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For so many of us the first time we kissed a girl is an experience we’ll never forget, because most of us didn’t grow up with books or TV shows or movies or IRL examples of gay smooching. It’s exciting! And terrifying! And sexy! And sometimes weird! Almost always it’s revelatory! We kissed girls and we liked it (and so we kept doing it). Here are our stories of the first time we kissed girls.

Heather Hogan, Senior Editor

I was in my mid-20s the first time I kissed a girl and as I was kissing her I thought my heart was going to whack its way right out of my chest. I hadn’t come out to myself. I hadn’t even entertained the idea that I was gay for longer than about ten seconds. We were spending the summer serving our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and she knew about the charismatic gifts and I knew about Biblical hermeneutics and her hands were so small and her eyes were so big and she made me fresh squeezed orange juice in the morning.

Here’s how it happened: We were sitting on a dock with our feet dangling in the water, no stars that night, no moon. Probably we were talking about baptism. What John the Baptist meant when he said this. What Paul meant when he said that. I leaned back a little and so she leaned back a little. She touched her pinky to my pinky. If I live a thousand years I’ll never forget way she flicked her eyes up at me when I turned my head toward her. It was a car crash. Everything in slow motion. I’d kissed boys and it was fine, but when she put her lips on mine I realized my whole life had been building to that moment. I laughed and she laughed; we both said, “Oh!”

I kissed her a lot that summer. I kissed her everywhere. I kissed her when we left for home from our summer abroad and I kissed her one last time standing in the church where she was getting ready to marry the man God had chosen for her.

Riese, 36, Editor-in-Chief

all names have been changed 

Fall, my senior year at boarding school in Northern Michigan. A Saturday night. My best friend Astrid’s boyfriend had picked up vodka for us in town, which we’d been whispering about all day while eating toast for dinner (to get drunk quicker) and later, by the lake, watching the sunset and plotting.

We snuck my boyfriend Joe into Gwen and Edie’s room and there were all these fairy lights and we drank and were drunk and everything felt warm and easy, like nobody cared about Early Decision, just Madonna on the CD player and little cafeteria cups of vodka, chased with cheap juice. Astrid had been losing it a little, like so many of us did that year, but nobody knew how to ask about it, or what was going on exactly. She hung out with Joe and I a lot, joking that we were a threesome, sneaking in between us to hold both our hands on walks around campus. I didn’t mind. I figured Joe didn’t mind either, ’cause she was the most beautiful girl in school. Everybody wanted to hold her hand.

I don’t remember how Astrid and I ended up in the closet together with Joe — I mean this literally, we were inside Gwen and Edie’s closet — but I know it was Astrid’s idea. It was pitch dark in there, crowded with coats. Astrid commanded us, like a bossy girl telling her friends what to do on the playground, “now, you kiss Marie, and now I’ll kiss Joe, and now —” and then it was our turn to kiss, and we did. I could feel her teeth, and everything was clear and sharp as vodka.

At some point Emily showed up and caught up, and at another point Astrid was kinda leaning against the railing of Edie’s bed, pulling me towards her. “Look, Joe, two girls kissing!” Edie squealed, laughing while Joe tried to get her to quiet down. “It’s two girls kissing! Ewwww!”

Then Gwen got sick and was in the tiny bathroom, and now Emily was sick too? So Astrid and I went upstairs to her room to pee. Gwen and Edie were on the first floor, which had doors that opened to the outside, but Astrid’s room was in a traditional dorm hallway. So we slipped out of Gwen and Edie’s room, careful to close the door so not to reveal Joe’s presence to any passers-by. We didn’t see anyone as we crept up the stairs, dashed down the second floor hallway, and slipped into her room and, eventually, onto her floor.

“See, your boobs are bigger than mine,” she said, her hand up my shirt. I mean, at least that was settled. Nothing felt weird, just different. Mostly I was just dumbstruck that the girl everybody had a crush on, even though she was my best friend, had chosen me to kiss, tonight. She’d never kissed a girl before either. I’m not sure that she ever did again. (Besides me, again.)

