Huge news first! I’ll be at the Hellmouth Convention in Torrance CA June 12-13.
I will be doing a panel with Amber Benson on Saturday the 12th at 10AM. (I’ll be doing a second panel on Sunday, and there will be some book signing times, too, but those details haven’t made their way to me, yet.)
This is how much fun I had last year, making a new friend in the process:
I love how serious Anthony is. Totally slaying it! 😁
I cannot emphasize enough how much I love this convention. It has the friendliest, most open-hearted people. And they are basically all queer (or very queer-friendly) freaks, geeks, and weirdos. They run the full range of ages, from “I saw this show when it first aired” to “my parents watched this show when it first aired,” and are otherwise a fantastically diverse group of my kind of people.
If you can get to this convention, DO IT. You won’t regret it. (Check that tickets aren’t sold out, however!)
Here’s the two videos of Amber Benson and me in conversation since the last newsletter:
You know, I simply never will fully accept the fact that I just get to hang out with Amber Benson like it’s no big thing. And it’s not because she acts like a Big Star. She’s actually the sweetest, most down-to-earth person you ever met. I’m honestly the luckiest author in the world, because I couldn’t hope for a kinder person or more talented actor to be working with me on the audiobooks. And that’s what I mean about not being able to accept it: her talent is so fantastic, I can barely handle it. Have you listened to the audiobooks? The way she handles all the accents and all the different voices in conversation with each other is just Next Level. I’m an audiobook snob and had really high expectations, and she still rocked my world.
RAVENLIFE: Raven’s Coming Out Story ✨🏳️🌈✨
I’ve been out as Bi+ for so long that I don’t really think about it. But it’s occurred to me that probably no one reading this knows my coming out history, so it seems a good time to turn back the pages to a 16 year old Raven…
I was a hyper-sexual teenager, as many neurospicy people are, but it had all just been in a het direction. It honestly had never occurred to me that “both and” was an option, and I knew I liked 🍆 so it never occurred to me that 🐈 was something I could also have.
That’s the thing about living in a world where diversity is limited. People as they are growing up don’t realize the glorious array of options that are available for them for living and loving. I mean, I know that’s the whole point, but still, my world was limiting me without even trying particularly hard.
It was a 2AM phone call with my friend M. At that hour, things get confessional. She nervously professed that she liked women as well as men. Pause.
“OK, that’s cool,” I said.
I don’t remember the rest of our conversation, but when we got off the phone, I thought to myself, “M is my friend. I have to be OK with her liking women.”
But how to be OK with it? Being a teenager, with teenage logic, I decided that if I could imagine two women having sex and not be repulsed by it, that was what was needed. (I know, I know. But I was young, OK?)
The first night, I tried to imagine going down on a woman. It seemed kinda gross.
But I was dedicated to my goal. The next night I imagined two women kissing. Their nipples rubbed against each other.
PING! In that moment, my desire for women turned from OFF to ON FULL TAP 🚿
It didn’t take much to get me there 🤣
The first person I told was my friend Jake. I knew he was bi, so that was an easy baby step. I hung out with him after school, at his house. I told him, and he said, “Welcome to the family!”
The second was my little sister. For some reason, I remember that I was taking a bath and she was sitting on the toilet talking to me. It seems an oddly vulnerable place to do it, but maybe it was just to be in a private space our parents wouldn’t walk into? Anyway, she started crying and said, “You’re gonna get beaten up and killed!”
I had to talk her down, explaining that as a bisexual woman I really wasn’t going to get the same level of prejudice and hatred that gay man and trans people face. Two years later, when she got to high school, she joined the LGBT+ group (which of course had formed after I graduated) as an ally.
Me on the ferry to P-town (a gay mecca), senior year of high school. I really miss that peacoat! And look at my Sony Walkman! I was listening to Jane’s Addiction 🎧
Obviously, the next thing was to do something about it. And that was a journey of years…
I immediately had a crush on M, of course. But I was too shy to bring it up to her. And, I found out later, she felt the same but was too shy to mention it to me. There is an amusing memory I have of M being over for a sleepover, us both in the same bed, me wanting her and her not knowing, her wanting me but me not knowing, and us just lying there unable to sleep or actually communicate effectively. In other words, the stereotypical lesbian conundrum.
