Sex 101: The Basics of Lesbian Dating, as Told by the Internet
About the Series: Sex 101
With cuffing season just around the corner and Libra and Scorpio seasons in full swing, romance is in the air. Along with that, though, come rigid sexual norms, too many atrocious Tinder dates, and having to deal with our exes (and exes of exes, and so on). Are these just the things that we, as young people still understanding our own sexualities, have to go through?
Here at Camp Thirlby, we don’t think anyone should be denied the education and experiences that encompass their sexual and romantic lives across (and outside of) the gender spectrum. However, that usually isn’t the case for many of us, whether that means having to seek out alternative forms of sex and dating information for queer folks or using our own lived experiences in a religious upbringing to process our knowledge and feelings towards sexuality years later. That’s where “Sex 101” comes in — a series that highlights the educations and experiences — no matter how unconventional — of our Camp Counselors that have something to say about how they navigated, learned, and unlearned certain sex and dating norms.
In 8th grade, I remember desperately wanting a Tumblr girlfriend. For the first time in my life, I had contemplated the fact that I might be into girls, thanks to the albeit embarrassing Glee fandom I was very much a part of. I had followed several out and proud lesbians who were also obsessed with Glee, and even found myself befriending other queer or questioning girls on the website, who I sometimes favored over my real-life friends. Being exposed to this influx of queerness (that was, to be honest, gayer than the show itself) in a world where I didn’t know anything but being straight frightened me, but also began to creak the door open of my one greatest desire: I really, really, really wanna date a girl.
Not just any girl, but a girl from Tumblr, through the safety of a computer screen, a world where I didn’t have to come out or romantically interact with people IRL — I was 13 and clueless! I began to see some of my mutuals initiate relationships through the website, some of which were far from actual dating, but others that were extremely successful. My useless crushes on boys made me think that maybe dating a girl from the internet would somehow fling myself into the queer community with 100% ease. I remember coming out through a Tumblr text post as pansexual (which has shifted to bisexual to now lesbian) because I had a major crush on a Tumblr-famous girl who sadly never followed me back. After months of wanting an online GF and never getting one, I stopped using the site as obsessively as I used to, but also snuck back into my cave of heterosexuality for the next four years.
I always look back on this memory, wondering what would have happened if I did, in fact, get a Tumblr girlfriend. Would we have become one of those success stories and still be together to this day? Probably not. But, to a lesser extreme, would I not have repressed that desire and treated it like an adolescent joke? It’s hard to tell, but I know I possibly could not have been as clueless as to how to date girls when I finally entered the queer dating scene through the scary gates of college. With absolutely no rulebook for how to date other women!
Dating in itself is already a tricky act to perfect; it’s filled with wacky gendered expectations that never favor the woman, at least in heterosexual relationships. There’s a strange lack of sexual communication with the majority of our partners, and there’s often a lack of general communication within dating and relationships, like being blindsided about what the other person wants and how it doesn’t match your own needs and desires. I wish we could all skip these traps and only have perfect first dates, but it seems impossible; I know I’ve dealt with all of these at some point or another, even when dating other women. Dating, it seems, is like being blindfolded and expecting to know exactly what’s in front of you. This feels like the case for all people, so limiting the pool to women who date other women is bound to create even more impairment — maybe we have noise-cancelling headphones on, too?
Although I knew I had the desire to possibly date another girl at age 13, my inability to just know how to do this, in every sense of the word, blocked me from actually fulfilling that desire. How do I even ask a girl out? But first, how the hell would I know if she was also into girls? What would I possibly do if she says no, or even worse, just isn’t interested, even if she’s also gay? These are the steps that happen before a date is initiated, what if she did say yes?! And when we do go on said date, what would we do? Would we split the check? Would I wait for her to kiss me, or should I make the first move? If everything goes smoothly, would I invite her home? Wait, how do I even have sex with a girl?!?!
