23-May-2006
Rigid adherence to “top” and “bottom” roles seems much more prevalent in the gay male community. At least we don’t see as many personal ads with “exclusive top seeks pillow princess” in the women-seeking-women section of the personals. Lesbians either expect themselves (perhaps unrealistically) to be more flexible, or like many women, they’re interested in becoming well-rounded. (Is this an unconscious desire to please, since society expects us to be malleable?) Many dykes who took our survey revealed problems with being labeled “top” “bottom” “stone” or “vanilla.” Others suffered more under the expectation of role versatility. For example one erotic novelist who wrote me met a woman through the Internet that led to a dramatic one night stand in a hotel room, in a city that was halfway between where each woman lived…
“She worked in the television industry as a director of a local news show. It started when she wrote me a fan letter and I answered it (I usually answer all my fan mail, but have since sworn off sleeping with any of my readers. It always leads to absolutely disastrous results and then they know where I live.). Answering her letter led to a whole flurry of e-mail/lust stuff that went on for about a month online.
In her relationships, she was almost always a Top and I am always without fail a bottom, but we decided that we wanted to switch. We finally agreed to meet and have sex, and try out our new roles.
In the bar of the hotel, we had some martinis and she went directly into Top mode and never left it, which greatly disappointed me because I'd traveled a long way to try to Top her and had spent a fortune on my hotel room & my underwear. And she wasn't even a particularly inspired or interesting Top. The sex was so-so. Nothing special. But what was "special" was the fact that she was really nuts. She started a fire in my hotel room during dinner (accidentally setting her napkin on fire by being too drunk & smoking, even though I was in a non-smoking room and had asked her not to smoke). In the middle of the very expensive room service dinner (the entire tab of which she stuck me for) she left my room to make a "quick trip" to her own room and then she promptly got lost. She couldn't remember her room number. My room was in the upper part of the hotel where you had to have a special elevator key to access the floor so she couldn't get back to my floor. She was afraid to go down to the lobby to inquire about her own room number or to call me, because she was not completely dressed and it was a busy Friday night in a very nice hotel. She claimed she was riding the elevator half-dressed and in a daze for well over an hour, until another guest had a key that accessed my floor. In all that time, she had never managed to remember her own room number, so I had to get dressed and take her there myself. I couldn't wait to get away from her and was very glad that we'd decided to have separate rooms. And still, after the horrible weekend, she wrote me an e-mail, asking me to move in with her. No lie.”
The above Class IV drama began with the ill-advised act of “sleeping with a fan,” stirred in the intent to reverse the top/bottom dynamic, progressed to three of the five natural disasters of lesbian sex: drunkenness, fire, and absurd formation of emotional attachment (the remaining two being the lopsided three-way and sexually transmitted disease).
