The First Time You Kiss A Girl

In terms of the homo-rainbow, my colors are pretty straight. I mean, Honey Boo Boo is right, everyone’s a little gay, but I think I’m just not that gay. It comes down to the fact that I just can’t imagine eating pussy. The thought of rubbing my face in a vagina just makes me feel a bit sick, and that’s not a slur on vaginas—I’m just not inspired to eat one. Although I think if I were pressed, like, if I met a girl I was really into or got super drunk, I might be able to touch one, or at least let another girl go down on mine. But generally, I’m not particularly interested in having sex with another girl.

When I was a teenager, I never really questioned my sexuality. I suppose I was lucky enough to know what I wanted in a sexual partner, without feeling pressured by anyone to shift my proclivities in any particular direction. I knew, instinctively, that I liked boys, so everything was very clear. It was a time; however, when boys were obsessed with girls hooking up with other girls, and as the kids in my year began to become sexually active, the buzz around “girl on girl” became a “thing”; although it wasn’t in a way that denoted a certain sexual preference, just in a way that horny teenage boys wanted to have a dirty perve on something that pornography and the media told them they should think of as “hot.”

The first time I kissed a girl was on a football field where the local fair, Essendon Festival (or Esty Festy, as it’s called by local kids and bogans), was being held. We all congregated there at night, as teenagers are wont to do, skulled cans of UDL (pre-mixed, sugary alcohol in cans) that someone’s older sibling had bought us, and tried to avoid the cops. My three best friends and I had gone for a walk, away from the carnival rides and food trucks, across a football oval where there were fewer people, so we could loiter and drink more two buck chuck without being caught while we smoked ciggies and talked about how much of a slapper so-and-so was. We were classy.

The only light was cast from the sickly glow of the festivities one hundred or so meters away, and as we walked back, sort of drunk but pretending to be drunker than we were, my best friend, Stephanie, and I linked our fingers together, giggling and swinging our arms, now joined at the palm, back and forth, dramatically. Rachel and Anita, who were walking ahead of us, turned back. “You guys are so lesbian,” Rachel yelled back. Steph and I didn’t miss a beat.

“Yeah, so what if we are?” Steph yelled back and I added, “Yeah, we pash all the time when youse aren’t looking.”

Anita and Rachel stopped and we caught up to them. “Oh yeah,” Rachel teased, “Well, if that’s true then pash now in front of us to prove it.” Steph and I had never kissed before, and with giggles and disbelief, we faced each other.

“Do you wanna?” I asked her.

“Do you?” she replied. “I guess we share everything like drinks and chewing gum and stuff so I guess it’s not that much different,” she added. I shrugged as she grabbed my face, and we tongue kissed. It wasn’t like kissing a boy. It was soft and gentle, and our tongues gently prodded each other’s, exploring rather than attempting to penetrate and mutilate, seek and destroy, which is the way that teenage boys kiss. I wasn’t aroused, but it certainly was a very pleasant kiss—better than any I’d had before.

“You’re a good kisser,” Steph said when she pulled away. “You too!” I told her, and we laughed hysterically as we hugged each other. Neither of us saw the kiss as a sexual thing, and by doing it, we’d stripped it of all its taboos and saw it for what it was—an intimate act, sure, but one that we were able to engage in out of comfort with one another rather than any burning desire to get into the other’s pants. This acknowledgment, in the hands of a teenage girl, is a potent sort of power.

Rachel and Anita stood by, dumbstruck, and there was a beat before they took off, shrieking across the oval, “Kat and Steph just made out!” as they sprinted toward a group of boys from our school. Steph and I, hand in hand, shot after them, still half drunk and giggling manically.

When we reached the boys, Rachel and Anita were recounting the story, and one of the guys didn’t waste any time in asking us to do it again. As before, Steph and I shrugged, stepped into each other, and began kissing. Except that this time, it was different; we knew what the boys didn’t know, as they began loping around us like monkeys, high fiving each other and slapping their own knees, whopping into the night.

What we knew was that we’d stumbled upon a new sort of sexual power, and it wasn’t the same one we got from having sex with a guy or giving him a blowjob—in those instances, the power was, essentially, still in the hands of the boy, because we were doing those things because we liked him. Now, we were able to perform something that meant nothing to us but that drove the boys absolutely wild. For the first time, I felt in ultimate control because, outside my love for Steph as a friend, the act was entirely devoid of emotion, the way a sex act with a guy, even a kiss, hadn’t yet been for me. Over the ensuing years, all the other girls started catching on, and every party would end up deteriorating into girls making out and the boys oafishly bounding about like apes, beating their chests like fucking morons. But mouth-to-mouth, we girls had a little secret, and as we’d pull apart, smirking at each other, we felt the universe shift, and we become very dangerous little sex weapons indeed.