That night, Matie and Jamie convinced me (against my natural inclination to avoid live entertainment) to go to the evening’s scheduled attraction, a comedy set by Elvira Kurt. Before Elvira performed we were welcomed by Tisha, Olivia’s VP and our cruise director, who greeted the “ladies of Olivia” and announced a few of the events coming up over the next few days, including a meetup for the “Older, Wiser Lesbians,” or “OWLs.” (“Date me, OWLs!” Matie whisper-yelled next to me.) 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. Indeed, along with the women who identify as bisexual, there seemed to be a fair number of women who say they hadn’t had any girl-and-girl experiences and identified as straight, but were nonetheless game – not surprising, really, given how likely women are to be attracted to both sexes. 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. I got a lot of young women in their 20s asking me how they could run a blog,” she says. “What I really noticed about Skirt Club at the beginning was that rather than just being hedonistic, it was a great social opportunity to meet liberal, like-minded women. And it’s typical to how women express sexuality. It’s not just nudity and sex.”

On Thursday night it launched in Melbourne, welcoming about 50 women for an invitation-only evening of bubbles, burlesque by Ferri Maya, and a chat about “the ancient art of women pleasuring women” from sexpert Ruth Ostrow.My husband and I spent the morning on a private, nude island near Raiatea with a group of swingers, getting full body tans while letting husbands and wives take turns playing with my naked breasts. I would move out of an apartment that I adored, that I’d almost single-handedly furnished, that I thought I’d live in for years to come. I would hug my landlady, crying again because she was crying for me.

This put me in a great mood as we returned to the ship, which must have turned on some kind of sex magnet. The ‘lace and latex’ theme nights are some of the most popular for Skirt Club. Picture: Victoria Dawe Soon, a pinup-style, bejeweled burlesque dancer with wavy pink hair and opulent breasts begins to shake and strip to the music. Burlesque shows are a rarity at most sex parties in the Bay Area, but a staple at Skirt Club events. Homegrown “play parties” are fairly low-key here, and with more diversity of women. Instead of the mostly skinny, femme, cis-gender women at Skirt Club, local parties tend to have women of all sizes from all parts of the gender, race and sexuality spectrum. It’s easy to see why Skirt Club, with its palatial seating, soft lighting and femmy vibe, could be an easier sell to women who don’t want to go too far outside of the hetero-norms they’re used to. It seemed logical we should open there. Two of our members had solid experience in luxury event management and offered to head up the 2018 program for Skirt Club Melbourne. We enjoy involving our members in the growth and development of our community.” I’d never considered before that being a femme with a butch partner needn’t be some inequitable hetero horror show, but instead could be something imbued with incredible queer comfort and power. It could be fun. It could be hot.

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At dinner, we wondered why we couldn’t have both: explicitly lesbian spaces that also explicitly love, and welcome, trans and gender-nonconforming people. Our identities shouldn’t be opposed, but in communion with each other: butch and femme, trans and cis, lesbian and queer. I ask Moon what she thinks of the party. The Skirt Club events, she says, are providing femme, bi curious women their own space to experiment. “It’s a safe place to explore without it having to ‘mean’ anything about their identity,” she says. “I don’t think the parties are gay, per se. Just as I don’t think fooling around with someone of the same sex is necessarily gay. The words we have to describe sexuality are too frail to contain the dynamism of the human experience.” The event themes that have proved most popular are the Shibari rope bondage party (dress code: latex and lace) and the Queen of Hearts party (dress code: Queens and white rabbits),” she says. The Skirt Club was founded by Ms LeJeune in the UK in 2014. The aim, she says, was to promote glamour, performance “and much more — away from the prying eyes of men and facilitate one night of consensual experimentation: no consequences, no questions”.