Things With Mid-August Energy

feature image photo by master1305 via Getty Images

1. A cold kalimotxo alongside a tinned fish snack
2. Painting my nails next to an air conditioner
3. Wikipedia rabbit holes about queer celebs I don’t actually care about
4. The mysteriously discontinued Lip Smackers Dr. Pepper
5. BLT sandwiches made with heirloom tomatoes
6. The sound a metal bat hitting a baseball
7. Tuna Niçoise salads
8. Me having to look up how to spell Niçoise every time I write it
9. My Leo mother
10. Searching “when does Leo season end”
11. Pellet ice
12. Costco hot dogs
13. Losing an umbrella
14. Impulse purchasing a new umbrella
15. Femmes wearing flip flops
16. Butches wearing flip flops
17. Overly smacky flip flops
18. Writing “flip flops” several times in a row
19. Sleeping through the farmer’s market
20. Unanswered texts
21. Encouraging my friends’ most chaotic behaviors
22. The smell of a new box of colored pencils
23. The sunscreen aisle at CVS
24. Wondering why I don’t have a friend with a boat
25. Beach pizza (pizza on the beach)
26. Afternoon naps
27. Not being able to fall asleep for an afternoon nap because it’s too hot
28. Movie marathons during thunderstorms
29. Keeping extra clothes in the car in case I sweat through my outfit (is this a Central Florida-specific thing?)
30. Linda Cardellini clutching a condensation-covered beer bottle in the television show Bloodline
31. Corn fritters
32. Bird baths
33. Hilary Duff music
34. Abandoned malls
35. Atypically high utility bills :(
36. Kissing my love in the backyard
37. Sleeping on the couch
38. Unfinished basements
39. The word “frenzy”
40. Accidentally sipping a warm soda
41. Searching “best mosquito repellent that works but won’t wreck skin”
42. Arguing with friends over who is the biggest mosquito magnet
43. Eating dinner at 10 p.m.
44. Starting to cook dinner at 10 p.m.
45. Saving the heel of a baguette to make gazpacho
46. Morning sex
47. A paper plate of fries
48. Developing new obsessions
49. Reading lesbian poetry
50. Writing lesbian poetry

The 68 Absolutely Gayest Ways You Met Your Gay Partner(s), According to the 2022 Reader Survey

Roller derby. Your college’s LGBTQ+ group. Roller derby! Forums for niche fandoms. Lex. Roller Derby. Climate justice protests. Academic conferences. Autostraddle Meet-Ups. Roller derby? OK Cupid. A-Camp. ROLLER DERBY. These are the places where you queer weirdos have met others like you, experienced the power of attraction and pursued relationships in which you remain to this very day! On the 2022 Autostraddle Reader Survey, we asked where you’d met your very special someone(s), offering a multiple choice array as well as a comment box.

From the multiple choice, the top answers were as follows: 29% met through a dating app, 21.5% through school, 21% through friends, 13% through work, 11% online (not through a dating app) and 7% at a bar or party. Over 700 of you also hit up the comment box to tell us exactly how you met — because you picked “other” or just wanted to get a little more specific. A solid third of these answers were people wanting to specify the dating app or website they used but the rest contained far more detail, which I am sharing with you now here, today, some ripped out of context, because sharing is caring. Specifically: I will be sharing some of the very gay ways your soul found another and united.

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1. Pottery sale

2. Farming conference

3. “online through witchcraft”

4. Ladies Rock Camp

5. Talking about gay mad scientists from a children’s cartoon on twitter

6. We fell in love while sitting a housemate’s toads

7. Studying Wildlife Ecology in college

8. In the comment section of a fanfic they wrote about trauma and community and healing :-)

9. Bering and Wells fandom

10. We met in 1995. I was in grad school and had a job at the campus women’s center. I helped her hang an art show. We later hung out at a feminist science fiction convention. We’ve been together ever since.

11. We’re both librarians who met through a mutual friend (also a librarian)

12. We met on an AOL Teen message board when we were lonely teenagers 20+ years ago

13. I was sitting on an LGB panel in my now-wife’s class on the psychology of oppression (it was the 90s)

14. Sweat lodge – we had both worked with this particular medicine man in different states and she just happened to be in town and come to ceremony that weekend

15. I play DnD and she’s my dungeon master’s wife!

16. Working at the same summer camp. We were randomly paired to be counselors together and we immediately both wanted to find out if the other was gay. Here we are, several years and two cats later.

17. The Rose, a women’s-only transitional housing apartment building

18. A dyke meet up / conversation salon in the 1990’s!!

19. Band camp in high school

20. She saw my bio on the website for the volunteer board at the local LGBTQ Center and stopped by my public job but I wasn’t there. Then we emailed and arranged to meet ‘for a tour of the LGBTQ Center’ which went well and was followed immediately by a coffee date. And The Rest Is History.

21. Feminist young adult fiction forum in the mid-2000s

22. Buffy The Vampire Slayer Faith/Buffy shipping site in the early noughties

23. Search & Rescue Volunteer Organization

24. Infectious diseases summer school

25. Archaeological excavation

26. We both followed Heather Hogan and the #gaysharks crew on twitter

27. We both play roller derby and were introduced by my ex at a party at her house 😂

28. Lesbian book club that was organized locally and advertised on the Unofficial Autostraddle facebook group

29. Board game night at a comic shop

30. At a queue to Pink concert 9 years ago. She was watching hockey on a tablet, her country’s team was playing against mine. Didn’t think I’ll see her again after the concert, but she had other plans.

31. We were both at 2 protests in a row in a small town where I knew most other people there and got to talking and decided to get coffee!

32. Two Rabbis made the connection (a double-Rabbi shidduch, if anyone reading this understands the phrase ☺️)

33. Our union — we were both on the bargaining team

34. Smut Slam event at the Edinburgh Fringe organised by Cameryn Moore. They told a story about knife play, I asked them out afterwards.

35. An online text based X-Men RPG

36. Xena Fan Fiction Writer’s Fan Group. Merwolf, specifically.

37. Sailor Moon chat on AIM in 1999

38. Discussing gay fanfiction about the members of Fall Out Boy

39. Queer contra dancing in Chicago

40. Unofficial Hannah Hart fan meet-up

41. We both worked at the same very small vet clinic

42. We met at a party in my first year of grad school, and she offered me chickpeas she roasted herself

43. L Word quiz night: she hosted it, I won it.

44. Feminist Choir

45. I was the back of a pantomime horse and she was the front!

46. They directed the queer sapphic ballet in which I was one of the dancers

47. On a Scottish island at an outdoor education centre

48. Working at the farmers market & a coworker introduced us because we had “similar style” but the similarity was just that we both dress gay

49. Health food store take-out counter

50. I was a rope bunny at a Sexpo and I was cold so I asked them for a hug

51. Trans hormone clinic lol

52. My wife is a personal trainer. She was training the president of the college where I taught. The president, a closeted woman, thought all lesbians should know each other. So she walked her into my office. And, va-va-va-voom.

53. In the Peace Corps (but also, decolonize aid)

54. Organizing for Climate justice!

55. Working on abortion decriminalisation

56. A Zoom workshop for the group Showing Up for Racial Justice

57. She was a regular customer at the bookshop I managed. After many months of flirting she (finally!) leaned across the counter and asked if I ever got a coffee break.

58. We actually both went solo to the Gentleman Jack party autostraddle threw three years ago which would have been such a good meet cute, we even ordered the same drink! Sadly, we did notice each other there and matched on Hinge like three weeks later instead.

59. A class about sociology and cats

60. We went to Mormon church together when we were kids

61. Nolose conference in the early 2000s! Fat dyke 4 fat dyke!

62. 2019 Women’s World Cup Semi-Final in Lyon

63. Quaker meeting

64. We met at a mutual friend’s wedding and she lured me into a conversation by loudly talking about the Kristen Stewart Lizzie Borden movie during the cocktail hour.

65. Queer Soul Night, in line for the bathroom!

66. Community softball team

67. Volunteering at a folk festival

68. We were bunk mates at the OG A-camp. I looked up when I entered the cabin and locked eyes with her in her denim overalls and cute-as-heck smile. At the end of the weekend, I slipped her my number on the back of a library index card that was used for Slam Poetry inspiration. We kept in touch and eventually got married- she carries that index card in her wallet to this day.

69. She wrote fan fiction and I corrected her grammar. Where’s THAT movie? Grammar weirdos are sexy, damn it!

46 Very Special Ways You Explained Your Sexual or Romantic Orientation on the 2022 Autostraddle Reader Survey

Labeling your sexual orientation: some find it simple, some find it laborious, some would simply rather not. And, as in past years, many people who took the 2022 Autostraddle Reader Survey had a lot to say about their sexual orientations that did not fit neatly into any traditional label or survey response. But before we get into that, let’s look at the overall numbers:

Below those questions we asked “if different from your selection above, how would you describe your sexual orientation?” and 997 of you seized the opportunity: to say that you identify with multiple terms, to reflect a current period of confusion, to tell me that you’re into everybody except cis men, to express confusion about your sexuality following your partner coming out as trans, to say you’re politically a lesbian but sexually queer, to get more specific about your attractions, to write “McRibb”, to tell me that you hated labels in general. Surprisingly, more than one person wanted to tell me that although they identify as pansexual, they prefer the appearance of the bisexual flag.

From the ethers of this magical comment box, I have extracted a collection of the responses that I found particularly entertaining or interesting or comforting-to-those-who-might-relate-to-it, and now I am sharing those with you all here, today.

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1. 99% lesbian, 1% holding space for the woman I used to be and the past relationships I had

2. That awkward Kinsey 1-2 space of perpetual bisexual impostor syndrome

3. My sexual orientation was never detected by anyone, it roams freely like a cryptid.

4. Women excite my whole being. Other people excite some of me for some time or some aspect.

5. guys are chill but i’m not sexually attracted to them

6. im gay 4 gay ppl

7. Everyone is kinda hot idk what that makes me 🤷🏽‍♀️

8. dykey fag / faggy dyke

9. get down on all fours

10. I am mostly t4t but also like women in a gay way and some men also in a gay way

11. I love reclaiming slurs so most of the time I call myself either a faggot or a dyke, depending on my mood

12. vamong us free robux tycoon

13. Currently my identity is weirdly closest to “not cis men, unless they’ve been in AMC’s The Terror (2018)”

14. Hasbian, as in done, out of business, given up, over the hill, fed up, retired, all dried up.

15. Bisexual, heavily into women/NB lovelies and Benedict Cumberbatch 😳

16. Took a bdsm quiz thats options included ‘homoflexible’, and I kinda latched on like a leech on a wound.

17. god I hate words (on a personal level! obviously whatever words bring you joy go for it)

18. Would have described myself as a lesbian until at 32 years old I fell in love with a cis man for the first time SO APPARENTLY IM BISEXUAL NOW

19. Absolutely no clue. I thought I was bisexual, but since falling in love with my girlfriend I am repulsed by all men.

20. People are gross

21. “may as well be a lesbian”

22. I don’t like labels but I like maths: 98% that my next relationship will be with a woman

23. I generally call myself gay because I am a gender queer bisexual misandrist

24. Best described as low effort, high style.

25. le dollar bean

26. Glitter Butch Dyke

27. Dangerous Bisexual

28. this survey is too long

29. Mostly lesbian, but I’m also coming out of a 10 year heterosexual marriage where I was mostly sexually satisfied, but always felt something was missing. Always was curious about women and now in a lesbian relationship and it feels so much more “right” than before

30. Some hybrid of queer lesbian ace plus the occasional TV man. I don’t think I’m generally attracted to straight people

31. Wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey, but in a way that’s about gender and chemistry and stuff?

32. Into other queer people / in love with my friends

33. fag of dyke experience

34. short answer: Tired. long answer: aromantic asexual kinky lesbian

35. Punksexual

36. IDK I’m genderqueer so definitely not “straight,” sometimes I say “queer” but I don’t want to give any of the cis gay boys in my friend group false hope so I’m trying on “femmesexual”

37. Probably straight but I have a crush on a female friend

40. Lipstick lesbian…. also raised by wolves

41. i don’t know if i’m bisexual or a lesbian but i am a girlkisser so jot that down

42. I’ve historically been bisexual and still think the term could apply to me but so much of my interactions with men are tied up in gender, it’s too much for me right now plus roe v wade ruined cis men until they go get my rights back

43. I like who I like and it happens very rarely

44. I called myself bi for years and it’s technically probably accurate but at the moment I stick with queer because it’s shorter than “I’m definitely into women and also kind of ace and I’m maybe into men but only very queer men and only occasionally and I haven’t done anything with a man since I was 21 soo ??”

45. Butchosaurus

46. I have zero interest in dating men, but Laneia’s recent hate-fuck article struck a *chord*. I’m into women but open to a good time, you know? Of course you do.

The Gayest Things You Did at 13

We asked you to tell us all about the gayest things you did when you were 13, and wow, you sure delivered! Here’s a list of Extremely Gay Things you, the 100+ fine readers of Autostraddle dot com who heeded our call and submitted a response to this burning question, did when you were 13 years old. Goddess bless each and every single one of you, amen!

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1. I brought a FRAMED photo of Kate Winslet to church camp and displayed it next to all the (unframed) photos of my family.

2. I wrote personalized erotica for my (then-“straight”) best friend featuring her, her crush, and fantasies she had expressed to me. I had kept it hidden in my bedroom so she wouldn’t have to hide it from her even stricter parents, and just found some recently. One line: “he put his tongue in your mouth and you tasted delight” (!!!). I can’t believe I was writing that and ever thought I was straight for this girl! We did end up hooking up in college.

3. At 13 I wore only men’s t-shirts and always tried to impress girls with how strong I was. Also, I constantly climbed trees and crushed on just about every actress who played a non-traditional female character.

4. I had a ‘fashion’ mural on my closet door that was magazine clippings of beautiful women. It was partially because I loved red carpet dresses, it was entirely because I was hot for Cate Blanchett, Emmy Rossum, and Michelle Williams.

5. Wore my guy cousin’s hand-me-down knee length denim shorts because they were “more baggy and comfortable.”

6. At my 13th birthday party I made my friends dress up and play-act a wedding in my backyard. I was the groom. I have a photo of the kiss. Just pals being pals!

7. I was WAY too into drawing shirtless ladies to be straight. “Men are just harder to draw,” said I. No, child, you just like boobs.

8. Can I cheat by a year? When I was 14, I got a pixie cut and checked out every single lesbian pulp fiction book from my local library.

9. Followed a link about I think DIY galaxy shirts? (I exclusively wore loud clothes because I thought that without neon & clashing patterns I would be literally invisible due to how small I was) which brought me to Autostraddle. It immediately became the first site I checked any time I logged on to the family computer — and I still didn’t realize *I* was gay for another year or two.