I wasn’t consciously wondering all of these things in 8th grade, but the further I progressed into my lesbianism when I finally began realizing things again at age 17, these questions slowly began to take up far too much space in my brain. But understandably so — lesbians and other queer women are never formally taught anything about their sexual and romantic lives, and I’m not just talking about sex ed that typically ignores queer sex and identities. What I previously hated but now absolutely love about being in the lesbian dating scene is that there are absolutely no rules. None! You make them up as you go! I could give credit to my first few dates and relationships for helping me figure out the ropes. Seeing my first date ever, where nothing happened because both of us were clueless, evolve into the dates I’m having now, where I’m not afraid to make a first move or unabashedly tell the other woman how hot she is, is evidence that lesbian dating is just a lot of trial and error.
But I always think back to that moment on Tumblr in middle school, and how without it, I may not have had the desire to even want to enter the magical world of dating other women. My Tumblr GF fantasy isn’t isolated, though; I thankfully have other tenets of the internet to essentially teach me all that there is to know not only about the complicated sex and dating lives of queer women, but also what I wanted as a baby gay, even before I could use that term to describe myself.
My first Tumblr girl crush walked so my ongoing list of Twitter lesbian crushes could run. I signed up for the other social networking site only a year after I began using Tumblr to soon realize that I was absolutely in love with 90% of the girls I followed who, as per usual, didn’t follow me back. When I discovered that some of them were lesbians before I even knew I was one myself, I remember having a case of inexplicable butterflies paired with a heavy dose of brain fog. I thought to myself, I find this girl really pretty, or, dare I say, hot… Is this a crush? Does that mean I have to want to kiss her?
I denied the fact that I wanted to kiss them, among other things, but I did realize that I was fascinated by not just any girls, but girls that were also into other girls. I would swoon over the gorgeous selfies they posted and secretly favorite their explicitly queer tweets, thinking I was just showing allyship to my followers who saw me doing so. I soon began following accounts solely because they were run by beautiful queer women, and at 17 I embraced the fact that I found these women hot, but only through the comfort of Twitter, of course. I tweeted in July of 2015: 10% of the people I follow I have followed only bc they're really hot, never explicitly gendering those people. But at least I knew they were women, and that statement in itself finally allowed myself to understand that I really, really, really wanna date a girl. It slowly progressed into me outwardly saying I thought girls were hot, to finally me stating my lesbian identity (which I predictably did for the first time through a tweet).
Not surprisingly, though, Twitter and other websites didn’t quit their job of easing myself into queer culture when I discovered my attraction to other women. I finally had the realization that I wanted to date a girl, but… how?!? I had begun to understand myself as a sexual being upon accepting my attraction to girls and dedicating my nights to queer sex ed Tumblr blogs, but this was entirely isolated — I was 17 and didn’t know any other queer girls. Maybe I understood my own sexual desires, but how the hell would I translate this onto other girls? I didn’t even have a working gaydar yet!
Most of my friends and peers during my first year of college were straight girls or gay men who knew absolutely nothing about the ways in which women dated each other. I attempted to meet other lesbians and queer women on my campus to both find community but, more importantly, learn and have the experiences that would teach me how to do what I’ve been desiring since 8th grade. Practice makes perfect, right? Although I have to give some credit to my first albeit brief fling with a “cool” junior girl who knew absolutely everything there was to know about being a lesbian, I can’t help but mostly thank the internet on this one.
Twitter still was my main educator. I had formed somewhat of a lesbian community on the platform, although we never actually talked to each other; instead, I just favorited their gay tweets, including ones on how lesbian first dates just have to include some level of oversharing of past trauma. I soon understood concepts like “uhauling” and that the best way to know if another girl is gay is if she has short nails. I figured out that our dating pool is laughably small and that not being friends with your exes is straight up weird. Those tweets beginning with “lesbian culture is…” and “fellas is it gay to…” showed me a whole new world of queerness that I soon would be tweeting myself.
