Where's My Queer Girl Friend Group?

An enviable Planet hang.

Showtime

The first time I binge-watched The L Word, cooped up in my dorm during a sleepy summer working on my college campus, I was dumbstruck. The clunky plotlines, inconsistent character traits, and bouts of transphobic garbage didn’t register as loudly for me during my maiden viewing voyage as they would later on. At the time, I was mostly just in awe — bowled over by the sheer amount of gay women populating my computer screen.

The magic of The L Word, for me, wasn’t so much the (mostly disastrous) romantic relationships, or the (sometimes really weird) sexual encounters, or the (financially questionable) depictions of lesbians as savvy and successful. The magic was in the friendships — getting to see a bunch of lez ladies constantly hanging out together at the Planet, a fictional queer utopia of a café in West Hollywood.

It looked like a fucking dream.

At that point the closest thing I had to Planet-like camaraderie was playing on my very queer/questioning college rugby team, which was the saving grace of a Connecticut campus crawling with painfully heterosexual lax bros in boat shoes. That team was like family to me. My last year playing was somewhat soured when I dated — then had a long, fiery, terrible breakup with — one of my captains (#lesbianproblems). But the fallout wasn’t enough to shake the deep, achy affection I still carry around for that time of my life, when I was trying to figure myself out in tangles of mud and limbs on a rugby pitch, physically fighting for a bunch of girls I loved.

Ever since I’ve succeeded in figuring myself out (verdict: full-blown homosexual), I’ve wanted the grown-up version of a gay girl gang. My queer and maybe-queer rugby friends had helped me navigate all the weird new shit I was feeling — what my friend John calls queer people’s second adolescence — and after leaving college behind, I actively intended to surround myself with other gay women as fully confident in their gayness as they’d be in their goals, their passions, and their convictions about closeted celebrities (as shared over fervent group text).

So far, after over a year in New York City, that hasn’t happened. And I'm starting to wonder if it ever will.

My first summer in New York, I decided to go all out for Pride: I splurged on an obscenely expensive ticket to a girl-centric party, then late-night barhopped. I went out with two of my friends, a lesbian couple; I was newly single, so as much as I loved (and still love) hanging out with them, they weren’t necessarily the best company at the time. I was a heartbroken third-wheeling gay in the middle of a gay-a-palooza. While my friends danced with each other at Henrietta Hudson — one of New York’s few lesbian bars, which has a $10 cover that rarely seems worth it — I made a fool of myself hitting on a college professor twice my age. A couple disappointingly sloppy makeouts later, I was sitting on a bench outside the bar by myself. My friends had gone home. I bummed a cigarette from a passing butch. It was one of the loneliest moments of my life.

There was a time when a lesbian-separatist universe would seem like heaven to me, but I grew out of that fantasy.

It wasn’t so much a being-single kind of lonely, though that definitely factored in somewhere. The gaggles of friend groups tumbling drunkenly by me were the ones I truly envied. What I wanted right then was someone who understood precisely what I was going through. I wanted someone who would commiserate with me over the masculine queer who, just a few minutes before, had accused me of being straight when I didn’t show interest in them (wasn’t the first time, probably won’t be the last). I wanted someone who would share my horror at the high possibility of an ex walking by. I wanted someone who would sympathize with my sadness in some clearly lost straight cis man trying to chat me up on my way to the subway when I would kill, then as ever, to simply be read as visibly queer. I wanted someone who got my particular post-breakup heartache, which was tangled up in complications of gender and power and personal politics gone awry.

I wanted to feel like I was actually a part of New York’s queer culture, rather than a brooding interloper on the sidewalk. I wanted someone — a best friend, or better yet, a whole group of them — who intimately understood that I’d spent nearly 20 years moving through the world as one person, and ever since my great gay awakening I’ve been trying to figure out how to live as somebody else.

Showtime

If you can build a lesbian posse anywhere, it’s New York, ri