When we went back downstairs to check on our friends, the door we’d so carefully closed had been flung wide open. Jen The Mormon (who’s name has NOT been changed because I am calling her out) was standing in the entrance. We could see Gwen, and Edie, but no Joe or Emily. (Joe had already left, it turned out, and Emily was still throwing up.) Apparently, Jen had felt suddenly inspired to perform room inspections at 10pm on a Saturday night. I turned to Astrid, and she turned to me, and there was nothing to do but run, and we did, back to my dorm, where we chugged Listerine and doused ourselves in Plumeria and generally freaked out.

Gwen, Edie and Emily would all be suspended for a week. Their parents had to drive to school and take them home, Emily and Edie lost their spots as Valedictorian and Salutatorian, respectively, and all three, now in possession of a disciplinary action on their college applications, were rejected from their first-choice schools.

The only reason I wasn’t there, and therefore wasn’t also punished, was because I’d been kissing a girl. We felt guilty and obvious, and maybe we were. But nothing else was.

Kayla, 25, Staff Writer

I was in eighth grade, and Valerie and I were sleeping over at Katie’s house, as we often did. We were playing Confessions, a rather straightforward game where we just tell each other secrets about ourselves. It was mostly a way for Valerie to tell us how many things she had done with how many boys. Katie and I, veritable nerds, struggled to come up with confessions to share. We were both rule followers who didn’t drink or sneak out or disobey our parents. I had a confession, but I couldn’t share it with them: I was in love with Katie.

Somehow, the topic of the impending eighth grade dance came up, and Valerie asked if we were going with anyone. I had been banking on going alone, having never been asked out by a boy in any capacity, so Katie and I had made a pact to go together without dates. Obviously, I loved this plan. But a few days before our sleepover at Katie’s, a sweet boy named Kenny did ask me to the dance. I politely declined, telling him I was going with a friend. Katie was still holding out some hope to be asked by her crush Andy, but with only a week left before the dance, it was looking like our plans to go together remained intact.

“We’re going together,” I informed Valerie, nudging Katie with my elbow.

Valerie grimaced and shook her head. “You have to have a date!”

Katie shrugged. “No one has asked us.” I decided not to tell either of them about Kenny.

Valerie temporarily left it at that, and the game of Confessions resumed. “I’ve made out with a girl,” Valerie declared, nonchalantly. My heart fluttered, and my palms heated, but I tried to play it cool. Katie, however, was immediately uncomfortable and shocked.

“Who?!” she asked. “Are you like…bi?” She whispered that last word, the same way she occasionally whispered “shit” on the soccer field when she was frustrated.

“No, silly. I was practicing,” Valerie explained. “It was just Aubrey last year. How are you supposed to get good at making out if you don’t practice, you know?”

“Makes sense,” I said, nodding, as if she were explaining a simple math concept.

Katie was unconvinced. “I would never.”

My world imploded, but I remarkably kept my cool, trying not to think too hard about what Valerie and her older sister’s friend Aubrey making out might look like. Katie got up and left the basement to get more sodas.

“Do you think you’ll have your first kiss at the dance?” Valerie asked while Katie was gone.

“I don’t know,” I said, but before I could say anything else, her lips were on mine. It was quick, soft, over too fast. I had just been about to put my hand on the back of her neck when she pulled away and giggled.

“Practice,” she said. “ I won’t tell Katie.”

I had never been kissed by anyone before. And for three years after that, I would pretend it never happened. For most of high school, everyone knew me as a girl who had never been kissed, and I let them believe it.

Katie came back. We talked a little more and I fought the urge to touch my lips, avoided eye contact with Valerie, unsure what she was thinking, why she had done that, if she knew. We went to sleep, we woke up, we went home. Andy did eventually ask Katie to the dance, although I would go on to take her to two homecomings and two proms…as friends. Valerie and I never talked about the kiss.

