PERSONAL ESSAYS

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Only minutes into the season premiere of The Real World: Austin, two hot, drunk girls changed into their bikinis, jumped in the hot tub, and made out. Geez. Back in my day, girls waited at least till sweeps week. I guess those were simpler times then — remember back in 1994, when conservatives got their panties in a wad over that bloodless kiss on Roseanne? It's hard to even remember the controversy now that girl-on-girl kissing has become as much a frat-boy cliché as the keg stand. There must have been some argument about moral values and network standards, but that of course crumbled under the vast realization that, dude, two girls kissing is hotttt. In the eleven years since Roseanne Conner first locked lips with Mariel Hemingway, girls kissing each other has practically become a rite of passage for zeitgeist television shows: from Ally McBeal to Buffy the Vampire Slayer to The O.C. Hell, even The Gilmore Girls got some action. And we hardly need mention MTV, whose 2003 Music Awards included Madonna's infamous kiss with Britney (oh, and someone named Christina) as well as an underage Sapphic tribute à la Tatu, the Russian lesbians who turned out to be little more than clueless Slavic girls playing a role for a buck. That's a fairly good metaphor for what the girl-on-girl kiss has become — once a symbol of female experimentation and empowerment, it is now mostly another way to turn guys on. When The Real World has two (attached) women hitting it before the second commercial break, you know the girl-on-girl kiss has finally jumped the shark.
    Things were different when I first kissed a girl. My story is fairly typical: I was twenty years old, and drunk, and at a party, and the tale of how my friend Carolyn went from lying beside me to having her tongue inside my mouth is not the first story lost to Jack Daniel's. She and I had been cuddling and

How Carolyn's tongue got inside my mouth is not the first story lost to Jack Daniel's.

fondling each other's hair on the couch, and the kiss seemed almost a natural extension of that behavior. Later, after I sobered up, it was a little astonishing; I was a good Texas girl with childhood dreams of Johnny Depp and River Phoenix. But the most astonishing part was how good that kiss was — soft and warm and shot full with longing. Ten years later, it is still one of the best kisses I've ever had. So it shouldn't surprise you that, later that year, Carolyn and I wound up naked in bed together after a friend's wedding. I don't remember much of that, either, but I do recall it was wicked fun.
    Did I worry that I was lesbian? I did not. My sexual experiences with men were too vast, and pleasurable, to even consider their future sacrifice. Besides, by then such experimentation had become accepted, even trendy, among my weirdo liberal arts friends. And while I did find myself pricked with longing whenever Carolyn wore a particularly tight pair of white flared pants . . . well, who wouldn't? The girl had serious gams. Around that time, I messed around with a few other girlfriends in the name of curiosity and bourbon. It never went much of anywhere. It was just something that happened at parties when girls were feeling naughty, like a college game of "Doctor." Although I was not familiar with the term at the time, I suspect I qualify for at least partial membership in the group commonly termed "LUG" — lesbian until graduation. Like my sisters in that sorority, I decided post-college that I preferred the company of men between the sheets. (Interestingly, my longtime roommate decided, somewhat to my surprise, that she vastly preferred women.) But I don't regret the experiences at all. They were so bound up with the chaos and revolution of that time, the fumbling discovery of my own female superpowers — to seduce, to shun, to choose whatever, and whomever, I wanted. When Carolyn and I kissed at that party, the boys in the room went weak-kneed, but that didn't matter; what mattered is that we did.
    So the pervasiveness of this girl-on-girl kissing makes me a little sad. Sure it has the veneer of progressive politics, but isn't it all just heterosexual male fantasy disguised as empowerment? A new kind of pole dance? I

"We call those 'party bisexuals,'" she said, crinkling her nose.

recently asked a twenty-one-year-old friend and recent NYU graduate about the whole thing. Had she heard of LUGs? No, she had not. What about girls who kiss other girls when they're drunk at parties?
   "Oh, we call those 'party bisexuals,'" she said, crinkling her nose. "We just kind of roll our eyes at them."
    My friend, Andrea, had gone to an arts program where many of her friends were proudly queer or transgendered. Some of them had been out as early as middle school, and the sight of two women kissing for the delectation of the male gaze was not exciting but, rather, sickening. Maybe it's because actually coming out — actually wrestling with your sexual preferences and the expectations of others — can be so painful. Maybe it's because that kind of MTV exhibitionism is just tacky. Maybe it's because sorority girls lay claim to enough already — money, beauty, society's good will — so does it really seem fair they can roleplay lesbian, too?
   "I think you need to make a distinction between girls who kiss girls because it turns on guys, and girls who do it for other reasons." This is Rebecca, twenty-nine, who graduated from the University of Kansas after a history similar (if more robust) than mine. "Because for a lot of girls, this is about figuring out why I might be having these feelings, or why I'm having these dreams."
    Agreed. And though it's been a decade since I graduated, I'm certain earnest female experimentation is alive and throbbing in the hushed corridors of female dorms around the country. But I wonder: How would my experience with Carolyn be different if I were in college now? Would it be freer — or just more desperate? Carolyn and I were both notorious drunks, hungry for male attention, and our first hook-up probably had as much to do with curiosity as the sheer proximity of each other's willing lips. And yet, that moment seems like this integral part of my sexual development — lovely, unexpected, even vulnerable. Far be it for me to mourn the days of poor closeted Ellen, but I hate to think the girl-on-girl kiss could have just turned into a party trick.  n°

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
	Sarah Hepola has been a high-school teacher, a playwright, a film critic, a music editor and a travel columnist. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, The Guardian, Salon, and on NPR. She lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

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