The ‘lace and latex’ theme nights are some of the most popular for Skirt Club. Picture: Victoria Dawe What I didn’t expect was everything else that would happen to me — and is still happening to me — thanks to this one little week in my otherwise pleasantly uneventful life. 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. But LeJeune says that not everyone is there to indulge the occasional fantasy – some women have experienced trajectory changes in their lovelife after attending Skirt Club parties. She plays the drums, loves cars — like, posts-on-car-forums-level loves cars — and follows tech news. She cares about clothes and buys a lot of hers vintage. She just got a tattoo commemorating Liverpool, her beloved football team.

I would move out of an apartment that I adored, that I’d almost single-handedly furnished, that I thought I’d live in for years to come. I would hug my landlady, crying again because she was crying for me. I would tell my partner that I cared about them deeply, and the past five years were among the best of my life. I wouldn’t trade them for anything. But I also felt like we had come to a crossroads, and we weren’t facing the same futures. I had tried so hard to see myself in their dreams, but now I was having dreams of my own. And I didn’t think I saw a future, even a part-time one, in Montana. But there were, in fact, a number of stereotype-fulfilling boomer TERFs on board the cruise — and plenty of lesbians whose policing of gender norms took more banal forms. The woman who bought me a drink after I sang Kelly Clarkson at karaoke — a petite therapist from California with a prim gray bob — ended up being one of them.I would move into a house with some friends in Brooklyn, where a room had just magically opened up. There’d be a dog, and a yard. It would feel like a sign. (I’d start getting really into signs.)

I would go straight to my friend Dom’s house, not even stopping at home to shower first, where I told him that I was, indeed, having a quarter-life crisis.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. I’ve known a few women who have never dated women but dive into a full relationship (after) meeting someone at Skirt Club,” she says. “It’s rare but it has happened.” Once again, she repeats her rejection of a label. “Just because you might have had sex with a girl, it doesn’t mean you’re gay.” It’s taken me a lot of courage to… put my face on the front of the company that says, ‘Being bi is OK,'” she says.

We decided upon Melbourne as a significant number of women were jetting in for the weekend to attend our [Sydney] events,” she says. We would imagine the membership to grow the same way it did in Sydney as we begin to roll out our 2018 schedule,” Ms LeJeune said.

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I was hesitant for a couple reasons. The first was that they’d slept with someone else, just once, when they were on a solo vacation, before we’d agreed to any sort of open-relationship terms; I felt like they’d forced my hand. (It’s hard for me even now to say they cheated on me, though that’s precisely what they did.) The second reason was that I’d watched some of my friends in long-term relationships experiment with nonmonogamy, only for the experiment to end in disaster: Somebody, inevitably, fell for somebody else. Tonight’s launch event is just a taste of Skirt Club Melbourne’s first big themed event, scheduled for August.

To find other swingers for casual sex and hookups, don’t beat around the bush with idle chit chat on Tinder. Everyone flips through the app fast. If you make a connection, try to get a Skype date or offline meetup arranged as soon as possible. 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. But Moon says that the women at Skirt Club were just as enthusiastic as women at the more queer parties she’s been to. When she was a guest speaker at one of Skirt Club’s full-fledged sex parties in New York and finished her talk on female pleasure, she expected the attendees to proceed with caution. In the United States, there are no laws that regulate what consenting adults do between the sheets. It doesn’t matter whether there are two people, three or four. As long as the acts do not involve torture, injury, children or animals, it’s a private matter. At the Gen O meetup, the hairdresser mentioned that most of the paying customers on board are older women who’ve had an extraordinarily difficult time navigating life as lesbians; they deserve a space, she said, to fully be themselves. Maybe Olivia could do a specific queer-plus trip for trans people and gay men? Being in a space with “someone who looks like a man,” she said — horrifying me, Jamie, Matie, Dana, and a bunch of others — “can cause these women so much trauma.”

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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.) 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. Afterward, I had lunch with Dana and some of the other Olivia staffers and asked them about it — why not make the Public Posts more prominent, MichFest style? Especially since the younger people at the first Gen O event had explicitly asked for more sex content. Olivia had run sexuality and intimacy workshops before, and at the lunch, the staffers floated the definite possibility that they will again. I know for a fact that a lot of my queer friends would be way more likely to book a future Olivia cruise, uncool as cruises might be to cash-strapped millennials, if they knew how likely they’d be to get some action. The second level is the more risqué Skirt Club: play parties, held about every six weeks, usually at private homes, which feature themes more bubbly, and sexual play: basically anything from straight out bonding to burlesque dancing, body shots and bondage, as Skirt Club co-director Renee Nyx told news.com.au in 2016.