10. Jewish summer camp, 2004. This cool girl M and I and a few boys were hanging out unsupervised behind the tents. For some reason M offered to let the boys touch her boobs. They obliged, and I guess I stared, because at some point one of the boys asked me politely if I would also like to have my boobs touched. I said oh no thank you. M didn’t think to ask if I’d like a turn touching her boobs…

11. I joined the school play exclusively because I thought this girl Breanna, who had played a (queer-coded) man in the play the previous year, was really cool and wonderful and cute and I did think about making out with her sometimes but told myself I was straight and I only wanted to make out with her during certain times of the month so it must be hormonal. I did not track the times of the month during which I wanted to make out with her. I did help her spray dye her hair green for the play while wearing my white costume.

12. Got my hair cut short! Future haircuts involved the hairdresser confusing me for a boy, which flustered the hairdresser and pleased me terribly. I’m pretty sure I was also crushing hard on my bisexual 40-something Sunday School teacher.

13. Wore a waistcoat over a turtleneck in my school photo, had k.d lang on my purple iPod nano, and secretly watched Law & Order SVU when my parents were asleep (Mariska Hargitay was worth getting in trouble for).

14. My friend Malia from Spanish class (was she a crush? maybe!) and I bonded over our shared heritage, how ridiculously easy the class was for us, and being in school plays. One day, she asked me what it would take for me to go out with a guy, so I made her a deliberately long list to make sure she wouldn’t find one for me. (It worked: she did not find any boys that met the qualifications.) Meanwhile, I dreamed of becoming a writer/artist and spinster aunt living in a cabin with a garden and chickens and/or goats. I do not know how to garden. In the following years, before coming out, I would grow increasingly perplexed to learn that my friends did not want to become spinster aunts with me.

15. Between ages 12-14 I had a series of I think 7 different “boyfriends.” Meaning, boys who asked me “out” and whom I was technically “dating” but with whom I never went anywhere or did anything or even kissed. I claimed it was because I was still too young to want to do things with boys, but the truth was, all my friends were doing it, so why wasn’t I? Answer: Because I was really, really gay.

16. Constantly thought about sleepovers in the same bed as my best friend. I remember wanting to hold her hand while we laid down but afraid of receiving a no, or even more frightening, a yes.

17. As a kid and a teenager, I had this really intense kind of hero-worship for older girls I admired or looked up to. Camp counsellors, student mentors, girls on my hockey team, girls on my swim team, girls in the school plays with me. At the time I really thought these were just a long line of role models, older girls I looked up to and wanted to be friends with or emulate. But looking back I realize it was less about admiration and more that I was just hugely crushed out on all these girls. I can’t even pick just one girl or one anecdote because there were SO MANY. Actually wait, here’s one. I was on a hockey team that had kids ages 6-18. Yes, one team. The 6-10 year olds payed on one line, the 11-14 year olds played a second line, and the 15-18 year olds played on a third. Well I remember one year when I was still on the second line, there was a girl on the third line I was really obsessed with. We would joke around and were friends at games and practices, but then at school she was two years older and so we weren’t friends and didn’t talk or hang out, other than maybe a wave of acknowledgement in the hallway. Well one day I decided I wanted to get her attention at school. It was an ongoing game in our locker room (and probably every hockey locker room ever) to throw balls of used tape at each other. So one day I brought a huge ball of tape to school and tried to throw it at her in the hallway. Yeaaaaah.

18. Another girl in my grade level taught me how to masturbate at a sleepover after we skimmed the books each of our parents got us to explain puberty. We spent all of our numerous eighth grade sleepovers experimenting with our bodies and exploring our anatomy.

19. I was always a curious pre teen, especially at that time as I was just discovering my sexual orientation. Realizing that I was a lesbian scared me more than anything, but I wanted to read anything I could get my hands on. Or watch anything lesbian on TV, even if it was repulsive (this was the 1970s after all). I have to thank my late mother for this, but she bought me the notorious lesbian classic “The Well of Loneliness” by Radclyffe Hall! I had been asking her over and over about homosexuality and I guess she wanted to do the right thing. So she gave me the gayest, most depressing, most controversial book on the topic. Maybe she wanted to discourage me, but it honestly changed my life for the best. The book gave me such clarity about myself that I read it over and over and over. It’s beautifully written and a heartfelt call for tolerance, which is what I really needed. You can imagine how my young mind reacted to the amazing first kiss between the main character Stephen Gordon and the beautiful but married Angela Crossby. I read THAT part an extra thousand times!

20. Really, really, really “admire” my fellow softball team mates. Like, just think they were super, duper cool, and I wanted to be just like them. (Spoiler, turns out I was crushing on them, and of course also wanted to be like them… and MANY of them are queer and trans identified now… the queer/homo/genderqueer in me saw all that in them :) ;) )

21. Made an entire Instagram account dedicated to posting photos of Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss / on Hunger Games press tours.

22. Painstakingly copied out metaphysical poetry in secret notes that I passed with a girl I admired and desperately wanted to be friends with.., “about [fictional, for me] boys.”

23. Daydreamed and obsessed about having a best/romanticized “bosom friend” like Anne of Green Gables and her Diana Barry.

24. When asked by a school bully if I was a lesbian had an overwhelming thought that “god I wish that were true but I’m probably unlucky.”

25. My favorite outfit, which I wore MINIMUM twice a week age 13, was as follows: red and black horizontal striped tank top underneath an extremely bright red graphic tee purchased at an Orlando mall Hot Topic during a family vacation (which read “BITE ME” (Vampires Only, Please)), underneath a Twilight branded zip-up hoodie, also purchased at Hot Topic, paired with black skinny jeans underneath red and black striped leg warmers.

26. No fun gay things happened when I was 13 (sadly), but when I was 12, I wrote a short story where the only plot was that a girl kissed another girl at a party.

27. My MSN name had 🌈”best friend’s name” is gorgeous🌈 permanently attached to the end of it. To help her self esteem.

28. I got my mom to take me to Lilith Fair and yet it still took me another seventeen years to realise I was very, very queer.

29. I loved to wear big leather jackets and I would take group photos with my arm around my just friend’s shoulder and think “wow this is the coolest thing.” I also had an unfortunate 2010s fake mustache and XD so RaNdOM phase with a pair of my friends who I always went to the mall with and we called our trio the Lesbian Lovers. Two of us turned out to be bi! The gayest thing of all is realizing just how many of us in our late middle school group ended up later realizing we were queer.

30. When my camp friend got a boyfriend, I was devastated, and I started a No Boyfriends Club in an effort to convince her to dump him. NO ONE joined my club, but that did not stop me from delivering nightly diatribes to the entire cabin about Why Boys Were a Waste of Time.

31. When I was thirteen, I absolutely fell for my middle school best friend without having any frame of reference for what being gay meant. I just knew I wanted to give her presents and make her laugh and braid her hair. She did, however, have a boyfriend at another school. So before Valentine’s Day, I approached him and suggested he do something to surprise her. I, of course, planned every single detail: we hung hearts that I crafted out of lace from her bedroom ceiling, we put a giant teddy bear on her bed, I picked him flowers to give to her, and I conspired with her mother to get her out of the house while we did it. When she came home, she was totally floored. But then I had to leave them to their date, so I sat across the street at a park until they were done. I was so thoroughly invested in this that our other friends became really suspicious and accused me of having romantic feelings… for the *boyfriend.* Because thirteen-year-olds can be ridiculous.

32. Accidentally left my phone at the dentist. The last thing I was looking at was explicit gay Wonder Woman fan fiction. My dad went to pick it up when I was at school and I was convinced that he opened my phone and read everything. Either way we’ve never spoke of it since.

33. Ah, 13… the tender age when my young, overdramatic self really wanted her First Queer Kiss with her First Goth Girlfriend. Both of us wanted this to happen. Neither of us wanted it to happen in public in our conservative-leaning town. So we did what any self-respecting Hot Topic-clad baby dykes of the early aughts would’ve done: Staged a handfasting ceremony in my childhood bedroom, complete with a note (printed on graph paper, because my Capricorn ass was the one in charge of logistics) reading “Do Not Disturb – Pagan Ritual In Progress.” I remember exactly nothing about this ceremony other than the dragon’s blood incense, which stuck to my curtains for a solid week afterward, and the makeout segment, which confirmed that I was DEFINITELY not straight.

34. In 2007, at the age of 13, my best friend and I took turns giving each other back rubs on a field trip. Criss, cross, apple sauce…

35. I turned 13 in 1986, in super-conservative South Africa. I didn’t even know that women could be gay or that lesbians existed until 1991 when I saw CJ and Abby kiss on LA Law! But during the July holidays of 1986, I slept over at my best friend’s and one night she and I were “practicing” close dancing and we ended up kissing. It was my first kiss, and it was pretty intense. I never kissed anyone again until I was out and 26! 1986 was also the year I went to boarding school, and I would let this very popular boy in my grade carry my book bag from the school gate to the girl’s dorm every day (he asked if he could). I was completely oblivious that this meant that he liked me, and I didn’t walk with him or speak to him at all… I just left my bag at the gate for him! Meanwhile, I had a giant crush on one of the (woman) teachers who lived in our dorm (she was 21). Not that I knew that it was a crush at the time…

36. I was in my community theater’s production of The Sound of Music and brought a little jar of wildflowers for the woman playing the Baroness every single show.

37. I was the only girl on the football team, back in the early 90s when it was mostly unheard of.

38. I chopped off all my hair, with help from a friend, and we bleached it in my parents’ kitchen. Then the mean modern dancer from my after school dance class invited me over to her house and kissed me then told me not to tell anyone.

39. So many options to choose from, including writing a love note to my best friend but never giving it to her (still have it somewhere tucked in a lockbox). Having a wardrobe consisting only of t-shirts and basketball shorts well into high school would also qualify. But I’m going to have to go with watching the second installment from the Star Wars prequel series ‘Attack of the Clones’ on repeat, along with all the bonus features on the special edition DVD. Not because it’s quality cinema, arguably the worst movie in the entire Star Wars canon. The movie may have been trash, but Natalie Portman has never looked better. I watched the movie on repeat, because I wanted to watch her on repeat. Portman in that movie had such a strong effect on me that my type many years later is still pretty brunettes.

40. I went on a school field trip to the village our music teacher grew up in, and her parents were involved in the church and I think maybe we sang in a church service or something? so we slept in sleeping bags in the church hall. I slept next to a friend in my class who I liked but didn’t hang out with that much, and we had a whispered conversation after the lights went out and we like stroked each others’ arms gently? It didn’t seem weird or like something we should talk about and I don’t think we ever did anything similar again.

41. (I’m the same person from the school field trip with church hall sleepover): I really liked my music teacher like a lot and I joined the choir even though I can’t sing and don’t particularly enjoy singing, and when we had to choose which subjects to keep doing for our big exams I chose music over art even though I couldn’t sing or play any instruments. I still vividly remember a class where she played us a tape and asked which instruments we could hear, and I wasn’t sure if one of the instruments was a clarinet or oboe, so I wrote both down, and she told the class I got extra points because I was the only one who wrote oboe, and I was so proud.

42. Had a sleepover with my friend sleeping in the same bed in which we watched Moulin Rouge! and talked about how pretty Nicole Kidman was.

43. Wrote Kristen Stewart a fan letter (BEFORE Twilight because she seemed so gay in the terrible movie “In the Land of Women”).

44. Joined my high school’s GSA because I was “such a good ally” and “just really interested in queer issues.”

45. I had an absolutely all-enthralling crush on Rachel Weisz which resulted in me watching both Mummy movies over. And over. And over. On TV? Drop everything to watch. Seen it in a movie store even though I had the VHS? Buy it as a backup. Friend coming over for a sleepover? Background movie. I told people I wanted to be an archaeologist (lmao) as a cover for being a closeted little lesbian. I still, to this day, see the wet nightgown scene in the first memory without a single flaw.

46. One summer my special friend and I would do the gayest beauty treatments together, usually involving co-showering or giving each other shirtless massages “to help our sunburns.”

47. Heavily prepared for and won the arm wrestling competition for my entire girl’s middle school cabin at my (very conservative) church camp. I just wanted the other girls to know I was strong, ok? It would take a few years before I sorted myself out, believe it or not.

48. For the first time I was allowed to dress myself for school pictures. Moving away from the frilly stuff my mom was fond of, I picked a red checkered button up over a muscle tee and a very baby gay “hair slicked back so tight it hurt” style.

49. Making ladies kiss each other on the sims. And woohoo ofc.

50. I started properly realizing I was queer around 13 so the list is endless, but queer media is my one true love so that’s where my big gay behaviour was most obvious. Notably I frantically consumed everything about Lady Gaga, I first learned about Don’t Ask Don’t Tell at 13 because of her and talked about it incessantly despite living in Canada. I’d also watch pirated queer movies on YouTube at midnight back when they were easier to find, Lost and Delirious had me HOOKED. Last but not least, Buffy the Vampire Slayer — holy hell was I gay for that show! When I found out about Willow being queer I read the plot synopsis of practically every episode on Wikipedia before I’d even started watching regularly because even then I was super committed to queer media (by the time I started it was only available through reruns on one channel), and I’d watch the little free minute and a half clips of the episodes on iTunes in between the reruns. When I happened upon the clip for Seeing Red (big ouch) and realized it was literally just a chunk of that scene at the beginning with Willow and Tara in bed together I watched it on a loop constantly. Looking back the fact that I ever thought I was doing a good job hiding my queerness from the people around me is pretty laughable but here we are, still super gay and still obsessed with queer media!

51. Brought a huge poster of Katharine McPhee with me to camp for one week — the poster was so big, it took almost the whole door. Crushed on my English teacher but was in serious denial about it. Casually became obsessed with Sara Bareilles, but it had nothing to do with how pretty she was, obviously.

52. There was a short-lived Christian youth outreach in my small town that I started attending for game nights/youth groups. The people who ran it were trying to be ‘cool’ and cater to the local skater kids — there were ramps and rails around the building and like, skateboard decor inside? (What was this skateboard aesthetic, you may ask? Think black spray painted walls, skateboards hung up everywhere, concrete floors, a video game section, etc.) Anyway, I could not skate for the life of me but the girls who went were all so cute! The first night I went to the girls-only youth group, we were told to go around the circle and write a list of nice things about each other; I think I fell in love with like, three girls that night. It was also one of the first times I’d been around actual out queer girls, but the only reason I knew they were queer was because I overheard the adults talking about the kind of prayer the girls needed for their “confusion.” Shout-out to religious trauma!

53. My lil gay tomboy self was wearing cargo shorts to middle school every day.

54. Against all better judgment, I agreed to watch and pretended to be interested in watching the horror film Orphan in the basement of this girl’s house because I had a years-long massive crush on her and I thought maybe if I agreed to watch the scary movie (even though others were watching Night at the Museum upstairs that I could have chosen instead) that maybe we would cuddle or HOLD HANDS during the scary parts. This did not happen as I was on the floor and she was on the couch the entire time. The only lasting outcome was that I could not sleep for at least three months afterwards and forced my mom to sleep in bed with me for that entire time.

55. I had my first boyfriend at 13. This involved sitting awkwardly beside each other at lunch, passing notes during class, and zero physical contact. I thought this arrangement was perfectly fine and acceptable.

