Pillow Talk: Ruminations on the Homoerotic Sleepover
Written by Leah (Bunny) Overstreet
Images courtesy of Kendall Bartel
Once upon a sleepover, the girls of my third-grade class scrunched our Disney princess pajama bottoms into booty shorts and tied the front of our satin, cap-sleeved tops for maximum hoochie-ness. I popped my hip and applied lipstick in the shade too-young-to-know-better along with the other girls mimicking their mothers in the vanity mirror— smearing teeny bopper shimmers onto their eyelids and LipSmacker-ing their pouts to maximum glossiness. We were playing out a tale as old as self-insert fanfiction: The most boyish among us, a soccer player with a messy ponytail, had been cast in the role of Justin Bieber in this game of pretend. The rest of the girls squealed and screamed, acting as“ his” super fans while I played the kind of girl who shows up to the concert reading a book. We played out the preplanned script like professionals and —predictably—“ Justin Bieber" was enchanted by my blatant disregard for his existence. Our pretend courtship ended with us under the covers doing whatever it is grownups did when the screen faded to black. Nose to nose, the girl pretending to be a boy asked me if we should kiss for real. And I was too young to understand my want but I let her kiss me on the cheek and I kissed hers in return (at least 2nd base by third-grade standards). Though I must admit that, looking back, I wasn’t kissing Justin Bieber.
I was kissing rough-around-the-edges girlhood. I was kissing cleats stuffed into a backpack by purple, glitter nail-polish fingers. I was kissing wayward curls and hazel eyes. I was kissing a girl rugged enough to be“ the boy one” without much debate. I was kissing that certain something that told me that she probably ended up as much of a mega-dyke as I did all these years later.
Lately I’ve been revisiting the idea of the homoerotic sleepover and the magic of a girl’s bedroom: the crime scene of unspoken tensions and tip-of-the-tongue shame. Girls undressed and pressed close under covers, playing spin the bottle, and practice kissing“ for the boys” knowing damn well that no one brings up kissing games without a target in mind. The nostalgia lingers despite having long graduated from swapping panties and accidental touches in the night and moving on to brazen, blush-inducing, not-so-biblical relations with many a Bushwick dyke’s ex-girlfriend’s ex-girlfriend. I’m surprised to find that the sleepover is still sticky with the magic it’s always had. I still feel emboldened to whisper secrets under the gauzy, tulle canopy of the witching hour. I still find myself tangled in pink sheets with boyish girls confessing our nervousness and laying bare our previous cool-girl facades. And we are still giggling and kicking our feet and gossiping our lusts and even the softer, fleshy feelings beneath the surface. Everything is so much like it always has been but, instead of sleep deprived mothers announcing “lights out,” we have bemused roommates texting us“ giggly girls” to keep it down“ pretty please,” cherry included.
There is something surreal about playing out the same scripts, but this time the intimacy is spoken out loud and, in fact, it is the whole damn point. Growing up, I often felt like I was radiating“ big dyke who wants to kiss all the girls at this party” energy… likely because I was lowkey a massive lesbian who was secretly hoping for one of those classic, movie pillow fights. But now, instead of averting our gazes out of shame and respect, the girl in my room is looking me right in the face, daring me to want her back.
Perhaps some of that sleepover magic lies in the nakedness of another girl’s room. To be surrounded by her most prized possessions and to see how she builds the world around her is very revealing. Maybe it’s just my Taurus rising talking, but I think that the fastest way to fall in love with a gal is through her bedroom.
I consider my bedroom to be the final frontier of my femme seduction, a living gallery of my glittery too-much-ness on display for the objects of my affection. For those who have had the pleasure of my pleasure, my room—carefully curated and filled to the brim with colorful chachkies, handmade zines, and frilly clothes, with walls scantily clad in pussy-pink paint and baddie centerfolds — is the nail in the coffin of my hot-girlness. You can see my point of view, the books that have shaped me, the hobbies I’ve collected over the years. Each piece of hand-selected decor kisses up the neck of my soon-to-be lover whispering sweet nothings like“ she’s got taste” and“ her niche interests are sooooo sexy.” Dare I say the bedroom itself (not just the bedroom’s activities) is one of the most important tools of sapphic courtship. Letting someone into your space is exposing and vulnerable, and that’s before the clothes even come off!
And once they do come off, the sesbian lex is all fine and dandy but I’m more intrigued by the afterglow—when we shuffle to the bathroom in borrowed band tees and silk robes to pee and get water and wash our faces. You see, we spend all of our lives in our dyke drag— calf length jorts and lingerie tops, trucker hats and slip dresses, ribbed tanks and pleaser heels— but once we’ve gotten each other home and we’ve shimmied out of our armor, we’re just girls. Some of us take off our Femme and slip into a Femme that’s a little more comfortable— sans eyeliner and hair ribbons and sequin tops— yet no less ourselves. The butch is stripped of her wife-pleaser and vintage denim and lays in bed with all of her softest parts exposed. The femme’s makeup is smudged to oblivion and her pretty little outfit, which she’s spent hours preparing, is crumpled on the floor. And the next morning we crowd around one vanity, smearing those shimmers and pigments onto our faces and, suddenly, we are those little girls again.