Erin, 31, Staff Writer

I had my first kiss with a girl at 18 years old. She’d be my girlfriend a month later, but at the time we were just two friends who’d spent months and months flirting each other. It was after the boys soccer team’s party (thrown with heterosexual intentions) where we spent the entire night talking to each other. As the night was winding down, she invited me back to her apartment so, you know, I wouldn’t have to drive home. When went got inside, she stopped me just outside the room I’d been sleeping in night after night for months before that, pressed me against the back of the couch, and kissed me. Shout out to the drinks we both knew I needed to get me to the point of kissing her back.

Stef, 33, Vapid Fluff Editor

I’ve written about it before, but it was at a party called MisShapes at a club called Don Hills in Manhattan, and I was 22 years old. I was out with an engaged couple I’d met a few months earlier on line for a The Faint concert. We’d been sorta flirting subtly via Livejournal comments or whatever but I wasn’t really fully aware of what was going on or what their arrangement was. Anyway, we had been out together all day having a fantastic time, and now we were dancing and very, very drunk. Jerome and I kissed first, and I panicked, and after they explained that it was all OK, apparently I kissed Amy. My memory of the night is blurry, but I know the three of us kept making out all night long in various locations, and then when I got home my cat died.

No, I’m not making this up. I got home and my cat Zero was missing, but he’d vomited and I could hear him wailing. When I finally found him hiding in the corner shelf of my bedroom he was paralyzed from the waist down and the lower half of his body was ice cold. I sobered up FAST, rushed him to the emergency vet, and by 6 AM or so I’d been forced to make a really difficult decision about my beloved little dude, who turned out to have a debilitating heart defect. It was one of the worst nights of my entire life.

My luck with women’s been about the same ever since.

Molly P, 31, staff writer

It was New Year’s Eve, and I was headed to a party as a newly minted college woman, aged 18 years, moved away from home for three months, so I knew everything of course. My two best friends and I went to a house party with, like, perhaps six people other than us and most of them
were dudes. Which is fine, I like dudes. I was at that time trying to figure out WHY I didn’t want to get back together with my high school boyfriend who was offering me everything — why didn’t I want to be with him, my mom would ask, and would say that if I wanted to be, I would be.

ANYWAY I was all up in my own feelings and getting drunk which is a great combo for me. I’d been awake to the realization about my queerness for a while, but didn’t have the words yet, let alone the ovaries to actually do anything about it. So when I walked out of the bathroom at one point and the one other girl at the party walked up and kissed me out of nowhere, I was surprised and not mad and I kissed her back and felt THINGS HAPPENING TO MY BODY, but also still surprised. She said she’d been dared to do it, and smiled at me. I honestly have no idea who she is, but remember her fondly.

Mey, 30, Trans Editor

So, I recently said in an Autostraddle+ advice article that the first time I kissed a girl was last year. Here’s the story behind that. So, growing up I hated myself and my body and even though I was attracted to girls, I didn’t try to kiss any until after I came out. Even then, in Idaho it’s really hard to find a girl who’s interested in kissing a fat trans girl. Anyway, Cecelia is the sun in my sky, my best friend and my favorite person in the universe and one of my favorite things to do is to find new ways to show her that I love her, so before camp last October I asked if I could kiss her. When we first saw each other I definitely chickened out. But Cecelia is amazing and is so great at figuring out just what I need from her so it was actually her that initiated the kiss. The night of the Dead Lesbian Haunted Hayride, Cecelia and I were playing Willow and Tara, because we’re witches. I was nervous and not at all ready for my performance. But again, Cecelia is the best and when the lights went off so the first group of campers could come in, she said “I think this would be a good time for that kiss!” So with the lights off, dressed like a pair of TV lesbian witches, I got my first girl kiss from my best friend. It was amazing and wonderful and still Cecelia has by far the softest lips of anyone I’ve ever kissed.