56. At 13 I realized I was into women because I was thinking about how hot Tegan from Tegan and Sara is while waiting in my friends closet for her to finish changing. I came out of the closet and then I CAME OUT OF THE CLOSET.

57. Watched Lilly Singh dressed as her mum react to the “Anaconda” music video every day when I got home from school, because the semi-naked women with their butts out were definitely hilarious. Seeing as Lily has also come out as bi in recent years I feel like there are now extra levels of gay to this story. Like a rainbow layer cake. Now I’m hungry.

58. The gayest thing I did at 13 was fall in love with a friend and spend hours staring at her school photo, memorizing her boobs and collarbone and admiring how pretty and perfect she was. I did not recognize this behaviour for what it was and instead participated in what I assume is another queer rite of passage: dating a gay boy. The next gayest thing was probably when I went to see Titanic, was secretly thrilled to see Kate Winslet’s boobs, and developed a crush on Leo. (The gayest thing I did at 14 was fall in love with Dana Scully, and the gayest thing I did at 15 was fall in love with another friend and write “I AM NOT GAY” in my journal. Very straight behaviour!!)

59. I wore cargo shorts and genuinely thought it projected ‘sexy, edgy tomboy.’

60. At 13 I had a dramatic, entangled friend breakup with my close friend at the time, and we didn’t talk for years. (In middle school I was “straight” and we were both “cis”.) Now we’re both nonbinary trans lesbians and have been dating for a year and a half.

61. I was homeschooled when I was 13 (by choice, I was a weird kid). I had a huge crush (though definitely did not recognize it as such at the time) on a girl a few years older than me who volunteered in my Sunday school classes and in my church’s homeschool co-op. My 8th grade year she was teaching a Japanese class for elementary schoolers at the co-op, and I somehow finagled my way into the class despite being much too old because “I just really want to learn Japanese!”

62. Played spin-the-bottle at my 13th birthday party but shied away from kissing boys, and when the bottle kept landing on them, added stuffed animals to lower that probability.

63. Wrote notes back and forth with an older girl in my math class that only consisted of Ani DiFranco lyrics. As friends, of course.

64. Spent hours on the Nike.com website designing sneakers on Nike Id and emailing them to myself.

65. For a few months I wore a blue ribbon in my hair to synagogue because an older girl who I “just really admired” always wore a blue ribbon in her hair.

66. Wrote my teacher’s name — first, middle, maiden, and last — over and over inside the cover of a notebook.

67. I died my hair purple, was wracked with extreme jealousy when another girl came out to me, and wore a top hat and tails with ratty jeans to middle school graduation. 🌈

68. I wrote a poem to my best friend about how we were soulmates because we had the same birthday and we met on our birthday. I read it to her in front of everyone at her birthday party. Now it’s clear I was deeply in love with her. I honestly think she felt the same way. She used to rub my leg under the lunch table. We would have long conversations about how “weird” it felt when we touched each other. We convinced ourselves it was because our connection was so strong because we were such good friends. I wish I kept the poem, but I do recall how it ended. “I’ll always remember the 12th of December.”

69. When I was 13 my school did a very heteronormative thing for the Valentine’s Day dance where all the girls got hearts, and if a boy gave you a compliment you’d give them your heart. During the dance there was a draw of names and you had to GET UP ON STAGE and slow dance with whoever “stole” your heart. Naturally, my (girl) best friend gave me a compliment so I gave her my heart and lo and behold my name was drawn. What followed was the briefest and most mortifying slow dance experience of my life. I truly think holding hands and swaying to Drops of Jupiter in front of the whole junior high is why it took me almost 10 more years to come out.

70. We took on each others middle names, and wrote each other letters while we were away with our families for our ONE WEEK spring break. Never thought about how gay this was until now!

71. Obsessing over my ‘friend’ with whom I somehow always ended up cuddling any time we watched a movie together.

72. I wrote poems about holding hands with the girl who sat in front of me using a symbol code I made up. I was terrified the notebook with the cypher would get lost, or stolen, so I ended up burning it.

73. I had a huge crush on my best friend (spoiler: we dated after college, the feelings were mutual but it took us TEN YEARS to act on them). Here are some gay things we did together: We would play a “game” where we would specifically dress each other up in the way that the other thought was sexy, a lot of dancing to ABBA and Beyonce, reading smutty fanfiction together (on the school computers?!?) and reading explicit romance novels (which we also somehow got from school), making a pact that we would die together!

74. I wrote Anne of Green Gables fan fiction including a musical where all the men died in a war and bosom buddies Anne and Diana had to raise a baby together.

75. Cry-rage quit pre-teen marching band due to mandatory high-waisted slacks and ongoing feud with piccolo player.

76. Said my career aspiration was “Weird Al.”

77. Swapped USBs full of scans of yuri manga with my best friend (who I had an incredible crush on) at school.

78. When I was 13 I walked to school carrying a basketball under my arm, because I thought I was So Cool. I was also wearing a gigantic baggy t-shirt and zip-off cargo pants to really complete the look. I also had a big crush (that I didn’t realize was a crush until much later) on my best friend and together we enjoyed exploring in the woods and camping and wading through streams to find crawdads and cool rocks and stuff. Afterwards we would go back to her house and hang out with her cats who were always having kittens. I wanted to keep one or more of these kittens so badly that I checked out at least 10 books from the library and wrote a report which I presented to my parents on Why I Should Get A Kitten. They didn’t go for it. I did not realize I was gay until I was 20.

79. I had an entire wall in my room devoted to my obsession with Julia Roberts. When I came out to my then best friend two years later, she wasn’t surprised.

80. My best friend offered me her epic typing skills to type up an essay I procrastinated for the small small price of kissing one of our friends. I met him in the back stairwell of our small middle school, at the top, while my friend stood below watching, laughing, waiting. I took one look at him and… literally ran away. Down the stairs, out the door, to the subway. Went home and played Rollercoaster Tycoon and ate pizza bagels with my cats and listened to early Taylor Swift.

81. As the most androgynous person in year 8, getting cast as Puck in our school’s attempt at A Midsummer Night’s Dream and having a suspicious amount of fun with the male pronouns/eyeliner combo and being mean to fairy girls?
‘Acting.’

82. I had this very detailed, elaborate private medieval world I spent most of my waking hours daydreaming about and in which I just *happened* to be a boy (because swords) who just *happened* to kiss a lot of girls. The kisses were also elaborate and detailed because I was committed to my Art. Although now I’m remembering certain, er, stories my best friend and I used to tell each other during sleepovers in her basement. And certain dares that went along with them. So actually that was the gayest thing.

83. I was with my first girlfriend at 13! I asked her out by writing her a little book with song lyrics that made me think of her (Tegan and Sara featured). She was all my firsts from kiss to heartbreak, we ran the GSA together, hung out all the time, basically did all the “kids in love” things. We’ve gotten through some tough times together since as friends. She’s the best, and I remember fondly reading Autostraddle at the time with her (the Carmilla recaps, etc). Happy 13th birthday Autostraddle!!

84. I stuffed a book from the LGBT section at Barnes and Nobles down my pants and read it in the handicap bathroom stall for over an hour.

85. I sang the entire Barenaked Ladies Stunt album with my BFF out loud, in harmony, while walking home from the Barnes and Noble where I stuffed my pants with an LGBT book to read in the handicap stall in the bathroom.

86. I got drunk and slept with my also 13 year old best friend every weekend, and never once thought that I might be gay. Yes, I’m in therapy now!

87. I dreamed that I kissed my female English teacher who I was obsessed with, then woke up and panicked about it so I told my best friend about the dream but re-framed it as a nightmare and we laughed at how gross it was. 😱😱😱

88. I was actually going through a “straight” phase when I was 13, picking up boys hither and yon with abandon. But I did do one extremely gay thing, I went to riding camp that summer and spent such a wonderful time around horses. And older teenage girls riding horses. (I’m pausing here to remember the soul-shattering beauty of girls on horses.) When I came back I was definitely a changed person because even though I talked a good game about my boyfriend, I wasn’t fooling anybody. You’re GAY, my nemesis said, and everyone else seemed to agree. So when I was 14, though I was changing schools and leaving my nemesis behind, I did some scientific investigation on myself and realized that heck yeah, I’m GAYYYYY. That was a very happy and liberating moment.

89. I had this friend who, in retrospect, I was clearly attracted to in a gay way. My middle school had two elementary schools feed into it, so half the kids were new to each other when we started 6th grade. I remember the first time I noticed this girl, A. I overheard her talking to her friend about a “dance party” she was having that weekend. I thought she sounded snobby and like she was trying too hard to be cool, but also I really wanted to be invited to that party. Somehow we became friends. I remember noticing the way she held things in her hands and kind of fixating on it, which is just SO GAY. I was hopeless at anything “girly” so I’d let her curl my hair and do my makeup, whatever she wanted, because I just liked being close to her. The summer after 8th grade she invited me to go to the beach for a week with her family. We spent the week trying to meet boys, wearing bikinis and telling everyone we met that we were 16 instead of 13/14. One night we got into an argument about something, I don’t remember what but it was one of those arguments where you’re trying to play it off like you’re joking, and I called her “flat chested” as insult. It upset her (because I did already have boobs and she didn’t) and I immediately apologized but I just remember feeling so dumb because that was not at all what I wanted to say to her, or how I felt. I thought she was so cool and beautiful but I could never ever ever say that out loud. Because even though I didn’t know I was gay or even realize that being gay was an option (it was the ‘90s, representation was not what it is now), I did know that telling your friend she was beautiful — in a serious way, not a like “oh that dress is so pretty on you” kind of way — was not “normal” and therefore something I could never do no matter how much it was the truth.

90. When I was 13 (1993), it became a trend among all the popular girls at my school to wear their dad’s button up shirts and ties. I guess it was the preppy version of the grunge flannel shirt trend? IDK but it was very intriguing to a baby gay like me, who had no earthly idea she even was a baby gay. I didn’t participate myself because my dad didn’t really own the right kind of shirts and ties, and I also didn’t want to be accused of being a poser since I wasn’t in that popular crowd, but I remember thinking they looked very good on the girls who did wear them. GAY.

91. The first time my best friend at Catholic school came over to my house we went up to my room and she picked me up and carried me over the threshold and tossed me on the bed. 💕 And I figured she was gay but it didn’t occur to me that I was because she was the butch. 😂

92. In the mid-90s — I read everything I could about AIDS, watched And the Band Plays On, and did my health poster about AIDS. All because that’s the only access I had to gay culture.

93. I was internally obsessed with Ann Reinking as Grace Farrell in Annie, and Nicole Kidman as Mrs. Coulter in The Golden Compass, but also thought I was in love with a boy in my class (looking back, I think he was gay). There was a movie called Flipped that, if I remember, was a sort of romance between children that ended with them holding hands, that for some reason my two best friends loved and watched over and over, and I remember just kinda sitting there… I also had a pair of dark red cargo capris from Garage that looking back, were gay. I wore them at my 13th birthday party, which I remember distinctly because I had my period and bled on them, but they were red so it wasn’t terrible.

94. Went to my local library to ask the very pretty gay librarian for queer book recommendations (thinking I was straight the whole time).

95. It was 1983 and I didn’t even know the word lesbian existed. But I did know I liked looking at Jessica Lange in Tootsie, which I did a lot — as much as one could in the pre-internet days. And I played softball, which is pretty gay no matter what generation.

96. Wrote entries in my diary about an English teacher at school WHO WASN’T EVEN MY TEACHER, detailing how pretty she was, how muscular her calves were, what her first name was, what clothes she owned, and many other observations I had made about her in the school corridors. This woman did not know I existed.

97. Took a bath with my two best friends in my parents’ spa-style bathtub. The tub was huge, the water heater was not. 30 years later, I’m a married queer with my spouse of 15 years and one of the friends has a wife and two kids.

98. I used to wrestle with my best friend. I also spent a whole weekend sewing her a Jake Gyllenhaal doll because she loved Donnie Darko.

99. My RE teacher had spiky hair with frosted tips and routinely came to school dressed in cargo pants and a leather jacket. I was physically incapable of talking to her in any capacity.

100. Being in love with boys and girls but telling myself I was only in love with boys. Also planning a wardrobe from the menswear section.

101. Had a crush on my best friend. Made a collage of Scarlett Johansson pictures. I secretly watched The L Word on the lowest tv volume late at night in my room.

102. Thirteen was the start of my “I’m not like other girls” era — which I guess was true for reasons I didn’t fully understand back then. I disliked school spirit, I disliked school pride, I disliked pep. And yet, I really really liked the head of the school pep squad. I had a huge crush on her. So despite my objections to the entire institution of school pride I went to every home sports game, wearing my boots and one vaguely school-colors flannel — I was such a stereotype and had no idea — to cheer next to her in the student section. The most that ever happened was one time we shared a bucket of popcorn and a coke together but at thirteen that felt earth-shattering.

103. The way I would listen to the Charlie’s Angels soundtrack and replay every scene in my mind. The POWER of Barracuda paired with Lucy Liu in *that* outfit plus Cameron and Drew cross-dressing???

104. Wore Timberland boots on the regular as a fashion statement, eagerly volunteered to participate in the all girls classes the school was testing out, read anime and would secretly google yuri on Tumblr, read gay themed books like Kissing Kate, hung out in the gay chatrooms on Gaia online, played RPG’s, showed a picture of a girl anime character with a short bob to my hairstylist as hair inspo because I thought she was hot, owned like 10 flannels, spent days painting a special handmade card for my best friend on Valentine’s Day of a literal heart, made out with pillows with my friend during a sleepover and traced letters on each other’s backs like that scene of Van and Taissa in Yellowjackets when they’re in the water together, I felt that was pretty gay lol.

105. Being 13 and in summer camp was really my peak gayby era. Somehow, between mismatching my socks on purpose because I thought it was cool and being the only person in my bunk who would willingly swim in the lake, I found time to contrive as many interactions as I possibly could with a counselor I was crushing on. Although, let’s be real, I was Not At All Self Aware and just thought that “she was cool and I wanted to be like her.”

106. I joined the field hockey team because I “really wanted to spend time with my friends” but tbh I was so madly in love with a girl named Sharon who was also on the team.

