Lisa Brower on the lesbian thing: “Having had at least a decade of dick behind me (sometimes literally), I wanted to know if the pasture was any greener than the straight side of the field. It wasn’t.”
Raise your hand if you’ve ever survived a difficult relationship with a man and decided life surely must be better on the opposite side of the fence. I don’t know if gay men go through that thought process, but everyone of my girlfriends has said it at least once jokingly after a horrendous breakup.
Being a literal sort of girl, I decided to go see if that pasture was any greener than the straight side of the field.
I decide to pole vault into girl-on-girl world in the summer of 1988. Having had at least a decade of dick behind me (sometimes literally), I noticed my lesbian friends seemed to be having a hell of a lot more fun than I was. I had already slept with women in college, so that so called taboo was out of the way.
Luckily I had my own personal guide to lesbian Atlanta to help ease the transition. She would show up at work on Mondays with blackened eyes and enormous hickeys from her weekend romps, sharing her adventures with our co-workers during smoke breaks. Her pickups showered her with attention; sending flowers, taking her to lunch, giving her rent money. There was an endless line up of older gay women in expensive cars spoiling her rotten and that looked like exactly what I needed too. At that point in my life I had financially and emotionally supported an ever changing line up of would be rock stars, so a sugar mama sounded like a dream come true.
I started hitting up the gay bars with her on weekends. I chopped off my hair into a cute, shaggy little cut and found freedom in a cosmetic free face. I added some polo shirts and flat shoes to my wardrobe. I danced my Doc Martin shod feet off to “I Just Want To Be Your Lover Girl” at the Sports Page and Talluleh’s.
I discovered that picking up women is a lot more difficult than picking up men.
Men are easy. They go out for the sole purpose of meeting and having sex with people. For a woman they’re a sure thing 100% of the time and at least 50% if they’re gay. They also go home afterward without a lot of sentimental drama.
Women like to have an emotional connection before they surrender the pink, which is great if you’re looking for a relationship. I found myself spending hours of my precious time in “meaningful” conversations just to get laid. They also assume that spending the night equals the entire weekend, and become irrationally angry when they see you out the next night with a new love. Since the Atlanta lesbian community at that time was concentrated around a few bars, the chance that you were going to run into your left over from the previous night was a certainty.
Who knew women could be so violent?
Then there was the sports issue. I had fallen in with a group of softball lesbians. Being severely astigmatic since childhood, the only thing I can catch balls with is my chin and that is not useful when you’re in the outfield.
It all came crashing down for me one night at Weekends Warehouse. I was wandering around the club with drink in hand, when I found I was paying more attention to the hot, sweaty, gyrating men than the girls.
Jane was nice, but I personally preferred Dick.
I found my friend in the crowd and ‘fessed up in the semi-privacy of the unisex bathroom. She knew anyway, I hadn’t been fooling anyone with my short hair. I wasn’t even a lipstick lesbian, but more like a lip liner one. Just sort of skirting the edges in a barely visible way.
I had the bouncer call me a cab and directed the driver to take me to the straightest meat market he could find. Then I quickly made up my face with my hidden stash of cosmetics while he drove, unbuttoning my polo as far as it would go in the hopes that large boobs would draw attention away from my crew cut.
What was I thinking? These were straight men I was going amongst. I could have been limbless and still used big titty magic to reel one in.
It was good to be back.