Apparently Lauren Levin and Lauren Blitzer wanted to read a book about lesbians on the prowl who pay more attention to the labels on their designer clothes than the labels of identity politics.

The title alone evokes the image of a lady-loving Miranda, Samantha, Carrie and Charlotte gathering to swap post-conquest tales. For the freshly-out lesbian who doesn't have blunt-talking lesbian friends, this book could be the next best thing.

The subtitle--So Your Prince Charming is Really a Cinderella--
could lead readers to presume the focus of this book is about how to find a solid life partner. On the contrary, these twenty-somethings consider happily-ever-after as an abstract concept on a distant horizon. Here's a more fitting subtitle: How young affluent femme lesbians get laid in Manhattan.

Each chapter focuses on a different aspect of lesbian life such as coming out, how to find women to date, and sleeping with a woman for the first time. The authors provide related vignettes from their own lives along with experiences recounted by other women they interviewed. With a few exceptions, the majority of the women are in New York City.

The stories about sexual encounters have a tell-all quality that queer and queer-curious women will gobble up (not to mention straight male readers). The reports on how relationships developed to get to the actual sex, however, tend to border on tedious. Since so much of the flirting occurs virtually, readers get a play-by-play report brought to you by Friendster, Blackberry and instant messaging. Yep, reading about someone else's cyber flirting is as exciting as it sounds.

Sometimes the authors over-reach their goal to sound hip and sassy, only to end up sounding downright obnoxious. Cringe-worthy examples include Levin's comment about an online flirtation: “This woman had never even met me. I could be an Amish midget with a severe case of Tourette's syndrome for all she knew.” A few pages later Blitzer writes: “Seeing two beautiful, deceivingly straight-looking women holding hands on the street turns about as many heads as a ghetto thug drinking a venti Strawberries and Creme Frappucino with whip.”

The authors end each chapter with peppy platitudes, as if they are hosting a talk show and are grasping for a tidy way to answer all the dangling unanswered questions before they cut to commercial. Tips they share include gems like: open your heart and someone special will come along, and you won't die of a broken heart.

To be fair, this bright-eyed, plucky tone could very well be just the encouragement baby dykes need to coax them out of the closet. For this ancient thirty-something, however, I can't help but recognize a coming-out process I've seen countless times before: mimicking whatever gay images are most accessible. It's a process of trying to become what you think you are supposed to be before settling into your own skin.

Even Levin describes her own hyper-gay phase that newly-out people experience: “The first few months after I came out,” she writes, “I felt as though I had something to prove. You say I'm not lesbian, well, I'll show you who's gay. I morphed into a ragingly hormonal gay superhero.”

Her description sounds like it was so long ago, she has the distance now to smile at the thought of her old self. But considering Levin wrote this book after being out for just one year, it's still too soon to be writing in the past tense about the process.

Page 1 / 2 - Next