107. When I was 13 I had these orange cargo shorts that I wore basically every day. When I say cargo shorts, I want you to think JNCO’s that were orange parachute material. Arkansas has hot summers, parachute material breathes way better than denim. These were always paired with a dark navy blue Life is Good skateboarding tee. If you’re thinking, did you mean to look like Goku from Dragonball Z? The answer is a RESOUNDING yes. He was my idol. I wanted nothing more than to grow up to be a super saiyan. I was 13. I understood this to be impossible, and yet hope springs eternal. I had two very good Girl Friends, not girlfriends. They were very popular with the boys. I did not understand their interest in boys, but I LOVED when their boyfriends screwed up because then I got to threaten them. Did I ever punch anyone? No. Did they all think I was going to? Oh yes. I do think I might have kicked one of them (sorry Clayton!!!!). They loved it. I loved it. I did not understand why I enjoyed the idea of beating up my totally-not-a-crush-just-a-best-friend’s boyfriends so much, but boy! Did I! At my school, 13 was about the age you signed up for band. I tried out to be a drummer. Sadly my dreams were crushed (“Girls rarely make it as drummers because there are too many boys, and no girls. Why not the saxophone?”) and I ended up playing the saxophone, much to my mother’s relief. I think she thought the saxophone was somehow less gay? She wanted me to play the flute, but I said I would literally just not be in band if I had to play the flute, so we compromised on the saxophone. I was objectively terrible at it. I was also the only girl in the saxophone section, so good thing I didn’t get to play the drums! Although the gayest thing I probably did was read a book called The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. (I have zero idea how well this book holds up, it’s uh, been a while since I was 13… but I loved it then.) It’s about a pair of Jewish cousins in the early 40’s who write superhero comics and one of them is (gasp!!!) gay. (If I could put gay in superscript here, I would). I did not know that this book was about gays. I thought it was about comic books. But it ended up being one of the very first times I saw a healthy gay relationship anywhere. I don’t think I’d had to go through the terrible loss of Sandy Lopez on ER yet (or the wonderful discovery of Kerry Weaver), so Kavalier and Clay become one of those Core Gay Memories. It depicted a real relationship, between real characters, not just a ‘dalliance’ that ended in disaster. Or a rough allusion that ended with someone being murdered. Or that terrible thing where you have to squint to see the queerness. It was just there. In white and black. On the page. Love between two people of the same sex. Love and heartbreak and commitment. All things I didn’t think were possible. Things I didn’t know I was allowed to have. I read that book under the cover of darkness and turned it in when no one was on duty to see me return it. And I hoped and prayed that the book wasn’t somehow flagged in the system as “homo stuff” or something and that a letter would be sent to my parents about my misdeeds. You know, my misdeeds of reading a book about gay people that showed them as actual people. That showed me that maybe gay people *were* just actual people. I don’t know how that book ended up in a junior high library in rural Arkansas, but I thank my lucky stars that it did. It changed my life. It’s always stunning to me the amount of underground queerness I lived out, even in a time I didn’t really know what it was or what it mean.

108. I was crushing on a soccer teammate who was dating an awful, gaslighting dude. Once when we were just hanging out before practice, I just couldn’t handle what a prick he was being to her, and reacted by kicking the ball hard to his body. He was a drama queen about it, and my friend didn’t talk to me for a good while, but it was worth it. All these years later, we’re still close (eventually the crush passed), and awful dude has been long forgotten.

109. My best friend Maren from next door and I played “Dirty Dancing,” meaning we lay on top of each other, fully clothed, a bit of grinding but no touching or kissing. I think we also played that pre-13. We never saw this as a gay thing, since we were only roleplaying our fave film. Though me being the heavier of us two, I was always laying on the ground, and she lay on top of me even though she was way more femme and delicate than me, she always “played” Patrick Swayze. It was the early 90’s, but Dirty Dancing still was very popular in Germany. Once, my best friend sat with me in the dark in her room while a romantic song was playing, but nothing happened, she probably waited for a move from me. She being so pretty and I, being insecure and having very low self esteem, and a bad opinion of my looks, would have never made the move. She always danced very sexy in front of me, she was obsessed with dancing the Lambada and incredibly short skirts… I always liked watching her but being so closeted I didn’t realize why.

110. The era, the 80’s. Getting a race bike for boys for my daily commute to school. And it was OK with the world because Jennifer Beals had one in Flashdance.

111. I wrote hundreds of love letters to Janet Jackson. I never sent them, but was convinced that we would end up married some day.

112. Be totally in love with my BFF at the time and not fully realize it until years later 🙃.

113. Listened to a LOT of Indigo Girls, Tracy Chapman, and tATu.

114. Anytime I’d write a love scene between a man and a woman in a fanfiction, I would write from the man’s perspective because I thought putting myself in the headspace of someone touching a man intimately was icky.

115. During my middle school humanities class, we would always spend the first ten minutes reading whatever we wanted. I usually read a book, but sometimes I would read the kids-focused magazines that my teacher had available. Once when I was reading said magazine, I noticed that they had cards of sports players that people could tear out if they wanted. I looked at the cards with mild interest until my eyes landed on a basketball player decked out in a Tennessee Vols jersey, looking like a complete badass as she dominated the court with the most gorgeous face known to mankind. In that moment, Candace Parker made my thirteen year old self gay, and without thinking twice, I tore the card from the magazine and proudly displayed it on the front of my binder. Listen, even though I was on my middle school basketball team, I did not love the sport that much, but here I was praising Parker’s talents to all who would ask (there were stats of hers on the back of the card that I had memorized) and never interrogating why I would feel weirdly excited every time I looked at the card too closely. I had never even seen her play, and yet, I was a Candace Parker stan (and still am!). Looking back, this was one of the gayer moments of my youth and imagine my full circle moment when I learned that Parker married a woman!!!! Truly proof that the gays stay winning.

116. Rewatched Josie and the Pussycats over and over and over again to figure out what I was feeling for Rachael Leigh Cook.

117. Fondle sessions with my best friend — like wow who knew nipples could feel like that ??

118. When I was 13, I watched Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and I could not stop thinking about the white shorts that Blake Lively wears when she’s in Mexico. I fully believed that I was thinking about them because of ~fashion~, despite not giving a single fuck about fashion as a kid. I even bought my own white shorts so that I could be like Bridget. Which I literally never wore. It shouldn’t have taken me a decade after that to realize that I wasn’t straight, but so it goes.

119. I cut my hair like Catherine Zeta-Jones in Chicago for absolutely no reason at all and definitely not because I was obsessed with watching her gyrate in what is basically lingerie while she talked about doing murders. (This was also the year Bend It Like Beckham came out. It was a formative time.)

120. I bought the season 1 DVD set of Queer As Folk from FYE in the mall. I also had a hidden folder on my family desktop computer full of pictures of t.A.T.u.

121. *~ told my first boyfriend I was bi ~* (and he responded “well duh”).

122. When I was 13, I had two best friends and one of them was moving away. I was the most sad I’d ever been, I think. This was the friend who wrangled a confession out of me about “liking” our best guy friend not long before, then gave me the smile of shared secrets as she left my house that day. We were all friends at church and the day of her family’s going away party, we all said our goodbyes but that wasn’t enough for me. I went on my own outside and ran after her car, waving as they drove away. Not long after, my family moved too and she sent me a beautiful letter about how much it meant to her that I’d been the only one to come out and wave goodbye. I sent her one back detailing all the reasons she was my very best friend and how much I missed her. I grew up and came out and she grew up and stayed in the church and I’ll never forget how much it hurt the day I saw her make anti-marriage equality posts on Instagram.

123. Watched a lot of “A Shot At Love” by Tila Tequila and kissed my middle school best friend because we were “pretending” to be wives.

124. Wrote a sad song on the piano (I could not play the piano) because the girl I was obsessed with was leaving school for a few months.

125. I figured out I was gay at the championship game of a soccer tournament. Immediate huge crush on the opposing goalie. After we won the shoot out we hugged. I have picture proof. Perhaps the gayest part of this story is that we still keep in touch 7 years later.

126. I came out.

31 Thoughts I Had While Battling a UTI

1. Wow I really have to pee? That’s weird, I haven’t had that much water toda- uh oh
2. What is this feeling, so sudden and new?
3. That song is so gay
4. Now I have Wicked stuck in my head
5. Okay, don’t panic
6. *panic* *pain*
7. Do I still have Azo tabs from my last UTI
8. When was my last UTI
9. Oh, 2018, that nepotism-baby comedy writer.
10. (God that was boring sex. Not worth the eventual outcome)
11. (Remember the girl who was training me at my new job said “if your fluids don’t mix with someone else’s, they’re probably not the person for you.” What a weird thing to say.)
12. (She was right, I guess, about that specific girl.)
13. Well, that’s one benefit of two years of pandemic-induced celibacy!
14. Azo tabs, focus
15. How fast can I get Azo tabs
16. I really need to clean my bathroom, wow
17. I’ll never be able to pee without cringing again
18. UTI antibiotics should be available over the counter!
19. Why are the AZO tab makers content with my pee being neon orange
20. Could they make my pee turquoise or magenta instead
21. Actually, scratch that, magenta might be too alarming
22. I bet Audrey Hepburn never got a UTI
23. Does drinking a blueberry-pomegranate sparkling water count as “hydrating”
24. Does my back hurt? Has it spread to my kidneys?
25. Or is that just from sitting for 8 hours a day in an “ergonomic” desk chair I bought off Instagram
26. Should I really be using a vibrator in this trying time
27. This is a cosmic punishment for having too much sex
28. PEE AFTER SEX DUMMY!
29. I know!
30. I’m never having sex again
31. I really, really can’t wait to have sex again

Have You Considered… Angelina Jolie in the 90s?

Feature image by Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic and Jim Smeal/Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images

I’m still not sure what brought me back to Angelina. To be honest, I’m sure she was always there.

Maybe it’s because a historic queer Oscars are coming up and in everyone’s excitement about Kristen Stewart and Ariana DeBose’s nominations, a lot of straight (some gay) media are skipping over Angelina Jolie’s win for Girl, Interrupted — which is not only bisexual erasure for Angelina (it is!), but also erasure of the movie that made me gay.

Maybe it’s because Autostraddle turned 13 this week, and that means I wrote about what a horny lonely nerd I was in 1999, which will always bring me back to Angelina Jolie (what did I just say?? Did you forget already! Girl, Interrupted made me gay).

But also maybe some things don’t need to have a reason. Angelina was — and remains — a stunner. Somehow both ethereal and permanent. First of her name, a legend of her time, none other like her.

And so… listed without commentary, here are 10 photos of Angelina Jolie, curated together for no other reason than the 90s called and they said hold my bisexual beer.

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At the 1997 Cable ACE Awards with Peta Wilson

Were the 90s Always This Dreamy?

55th Annual Golden Globe Awards

In Front of a Graffiti Wall

At the 50th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards

At the 5th Annual SAG Awards

At the Airport

Looking like The Matrix in 1999

And Of Course with Gillian Anderson, Because Bisexuals

Smoochy Wow-Wow and 71 Other Names We Use for Our Pets in Private

1. Tiny (such that the tiny detectives are coming to take her to tiny jail because she is too tiny)
2. Madame Floof
3. Professor Pouty Paws
4. Noodle
5. Moo Bear
6. Hair Bear
7. Little bear
8. Small bear
9. Smol bear (connotatively different)
10. Pretty bear
11. Rude bear
12. A rotating selection of seasonal baked-good-based names according to mood, such as pumpkin bread, pumpernickel, snickerdoodle, etc
14. Hoags
15. Bad Girl
16. Cloud Boy
17. Polar Bear
18. Mister Softy
19. PuppyCat
20. DJ Hoagalicious
21. Peanut Butter Boy
22. Hoaglish
23. My Sweet Angel
24. Bridge Troll
25. Lolu
26. Sea Salt Prince
27. Lolo
28. Baby Smush
29. Smushie
30. Sausage Roll
31. Superstar
32. Hoaganator
33. Sam
34. Clown Shoe
25. Sam-a-lam-a-ding-dong
36. Cinnamon Roll
37. Smoochy Wow-Wow
38. Tuba
39. Buffalo
40. Mr. Buckets
41. Mister Man
42. Samby
43. Bethany
44. Beebo
45. Screambo
46. Little Tiny
47. My Most Precious Man
48. Panther Boy
49. Silky Boy
50. Babee Boy
51. Blobby
52. Dibby
53. Lolalula
54. Dolby Digital
55. Beans
56. Beanie
57. Beam
58. Queen Beanie
59. Peach Patch Baby
60. Beeperton
61. Quabop, Creator of the Universe
62. I mostly just call her baby and ask if she knows she’s a baby and how she got so small. I often ask her if she’s aware she’s a cat, and she still seems pretty oblivious tbh.
63. you little bastard
64. Bexaroodle
65. Noodle
66. Doodle
67. Little squish
68. Pointy-elbowed asshole
69. Snake baby
70. Perfect lil cowdog
71. Pigeon
72. Pigeon in a cat suit

Pets featured below with given names; guess at your own peril.

Here Are 80+ of Your Collective Pandemic Sex Dreams

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57 Strong Feelings You Had About The L Word’s Catastrophic Season Three

Well, we’ve made it through the hellscape of season three only to discover that the hellscape is now our actual lives! Carly and I Face-Timed Brittany Ashley a few days ago (because social distancing) to go over the best and worst moments of this terrible season, based on your votes! You can and should listen to the episode here. I would like to just NOTE that it seems like one of our communal number one feelings about this season is that it was virulently transphobic and that a lot of us didn’t realize that the first time we watched it. Now we are, as they say, aghast. We LOVED reading all your comments on the survey (over 1k people took the survey!) and we read some on the podcast and some are here and some are in both places but we loved all of them especially the ones that loved us. Ok, drink some water.

• GO LISTEN 
• SUBSCRIBE
• GIVE US A NICE REVIEW!! NOW’S THE TIME TO DO IT, FRIENDS!
• FOLLOW US ON INSTAGRAM!!
• FOLLOW US ON TWITTER!!!

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1. I work in a nursing home and there’s a resident who always has her tv on really loud and there’s this ad that comes on all the time with the same song that bette finger fucked Alice to so i’m constantly reminded of that through my workday, thanks l word

2. the Lobsters dinner table scene will haunt my nightmares until I die. If you ever see my ghost in a waterfall, it will probably complain about that episode.

3. THE MAX AND BILLIE BLAKIE SEX SCENE. IS PROBABLY. MY FAVORITE SEX SCENE OF ALL TIME. AND THE GENDER FUCKERY. IS AMAZING. AAAA.

4. Carmen doing her sexy dance for Shane is the only reason why I even lesbian anymore

5. The vampire arc and the opera finger scene single-handedly had the power to stop me from erasing this season from my memory.

6. Everyone needs a vest you can gig in!

7. Although the whole Alice going into a pit of literal despair over her break up with Dana is pretty messy, it is iconically lesbian.

8. I feel very personally seen by Season 3’s depiction of the queer experience of crying about your ex during yoga.

9. My fiancée had never seen the series, so we rewatched it last year, and I am mortified by the experience this season especially. Direct quote from my lady lover: “Wow, this is getting messy!” JUST WAIT BITCH.

10. If I was going to read fan fiction about any characters it would be Bette and Senator “Call me Barbara” Grisham. That scene is hotter than most of the sex scenes (obvious exception for Shane/Cherie sex, the absolute full stop best sex scene this show ever had).

11. I can’t believe they wasted Dana Delany on one of the rare times Bette DOESN’T cheat

12. The Shane/Cherie sex scene shook me to my core

13. I think about that strap-on sex scene at least once a week…..

14. This season was honestly a shit show but I can’t even begin to express how many times my roommate and I hit rewind to watch Shane fuck Cherie with the strap on

15. It was the best of times and the worst of times but one hell of a ride. Especially for Cherie Jaffe.

16. Fuck this garbage pile of biphobic transphobic mental illness trivializing bullshit…. but this is still somehow my favorite podcast! Love you!

