I am starting to conform to stereotype - the one where lesbians stay friends with their exes.  It's not even all that long since I wrote a rant against that very thing and I guess I have to blame stuff for this turnaround.  So here goes.

I have exes who are really good people, who, despite having survived the horror or relationships with me, are compassionate enough to want to be friends.  Somewhere along the way I guess I also pulled my head out of my ass long enough to see them for the good people they are and not just the hurts we inflicted on each other after the bubble burst. 

Facebook, despite being such an evil sort of a megalith in so many ways, has returned some rather precious lost souls to me and as a result, one of the exes that I am now proud to call my friend, is an ex boyfriend from many years and lives ago.  OK, my very first girlfriend has now rejected my friend request ... twice.  And my first love sent a message via someone else that she was glad to hear I'm still processing oxygen, but has no desire to be friends.  It has also, however, brought some exes back into my life on that superficial Facebook level, where even if you don't have enough in common anymore to sustain a conversation, you can still poke each other from time to time without the usual precautions and after effects.  I'm even in touch with a couple of one night stands, which is entertainingly surreal at times.

Perhaps another big factor is time - good old time, which heals stuff and steals other stuff and blurs a whole lot of other stuff until you feel remarkably calm about most stuff.  We get older and kinder (hopefully) and approaching middle age, we do that audit - the one epitomised so well in Hi-Fidelity (book and film) and look back at the people whose unfinished stories still haunt us somehow. 

Then of course there's the ghetto aspect.  The amount of out lesbians in South Africa is just too small to go around alienating people; we're all part of the damn chart whether we like it or not.  I managed to avoid getting involved with the ex of an ex until I was about thirty somehow, but since then it's all gone a little L Word. 

So, dear lesbians, you were right all the time and I ... I was wrong.  I'm sorry for all the disparaging invective I've spewed forth on the subject and I am sorrier to the exes whose exes I resented. 

I was sitting on the beach yesterday talking to one of my favourite straight women about sexuality.  We both agreed that things would be better if everybody on earth thought they were bisexual and then just did whatever and whoever they wanted from that point.  She was astonished when I told her how prejudiced the gay (not queer!) community is towards bisexuals.  Now, I don't conside myself bisexual at all.  I tried a few times, to have sex with men who I loved so much that really, all that w...

How many lesbians and their husbands did Lin Sampson talk to before she wrote her somewhat mystifying column "Bride on the gravy train," one wonders?  In her version of things, "many" men looking for second wives choose lesbians, for a variety of cliched reasons.

“I’m sick of all those straight women. They bleed you. I want someone who doesn’t think that a blowjob deserves a Prada handbag,” said one. (The Sunday Times Lifestyle, May 10 2009)

It would be exhaustingly boring to tackle eve...

I bet I am the last lesbian on earth to work this one out; butches wear cargo pants and other clothes with completely extraneous pockets, because femmes don't like to take their handbags into nightclubs and we end up carrying stuff for them.  A few times wearing jeans with the standard five pockets and you start missing your cargo pants, because wearing anything else, by the end of the night you end up resembling one of those, "Is that two wallets, car keys, lipstick, tissues and a coupla cel...

I write a whole heap of stuff taking the piss out of us, the lesbian community and a whole heap about the stereotypes – but it occurred to me that I don't write so much about the good stuff.  And there is so much good stuff.

Do you remember when you first worked out you were a lesbian?  Maybe the best part is the first time you do something about it … wasn't that experience just like coming home?  Suddenly the jigsaw's all together perfectly, making the most beautiful image.

How about falli...

It's very freaking disheartening that people seem so incapable of changing their minds at times.  I was watching The Ellen Show - an episode which was made before the USA elections (it must have travelled Africa overland) and the gorgeous Ellen Degeneres was talking to John McCain about gay marriage being overturned in California.  In his usual smooth way, he referred, more than once, to their "respectful disagreement" about gay marriage, because "I believe marriage to be a unique institution...

But why do gay people have to go on about it so much?

People say that so rationally, so calmly that it almost seems reasonable to me too.  And then I think.  I think about pink triangles and black ones in concentration camps and Michael Causer and Matthew Shepherd and the two murdered Soweto lesbians and all the victims we'll never even hear about.  That's why – that's it.  The rest of us cannot shut up until those people are safe, until kids aren't getting bullied for it in schools, until l...