Lesbian erotics

“I was born knowing how to do this,” Cassandra purrs after licking Traci’s pussy through a dental dam all the way to her first orgasm of the night. She later shows me the sticker posted in her locker at the Hustler Club where she works: Girls Eat Pussy Better.

Traci is taller than Cassandra, but their bodies resemble each other: thin, firm, tanned brown so that no blemish shows, with shaved pussies pulled tight against their bones — all clitoris. I’ve only seen girls like these in porn or dancing in strip clubs. Their bodies are the first reason my clothes stay on.

My vulva bears fur and stubble. My legs are white. Fat sits on my tummy, and my hands look dwarfish with short, plain fingernails. These ladies complement the red-light district whose Hilton we book a room in, while my flip-flops, white Bermuda shorts, and babydoll top say middle-class tourist. I’m a pretty lesbian feminist barely out of high school; they have the ageless bodies of women I’d watched with throbbing in my pants and discord in my mind, the bodies of a bad porno.

Cassandra pushes her body into mine. She undulates and I smell body odor and perfume so pungent it must be cheap, or old. When I touch her thin hair it scratches against my fingers. She’s attractive, yet her face makes me think of Charlize Theron in Monster. Her small mouth touches mine and I remember Traci’s rule: no fluid exchange.

The lesbians I know don’t practice safe sex. They kiss deeply and talk rape politics. The lesbians I know cut their fingernails short — they say it’s because they fuck women. But tonight I watch Cassandra’s long, pink fingernails push into the latex sheet spread across Traci’s pussy. I watch their delicate hands intertwine, their bodies roll into genuine pleasure while maintaining the performative poses of a stripper and a porn star.

*

It’s 2009. I’m 22 years old, white-passing and privileged, and reeling from my first lesbian breakup. I chop my hair off à la Jenny in The L Word and fly to San Francisco for Pride, which I consider to be a mecca. While I’m in the air, Michael Jackson dies.

My first night in the Bay Area, I meet Traci. She invites me to the Queer Playground, a BDSM play party at the SF Citadel. Clad in black leather I picked up last minute at a thrift store, I venture into the dungeon. The world of kink unfolds and I receive my first-ever flogging. Traci’s submissive, Missy, does the honors, whipping me with the hottest new equipment.

Lounging with the perverts and freaks of BDSM-land, I feel safe. This world is just a black-lit room in a house I already feel comfortable in. But the next night, when Traci transforms from queer dominatrix to red-light lesbian, I find myself gasping for oxygen on streets that hiss of murder and rape. Linking arms with two leggy blondes with their shit hanging out, I ask myself why they submit themselves to such danger.

Cassandra demands that Traci and I each put a hand down her skirt as we walk up Columbus Avenue. Our strut down the street draws the attention of men, bouncers, tourists, and residents of the alleys. While I live in hiding of or defiance to the male gaze, Traci and Cassandra laugh, shake around, and call out, “Sorry, you’re not invited to this party!”

Well-dressed folks and squares stare. Do I look how I feel — a suburban teenage girl walking the streets with two well-seasoned sex workers? I can only put one foot in front of the other as I wonder what to do with my gender and my politics. It’s the last night of Pride, and I feel fear, embarrassment, and confusion.

Settled into our room at the Hilton, Cassandra bounces on the bed and feeds us Kinder Bueno chocolates. Traci dumps the contents of a small travel kit onto the table: condoms, latex gloves, dental dams, lube, a tiny fork, and a sharp piece of bamboo. She performs some quick SM moves with the last two items, pricking my arm then surprising me with a small clothespin to my flesh. The rush I discovered the night before passes through me. Traci smiles.

Both women strip and frolic about the room like bunnies. I keep thinking they must be doing this for me, and I’ve never felt more masculine in my life. I’m femme, but they out-femme me by a long shot. So I watch, aroused, a political frenzy in my head.