17. So many tears and transphobia

18. I need a strong drink and some group therapy after revisiting season three. Thanks for being the closest thing to the latter.

19. Dana in the waterfall is THE BEST. it makes my peeper tingle with joy.

20. Real life Dana upset about L Word Dana

21. When they blocked Erin’s eyebrows for the basketball game scene, you could see the clumped hair under her makeup. It made me aggressively upset.

22. I am trauma bonded to this tv show now

23. This season exposed me to toxins that I’m still working through

24. Emptiness is loneliness and loneliness is cleanliness And cleanliness is godliness, and God is empty just like me Thanks to this season of The L World

25. My least favorite thing about the entirety of the series is Max’s facial hair

26. WHY DID THEY KILL DANA? WHY DID THEY DO MAX SO DIRTY? WHYYYYY

27. Where can I take Uta’s vampirology class?!

28. How could something I loved so much 15 years ago be so nails-on-a-chalkboard now? What is art? Who am I?

29. WHY IS MAX NEVER ALLOWED TO BE HAPPY

30. Why Why did any of us do this

31. I hate it so much but I also love it so much wtf is wrong with me

32. downhill but in a fun way– like sledding!

33. make kit bi and not a terf you cowards !!

34. Max’s facial hair is buck wild

35. Bette in Full Flashdance gives me life

36. I love that we see the Kiki Smith print back in Bette’s house in Gen Q after she sells it in this season. That’s a real Bette Porter power move to buy it back.

37. I’d watch a movie that was literally just the Marilyn and Peggy Peabody story. Get it, older queer ladies!

38. 😫😫😫😤😤😤🥵🥵🥵

39. I can’t believe I watched this and thought it was fine once

40. It was one of those nightmares where you know the train is going to crash and you need to get off asap but also that pretty girl keeps talking to you

41. A lot of season 3 made me laugh…and not because it was comedy

42. party on, podcast

43. trash, but like hot gay trash

44. Helena Peabody gets over her pregnancy fetish and that is truly the best thing season 3 did for us.

45. I’m still pissed that Dana doesn’t have a permanent memorial Myspace page up

46. This season makes me feel really bad for Erin Daniels and Laurel Holloman. The rest of the cast, too. And the crew. And anyone who watched it. And the universe for having it put out there.

47. I think I was more heartbroken than Carmen when Shane left her on their wedding day. I’ll marry you, Carmen.

48. Season Three was such a blur but we were literally gifted with #poolsex between Cherrie and Shane and THAT is a godsend. Also the flashback to Bette and Alice in college– lesbians can have a little opera-themed sex fantasy as a treat!!

49. Just yesterday I was walking home with keys in hand–but not between my knuckles like Wolverine because that’s a fight I’m bound to lose if it comes to it–and I was thinking about how badass it would be to have a taser and say “we’re not f*ggots, we’re dykes” to a predator…

50. Cherrie Jaffe will forever be my preferred mommi

51. Just…what a way to miss all the marks. And I’m not talking about the Million Men Mark March the l word seems to have going.

52. It was an emotional roller coaster but Shane’s hair finally looked good

53. S3 E9, the Dana & Alice shopping scene – Can we PLEASE talk about the fact that Dana is walking around with a Gucci shopping bag, Tiffany’s bag, etc., yet the fucking ugly ass purse on her shoulder looks like she got it for $2 at a yard sale….?! Or dug it out of a dumpster behind a suburban Goodwill in 2002. !!!! Girl has clearly got money yet CHOOSES to have incredibly questionable thrifting taste… lesbian culture for sure.

54. it was great if you watch on netflix and just skip 80% of it. one of the strongest/hottest seasons that way.

55. This season caused the start of my annoyance with Tina. Shocking I know lol

56. At least Mark wasn’t there!

57. Other than listening to this podcast I never want to think of it again. It’s kind of wild how this podcast recapped these episodes in the same year that we saw Work in Progress and TLWGQ. It’s like that old line that X walked so Y could run but more like the Max storylines flailed around like one of those inflatable tube people outside a car dealership so Chris on Work in Progress could run. I would like the wax jingle as a ringtone though. Yours in gayness, Betty

46 Innovative Ways You Giant Weirdos Described Yourselves When Signing Up for A-Camp XI

Ahh, it’s that time of year again: when I make ten million index cards, spread them out all over my floor, dump fairy dust all over it and then (and then!) use magical powers to sort them into neat stacks representing where y’all will be laying your heads in … a very soon amount of time. This process occurred last weekend, when my dear friend / A-Camp human Courtney flew all the way to Los Angeles on an airplane and we had a nice time talking about how cool you all are and where you should sleep and shower. Also though there’s a showerhouse so you don’t have to shower in your cabin. You do you!

So here, pulled mercilessly out of context, I present excerpts from the personality descriptions of over 350 (!!!) campers, all of whom I cannot wait to meet or see again on June 5th!

1. Dirtbag mommi looking for trouble

2. I’ve been wearing socks with sandals for 29 years

3. I’m terrified of candles

4. Sometimes I don’t realize how loud I’m talking and then I get embarrassed

5. I’m a queer trans weirdo with lots of snakes that broke her arm last year

6. Almost 30 and wow did I really use to queer oil wrestle half naked? When did I start wearing dress shirts?

7. I’m still sad about Callie and Arizona

8. Xena could get it.

9. One time a girl kissed me and I blurted out “don’t die” and then cried.

10. I love to read and cook and explore Greece in 480 BCE.

11. I dream of someday starting a friend-commune in a castle in Scotland while writing the lesbian historical romance novels that the world needs now.

12. Talk dirty to me while quoting Antonin Artaud and discussing contemporary meme theory.

13. I would describe myself like Diane Nyugen from Bojack Horseman mixed with a very enthusiastic drag race lover.

14. I admire Mary Poppins because I also desire to be beloved for my weirdness, rudeness, timeless style, and unlimited power.

15. Lana Condor in Deadly Class on the outside, Lana Condor in To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before on the inside.

16. Librarian in the streets, person who actually wants a good night’s sleep in the sheets

17. My best friends describe my personality as ‘Hayley Kiyoko meets Eeyore’.

18. Cabinmates have described me as an Agreeable Biscuit-Type, a Femme Flower Child Uncle Situation, and a Goddamn Sea Prince, among literally 82 other things, I have a list.

19. If I was a drink, I’d be bagel store coffee: better in the morning, culturally Jewish, a lil dull, a lil sweet, always reliable.

20. Lamb Chop Sun/ Pepper Ann Moon/ Daria Rising.

21. Abby sun / Therese moon / Carol rising

22. Hufflepuff with a Ravenclaw rising.

23. Ideally I’d have Rhea Butcher’s hair and Shawn Mendes’ biceps

24. Wednesday Addams/Miss Honey personality (closet goth kindergarten teacher)

25. Camp counselor vibes are like 78% of my personality.

26. I’m the greatest bottom who ever lived.

27. I love my Xbox almost as much as my flogger

28. Terrible dancer- will dance anyway.
Terrible singer- 100% will sing anyway.

29. Please point me towards the pool, where I will have a standing daily appointment to nap.

30. I cant wait to drink an obnoxious amount of orange juice with my fellow Sea Serpents.

31. I try to dress like a queer fat babe Dean Winchester.

32. Wondering if Hey Dude! x The Craft/MTV Sprang Break ‘98 is an appropriate fashion reference point for my A-Camp attire… the fact that I’ve been thinking about it…

33. I’m your dad-friend. It’s basically the same as your mom-friend, but I don’t carry a purse, my jokes are terrible, and I really just recycle the same three outfits

34. I bought my 1st pair of fuzzy boots this week & they changed my life

35. I think I got sorted in to Slytherin because I’m attracted to villains

36. I liked NASA before they were cool again!

37. Letting loose: I am a likable lionhearted levelheaded lesbian legislative librarian litigant laughing at a lamentably literally alliterative life.

38. Hark! A tall and shaven-headed presence resembling an angry baby, drinking iced coffee that will necessitate a lie-down.

39. I can be described by the inspirational phrase, “It’s trash CAN, not trash CAN’T.”

40. I’ll bring my bat detector to camp!

41. I once was told I was “not nerdy enough” for a girl and was deeply offended by this.

42. A thing that always disappoints me: when someone else is subbing in for Rachel Maddow.

43. Short af with a personality larger than the menu at the Cheesecake Factory.

44. Some year I’ll write something clever enough here to make onto one your A-Camp Autostraddle lists

45. If I ever actually write anything useful here, I’ve been replaced by a cyborg and shouldn’t be allowed on site

46. Born and raised in the Bahamas so I’ve got that laid back island vibe going on most of the time. Except when I’m flailing excitedly over fictional lesbians or letting “Taylor Swift is announcing her coming out” consume my life. Hope this helps!

25 of Your Most Alarming Travel Nightmare Stories

On our recent Queer Travel Survey I asked if you had any funny travel nightmare stories and I learned a lot about everybody and bedbugs! Also: food poisoning, brutal transportation delays and mix-ups, not being able to find your AirBnB, bedbugs and a surprising number of you thinking it’s a good idea to save money on lodging by “staying up all night” in foreign cities where you don’t know the language and have all your luggage with you!!!

I probably have 100 travel nightmare stories myself, I enjoyed all of yours, and here are some of them — note that they have been edited for clarity and length!

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2.

I was set on fire in Amsterdam on accident by a girl who was very high. Kids! Don’t mix drugs & play with lighters — especially near other high people with big curly hair. I ended up shaving it all off and looking equally sexy shorn as I did when I had hair like a lion.

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3.

So, I went overseas for a month to see my partner, who it turned out had left me for their stepsibling. That was a month-long nightmare. Don’t do that.

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4.

When I was 12 I got my first period on a cruise ship with my extended family (a group of 15). It was the morning of one of the two “land days” we had on the trip so we were in a bit of a rush to get off the boat and make the most of our time in Fiji. The plan was to go snorkeling, and I really wanted to go, so I had to learn how to use a tampon pronto, but the ones my mum gave me were very hard to figure out, especially in my room’s tiny toilet cubicle with no help from the internet. I also had (then undiagnosed) PCOS so I’d be intermittently overcome with bouts of pain. I thought I got it in okay so we headed to the bus but I soon realised (very, very painfully) that the cardboard applicator was in my vag along with the tampon. By the time we got to the snorkeling place I was crying from the pain and the fear I wouldn’t be able to go snorkelling.

I dashed into the toilets with my Mum and explained the issue, and she bought some pads from a nearby store and brought them to me — but couldn’t avoid some of my family members realising what was up. When I got back to the bus where the large group of cruise shippers were gathered, my well-meaning grandpa came up to me, still sniffling, gave me a big hug and said very loudly in front of the entire group “Don’t worry love, I have to wear nappies too.”

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6.

For our honeymoon, my wife and I went to Maui. Our first day there, jetlagged as hell, we watched a man have a stroke and die on the resort beach after his family had pressured him into going snorkeling. It… set a tone.

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7.

I was 14 and really in love with the only cis boyfriend I’d ever have. We were going on a trip to Poland together — we were in a socialist youth group and went to visit Auschwitz and Cracow and do historical tours around Jewish life in Poland during and after Nazism. But then he got scared and we broke up a few weeks before the trip. It was awkward, and I tried to avoid him, but he wanted to pretend everything was fine. He even booked a room with me! I was shocked and told him no, staying with another group member instead. Throughout the trip he kept wanting to talk. I tried to avoid him.

Things finally escalated in an actual escalator (lol) where I shouted at him for kissing me after breaking up b/c he didn’t want my parents to know. Everyone in the escalator obviously became the poor innocent audience to this awkward fight. He wrote “vengeance is not justice” on a piece of paper and gave it to me. I spent the rest of the week avoiding him and meeting awesome new socialist friends and comrades in Poland that I’m still friends with today.

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8.

I was staying at a hostel in Reykjavik, Iceland, that was known for its party vibe, which I somehow hadn’t realized when I booked it. After a long day of travel I woke up late on a Saturday night to the sounds of three different pairs of people in my six-person room all having sex. I sought refuge in the lounge — but two people were hooking up there, too. So I went to the bathroom for a shower, where, of course, I found even MORE people hooking up!

I ended up walking around outside by the waterfront at 3AM in my pajamas and flip-flops without a coat.

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9.

The last time I travelled was for an academic conference which was held in Florida. I had to share a bed with a girl I didn’t know very well. She screamed in the middle of the night for no reason, there were elephants (I assume) on the floor above ours running back and forth across their room all night long, and our hotel was so moldy we could hardly breathe, which I’m pretty sure caused the sinus infection that I still have. Also, it was during Hurricane Michael and we were in the storm surge zone. The things I will do for a line on my CV.

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10.

My wife and I are jinxed to have people invade our room. In Paris someone was given a key to our room at like 2 AM — we went down to the concierge to get him a new one, but he was too stoned to care, so we went back to our room. We woke up about an hour later to a guy standing at the foot of the bed in his underwear. He told us he’d come through our window (a three-story climb) and he seemed to be tripping balls. Again, the concierge didn’t care. Later our friend asked us, “how long do you think he was standing there before you woke up?” Very glad that hadn’t occurred to us until we were home!

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11.

I was in a motorbike accident on an island in Thailand and ended up having to get surgery on my ankle in a local first aid tent. The wound was infected and the doctor said it was gangrene! It eventually got better after a hospital stay. But then I was attacked by a monkey who thought the covering for the injury was food?

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12.

I once stayed in a very old and remote traditional Japanese guest house near Mt. Fuji and decided to start watching American Horror Story the first night I was there. I spent the next two nights feeling like I was about to be murdered anytime.

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13.

I went into the Peruvian Amazon for five days on a camping tour. Usually at the start of an organized camping tour, they go over things like how to go to the bathroom, packing toilet paper, whatever else you need to know. This was not a very well-organized tour so none of that happened. We didn’t see land for three days and I just didn’t understand how they were going to the bathroom! Did they hang on the side of the canoes? Immerse themselves in the water? Everything seemed messy and like I was not coordinated enough to pull it off. Well, I ended up in a real emergency after about 24 hours. With both men about 50 feet away I hung off a platform they had put my tent on that was maybe 10 yards in the air and did what I had to. You could hear it drop into the water and I was terrified I would slip and fall the 10 yards into the river into my own shit.

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14.

My college boyfriend refused to break up with me before I left for Australia for six months. He bought tickets to meet me, broke up with me while I was gone to try and date someone else, then came to visit me and acted like we were together again since he was there. Then, we spent one month sleeping in the back of a station wagon driving around the country, while he tried to coerce me into liking him again!

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When I went to NY with my best friend for her birthday, we got so fucked up that, as we were walking from our hotel to our next destination to drink more, she was walking backwards, tripped over a little gate around a tree, fell on her face, and broke her front two teeth. Had to go to the ER and was there for hours before heading to the dentist first thing in the morning. We had to get her false teeth for the weekend. STILL the best weekend of our lives.

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17.

