RAZOR, November, 2004

By Anna David

When I first kissed a girl, I expected it to feel either intoxicatingly erotic – an experience that might launch me into a life of permanent lesbianism — or creepy as hell, like a sex dream about an overly religious kindergarten teacher. But I was shocked to discover that kissing a girl felt…very much like kissing a guy. Her lips were extremely soft and she moved her tongue more daintily than the average boy with whom I’d locked lips, but my body didn’t start glistening with arousal or drying up with disgust.

Then again, it was a simple game of “truth or dare,” played during a particularly regressive part of my 20s, and the girl was my best friend at the time. I never had the desire to take it any further and while that’s possibly because I subconsciously lost my nerve, or realized that I wouldn’t be able to stomach the awkwardness afterwards, I also came to realize something mildly revelatory for me: I may be attracted to other women in theory, but not in practice. I mean I get that it’s hot. I’ve even fantasized about other women and declared aloud that if Angelina Jolie wanted to have her way with me, there’d be no struggle. What turned me on the most wasn’t anything my friend did, it was knowing that several excited men were watching the action with the kind of rapt attention they usually reserved for Lakers games.

Of course, I’ve always known that most men find the concept of two women together erotic. What I didn’t know until well into the 90s was that temporary lesbianism was actually occurring all around me. Suddenly, good friends — including my truth or dare partner, by the by — started casually revealing the fact that they’d traveled to the other side. “It was a college thing,” an otherwise straight girl might explain dispassionately. “Just a phase.” Others would tell tales of fooling around with their female friends during slumber parties when they were eight or nine. Now, I don’t know if all the other girls were off making out while just a few of us stiffs told ghost stories, or if I attended the one college on earth that seemed utterly oblivious to the lipstick lesbian collegiate experience, but the fact is, I clearly wasn’t sending out the “available” signal to other women because bisexuality truly failed to even enter my consciousness until I’d been out of college for a good three years.