KaeLyn, 34, Staff Writer

Christina was the first girl to come out to be as bi, after I came out to her as bi. She was a little older, in college, and I was finishing high school. She had long frizzy hair, a smile that was simultaneously sincere and goofy, and her entire wardrobe was fitted graphic tees and utility pants. She wrote poetry and she often cooked me dinner. We said we were soul mates, but like all past loves, my feelings for her have faded with time. (We haven’t spoken in over 10 years, but that’s another story.)

At the time, she was the person who knew me best, who loved me at my most vulnerable, who didn’t care if I gave her ex a blow job in her bedroom because our relationship with each other was what mattered most. She may have been the first girl I loved, but neither of us had been with a woman and we cautiously flirted around the edges of physical affection. I think that is what made it so pure and so intense. We touched, but never touch.

One night, when I was on break from my freshmen year of college, I was hanging with Christina, some rando guy, and her ex (of course) at her apartment. After several wine coolers, the guys dared us to kiss each other. We giggled and pressed our tipsy sweet mouths together as if it was the most natural thing, like it was just a thing our mouths were meant to do. We later ended up pairing off and hooking up with those guys (her with rando, me with her ex) and then we switched pairs (her with her ex, me with rando—though I didn’t like him and wouldn’t let him touch me).

I had a boyfriend back at college and it was the first time I cheated on him. I think he always knew it was more about Christina than the guy I hooked up with. Coincidentally, Christina hooked up with that boyfriend after we broke up. I still think that what we actually wanted was to hook up with each other.

Nora, Fashion and Beauty Editor

I was maybe 12, attending a horseback riding camp somewhere in New England. It was me, about 50 or 60 other teens and tweens, and a bunch of really spectacular Morgan horses with flaxen (gold!) manes — intensely homoerotic in a “first half hour of Wonder Woman” sort of way. We were playing truth or dare one night in our cabin, and I was dared to kiss a girl whose name I can’t remember (sorry, girl!), but who definitely had some bitchin’ Jill Cunniff of Luscious Jackson-style skunk highlights. The kiss felt unexpectedly electric to me, as short as it was, and I spent the next eight years or so kind of pining for another opportunity, but not knowing how to go about the whole thing. Eventually, I realized what a great place New York was to make out with people of all genders. God, I’m so glad not to be an adolescent anymore.

Rachel, 28, Managing Editor

I can’t believe that it wasn’t until college but I guess it wasn’t because I can’t remember another one and like, I’d definitely remember, right? I had had a crush on her forever and she was a Gemini and had a crush on everyone. She invited me over to her dorm room — a single! What a luxury — at like 11 pm, so I was hopeful. We started out sitting on her bed and talking and she showed me, nonchalantly, the enormous swollen spider bite on her thigh that she had gone to the health clinic for earlier that day. Gross, I remember thinking vaguely, but I was still not dissuaded in any way from wanting to make out with her. Eventually we were lounging on her bed and then reclining and then laying next to each other with our faces like a millimeter apart, like Alison and Emily on PLL, and I don’t remember who kissed who first. My whole body felt like Christmas lights and I thought oh, it’s really not like this with boys, but mostly I thought about kissing her and then everything else that happened after.