Cassandra said it — she was born knowing how to do this. After three marriages with men and raising her son on the unpredictable wages of an erotic entertainer, this migrant woman came out a happy lesbian. She has the body of an eighteen-year-old stripper, petite and so feminine that when she thrusts herself into Traci’s pussy, it’s the most womanly act I have ever seen. Her actions are clean, skillful, and sensual. Traci’s long legs unfold, and all hands stretch the latex dam across her pussy. Standing up or lying down, Cassandra’s tongue works Traci’s clit with the slippery precision of a porn star. But there are no cameras, no men, and nothing fake about Traci’s pleasure.

Cassandra licks her as though her tongue and Traci’s clit are two tiny sea creatures in symbiosis. Their bodies look and work perfectly — a stroke, a lick, a finger, and they break into orgasm. They know just how to please each other, and they’ve just met.

I think of my lovers. I think of bear-hugging french kissing, hard fucking, passionate love-making, and cries of pain from penetration too deep or familiar — orgasms that hurt, or never come, or come too soon, shooting out of an imaginary cock. I think of spooning and messy short hair. Traci and Cassandra don’t even break a sweat. They perch on the bed, looking bored for a moment before switching places. Traci growls, “Come on, Cassandra,” and Cassandra rises above a breathy sigh to cry, “Yes!” like a little girl.

They move gracefully. They exhale their pleasure in tiny gasps, and they make bedroom eyes at each other that I thought were made for men. They aren’t fucking; they aren’t making love. They are two pretty twin girls meticulously giving each other orgasms. After each orgasm they graze necks and giggle and stroke each other’s long hair. They are “porn lesbians,” and they’re real.

These are the lesbians that straight men want to see and “real” lesbians don’t. These lesbians don’t ask for marriage; they ask for safety. These lesbians have boyfriends and pimps. These lesbians look like Barbie dolls. They want only each other and do nothing but get off. “We” dykes joke that adopting cats and sharing politics and crying after an emotionally-charged romp with our primary partner are gay, when really these things smack of domesticity and heteromonogamous normativity revamped. These lesbians, these women who wear the sex industry on their sleeves, who turn sexual abuse into careers, who so many can’t even stand to see — their sex is the gayest thing I’ve seen.

*

At 22, I’m on the cusp of discovering my femme identity. Femme will shift from adjective to noun. I’ll soon become a sex worker myself. My privileges are dissolving, being called into question by two sets of toned hips wiggling through a hotel lobby. This is meant to be a ménage à trois, yet I’m painfully aware of my anthropological distance.

Strutting down Broadway in miniskirts and cowboy boots, cackling at our catcallers, my Pride pals smack of drag queens. So why do I feel nervous and ashamed instead of fabulous? It strikes me that the femme gay man is always radical, while the femme gay woman is not because she is already owned by the male gaze. But she’s there, and queer as hell.

The public display between me, Traci, and Cassandra on this San Francisco night is more faggy than dykey, only we’re women — so we’re prey, or we’re whores, or we’re both. Our desire is inextricable from the red-light district, where heterosexual men eroticize their dominance and where women and queers work. To enjoy this, I have to be raunchy. I have to be something that even certain lesbians hate.

It is here, beneath the rubble of my prejudice and fear, that I discover what it means to be femme.

I’m studying feminism in university, and now I ask myself: who gets to write about being a lesbian feminist? Are “smart dykes” the white men of the lesbian world? For the first time, I’m understanding that feminism makes more common sense to women like Traci and Cassandra than to middle-class liberals, for whom patriarchy is disguised. I’ve discovered the sisterhood in strip clubs and on street corners, and it requires no theory to explain itself.

I sit in that Hilton hotel room with my clothes on, blushing. The lesbian sex that I’ve had up to this point now seems rife with class and masculine privilege. I wonder: is an authentic lesbian erotics unknowable in a heteropatriarchal economy?

Cassandra puts my questions to rest when we stop by the Hustler Club to gather her belongings. Standing before her locker, parade glitter sparkling on her cheeks, she gushes about her sexuality. “When I have sex with men, I feel sometimes pleasure in my body because of the motion. But I feel like they take away from me. Women give to me — and they’re sexy and smell nice and know how to pleasure me.”

I know what she means.