I headed off to college with the goal of sleeping with women being just as much a focus as studying literature and photography. Annoyingly, I found it much easier to find males who wanted to smash than figure out who the women who were into women were, and negotiate doing something about it.
I joined the Bradford College LGBT group the first week I was there. And in the process, began to find out how much some lesbians despise bisexuals.
At the very first meeting I attended, Mel, the lesbian in charge, said she wanted to change the name of the group to BAGL—Bradford Association of Gays and Lesbians—because she liked bagels.
“But what about bisexuals?” another member asked.
“They don’t really belong here anyway,” Mel announced. “They aren’t really gay.”
(In an amusing aside, a year later Mel started dating a guy. The guy was rumored to have the biggest 🍆 on campus—I’ve always felt that added a profound irony to the situation. When asked if Mel was now a gasp bisexual, she said, “No! I’m a bisexual lesbian!” Basically, she hated bisexuals so much that even when she was getting’ a good deep dickin’, she didn’t want to associate with us. It’s really telling.)
Me & my bisexual roommate freshman year of college, in front of our dorm room. We were VERY OUT on campus 🤣
Besides that incident, there was this: I was eagerly looking in the Women-Seeking-Women section of the classifieds ads in local papers. Which is how I found something that has never left me: at the end of a sapphic ad, there would be the final line: “No drugs, no head games, no bis.”
Fan-fucking-tastic. I was rated in with drugs and mind games. I had expected the queer community to welcome me with open arms, and instead, I was clearly being told I was not welcome.
But this was the ‘90s. Lesbians had consolidated into “womyns-only” bubbles, and bis and trans-women were very much not invited. Bis were seen as “disease-carriers” who brought HIV and other STIs into the lesbian community (because apparently women are so pure and rose-scented that they cannot pass STIs to each other, even when eschewing safer sex precautions altogether…) Bis brought drama into community which would definitely would never have had drama without them cough choke by getting poor innocent lesbians to fall in love with them, and then up and leave those poor lesbians for a man.
I made it all the harder for myself by being hardcore goth at this point. At this point in time, the lesbians who went to Lilith Fair or went on women-only cruises all dressed the same. It was a type of soft-butch: short hair, chinos, plaid shirts. Minimal or no makeup! Someone who was dressed in all black, with heavy eyeliner and black lipstick, wearing fetish fabrics and velvet skirts was definitely not someone to be trusted or welcomed.
I threw myself against the lesbian community like against a brick wall for years. Eventually I figured out that a high percentage of my fellow goth girls were bi+, and anyone who dressed outside the mainstream was a potential partner. Lesbians didn’t want me, and I didn’t have particularly much to talk about with them.
Now many of these problems were mitigated by me finding Michelle my senior year of college and being handfasted with her for the next eight years. But Michelle and I were poly (and thus looking to date others). We longed to be in queer women’s spaces, so we dealt with the prejudice against us together.
Our handfasting. Yes, we were very geeky gals 🤓🤓
Spilling the 🫖: Astryiah’s physical description is based on the first gal at college I got to fool around with: Belle. She was perfect in every way, one of the most gorgeous women I’ve had the pleasure of being intimate with. She wasn’t really sure if she was bi, but she was willing to give it a try with me, and I will be eternally honored. I’ve lost touch with her. I wonder where she is now—and who she is with now…
Happy Pride to all of my dear Alphabet Soup Community. I welcome and cherish you no matter what letters describe you or what colors grace your flag!
OK, I’m out of reader questions now! Hit reply to this email and tell me what to write about next in the RavenLife segment!
See you in two weeks…and as always, be good or be good at it! 😘
💭 I’d love to hear your thoughts, questions and feedback: drop me a note 📨
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