When I studied abroad in Morocco after my first year of college, I was walking home carrying my bag over my shoulder after a weekend trip to the desert with my friends, despite the fact that our host parents had told us walking wasn’t a good idea. I justified it because I walk all the time and it was only 20 minutes away. As I’m walking, a boy on a bike rode by and grabbed the purse I had on my shoulder away from me. I tried to give chase, but he was much faster and I was very tired, so I gave up and sat in the middle of the road on top of my suitcase, crying hysterically. That bag had everything I needed in it, including the passport I’d need to leave the country in a few days.

Less than a minute later, a group of businessmen driving by asked what was wrong. I was able to communicate to them in French what had happened. They told me they’d take care of it. I stayed sitting on my suitcase, expecting to never see them again. Less than five minutes later, the car drove back and one of the men handed me my purse! This made me cry even more. They offered me tissues and snacks and a ride home. Even though I knew getting into a car with a bunch of men I didn’t know wasn’t the best idea, I accepted, too exhausted to keep walking — and they took me home. I think they were glad to see me go because my crying was making them very uncomfortable! So that’s the story of how I (almost) got pick pocketed in Morocco.

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18.

My wallet was stolen in the Notre Dame in February. I think it happened because I’m Jewish, and the Christian god was smiting me for not leaving any alms in the church.

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20.

I fell down the stairs in Blarney Castle and almost started a domino effect, but managed to stop myself after a few steps and did not kill my entire tour group. I was, however, very muddy and very sore. (For those who haven’t been, the staircase is a tight spiral and the steps are unforgiving and steep, and often slick with, well, mud.) But I kissed that dang stone!

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22.

When I went to Morocco, I was super super careful about the water situation the whole time — until 5am on our last day when I was so sleepy that I ran my toothbrush under the tap without thinking. We returned to Spain later that day, and I felt a little funny. The next morning, after walking 30 minutes to school, I SUDDENLY. FELT. THE. FEELING. I told my professor I had to leave. She said, “yeah, you look sick,” but in Spanish, you say “yeah you have a bad face,” so like, thanks. I started for home… but there was A BUS STRIKE and A STUDENT STRIKE! (I love and respect the striking tradition but omg, bad timing.) So I WALKED home — by which I mean “waddled” as I was trying to hold all the liquids inside me ’cause I ALSO STARTED MY PERIOD THAT MORNING. I got to my host family’s house and locked myself in the bathroom — they were an adorable elderly couple concerned for my well-being and I was a fountain of unspeakable substances destroying their guest bathroom. The bathroom, by the way, was floor-to-ceiling marble and glass, aka the most ECHO-Y BATHROOM KNOWN TO MAN. It was also sandwiched between their bedroom and my host dad’s office. I spent four days locked in that room, and poor Paco heard every bit of it from his lovely leather and wood study.

Victoria kept trying to feed me DEEP-FRIED GARLIC FISH because it is good for you. She also kept trying to sterilize the bathroom in between incidents, and I’d have to go ask her to leave so I could have more loud periody diarrhea. Anyway, Paco finally convinced her to stop with the garlic fish and give me some crackers, and I slowly regained control over my bowels. Paco was not able to look me in the eyes for several weeks.

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24.

My then-partner I were on the Colombian island San Andres. We stayed at a lovely place and the owners allowed us to borrow bikes. The island is bikeable so this is great, things are going great, we’re touring the whole island, we’re getting through some intense wind and eventually rain, we lock our bikes up nearby a beach to hop in the water when the torrential downpour starts up again. We go to get out of there when my partner realizes she can’t find the key. We scour the beach, people try to help, but to no avail. We finally call the owner who sends her son and friends to clip the locks. I’m wet and miserable, evening plans were ruined, so we bike back silently and angrily. We get back to the place we’re staying, change and dry off, when I hear a metal clang from my partner. She had tucked the key in her bathing suit top and, despite checking this spot, had not found it on her person.

At this point the situation was laughable and she doesn’t know this but I still have the key in my possession.

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25.

Scenery: the middle of nowhere, Iceland. One of those “I can see it happen but there’s nothing I can do to stop it” situations — the car door closed and locked from the inside. No jacket, no money, no more battery. It was foggy and freezing and I had no idea what to do or how to break into this car. Then, OUT OF NOWHERE, a lesbian Canadian couple shows up. They give me a ride to the next gas station and offer me homemade vegan guacamole sandwiches.

After I’m all set, they proceed off into the unknown. Thinking back I believe they came from rainbow-glitter-fairy-wonderland to save my ass. In conclusion, maybe we are rare to find around the globe, but when you really need us, we are there.

86 Truly Innovative Ways You Gays Described Your Haircuts

Our lesbian stereotypes survey had, of course, a question about haircuts, as many queers, regardless of gender presentation, have very passionate feelings about their hair. We’ll be getting into the stats on that later this week or next, but I was so inspired by how you described your present, current, and/or future haircuts in the comments section that I couldn’t wait one moment longer to share that with y’all. Also please note that a full article on what I have learned is called “the bisexual bob” is in the works.

Find below, ripped mercilessly out of context for your enjoyment, just some of the many ways you described the hair that flows from your scalp into the sweet light of day.

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1. “A compromise between Natalie Dormer and the comic book Captain Marvel”

2. Unironic rainbow mullet mohawk situation

3. Usher-style Mohawk situation

4. “I’d like to speak to the manager”

5. Edgy 12-year-old boy

6. Kinda British boarding school dude

7. “I guess I’m a lhb [Long Hair Butch] but my hair went white and now everyone treats me like a granny or Walt Whitman”

8. The good old Hillary Clinton frumpy crop

9. “The more like Steve Harrington, the better.”

10. “Occasionally I wake up looking like a teen heartthrob on the cover of Tiger Beat circa 1997 — like a Home Improvement-era Jonathan Taylor Thomas”

11. Scully bob

12. Sexy Willie Nelson

13. Merida curls that have always been chin length or longer

14. Dramatic witch mane

15. “Dude medium length (wavy, like a lot of NHL players or Jack Savoretti or Kit Harrington)”

16. “I made my partner cut my hair like my favorite anime character’s. The short blunt bangs are very trendy, no one needs to know my inspiration was a fictional 17 year old boy.”

17. PTA suburban mom boss bitch

18. Short Jean Seburgesque pixie

19. The young-lesbian lob

20. Mid-30s queer crisis undercut/sidecut

21. The Big Gay Chop

22. The Bisexual Bob

23. “Like a rainbow had shat on my head, with an undercut and an emo fringe”

24. Like a Hanson brother

25. The Bieber

26. “That really cool high school English teacher who makes, like, three students realize they’re gay.”

27. Twig from “The Edge Chronicles”

28. Hugh Grant in “Notting Hill”

29. Merida from “Brave”

30. Johnny Depp in “Willy Wonka”

31. Heath Ledger in “10 Things I Hate About You”

32. Leonardo DiCaprio in “Titanic”

33. 90’s lesbian Leonardo DiCaprio

34. “I love my long-ass hair, it is my source of Samson-like strength”

35. Big, bushy Hermione hair

36. “It fluctuates between a sort of “captain america/JFK” masculine cut, an undercut, and shaved.”

37. Taylor Swift asymmetrical angled lob

38. 2001 Teen Boy Love Interest

39. Weird soccer-mom short back, long front thing

40. Accidental Bieber swishy style

41. “I cut my hair into a Jenny Schecter-style pixie in college to seem gayer. Instead it just made a weirder type of guy hit on me.”

42. Han Solo

43. Mall goth dude

44. Humphrey Bogart

45. Jon Snow

46. Carly Usdin, all my life

47. Ashlyn Harris

48. Alice

49. Annie Lennox

50. “v specifically cultivated floop w chelsea-ish side parts i can push back or let flow to subtly shift gender vibes”

51. Lesbian Macklemore

52. Faye British school boy

53. Young French boy

54. That fuckboi fade

55. “I like the feral look. The more twigs and mud the better. The look that says I’m too busy clambering through the wilderness to give a damn, but hey i’m working it.”

56. Sweet mullet

57. Flowing mane of a mullet

58. Very 80s new wave mullet situation

59. “a curly mullet I can downplay for work and up-play for other times”

60. Dragon Ball Z villain

61. “Sometimes I look like Draco Malfoy? I am very gentle, though.”

62. ’70s goddess

63. From Amélie to Bellatrix Lestrange

64. “All I know is that Amy Adams’ greasy alcoholic depression hair in Sharp Objects makes me swoon.”

65. Mulan-length

66. “Dark, dense, kinky… kinda like my soul.”

67. Short, very gay Miley short-sides long-on-top hair

68. “Every year or so I think about growing it out in hopes of looking like a sexy viking, but instead I just end up looking like a straight person and it’s terrible.”

69. “Like my dad did his wedding pictures in 1963”

70. “Like that of a male movie star from the 1920s”

71. “My mom says my hair is “neat and flippy,” my brother says my hair is “cool and artsy,” and my boss says my hair is “hip,” which just means none of them know the word queer.”

72. Endless goddesslike sunset colored ombre hair

73. Long metal hair, henna red

74. On my way to having a Hannah Hart look

75. Hannah Hart but NOT CUTE

76. “I dream of going gray so I’ll look like Anderson Cooper.”

77. Harry Styles’ circa 2015 before it got too long

78. Long and awesome (think Harry Styles c. 2015)

79. “My hair is the lovechild of Cameron Esposito’s and Rhea Butcher’s hair. Also still really torn up about that relationship change. LOVE IS A LIE.”

80. “High femme, vintage maven, full set and brush out, curls and hairspray for days.”

81. Amelie-ish

82. Tegan Quin during the Hearthrob era

83. “Late 90s soccer player/ Robin Wright vibe”

84. Like a lion’s mane

85. “It’s bright silver i’m just trying to be Lesbian Dante out here”

86. “I got a Rachel Maddow haircut well before I had any idea I was queer. My hair has always been precocious.”

33 Deeply Enchanting Feelings You Have About Witchcraft

Our Lesbian Stereotypes Survey asked y’all about your affiliations to witchery, as there has been an association between lesbians and witchcraft for many moons. This includes, most legendarily, Pat Robertson’s famous assertion that “the feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.”

Although we don’t know the international rates of witchdom, it does seem like a whole lot of you are indeed witches:

In addition to answering the question, 562 used the “comments” section to share various emotions about the question itself and your own experiences with witchery. We’ll talk a little more about the witchcraft you talked about in a serious way in an upcoming post.

Below is a listling of your commentary on the witchcraft question, ripped mercilessly out of context and pasted here for your spiritual enjoyment.

1. I just burned my ex’s left-behind Tarot cards while chanting “I will not set myself on fire to keep someone else warm”

2. i just made some pasta and it was witchcraft

3. Geez as a lesbian drummer in a doom metal band I get asked this question all the bloody time…

4. Willow from Buffy changed my liiiife

5. Very rarely I’m like “hmm… but what if I did do witchcraft”
but then…
I don’t

6. I WAS A TEENAGE GOTH. IT’S BASICALLY A REQUIREMENT

7. Well, there was a Buffy/Charmed phase

8. I have seen The Craft several times

9. I had a phase when I was 17… which coincides with when The Craft came out

10. I was Wiccan for a year of high school, like any lesbian

11. Show me a person who hasn’t used the evil eye at least once and I will show you a person who clearly has never lived or loved

12. …I don’t practice witchcraft unless you count the time when I read tarot cards to a Russian friend as a pastime, until I realized she took what I dead seriously and called me a “white witch”

13. My abuela decided I am a pussy and didn’t pass the magic to me

14. I light candles and learn herbs and practice good intentions and once officiated a cat baptism so…. sure.

15. I believe that witchcraft is real but I think it’s not a good idea for my white ass to involve forces I don’t understand or have family connection to into my life like that’s literally the plot of every horror movie

16. Gosh, this is why people think lesbians are awful.

17. SECOND WORST LESBIAN STEREOTYPE

18. Witches are hot AF. Don’t want to be one, do want to date one.

19. I mean… I lived right near Salem Massachusetts for 3 years. These things happen!

20. One day I will end up a witch on the corner with thirteen black cats cursing the prime minister

21. I’m totally cool with burning effigies of conservative politicians

22. I don’t do witchcraft, with the exception of the night before the 2016 election. I looked up a practical magic-esque “how to make a bad thing not happen” spell. Clearly that didn’t work.

23. I have lit a candle in the hopes of getting a research assistant job in the past (it didn’t work)

24. I’m not a witch, but I decorate like one.

25. I burn sage and get my tarot read every once in a while because I live in Los Angeles okay????

26. Lord knows I was casting spells and waiting for my Hogwarts letter when I was a kid.

27. I mean, we all wish we were Hermione, but no.

28. Hogwarts forgot to send me my letter

29. A girl (who in hindsight I definitely had a crush on) did convince me I was a witch in third grade

30. I genuinely don’t understand how someone can practice something that isn’t real, but then I guess I think that describes all religions so… you do you, witches.

31. I wrote an essay about lesbian witches one time.

32. DONT BUY WITCH KITS FROM SEPHORA OKAY?? Just… don’t.

33. I’ve just bought a book about it soooo… tbd

55 Very Deep Thoughts About Your Sex Life You Shared With Us On Our Recent Sex Survey

About a month ago we solicited your participation in a survey about the way top / bottom / switch terminology is used (or not!) within queer women & trans folks’ sexual lives and communities. There were plenty of opportunities within the survey for you to share not only your choice-from-multiple options, but also your open-ended answers.

For example, you were free to tell me what your identification as Top, Bottom, Switch or “None of the Above” meant to you. I asked “anything else you wanna tell us about how you have sex” on page three, and at the end of the survey I asked “anything else you wanna tell us?” Mostly you told us that you love Autostraddle, which, thank you so much; or reminded me that St. Paul erasure is a problem that I was perpetuating by writing Minneapolis instead of “Minneapolis/St.Paul” and you know what, thank you so much, I did not know that! (And for the record, I’m from the Midwest, so.)

So, the sentences below were ripped mercilessly out of context from your open-ended answers to questions about your sexual behavior and identity as well as questions about how you would define various sexual terms. I have turned fragments into complete sentences and made spelling corrections when it felt like the right thing to do. Please note that the inclusion of an idea on this list is not an endorsement of that idea. 

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1. I think we should bring back the term ‘Kiki’ for switch ’cause it’s cute

2. I am a Gemini who can’t keep their mouth shut even during oral

3. My ex really wanted ass stuff done to her, that’s why she’s my ex

4. A former sub of mine once described me as “Xena the Warrior English Teacher.”

5. YES I’ve been dying to tell someone about how my partner and I finally found a name for our new dildo and it’s Antoni

6. I’m so happy I’m a lesbian.

7. I’m married now and my wife would say I am a bottom. In fact, when we wrap up our leftover pizza, she always puts mine on the bottom for this reason.

