Then somehow, all of a sudden, years passed. We became two professionals in our late twenties, living in our dream apartment on the top floor of a Brooklyn brownstone. We weren’t allowed to have pets, but, like good millennials, we had plenty of plants, and interests outside of each other: my roller derby, their ultramarathons. We were busy, stable. Happy enough. It was thrilling, and cathartic, to have such a deep, generous conversation with three smart women about a question that’s been at the center of my personal and professional life for nearly five years now: Can lesbians, and women in general, survive the gender revolution?

When her parents died, Nella's brothers increased the pressure. There was no money for an education, they said, and besides they didn't believe a woman needed one. 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. But, in the spirit of honesty, I think relationship counselling might help you to work through your feelings and talk about where the marriage is heading.Buoyed by what she found, Nella began connecting with women online. Women like her. Women who soon became her closest friends. In the office, nothing changed. Both of us swore not to tell anyone else. I dodged questions from friends about my relationship status like bullets - the lies were worth it for the delirium I felt when I was with her.

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 women, experiencing stirrings of feminist thought without a vocabulary to express them as well as a desire for each other, find intellectual and emotional support on afternoons when their husbands are away.

In the spirit of lesbian camp bonding, I told my new crew about my situation — nonmonogamous, not sure how to feel about it — which seemed to pique the interest of beer bathing suit girl, because she would soon afterward follow me into the impossibly tiny bathroom, bursting in on me mid-pee. They knew of a rich man who was interested in her. There was little time to lose, they insisted. At 20 she was getting on a bit.The city, with its colonial-era Art Deco buildings surrounding a market, a football stadium and places of worship, sits on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. I would tell my partner that I cared about them deeply, and the past five years were among the best of my life. I wouldn’t trade them for anything. But I also felt like we had come to a crossroads, and we weren’t facing the same futures. I had tried so hard to see myself in their dreams, but now I was having dreams of my own. And I didn’t think I saw a future, even a part-time one, in Montana. I think, in all of our lives, we sometimes hit milestones that we never saw coming. I guess they're what some describe as "aha moments" — those instances at which everything feels flipped on its head and you stop and think, "Oh, this is who I am. This is what I'm supposed to be doing with my life. This is what feels right." After reading or speaking with a handful of women about their first dates with the same gender, it sounds like they were definitely unexpected milestones (in the best possible sense).

She added: “It wasn’t really a thing to be gay when I was growing up. But as I got older, it just felt like I had this weight on my chest. I knew that there was something that I needed to figure out.” Growing up, I used to wish that I was ‘normal’,” says Leila. “Now we joke about how we’re not normal. We say we’re aliens and we have superpowers.” Per the rules of our loose nonmonogamous agreement, I FaceTimed with my partner about what was happening on the cruise, first telling them about the catamaran girl and then, in so many words, about Lynette. I suspected, even early on, that I was about to break our most important rule of all: Don’t fall in love with anybody else. 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. It’s a great day to meet friends in the park. The women are in high spirits, chatting animatedly, playfully sketching patterns on each other using body paint, and sharing a picnic.But there were, in fact, a number of stereotype-fulfilling boomer TERFs on board the cruise — and plenty of lesbians whose policing of gender norms took more banal forms. The woman who bought me a drink after I sang Kelly Clarkson at karaoke — a petite therapist from California with a prim gray bob — ended up being one of them. 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.