Laneia, 36, Executive Editor

Can I just link you to this? Ummmm I was 22, I think. She was 23. We were best friends and I loved her more than anything — like some part of my body had been pulled out of me and used to make some part of her body. I was married to a man and we had one child together (she’d nicknamed him Monkey). I told her that I wanted to talk to her about something the next time she came over to drink and listen to music in my garage, which was weekly. The something I had to tell her was that I thought we should kiss, plain and simple. We were best friends and there were these things we didn’t know about each other, like what we looked like naked or how we kissed, and that had just struck me as weird and I thought we should correct it. My husband was out of town for work and she came over with her boyfriend. He hung out with us for a little while and then went inside to watch TV [and continue ruining my life by simply existing]. After several drinks and cigarettes and CDs, I told her everything: that I thought of her when I masturbated, that I’d never kissed a girl and I wanted to, that I wanted that girl to be her, and that I wanted to see her naked. She agreed because somehow by the grace of the universe that specific strategy is super effective, so we closed the garage door and took off our shirts and bras under the florescent light. I asked if we should kiss and she said yes and suggested we stand up. One of us hit the light switch, but the streetlamp, bless it, made it possible to see every single detail. I touched her breasts like they were landmines. When it was clear that kissing was the next logical step, I realized I didn’t know where to put my hands. I decided they’d go on her lower back. Then I had to remember how to kiss at all, which took some focus. This all happened within two seconds but because I’d apparently left my body and was floating above the room, I watched it all play out in slow motion. The kiss started off innocently, like this was just a silly thing girls did after too many drinks, and then I went into a special kind of autopilot that I didn’t know was programmed in me. My hands went to all the places I wanted them to go but was too afraid to plan for. I kissed her the way you kiss a person when you’re maybe three minutes away from fucking. I took landmines into my mouth and lived. It would be another three years before I realized I was gay, but that was the night I learned what it felt like to get exactly what you wanted, and it was fucking brilliant.

Reneice, 28, Staff Writer

The very first time I ever kissed a girl was during a game of spin the bottle in middle school. I don’t remember which girl it was because the whole thing was a blur, I just remember wondering why the girls were all SO excited about landing on boys when the girl on girl kisses were all way better executed and incredibly hot. I didn’t realize I was gay at the time and just thought that’s how everyone felt about the excitement of the game and kissing lots of people. Oops!

Yvonne, 26, Senior Editor

The first time I kissed a girl was in my room when I was 17. My best friend and I came up with an elaborate plan why she had to sleep over my house one Friday night. We had to be at the band hall the next day because we were performing with the marching band in our town’s annual parade. Even though the parade was in the evening and we had plenty of time to arrive on time to the band hall, we justified that E had to sleep over so we wouldn’t be late. Yeah, I know, it didn’t make sense. It was just an excuse so that E could spend the night. I think deep down inside ourselves, we both knew what was about to go down when she came over.

You see, the few months leading up to that night, my best friend and I had definitely built up some sexual tension. We were inseparable and constantly talked to each other — in between classes, at lunch, after school, on the phone for hours. We slapped each other’s asses in the band hall like we were fucking jocks in the locker room and held hands sometimes because that’s what friends did, I guess. Our gazes met each other and lingered there for longer than what was “normal.”

We rented a couple of movies to watch — Superbad and Brokeback Mountain. Some spot on choices for that night, tbh. I had a futon and TV in a nook area of my room which was ideal for making out with girls in secret. We watched Superbad while we sat close to each other and held hands like it was just a chill thing to do. I don’t know what prompted it but E turned to me and kissed me. I didn’t pull away and I kissed her back. I wrote in my journal a few weeks later, “It was the weirdest but normalest thing I’ve ever done.” After that kiss, we didn’t finish the rest of the movie and instead went straight to bed, if you know what I mean.

Carmen, 31, Staff Writer

Man, so many of these are really great stories. They’re detailed and poignant. I wish I had something of that caliber to share. The first time I kissed a girl was aided by alcohol at a house party in college, so a lot of the more finite details exist somewhere at the bottom of a Bacardi Coco bottle. The girl I kissed wasn’t a girl I loved, or even really pined for, so there isn’t a lot of sentimentality attached.

In fact, my favorite thing about the kiss was the song playing during it, Prince’s “Darling Nicki”. That’s such an undeniably sexy song, you know? I always felt like I should get some extra cool points for the perfect background music, even if I didn’t personally have anything to do with it.