8. I didn’t realize how boring my wife and I are so….thanks? STONEWALL WAS A RIOT

9. in this hell timeline, have as much queer sex as possible. anything to make life worse for mike pence and better for us <3

10. If I don’t focus and mentally force myself to come, I can’t. Doesn’t matter how much stimulation I’m receiving or how good it is, if the conscious decision isn’t there, I just don’t orgasm. Believe me, plenty of past partners have taken that as a challenge. Need someone’s ego deflated? Your ex thinks they’re god’s gift to sex? I am now taking commissions!!

11. Its always better when Beyonce is playing. (Self titled album of course, I’m not a monster)

12. Also I misread “pain switch” as “pain witch”, so i identify as that, now, obviously.

14. Being a top means that I don’t wear pants

15. pillow princesses are braver than the US marines

16. I love my tiny top girlfriend!

17. “i am a bottom and also an alpha which means i don’t mind getting dunked on as long as you recognize i jump higher than you.” @hellenorosevelt said it first.

[ed. note: please note that our dear friend hellen added “@hellenorosevelt said it first” to her own open-ended response, that was not an editorial addition.]

18. I’m a big angry femme top really into shy butch bottoms

19. I mommy domme more often these days. I think my subs are looking for a place of comfort in this terrible time.

20. Oh god, I don’t know what any of these words mean! I’m about to turn 30, is it happening? Am I becoming one of these endearing old gay men trying to understand the words the young gays are using?

21. I LITERALLY DONT UNDERSTAND WHAT THESE TERMS MEAN IN THE CONTEXT OF LADIES GETTING IT ON. PLEASE HELP ME!!!!!

22. … the sex we have is just the sex we have, you know? So I’m kind of taking a stab in the dark with all of these questions. I guess it’s a survey and that’s kind of the point but I can’t help but feel like I’m going to be graded! F ON GAY LINGO, I WILL NEVER GET MY LESBIAN DEGREE NOW. That said, I guess I’m a top.

23. You know that episode of the L Word when they are on the cruise, and Shane and that author sneak away to hook up, but then realize they are both tops and decide to not actually hook up, but just tell everyone they did? That’s happened to me a few times.

24. The L Word taught me queer relationships are all switchy did they lead me astray?

25. I love making my partner feel good but sometimes my jaw / wrist / face aches HELP

26. Once I was receiving a glorious fisting, and I was being so vocal that the dogs figured out how to open the bedroom door to check that I was okay.

27. one of my cats likes to lay right next to my partner and i while we get it on. she just stares at us and purrs. cats are weird and also kinda creepy huh?

28. A month ago, a cis guy I had been dating for 3 months broke up with me via text SPELLING MY NAME WRONG and that sex was great, but WOW I’m I glad to be fucking within my standard queer group of “women and nonbinary folks (regardless of genitalia)” now

29. Most of the time I feel like a top but sometimes I want an Amazon to throw me over her shoulder and carry me back to her place.

30. The way I have sex is like a tornado in a bottle, analogously intense and all-consuming but without the destruction and death

31. Lately we keep having sex after watching movies with lesbians. This was started after we watched Carol. It’s quite an enjoyable trend.

32. I’ve had a moment where every ex I’ve dated in my town was in the same room talking to each other. Don’t date in a small town.

33. God I miss women and I have no idea what I’m doing with my life.

34. My arms are WEAK and I get TIRED on top

35. Sometimes I do her, sometimes she does me, sometimes we do each other at the same time….and sometimes we just drink a beer and cuddle because that’s awesome too

36. Be gay, do crimes!

37. No butt stuff

38. Spring comes around and it has to be EVERYDAY

39. Sex is usually something people delude themselves into believing is for mutual care when it is more often about inflicting mutual suffering, exploiting another person to participate in petty and pointless psychosexual dramas. And too many are iffy on the mutual part.

40. I want murder

41. Well!

42. I am 100% switchy for life. My wife is a bottom. This sometimes causes tantrums

43. My gf and I are both bottoms so it’s a CONVERSATION.

44. My girlfriend and I have made a few jokes recently about what counts as topping and about what either of us are because for the first two months of us being sexually active, we each thought of ourselves as tops and the other one as bottoms

45. Wasn’t on the list above but to be clear we don’t scissor. We tried it once and it DID NOT work for us.

46. I love to scissor, I can’t believe you didn’t include anything humping related on this survey. Sometimes when I grind up on my girlfriend’s thigh I think “thank god I’m a lesbian”

47. In response to “How would you define “switch”?”

“You know the Will Smith song “Switch” from 2005? It’s like that”

48. In response to “How would you define “top”?

“It’s a me, Mario”

49. My girlfriend is so attractive that I still get nervous and don’t initiate sex as much as I would like to

51. Autostraddle makes my heart go mushy and I have crushes on like 90% of your writers

52. Filling out the rest of this survey was weird enough for me, my catholic upbringing is cringing at seeing this all on paper. This is how much I love you guys. You’re welcome.

53. I would define “bottom” as the person “receiving”? Maybe? Honestly I wondered if I should Google, but didnt want that search on my work internet server

54. now I’m distracted thinking about sex and can’t focus on my work THX GUYS

55. I can’t really think of any specific other terms I use to describe how I have sex. But I’m sure I’ll think of several as soon as I submit the survey.

58 Ways You Beautiful Lunatics Described Yourselves When Signing Up for A-Camp X

Another year, another giant stack of humans to place into smaller stacks correlated to cabin assignments for A-Camp X, which is AAAAHHHHHHH merely three weeks away! The highlight of this entire magical process that I do every year (this year I had a MAGICAL HELPER for the first time ever and boi y’all — help helps!) is, of course, reading the personality descriptions y’all wrote for yourselves. I feel very privileged to know your Hogwarts house, Enneagram type, and Scorpio Venus Moonsun Twilight Eclipse Rising or whatever. Also — one very helpful witchy camper, in their personality description box, took a moment to inform me that Ojai is “an incredibly powerful and haunted place.” So that’s something to look forward to, ghost-hunters!

So here, pulled mercilessly out of context, with punctuation/point-of-view adjusted for impact or consistency (I consider my listlings to be tiny poems, I truly do), I present excerpts from the personality descriptions of over 350 (!!!) campers, all of whom I cannot wait to meet or see again on May 16th!

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1. In Portland, I am rarely the only blue-haired person riding the bus

2. Basically an 80 year old in a 26 year old’s body

3. Basically the perfect combo of toddler, millennial, and grandma

4. I am basically a 40 year old father at heart

5. I am the QWOC Pippi Longstocking who grew up to realize that loving all of my peculiarities is the true source of my superhuman strength. You can find me up in a hot air balloon as I enjoy an Orphan Black marathon while listening to the saddest Julien Baker song imaginable with books on queers & women in music history scattered around as I indulge in the joy of eating so many Hello Panda cookies.

6. My favorite Day of Carol is #19 for the screenshot of Therese’s jeans circa 2009.

7. I once slept with my brother’s ex-girlfriend, she lives in Germany now

8. I’ve been in a long term relationship with my Masters Degree, we are experiencing lesbian bed death, and my eyes are wandering

9. A Slytherin in the streets AND the sheets

10. Gryffindor Head Girl!

11. Early life Ravenclaw, current life Hufflepuff

12. My purse is always full of sewing supplies and cheese snacks

13. I’ve been told that my celebrity doppelganger is Prince George

14. I would like everything in Dean Winchester’s wardrobe, but in my size.

15. I’ve got an old printer with a little screen that says “processing” when it has a print job in the queue, but recently it froze on the “processing” screen even though it’s got nothing to print and I can’t throw it out because that printer is me.

16. Nature is beautiful and so are women!?

17. I would describe myself as a geek. But I’m like a cool geek who drinks kombucha, listens to rock music, and has several tattoos.

18. I’m a tight-skirts, no-bra, how-do-you-makeup femme/militant bisexual who likes dragons and the circus and burlesque and talking about my feelings.

19. I swing wildly between DIY punk and high femme goth

20. Aesthetic goals this year are to look more like a twink and to pat more cats.

21. My next cats will be named Ruth and Gloria after Bader Ginsburg and Stienem.

22. My cat is named Spencer Hastings.

23. My interests include overly specific pop culture trivia, listening to music, and femme tops.

24. I like yoga, reading, puzzles, live comedy, podcasts, storytelling, rambling conversations, being outside, memes, shitty beer, Campari, my dog, lists, making fun of myself, and anytime a group of people all start loudly singing along to a song together.

25. I’m obsessed with all things pop culture, specially if it includes badass women who might murder me in my sleep. I would let them.

26. Born Canadian / raised in the South / now a Midwesterner / always a librarian => very polite, pretty introverted, SO HAPPY to support everyone else’s hopes and dreams.

27. I did parkour in an elevator once and it broke

28. I’ve eaten the Obamas’ leftovers

29. I hate the 20 minutes of anger/miscommunication in a rom-com before it all works out in the end

30. Smol, bi, and ready to cry

31. Bi problems, who’s got ’em? I’ve got ’em too. Bi trouble, we’ve got double, don’t know what to do.

32. I want to make a difference in the medical field for queer people because when you google ‘lesbian doctor’ porn should not be the first thing that shows up.

33. I’ve been described as having the patience of a saint and the determination and drive of a bulldog

34. I’m a floral femme who loves gettin’ dancey and challenging people to pizza eating contests that I definitely will not win.

35. Queer Vietnamese femme who’s eternally internally screaming.

36. ~former baby, future corpse~

37. former feral child, current genderqueer badass.

38. I love Alison Bechdel so much I may cry.

39. When I grow up, I want to be Keladry of Mindelan, but in a courtroom.

40. I have a lot of feelings about Tonya Harding.

41. My sexual orientation is Faith Lehane.

42. When asked in elementary who my favorite N’Sync-er was, I proudly said it was Lance.

43. I’m evangelical about Carly Rae Jepsen

44. I will happily tell anyone in proximity all about Celine Dion’s infinite charm.

45. I’m struggling to get through season 2 of The L Word but omg Dana is me

46. “What a good lesbian!” – An acquaintance who saw me dancing drunk in a raglan and snapback

47. I’m a bouncy, giggly boi who loves mornings and has loads of hugs and energy. Did I mention I love mornings? Don’t worry, I’m super respectful of other people’s morning hatred.

48. I’m currently living in a remote Mayan village on a lake surrounded by volcanoes

49. I’m an androgynous toasted marshmallow: brown and kind of hard on the outside, soft on the inside.

50. Maybe like a mango…nice and sweet once you get in there?

51. Much like a grapefruit: beautiful and polarizing.

52. I’m late to stuff if there’s a lot of cute dogs on the way there

53. I haven’t worn a dress since I was 18, but I would be delighted to wear a kilt!

54. I’m the boi you could bring home to your parents

55. My favorite activity is doing very detailed research and/or math to answer very unimportant questions; the more ridiculous the ratio of the importance of the question to the effort required to answer it the better.

56. I have a jumpsuit that fits perfectly; that’s an achievement, right?

57. I eat tomatoes whole

58. I will fill this out later and when that day comes everyone will be astonished by how well I described myself here. I will definitely come back and edit this and not eat my words later

47 Passionate Comments From 100% Straight People On The Daily Mail’s “Nobody Is 100% Straight”

As you may already be aware — The Daily Mail, never a stranger to scandal where they can find it, recently seized upon a Broadly article from November 2015 entitled “Straight People Don’t Exist, New Research Says” and a November 2017 book published by an author of the study about male sexual fluidity to write a piece of their own two days ago: No one is 100% straight: Study says sexuality is a ‘spectrum’. We wrote about the often dubious studies on this topic in November 2015, and in short, no study has presented evidence empirical enough to override the widely reported human experience that being 100% gay or 100% straight is entirely possible and in fact quite common! Sexuality, including male sexuality, is more fluid than a lot of cis-het people think it is (which is what the book is about), but sexuality is not fluid for everybody. Heterosexuals and homosexuals are real. Regardless! That’s not why I’ve brought you here today.

I’ve brought you here today because commenters on The Daily Mail lost their collective shit over this article and the comments are a real riot because you guys, listen: they’re straight. Like, VERY straight. This article and this study are total rubbish because these people are straight and would never ever do anything gay, not ever, because they’re straight. Okay? Straight. If these men saw a man with his shirt off, they would look the other way, so horrified would they be by this rugged display of implied homosexuality. Because, by the way, they’re straight. Heterosexual. Only attracted to the opposite sex. 100% straight! Straight! So straight!

VERY STRAIGHT PEOPLE.

The Daily Mail published an article claiming that ‘no one is 100% straight’ and this is possibly my favourite comment ever. pic.twitter.com/t73Oa7TlCr

— Marc 🎗️ (@marcfc) March 14, 2018

There’s nothing I love like a good comment curation exercise. These boards have really evolved over the past two days: tropes have emerged. Wars have been waged. The same jokes have been made 7-14 times. You get the impression that (surprise!) a lot of people are straight. But I plowed forward in search of the pure beauty that is humanity: below, please experience only a small sampling of the 1,000+ comments on this post, ripped mercilessly out of context and reprinted here for your entertainment. Please note that often commenters reply as if they are speaking directly to the author of the book, because of course, he’s listening. That’s exactly what he’s doing.

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1. Total nonsense, as a woman I prefer the company of men as I find other women judging, catty and boring. I am 100% straight thank you.

2. So this is what they come up with in universities!

3. FAKE SCIENCE

4. Another report churned out by academics who sit around all day not knowing whether they are boys or girls, meanwhile in the real world…..

5. He didn’t ask me. I could have told him he was wrong. It would have saved him writing a book and looking silly.

6. My wife is 100% straight. I’ve been begging her to have a threesome with me and another woman for years but she’s having none of it lol.

7. Who financed this ” research “, Stonewall?

8. Everything is not some spectrum-based moral equivalency…sorry millennials.

9. So speaking as a 100% straight man who does not find men sexually attractive whatsoever, does that mean I am not normal and am now in fact a minority? Can I get special protection as a disadvantaged group? Get priority in jobs?

10. i think that women like to look at other women but not in a sexual way but in a more London Fashion Week kind of way.

11. not on my watch

12. no im straight

13. Uh— No, #NotMe

14. I wish i could be intimate with a female but only a extremly attractive one….i once made out a girl in vegas….

15. At no point in my 30 years of life have I ever ever been aroused by another man… There are planets to discover, species to study, life-changing technologies that we should all be invested in. Not this.

16. During the years of the Soviet Union, the establishment funded research to support their own agenda. Funny that.

17. I must admit women and women porn has turned me on. But I have NEVER been turned on by another man. NEVER

18. I’m quite happy to assure other men that I have never, ever been remotely sexually attracted to another man. Never, never, never, ever ever ever……….

19. I have never once, not ever, not even for a smidgen like fraction of a moment ever been aroused by another man.

20. I DO NOT FIND OTHER MEN SEXUALLY APPETIZING AT ALL PERIOD. AT ANY STAGE. ANY DAY. ANY MILLISECOND….

21. Some of my best friends are gay….but that’s enough thanks.

22. Google “estrogen water supply canada lake and fish.” It actually explains a LOT.

23. I love my husband and the thought of sleeping with another woman is absolutely appalling for me. I have nothing against being gay by the way

24. Whoaaaa there Liberace. Speak for yourself .

25. next it’ll be WILDLIFE….

