Swap (The Black Lesbian Swinger Series)

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The Skirt Club was founded by Ms LeJeune in the UK in 2014. The aim, she says, was to promote glamour, performance “and much more — away from the prying eyes of men and facilitate one night of consensual experimentation: no consequences, no questions”. We decided upon Melbourne as a significant number of women were jetting in for the weekend to attend our [Sydney] events,” she says. Like this article? Sign up to our newsletter to get more articles like this delivered straight to your inbox.

I would feel horrible, hurting a person I cared for, even though I was certain they wouldn’t be able to care for me in the years ahead in the way I needed them to — someone who I suspected, ultimately, wanted different things. How do you justify leaving a perfectly nice relationship, taking a blind chance that there might be something better for you out there — even if you’re right? When I first pitched this story to my editors, I thought I’d be reporting on a lesbian cultural artifact in its twilight years. The women who’ve faithfully gone on dozens of Olivia trips over the decades are getting older, and I didn’t have a lot of faith that younger queer people were going to step in and save companies like this from extinction. Other elements of lesbian culture have been steadily dying; why should Olivia be any different? It was thrilling, and cathartic, to have such a deep, generous conversation with three smart women about a question that’s been at the center of my personal and professional life for nearly five years now: Can lesbians, and women in general, survive the gender revolution? For the last stretch of our afternoon, we were dropped on a secluded beach at Nevis, where a few of us ferried beers and our new favorite drink, the very college-esque Panty Ripper (coconut rum and pineapple juice), from shore to the rest of the women waiting in the water. One woman stuffed a bunch of beers into her bathing suit and we cheered whenever anybody pulled one out. A couple women had GoPro cameras, with which we took a lot of increasingly drunken group shots while we swam. One of them was attached to a floating handle that looked very much like a big yellow dildo, which, once somebody pointed it out, kept sending us into hysterics. I’m loose and light and a little sleepy from my second Corona and a blossoming sunburn. Sure, I say, why not, thinking all the while: If any other 27-year-old lesbians could use a self-esteem boost, all they need to do, clearly, is get themselves on an Olivia cruise.

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I come from a queer universe where traditional butch/femme identities seem old-school and retrograde, second-wavey, practically heteropatriarchal. There’s a lot wrong with that perspective — for one thing, a lot of the modern queers who shit on butch/femme dynamics aren’t from the working class, where those identities were born — but it’s one I still sympathize with, especially as someone who’d previously been hesitant to claim femme identity as my own. But after meeting Lynette, I saw how much pride she took in her butch womanhood, which wasn’t some androgynous nowhere zone — femininity’s absence — but a whole universe unto itself. (She wore a different suit to dinner every night.) A couple days later — after getting my serious lesbian conversations out of the way — I was about 14 rum punches deep and drunk-dancing on a catamaran. I approach a pretty, shy girl at the bar named Mona. She tells me that she grew up in a religious, sheltered household. She’s only ever dated men, and never really identified as bisexual, even though, she admits, she probably is. “I guess no one ever asked me,” she says. Then she looks at her card and asks if she can give me a spanking.

I was less confident. But perhaps it wasn’t that I didn’t trust my partner; it was that I didn’t trust myself. For so long, I’d put off the possibility of us opening up our relationship because — try as I might to be cool and aloof and whatever about casual hookups — I typically like sex best when the person matters to me. It overwhelmed me, just then, the sudden force of my wanting. I wanted my own big, strong butch. Someone who wasn’t looking for someone to help them grow, because they’ve done most of their growing already. I felt crazy. I felt like a teenager. I felt guilty and confused, like I had no idea what I was doing. But I also knew that I might not ever do anything quite like this in my life ever again. So I might as well let myself live through this bizarro universe and see where it would take me. So at 7:30 on a Thursday night, Courtney and I arrive for the party at a club in the South of Market neighborhood. It’s cold and drizzling, the kind of weather that’s more encouraging of Netflix and chill than sexual adventures. A male bouncer lets us past the door into a bar area warmed by tungsten glow and furnished with afghan rugs, ample seating on red velvet-covered chairs and inexplicable, charming typewriters. Women mill about the room. We celebrated his birthday right away with a leg-shakingly good romp in bed. At this point, all the swingers knew it was his special day, and both of us were turned on just by the thought of what could happen.The gardens are nice and enclosed for real naturists sun bathing , but then again you have the single guys staring at you all day which is very uncomfortable. Before meeting Lynette, she of the multiple grooming products, I’d gotten used to dating people whose own beauty routines consisted of, if anything, 3-in-1 body wash. They tended to gently poke fun at me for all my feminine trappings: the 20 minutes I’d spend each day on my serums. I’m a little ashamed of how, over the years, living beside various permutations of my partners’ easy masculinity, I’d defend my own femme rituals with I’m-not-like-other-girls insistence: Hey, at least I don’t shave! At least I barely wear any makeup! My frivolity was never out of hand. And I prided myself for that, for the ways in which I deliberately limited myself.

