The Time I Went On A Lesbian Cruise And It Blew Up My Entire Life

He assured me he had no problem with gay people, and he really didn’t; the three guys running the catamaran all day were amazing. But he did occasionally seem to forget about the realities of the situation.

“Your husband sent me to take care of you,” he said later, winking, when he refilled my water.

“I don’t have a husband,” I said. “I’m gay. We’re all gay.”

“Right,” he said, nodding. “Right.”

Eventually, once we’d reboarded the boat after our snorkeling, I did start talking with a few of the women I met at the Gen O mixer earlier that week, and it only took a couple of drinks for us to become the best of friends.

For the last stretch of our afternoon, we were dropped on a secluded beach at Nevis, where a few of us ferried beers and our new favorite drink, the very college-esque Panty Ripper (coconut rum and pineapple juice), from shore to the rest of the women waiting in the water. One woman stuffed a bunch of beers into her bathing suit and we cheered whenever anybody pulled one out. A couple women had GoPro cameras, with which we took a lot of increasingly drunken group shots while we swam. One of them was attached to a floating handle that looked very much like a big yellow dildo, which, once somebody pointed it out, kept sending us into hysterics.

Bonding is built into an Olivia trip, which, I realized soon enough, is basically like grown-up lesbian camp. “It’s funny, because on a normal cruise, you’re trying to spend as much time as you can away from other people,” Jamie would later put it. “But we’re all here precisely because we want to be around everybody else.”

And everybody else is so deliriously jazzed, so happy to meet you, so happy that you’re here! On this floating gay island and its satellite getaways, time works differently than it does back home. You can skip the normal-life process of slowly getting to know somebody on the shallowest of levels and get right to the good stuff.

Back on the catamaran for our return to port, we got into some deep and very lesbian-y talk about relationships. One young couple from upstate New York had been together for nearly 10 years, though you wouldn’t necessarily know it; they still looked at each other like they’d only just fallen in love that week, and I told them so. We learned from the girl who’d stuffed beers into her bathing suit — the self-appointed class clown of the catamaran — that she was desperately in love with a married woman, but otherwise conducted herself like a classic lesbian fuckboy. Later, after karaoke night, I’d hear her tell someone that the wait between songs was so long she was able to sign up, take a girl back to her room, have sex with her, and come back to sing with time to spare. (She picked “Baby Got Back.”)

In the spirit of lesbian camp bonding, I told my new crew about my situation — nonmonogamous, not sure how to feel about it — which seemed to pique the interest of beer bathing suit girl, because she would soon afterward follow me into the impossibly tiny bathroom, bursting in on me mid-pee.

“Uh, I’m peeing,” I said.

“I don’t mind,” she said.

By this point, I was — somewhat unintentionally — quite drunk. We started making out (I was still peeing) and almost right away, I began writing a goofy story about it in my head, thinking about how I’d relay the anecdote to my friends (“So I had sex in the bathroom of a catamaran???”). But there was another part of me that was very much not into it, especially when the makeout gave way to other things and people started banging on the bathroom door.

“There’s a line,” I said, pulling my bathing suit back on.

“Fuck ’em,” the girl said, grabbing for me again, but I wrestled my way out, burning with embarrassment at the prospect of facing a bunch of people who’d know exactly what we’d been doing. (I was also, literally, developing a pretty bad sunburn.) I made my way up the tiny laddered chute to the deck, bouncing against the walls like a pinball, and immediately moved as far away from the bathroom as possible.

Later, when telling friends what had happened, I did laugh about it — one told me it sounded like something pulled straight out of The L Word, which, true — but I was also a little mad at that girl, and even more so at myself for being so sloppy. The consent element there was indeterminate; I had willingly gone along with the hookup, at least for a little while, though I remain uncertain about how much I really could have consented while drunk-peeing in a bathroom the size of a broom closet.

But even though the girl on the catamaran had pushed up against my boundaries, I wasn’t completely without agency in that bathroom, drunk and sunburned as I was. Bad sex happens. Even with lesbians! Straight men don’t, in fact, have the market cornered on fuckboyish behavior. I was going to move on, get over it, and go back to enjoying myself.