26. As a fully paid-up heterosexual male, I don’t feel any urges towards males. So that’s it then you study has serious flaws. I strongly suspect that I am not alone, which destroys the basis of your thesis. I bet that this observation will not be posted.

27. I’m sorry to disappoint, but the only male body I admire is my own.

28. I am a bloke and I’m not aroused in the slightest by other men. I am 100% straight. Live and let live though we are all free to live our lives how we want but I’m just saying your article is wrong because I only get aroused by women. End of conversation. Boom.

(ED Note: This 100% straight guy left this same exact comment three times in a row)

29. The only “spectrum” I’m on involves brunettes, blondes, and redheads.

30. What a waste of money! That money could have been used to find cure for terminal illness like cancer.

31. I tried getting it on with a woman in my teens, it didn’t do anything for me and would NOT do it again.

32. The inexorable march towards gender neutrality. Glad I am at the end of my life, we learned nothing from the decline and fall of the Roman empire.

33. Researchers actually are given a salary for this, so-called, work. In my next life I will research, sitting down all day drumming up mad theories, cups of tea, taxpayer-funded. Bliss

34. Who write this article? Someone from Gay community?

35. IT’S OK TO BE STRAIGHT

36. Quick, put the author into a ‘LOONY-BIN. ALOHA-

37. I find lesbian love scenes boring. Sorry but it does not turn me on. I am not homophobic either.

38. I am male and no other male has aroused me, not even remotely.

39. Nekkid women do NOT crank my tractor!

40. I am unquestionably the most hetro dude in the world and so I can say with 100% truth that the “researchers” are wrong, again.

41. …but I consider myself the straightest man in HISTORY so I might be the exception…

42. i have taken a few pop quizzes on this and got back 100 straight which I am.

43. I like male masculinity, men with beards, hairy men, strong muscular men, the smell of a man, a man’s body

44. I might entertain ideas about Ruby Rose or Emily Browning and have my share of attractive women offering liaisons, but never had a desire to actually go there.

45. How about 100% WRONG

46. Artificial estrogen in the water, from birth control pills.

47. No no no. No one studied me.

38 Inspirational Ways You Weirdos Described Your “Types”

Two weeks ago for the Friday Open Thread, I asked you what your “type” is and my friends, you did not let me down! It felt like a 90s slumber party with 150 of my best friends and I can’t wait to hang out with you again soon in an open thread! You all were so specific and earnest and honestly, I’m inspired to seriously hone in on who I want to crush on from now on. Thank you so much for your contribution to last week’s thread, and for your pleasure, here are 38 of the ones that inspired me to go out there and demand what I want, presented in list form.

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1. Femmes who are probably social workers

2. Mean femmes

3. Glammed up butches

4. Overextended busy queers

5. Southern charm

6. Unavailable

7. “Someone who might wear a sundress sometime & tenderly murders me with a look.”

8. Shane (from The L Word)

9. “Grown-up Spinellis”

10. Bean-shaped

11. Anything but men

12. Scorpio

13. Tender sci-fi tomboys

14. Wholesome and puppyish

15. Old wealth

16. “Shirley Manson femme”

17. “Femmes who can murder you”

18. Rachel Maddow on screen

20. Rachel Maddow off screen

21. Everyone but actors

22. “Dominant nature loving perverts, willing to engage in artistic/creative endeavors, have sex in the woods, and tie me up.”

23. Nice Jewish Girl ™

24. “Andro/MOC folx with soft curvy bodies and crazy hair”

25. The recently divorced

26. Boaters

27. Bookish butches

28. Gregarious introverts

29. ?️Older women

30. Smart girls who look like they played soccer

31. Bisexual Jewish therapists

32. Assertive organized girly girls

33. “Apparently women with the name “Carmen” which started with Carmen Cortez in Spy Kids as a child until I graduated to Carmen de la Pica Morales. Women totally out of my league.”

34. Younger, hot, queer Meryl Streep

35. Little spoons

36. Scary, brooding people

37. Masculine-of-center STEM majors

38. Straight women

50 of the Gayest Nerdiest Things You Weirdos Named Your Pets

This month’s “Queer With Your Pets” gallery, which solicited reader photos of human beings with their animal friends, netted a whopping 230 submissions, and it’s a glorious gallery and a nice thing to have in our lives right now!

I noticed something very interesting while reading through the entire gallery despite my very public and consistent opposition to the existence of cats — y’all are super gay and also big nerds. Like if you were in my house and I woke up and walked downstairs and saw you sitting at the table I would say to you, “Hello, you’re gay and also a big nerd.” If your pet has a gay nerdy name and it’s not on this list I’m sorry I had to stop before the list became 230 items long, I love you to pieces and I love your pet and your pet’s name, unless it’s a cat, in which case I love looking at pictures of your cat but would rather not see it in person because of allergies. Thank you so much!

Feel free to vote in the comments on the Gayest Pet Name.

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1. Ramona
“We got her when she was ‘Ramona Age 8 Weeks’ but she quickly grew into ‘Ramona the Pest.'”

2. Stella
“After Gillian Anderson’s character in The Fall”

3. Harvey Milk
“Full name City Supurrvisor Harvard Pigpen Poopy-pants Milk Karvonen-Quigley.”

4. Mary Oliver
“I adopted her after moving to New York because I couldn’t survive grad school on glitter trash island without the ‘soft animal of [my] body.’ That’s a line from Mary Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese.'”

5. Lilith
“After the biblical Lilith”

6. Butch

7. Lady Galadriel
“Once, we were watching Lord of the Rings and Lady Galadriel appears on screen in all her terrifying glory, and I glance over to the girl cat to see if she’s paying attention, and I swear she was literally glowing. Like an elfin goddess. She named herself.”

8. Countess Sparklybitch
“In honour of Countess Markiewicz, a heroine of the uprising.”

9. Batman
“I changed Batman’s name from Brian… it didn’t seem to suit him.”

10. Scout
“I agreed [to name her Scout] cause I love To Kill a Mockingbird.”

11. Scout
“In honor of Brenda’s time as a Girl Scout”

12. Captain Killian
“A badass but sensitive pirate (AKA Captain Hook!) on ABCs Once Upon A Time.”

13. Whiskey
“We got Whiskey when she was a puppy in CT (we lived in Boston at the time). We named her after Whiskey in Dollhouse (she only ever wanted to be the best!) although now we just sound like alcoholics a lot.”

14. Whisky
“He looks like a delicious whisky and I think it’s a pleasantly gender neutral name.”

15. Brice
“After Williams-Brice Stadium, the football home of the University of South Carolina Gamecocks.”

16. Henry & Hazel
“Henry’s full name is Henry Tim Riggins. Henry because he’s a little gentleman, and if you don’t get Tim Riggins, I can’t possibly explain it. Hazel’s full name is Hazelnut Clover, and it’s because we like old lady names. Plus nature-y things. The alliteration with her brother’s name is also good!”

17. Ziggy
“Ziggy is short for ziggurat, which means ‘strong tower.'”

18. Matti
“I was seeing a girl at the time who reignited my interest in baseball cards and more specifically Don Mattingly, so we named her after him.”

19. Luna Fluffgood

20. Luna
“I named her Luna, because I’m a witch, and I also love Sailor Moon, and her astrological sign is Cancer, which is ruled by the moon.”

21. Gertrude
“I named her Gertrude, after Stein, because she reminded me of an elderly lesbian.”

22. Taro
“Taro / 芋仔 is basically a Taiwanese potato, and he’s a little potato for sure.”

22. Junia
“The first (and possibly only) woman apostle that Paul mentions in the New Testament.”

23. Bishka
“I named her Bishka because it’s the diminutive for Albina – the name of my celebrity “root.”  Albina in various languages means “white”, and her namesake is known for being a mercurial ice queen which fits perfectly with my cat’s tendency to be incredibly affectionate for 15 minutes but protest loudly for the rest of her life if you dare to pet her outside those confined periods. Bishka is a very lesbian cat because she hates male cats, rocks an alternative lifestyle wardrobe without complaint, and is really good at processing her feelings openly and loudly. She’s very much a teenager in her angst and emotions, and my girlfriend and I have been pouring our energy in helping her manage her stress, but sometimes all we can do is let her storm off and have her tantrums in private because her moms will just never understand how life is so unfair.  She loves using hands as a pillow and sometimes will knead fleecy blankets while simultaneously chewing on them (something I’ve dubbed her “nom-and-knead”)”

24. Neville
“I’m a huge Harry Potter fan”

25. Mikoto
“…an anime character who turns into a cat when she gets hungry.”

26. Leonardo DiCatrio
“I debated whether to name him after Leonardo DaVinci or DiCaprio. Ultimately, the pun won out.”

27. Sprout
“a member of the band Northern State.”

28. Lucy
“I named her after Lucille Ball, which, IMHO, is pretty gay.”

29. Charles Avocado VanGogh
“I wanted his name to be VanGogh (my favorite painter), my ex wanted his name to be Charlie (after Charlie Day from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia). I took up calling him Charles, which really happened to work out once I realized RuPaul’s last name is Charles. And I loved Avocados, so it was natural to make that his last name.”

30. Elliot
“…after Elliot Reid, the Scrubs character (one of my favorite shows).”

31. Moz
“a nickname for Morrissey”

32. Firepaw
“Paw’s full name is Firepaw because I was 10 and very into the Warrior Cat series.”

33. Jezebel
“My partner and I chose ‘Jezebel’ because we liked it, but it turned out to be a very accurate description – she is the queen of all of us.”

34. Waverly
“After our favorite brave little toaster, Waverly Earp.”

35. Neera
“My name in Persian means goddess of water, so when I was looking for names for her I learnt Neera means ‘pure water’ but also nectar/wine which i thought was a fun fit!”

36. Esme
“Esme” means loved, and also shining (think of the emeralds!), and we have several fictional Esmeraldas that we like (including granny Weatherwax from Discworld and Esmeralda from The Hunchback of Notre Dame).”

37. River
“I named her for two of my favorite strong, female, syfy, characters, River Song and River from FireFly.”

38. Prim
“I didn’t think she’d make it and I definitely felt like I volunteered as tribute, so I named her Prim (Hunger Games).”

39. Fergie
“…after Duchess Fergie, who nobody knows anymore”

41. Beverly
“Dr. Beverly Crusher from Star Trek: The Next Generation”

42. Clark
“…after Clark Kent, because I’m a huge Superman fan, but also sort of Clarke Griffin from The 100.”

43. Grand Duchess Faolin Von Pixelface
“The first half of her name is after a video game character (Guild Wars 2) and the second half is because of the single white dot or pixel on her forehead.”

44. Giles
“One of my favorite Buffy characters is Rupert Giles.”

45. Gordie Howe
“Named after the Detroit hockey legend.”

46. Kiki
“I love the film Kiki’s Delivery Service and couldn’t let go of the idea of naming my smoky grey cat after an adorable witch.”

47. Kenzi
“From Lost Girl.”

48. Agatha Kitty
“Yes, I like Agatha Christie. No, I have not seen the Doctor Who episode.”

49. Stewie
“Stewie, whose full name is Kristen Stewart (because let’s face it, they look exactly alike), was surrendered by her previous owner to Indianapolis Animal Care Services me would suit him very well.”

50. Auto
“Take a wild guess why I decided on that name.”

I Love That Heterosexual Show “GLOW”!

Lesbian Bar Names of the Past, Ranked

^{shout out Lost Womyn’s Space}

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For years, the lesbian bar as we know it has been going quietly and gently into that good night. She’s watched from the sidelines with an unfortunate font choice and if nothing else thought-provoking color scheme as trends have gone the way of shared spaces, monthly girl parties and queer nights. Left in her wake is a rich, century-long history of queer women carving out spaces for themselves, as well as a language of sorts. Perhaps you’ve heard of Lesbian Bar Name.

Its makeup is simple yet distinctive. Usually, there’s a confectionary/mystical/utopian/othering component, words reminiscent of a Microsoft Office Powerpoint transitional title, references to cats/girls/plumage/fire, mentions of the mouth area, reinterpretations of the way some words incorporate “x”s and “z”s, homages to act of lounging, or is straight up just an older woman’s name.

Let’s honor the lesbian bar and Lesbian Bar Name here today with lesbian bar names of the past ranked by Lesbian Bar Name.

55. Crescent Tavern (Seattle, Washington)

54. Third Dimension (Manila, Philippines)

53. The Flame (San Diego, California)

52. Charlene’s (New Orleans, Louisiana)

51. Tiger Lounge (New Orleans, Louisiana)

50. Fairy Tale (Athens, Greece)

49. Kicked Back (Amarillo, Texas)

48. Outskirts (Toledo, Ohio)

47. Ruby Red’s (Sydney, Australia)

46. Chances Bar (Houston, Texas)

45. Cloud Nine Lounge (Davie, Florida)

44. Connections (Omaha, Nebraska)

43. Gateways Club (London, England)

42. Escape (Madrid, Spain)

41. Chrome Cat (Lansing, Michigan)

40. Gaby & Mo’s (Austin, Texas)

39. Attitude’s (St. Louis, Missouri)

38. Cat’s (Baton Rouge, Louisiana)

37. Never Never Land (Shreveport, Louisiana)

36. Lava Bar (Boston, Massachusetts)

35. Sugar Shack (Milwaukee, Wisconsin)

34. Colette’s (Tucson, Arizona)

33. Chez Moune (Collette’s cat btw) (Paris, France)

32. Candy Bar (London, England)

31. Pandora’s Box (New York City, New York)

30. Prism (Alberta, Canada)

29. Peg’s Place (San Francisco, California)

28. Lace on the Avenue (Washington, D.C.)

27. Billie Jean’s (Kansas City, Missouri)

26. Sports Page (Atlanta, GA)

25. Visions (Durham, North Carolina)

24. The Hideaway (St. Petersburg, Florida)

23. Our Hideaway (Chicopee, Massachusetts)

22. Cherry Pie Nightclub (Miami, Florida)

21. Fannies (Milwaukee, Wisconsin)

20. Exhale (Albuquerque, New Mexico)

19. The Fish Bowl (Baton Rouge, Louisiana)

18. Club Pink (Detroit, Michigan)

17. Cowgirl’s Oasis (Fort Worth, Texas)

16. Zgirl Club (formerly Misty’s) (Phoenix, Arizona)

15. Eden (Denver, Colorado)

14. Eden Lounge (Dallas, Texas)

13. Pi Bar (Minneapolis, Minnesota)

12. Paradise Club (Los Angeles, California)

11. Sisters Nightclub (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)

10. Sisters Bar (Portland, Maine)

9. Herizon (Binghamton, New York)

8. ChiQ Bar (Petersburg, Florida)

7. Chixx (Omaha, Nebraska)

6. Girlsroom (New York City)

5. Girlbar (Chicago, Illonois)

4. Lipstick24 (Austin, Texas)

3. Meow Mix (New York City, New York)

2. Kitty Kat Klub (St. Louis, Missouri)

1. Lick Club (Vancouver, British Columbia)