Anyway, I had been drinking and dancing for a few hours already, and the main thing I remember was how sweaty and sticky everything felt. I went to college in Minnesota, which meant it was below freezing nearly six months out of the year and every house seemed to have the heat burning. I was in the basement, standing beneath the vented window, appreciating the sharp January air against my sweaty back.

I was talking to a friend of friend about… something? We were doing that thing where you laugh and then your limbs fall on the other person. And then she licked her lips. Or maybe I licked my lips? Someone definitely licked someone’s lips. The next thing I knew we were kissing. Her lips were soft, and tasted like more than a bit like rum. I don’t remember who pulled away first, but I’ll never forget how dizzy my head felt. The way that it felt like firecrackers were launching just beneath my skin. How the whole world blurred and spun counter-clockwise.

I remember that she drunkenly laughed again. I tried to join her and shake my head out of the fog quickly consuming me before some other friends joined our conversation. I think I recovered well? But, inside I knew, it was over. I was a goner.

Sarah, 30, Business & Design Director

So I had to dig through my old LiveJournal to figure out when this actually was. Reader, I am very shocked by what I found. My first kiss with a girl was inextricably linked with my first time with a girl.

I was still very much in the closet, and only out to a few people. Even so, I was comfortable expressing myself to the people who did know. When I reconnected with an old friend and she told me she was bisexual, we began flirting with the idea of “us” immediately. There’s lots of stuff in my journal about late-night AIM sessions, feature-length fantasies, and even something about how cute she looked “biting her lip for me” while we were “camming on MSN” (?!) We eventually went on a movie date where we grazed each other’s inner thighs with our fingernails the entire time but didn’t kiss. Her touches confirmed what I already knew–I was really, really gay.

A week later she came over to watch But I’m A Cheerleader! while we laid in my bed. I reached for her hand first. We intertwined our legs and pulled our bodies closer, and I guess that’s when we kissed? There is no mention of it in the journal entry! Honestly, I just launch into the sex part with the sort of teenage exposition that leaves nothing to the imagination and is loaded with terrible metaphors, like:

“i can still feel her hand between my legs… pressing, circular… like the waves after a day at the beach.”

You’re welcome.

Raquel, 29, Staff Writer

I was a terrible mess in college. What a surprise! An experience no one else has had! My freshman year, three years into a terrible relationship with an awful guy two years older than me and from  the same rigid religious high school I had the misfortune of attending, I finally got up the (liquid) courage to tell him that “I think I might be bisexual”. God help me.

Naturally, like many a douchebag before him, he was elated. He began encouraging me to bolster my (liquid) courage more and more often, and soon, it happened—my first drunken, clumsy make-out of many with a straight (“straight”) girl. My memory is watery—or rather, beery—but I remember it happening in the back seat of our mutual friend’s Jeep, in the dark with the headlamps behind us washing over our faces in waves. I remember it was wet, her mouth felt like a large strange cavern, guarded by lips unsure of what shapes to make for this experience. I remember it was, well, pretty terrible. There was none of the natural movement I knew to follow when kissing my boyfriend, and, disappointed, I concluded that maybe I wasn’t bi after all. I wondered, idly, as we continued attempting this sloppy, sloppy makout, what inspired all the “Party Makeout” girls I’d watched with confusing and awkwardly-warm feelings. Is it really just for the titillation of the gross men around us? Even in my preformed, pre-feminist time, this was a disappointing thought for me.

Still, this didn’t keep me from beguiling (and, sometimes, begging) all my beautiful, straight friends to kiss me. It was only many awful makeouts with drunken straight girls later—when I first kissed a beautiful lesbian I had been following around for an entire semester—that I realized, Oh. It isn’t that I’m not attracted to women—I am very attracted to women—it is that those women were not attracted to me. The spark and the fire and the immediate fluency I felt with her lips eclipsed all the previous kisses into a jump-cut of misses. But that, maybe, is a different roundtable.

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