The CTGML Facebook Group is up. To the 43% of people who voted in my survey that I shouldn’t start it because it’s a “stupid idea,” sorry. I hate Web 2.0, too, but I hate everything new. Like, if I had been around at the dawn of ink-and-paper writing, I would’ve been all like “God, this sucks! Why can’t we just keep using cuneiform?” Had I been alive in the waning days of the bronze age, I would have proclaimed iron to be “ridiculous.” Seriously, join my Facebook group. The most intelligent people on the internet read this blog, so we’ll have some great discussions there. Possible features the group will include:
— Post links to sexy clothes and hot sales you find online!
— Get fashion advice from lots of stylish ladies! (Straight dudes, this feature could be especially useful to you)
— Official CTGML discussion thread on pickup lines for women to use on men! (Straight dudes, you can help us out here)
Anyway. I encountered the following in Hannah Holmes’ book The Well-Dressed Ape: “While some researchers see copulation as the culmination of the negotiations, others suspect it may be just another way for animals to gauge one another’s quality…. Why [do people like to have sex all the time]? Is it a test of a partner’s quality? Some theorists think a roll in the hay might be a good way to gauge another human’s health and personality.” Sound familiar, ladies? Little did you know that all your casual sex was a brilliant Darwinian strategy.
But the tactic of hookup-as-relationship-test works even if your pairing is unlikely to produce offspring. Like the subjects of today’s story, “Heidi,” a musician, and “Gretchen,” a friend of the dudes in Heidi’s band. The two of them moved in the same social circles, and finally met one night last October, at a sleazy local dive bar (“The Buckaroo”). Gretchen is tall and skinny, “very androgynous,” and it seems Heidi was attracted right from the beginning. That night, it happened to be Gretchen’s birthday, and the whole gang ended up going to a different, moderately less dive-y bar to celebrate. “I bought her a shot of whiskey.” Along with Levi’s jeans and Chucks, Heidi was wearing an airbrushed Cher t-shirt that said “Gurlz rule.” Gretchen was a fellow appreciator of Cher, so this helped them build rapport.
At the end of the evening, “we just crashed on a friend’s couch.” A dude who lived nearby offered up his couch and floors to the few who were still out partying. Hooking up came fairly naturally once they were in a room together. Heidi was lying on a blanket on the floor, and said “do you wanna lay down here?” They ended up fooling around. She says “it was great sexy times.”
Three or four days passed before they saw each other again. This time, it was Halloween. Heidi and her friends went out to a dance party being held in a warehouse. She was disguised as Ursula from the Little Mermaid, in full purple body paint, silver spray-painted hair, and tentacles constructed from pantyhose filled with packing peanuts.

Heidi is slimmer than this, though
She was wearing a black skirt with some sort of halter top, accessorized with a golden crown and trident, and red lipstick.
(I had, like, heck of problems finding the right kind of trident online. Free market, my ass. You’re on your own with this one.)
As Heidi walked into the warehouse, the music hit a lull, “everyone in the room turned and stared at me, and it was like, ‘Yes!'” Among those at the party, “this particular girl turned and noticed me.” Gretchen was dressed as Ziggy Stardust. She was wearing tight jeans with a ball of yarn in the crotch, and had the lightning bolt painted on her face. They ended up dancing for a bit to “raunchy hip-hop” that the DJ was playing.
The party was “crazy.” Eventually they left, of course. Once again, they crashed at someone’s house, their friend “purple Siberian tiger” (for such was his costume). This is one of those cases where my notes are hard to read, but I think Purple Siberian Tiger slept on the sofa, letting them have the bed? It could be. Anecdotal evidence I’ve heard suggests that guys are only too eager to let lesbian couples hook up in their bed, if they get all horny at a party or something. It is one of the few compensations for the crushing burden of homophobia that queer people must bear in our regressive, reactionary society.
Anyway, having fooled around enough to verify each other’s quality, health and personality, they were ready to have sex. That’s what my notes appear to suggest, anyway. But I realized I wasn’t sure what that implies, since the distinction between “fooling around” and “going all the way” isn’t so clear in a lesbian context as it is with straight people. To gain insight into the “gay lifestyle,” I asked a bisexual woman. She says: “With a guy, my vocab distinctions would be: ‘I made out with him,’ or ‘ I hooked up with him’ (which would involve oral sex either way, or finger fucking), or ‘I had sex with him’ (which would be like, regular penis vagina sex). With a girl, my distinctions would be more like, ‘I made out with her” or ‘I had sex with her.’ The stuff that wouldn’t count as much as sex with guys would count as sex with girls. Some girls might say going down is a bigger deal than fingering and that that counts more as sex.” Also, it “probably” makes a difference whether they’re fully nude. So there you have it.
The two of them continued to date for “a short while,” and then Gretchen cut it off, saying “I’m not really looking to date anybody.” Heidi has seen her around town recently, they’re friendly and everything’s cool. When I asked her if the clothes had any effect, she said “absolutely,” and that there were “many references” made between them while they were dating to the Ursula and Ziggy costumes.