But I also was exposed to women unashamedly lusting over other women, and that allowed me to figure out those lesbian sex terms we all love to overuse. I had once assumed that “top” and “bottom” were only used for gay men, but I was so wrong! The abundance of gay women wanting celebrities like Rachel Weisz or Cate Blanchett to top them forced me to do some research and understand that tops, bottoms, and switches for queer women were very much a thing. Well, wait, what was I, then? While that answer was only discovered through years of real-life experiences, the internet gave me the vocabulary for understanding my sexual preferences as it related to my lesbian identity. The simple act of even claiming sexuality as a woman is a radical act in itself, so being able to do this as a woman who loves other women through Twitter, of all sites, felt like a way for me to have power over my sexual desires that so many institutions deem to be “a phase” or illegitimate.
It wasn’t all sexual, though. Sometimes, I gained the most insight from my favorite of all Instagram accounts — lesbian meme pages. I discovered these years after I had come out, but the way they poked fun at uniquely lesbian topics and stereotypes somehow taught me far more than any other type of media. While shows like The L Word guided me on the basics of dyke culture, accounts like @xenaworrierprincess and @godimsuchadyke felt even more accurate, as its content is made by lesbians that were just like me! Whether it touched on lesbian astrology culture, this known fact about what lesbians do in between sex, or how all successful lesbian first dates should go, these meme pages did more for me than actual dates. They were general guidelines I could take on said dates, even though it can be harmful to assume all lesbian dates would go as the memes said they would. The beauty lie in that, however — they weren’t strict rules for how all my dates should go; they were instead the backbone of the plethora of possibilities that could happen. Like I said earlier, there are absolutely no rules when it comes to dating other women, making it an exciting experience for when I built up the confidence to do so.
I felt this confidence when I started using online dating platforms and making connections with other queers, both platonically and romantically. While I wouldn’t say that I’m a pro at lesbian dating, I do know that I’ve come to two conclusions: that my strong desire to have a Tumblr girlfriend in 8th grade was not just a phase, and that resources on queer sex and dating do exist, even if the memes are ironically the most helpful. I still follow a majority lesbians on Twitter, stalk lesbian meme pages on Instagram, and even go back on Tumblr every once in a while. But now, I also find myself seeking out explicitly queer platforms, like websites such as Autostraddle and accounts like @_personals_, that feel even more qualified to teach me the nuances of sex, love, and all that’s in between for us queer ladies. My only hope is that platforms like these will become more widespread and available to LGBTQ+ teens who don’t have access to queer-focused sex ed, parents who understand queer dating (or know their kids are queer at all, for that matter), or opportunities to date (they’re still only children!). I want more representative media in television plots and film narratives; I want queer people to be writing these narratives and accurately portraying the intricacies and messy questions that come with being queer.
Because at 21, after three years of navigating the lesbian dating scene, I still at times feel like I’m wearing glasses with the wrong prescription, mindlessly feeling for the “correct” action to take next. But I feel comfort in those queer online communities that got me to where I am today, and now for the ability to not only publicly write on my own experiences, but also publish other writers’ explicitly queer content on this platform for the purpose of educating others who haven’t yet gone through those crucial experiences.
About the Author
Natalie Geisel (she/her) is a senior at The George Washington University studying women’s, gender, and sexuality studies with minors in English and communication. Her love of writing sprouted from starting her fashion blog in high school, and her current written work focuses on topics of LGBTQ+ content, culture, and identity. Launching and managing Camp Thirlby was out of interest in intersecting gender and sexuality into the world of youth and wellness, hoping to add marginalized voices, like her own queer one, to an underrepresented community. When she’s not writing, she spends her spare time at dance rehearsal, attending local indie shows in the DC area, or finding the best cafes that serve oat milk. She’s passionate about inclusive sex education and sustainable fashion and thinks everyone should be, too. You can view all of her written work on her website.
