WANTED: Lesbian Supervision

I have a male friend who is gay and as book-crazy as I am and I have therefore been reading gay literature for years now. That has taught me a truly great lot abt gay culture - alas, at times almost more than I could bear for some things I did not need to know, and yet I now do. His dinner parties have also exposed me to some truly flamboyant characters, whom I love to talk to bcs they are hilarious and their mannerisms are to die for. Thanks to them I have been introduced to such pearls as Domesticity Isn't Pretty and a rather delightfully foul-mouthed Bette Midler. I was never a fag hag but oh I can think of much worse things. Of coure, now I never go out clubbing anymore and I'm only up by 6 am if I have insomnia but those were fun times.

He lived abroad for a while, then I lived abroad, then he lived abroad - so whenever we happened to be in the same country and it was here I'd go round and bring a batch of books w me to see me through 2 weeks or so. Of course, him being gay, my being straight and curious, those happened to be 99.9% gay books (author AND theme, that is, so you'd have Coupland who is not obviously gay and then the gay plots/characters). Some I found vile, some I found passable, some absolutely lovely, some unbelievably hysterical, some disturbingly beautiful. Auster's Moon Palace came home w me one of those times and, as much as I was loving it, I couldn't fully appreciate it bcs halfway into the story, there still was NO SIGN of the gay character! Where was the gay character? When would he show up? WHERE WAS THE GAY CHARACTER ALREADY, this absence was too disconcerting.

*Sigh*

Abt 2/3 into the book I realised there was NO gay character, NONE WHATSOEVER. The git had given me a straight book for fuck's sake, and without warning me first! I was absolutely livid and am still outraged to this day and he still laughs heartily when we talk abt it. There is always a tense moment upon picking new books now as I narrow my eyes and enquire abt the straighticity of all involved. And he'd better be accurate bcs if there are going to be straight books among that pile AGAIN, I'd better be forwarned.

--- He always refused to take me to the one lesbian bar we had in the city when I asked, he always said he wouldn't be able to protect me. What the hell does that mean? I sat on little pyramid-shaped stools in a gay bar - alright so the tips were rounded but I SAT ON A BLOODY CONE TIP FOR HIM and yet he refused to take me to a lesbian bar. What were the lesbians going to do, beat him up? Isn't he kin of sorts? Or would they mob me, do I look too straight? Are our lesbians more predatory? WHAT? The ignorant Anthropologist, now I fit right in. ---

All this to say, I am pretty fluent in Gayish, not so in Lesbianish. His cousin is a lesbian as well - but my only contact w her were his parties, and one day she showed up w her girfriend who was the daughter of a colleague of mine from when I was reading Anthropology who was just the tiniest bit mad, and with whom I had done fieldwork in the North [and good grief the horror stories I could tell you abt that], and so I exclaimed S., hullo! The world is a small pea indeed, how is your mother? And she replied I wouldn't know. And I dearly wished I'd choke on the pea but as stated, it was a rather smallish one. So yes, Gayish Spoken and that is all.

I now need your assistance bcs I am watching the 1st episode of The L Word and I am enjoying it, even though it builds up a bit slowly, and I find it fabulous that they really kiss and get naked and grind their pelvis against each other etc. and there is no hypocrisy in the filming of it, it looks bloody real, so real I am left wondering if the actresses are all lesbians, that's how good they are. And I love Shane, I LOVE HER, the way she moves, the way she talk, her voice, LOVE LOVE LOVE! She is what I'd like to be if I didn't give a damn and were tough and careless and androgynously skinny and gorgeous and dark and supremely confident in my skin and profoundly scarred and wary of willies. [But I haven't even finished watching the 1st episode so what do I know abt Shane.]

Just now they were sitting around discussing Shane, who is the equivalent of the group's stud. See? I do not have accurate vocabulary for this! Shane is bonking her way through Southern California, it would seem, and doesn't much care whether her chosen ones' hearts are broken in the process as long as she is given access to other organs and bits. So, after she gets up to go shag yet another one the girls [am I allowed to call American lesbians girls or must it be women at all times? Serioulsy.] talk abt it and they decide it is her confidence and then one of them says:

Shane has the best nipples and she knows it.

!!!!

And this one sentence showed me the gulf between all lesbians and me bcs I had noticed Shane's breasts in the sense that she doesn't have any really. And I am aware that nipples are part of the package, yes. But I wasn't of the fact that you can have almost no boobs at all and still it doesn't matter bcs you have the best nipples. We are all influenced by the straight culture we grow up in and men pay loads of attention to the boobs and whether they can see the nipple, yes, but it's the visibility of it rather than how glamorous it is that matters, the nipple being more or less the cherry on top. Or am I mistaken?

Shane is said to have nipple confidence and I'll say, where have I been that I don't know these things? They all live in L.A., I suppose that could make a difference, they're differently obsessed over there. Let that be it, I don't want to have to start worrying abt my nipples now, my ass is taking too much of my time as it is! Is the nipple the new penis, w all the size and shape and girth worries it entails?

Possible lesbian readership, I'd love to have your take on this. Elswhre? Jen? Anyone?