My wife and I are a typical heterosexual couple, but we have a dirty secret: We're swingers. No, we don't twirl and flip to music from the 1940s; we meet other couples and have sex with each other's partners. Due to our conservative careers and even more conservative families, we keep our sexual practices to ourselves. Only a few close vanilla friends know what we're into ("vanilla" is the term swingers use to refer to anyone who isn't a swinger ... and also other swingers who happen to be covered in vanilla). These choices are homophobic,” I tell my new friend Dana. She’s technically my press handler, tasked with making sure I see the best that the tour operator, Olivia Travel, has to offer. So far, she’s more than delivered, but the weak karaoke selection — not Dana’s fault! — is a rare low point on a trip that, four days in, has already slowly but surely begun to change my life. Warning: As you’d expect, this week’s diary features some explicit details about sex, so it’s definitely NSFW. Monday LeJeune refers to the volunteers as “hostesses” and they play the part in exchange for free entry, helping to break the ice and encouraging attendees to participate in the night’s flirtatious games. The first time I thought that Olivia might actually stand a chance at survival was Sunday, the first full day of the cruise, when I attended the welcome mixer for “Generation O,” which is how Olivia refers to its precious few millennial and Generation X clientele. As I walked around the ship, which holds over 2,000 passengers, it was already clear that the average woman here was a couple decades older than me. But it turned out that there were a few other twenty- and thirtysomethings who’d managed to find their way to Olivia.I don’t even know what is happening. But I like it,” she says. Later though, Breanna says that she couldn’t quite wrap her head around the event. The invitation to Skirt Club, a women-only, bisexual and bi-curious sex party, tells you one thing, loud and clear: This may be a girls-only orgy, but it’s not lesbianism as you know it. This is Katy Perry singing “I kissed a girl and I liked it.” This is an Agent Provocateur window display. This is the kind of awkward, lighthearted, lesbianism many women either had – or wished they’d had – in college. It’s “lesbianism” that lesbians will recognize, but have a hard time endorsing without some irony. It’s lesbianism as a side piece. It’s lesbianism: our little secret, for women whose bi-curiosity has become too overwhelming to ignore. Skirt Club is open to all women, but “very few” Skirt Club members are lesbians according to founder Genevieve LeJeune, who identifies as predominantly heterosexual, though definitely interested in sleeping with women – a two on the Kinsey Scale, if you will. LeJeune says that based on information that women give Skirt Club when they sign up, most partygoers have the same sexual inclinations as her, or are more heterosexual.

I keep forgetting that my name tonight is Layla,” she says. “We all choose our names. I got mine from that Eric Clapton song.”I would worry about which of the many friends my ex-partner and I shared I would lose in the dyke divorce. I’d have to come to terms with the fact that I can’t control how other people feel, can’t hold out for universal approval. Though I would also seek constant reassurance from my closest friends that I wasn’t a bad person for putting myself first, for a change; that, even after blowing up my life, they’d keep on loving me. As the scenery changed from the endless blue sea to the jade mountains of Bora Bora, we were both so overcome by the beauty that we couldn’t help but go to town on each other. After a morning of topless photos on the beach, we invited a friend to our room for a threesome. She had suggestively asked to help celebrate my husband’s birthday, and he was more than happy to unwrap this gift. This put me in a great mood as we returned to the ship, which must have turned on some kind of sex magnet.