanted to be seen in the public eye, the way she wanted to move through the world. She was not a boy but a full-grown butch who, at 53, was confident in who she was and what she wanted.

The organization's projects and initiatives are concentrated in five core values: social justice, youth voice and action, empowerment, positive change, and diversity. Academic Quality: To assess academic quality, we focus on what we believe are the most important distinguishing factors. We compare a school's admission rate to its enrollment rate to gauge the rigor and competitiveness of a school. We use full-time retention rate (or, the rate at which students return after their freshman year) to rank a school's effectiveness at keeping students enrolled. Similarly, graduation rate is crucial in weighing how many enrolled students successfully complete their degree program (note that graduation rate measures full-time, first-time students). Vassar’s student organizations include Ace Space, the Queer Coalition of Vassar College, and TransMission. 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.

‘The Handmaiden’

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.)

Before I left, I talked to a few of my reporter friends about it, just in case a hookup opportunity should present itself and I decided to partake for, um, research purposes . We decided that my Olivia story fell in some sort of weird journalistic in-between, just like my own job does. I sometimes do reporting, but I’m not strictly a reporter; I’m a writer, editor, and cultural critic. Plus, I wasn’t assigned this story to go and passively report out what everybody else was doing on the cruise; I was supposed to immerse myself in the experience (while, of course, disclosing to anyone I spoke with that I was writing about the trip). And the thing a lot of women on the cruise were looking to experience was, yes, getting laid. UCLA School of Law's Williams Institute published data regarding U.S. metropolitan areas with the largest LGBTQ+ populations. The top cities were New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago, followed by San Francisco and Miami. The city with the highest percentage of LGBTQ+ individuals per population was San Francisco. 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.” 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. Set in the 18th century and taking place on an isolated island in Brittany, two women create a world of their own in Portrait of a Lady on Fire. This stunning film directed by revered filmmaker Céline Sciamma, follows Marianne (Noémie Merlant) and Héloïse (Adèle Haenel) as their budding romance grows. Visually gorgeous and full of deepest depths of yearning and love, this is a romantic classic you won’t soon forget.

Rea Carey, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force told the Los Angeles Times in their coverage: 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. We both like Justin Bieber, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, babies, spicy foods, and romantic comedies, as well as traveling, swimming, dressing up, having sex, being tall, biking (“cycling,” she’d say), and making detailed plans well ahead of time. We also appear, at this admittedly early stage, to be each other’s scarily perfect sexual complement; lesbian sex can look like a million and one different things, and we like so many of the same ones that it is, honestly, a miracle we ever got out of bed and did anything normal, like eat dinner or generally interact with other people. (Turns out, there was nothing wrong with me during my sad stretch of a dry spell after all — I just hadn’t been having the sex I actually wanted to have.)