Before I realized I was a lesbian, I thought I was a prude.

From childhood to my early teenage years, it was far easier to conceptualize my aversion to sex — the dirtiest word in my Southern Baptist vocabulary — than to address the hunger fueled by my obsessive friendships with women.

I thought I had enough evidence to believe I was self-aware. So mature for my age, with a good head on my shoulders, responsible and independent and polite. I was a good girl. I kept my head down and hung out with other good girls.

At sleepovers, we binged movies: sometimes teen dramas or comedies, and sometimes horror. We watched Jennifer’s Body and Black Swan, shrieking with thrilled laughter when Amanda Seyfried straddled Megan Fox in bed, hiding behind our hands when Mila Kunis went down on Natalie Portman. In games of truth or dare, I invented crushes on effeminate boys at school and treated masturbation with the same fearful piousness I leant to demonic possession.

The most trouble we got into was pulling all-nighters to scroll tumblr, reblogging DSLR photos of Arizona green tea and poems about death, and, to my absolute horror: having competitions to see which of us could kiss the longest. I always lost. Afraid to commit to more than a peck, I hid behind indifference. I claimed I didn’t have the same needs they did; didn’t need to hook up with boys, didn’t stay out late, didn’t get drunk, didn’t make out. My friends teased me lightly and gave me space. They didn’t push.

Now, I feel guilty recounting those days. They gave me grace, and I was a starving liar.

***My first experience with cannibalism, and with queer women in a movie, was Jennifer’s Body. Always a fool for a dark-haired bitch, Jennifer made me weak in the knees.

When Jennifer first awakens as a bloodthirsty succubus, she heads to her best friend Needy’s house in search of something to eat. Slicked head to toe in black bile, Jennifer pins Needy to a wall as if preparing to bite down on her throat. But Jennifer just drags her mouth over the skin in a near kiss before shoving Needy away. Beyond her sharpened teeth and impossible strength, Jennifer’s restraint appeared to me to be the most supernatural part of her transformation. Needy was a perfect, tempting meal. Even at her most feral, Jennifer didn’t bite.

I imagined having so much self-discipline like it was an aspiration I could explain to teachers. When I grow up, I want to be able to control myself. 

In the same year I watched Jennifer deny herself, I had a friend — let’s call her Leah — who came out as bisexual. Enviously, I thought Leah was making shit up. How could she already know herself well enough to declare that was true?

Asking Leah how she knew she was bisexual was impossible without raising questions I couldn’t answer. But her announcement struck so much anxiety in me that I attempted to read a bible I’d received from vacation bible school the summer before, an ugly, floppy paperback with an American flag cover. I gave up five pages in.

Instead of questioning why the idea of someone I loved being queer could unsettle me so deeply, I instead — humiliatingly — told the rest of our friends I had a crush on the same boy Leah liked. When they ended up dating a few months later and I quickly realized I’d lost both of them as a daydreaming possibility, I needed a new boy to pin my imagined interest on. After my friends spent another sleepover excitedly texting the guy who confessed he wanted to date my friend Sabrina, I flared with a rush of hot panic and blurted out I wanted to kiss him too. Sabrina, and everyone else in the room, were confused. I couldn’t blame them; my “crush” came out of nowhere. I even confused myself. She went on to date that guy for the rest of our high school years, and I never brought it up again.

Now, of course, I know those boys were camouflage. What my fickle dyke heart wanted was to crave what Leah or Sabrina craved, mimicking their crushes on men in hope their desires might become my own. It was the closest I could come to having Leah or Sabrina all to myself.

In Luca Guadagnino’s film Bones and All (2022), Maren and Lee are young cannibals coming into their carnal appetites. Despite their primary relationship with one another, queer desire is blatant on screen. An early shot opens with Maren lying beneath a glass table inches away from her friend Madeline, softly stroking Madeline’s hand as she asks Maren questions about her life and family. When other girls at the sleepover interrupt, Madeline cuts them off with: “We’re trying to talk.” Maren stares at her with adoring, half-lidded eyes.

Of course, Maren and Lee’s relationship is the crux of Bones and All, but the most important moment to me is that sleepover. It is the catalyst for the devastation to come and the beginning of Maren’s adulthood. Watching her through the glass tabletop, shifting closer to Madeline with her eyes on the other girl’s lips as they shared secrets, felt like stepping outside of my body and seeing myself at my own sleepovers, all shy admissions and deep, starving inhales. Maren’s urge to slide Madeline’s middle finger into her mouth and deglove it with her teeth overcomes restraint. She needs to eat. Madeline is there with her mouth near Maren’s, asking Maren about herself with her nails painted Copper Fever. So Maren eats.

The forbidden is seductive. Cannibals, like lesbians, are feared for their selective appetites. But in hunger, there can be power — power to consume and be consumed.

After Leah put the idea of queerness in my head, I couldn’t shake it. More than anything, I wanted to understand my body and its reactions: Why did I tense up when she put her arm around me? Why did I feel so angry when she kissed her boyfriend? There was a bottomless, dissatisfied pit in my belly. Need verged on revulsion, intimacy on violence.

I never came out to Leah, even when I began to fear I might also be bisexual. Over the next few years, I buried my suspicions about my sexuality and began to form an overly intimate and codependent friendship. I pored obsessively over tragic gay novels (who the fuck let me read A Little Life at seventeen?) and wrote vague poems about women that I claimed came from the perspective of men, with one of them so intensely focused on describing a girl’s fingers that my teacher asked me if I had a hand fetish. One morning I woke from a nightmare where I’d bitten down on a friend’s skull. The imagery left me so sick that I remember rolling out of bed and spitting into a trashcan. Even now, I could describe the exact way the bone felt under my teeth, the satisfying stretch of my jaw, and the way the gory mess of her head glistened in the aftermath.

I tried to curb my appetite by focusing on disgust: a girl’s saliva trailing between her mouth and the rim of a water bottle, dirt under her nails, torn up cuticles, the smell of sweat on the nape of her neck, the metallic tang of gym class pinnies, overly sweet perfume, unwashed scalp. But all that focus just became fascination. In my classroom voyeurism, I wanted something gross enough that it couldn’t be desirable.

Despite all the vile imagery I conjured, the hunger couldn’t be suppressed. My disgust only pointed toward myself when I stared at those dirty fingernails and found that I still wanted her to slide her hand into my underwear.

Stewing in preached abstinence, consumed by desire, I wondered if every other girl felt the same way that I did — compelled to devour, lit up by voraciousness, unable to stop from brushing another girl’s hair away from her neck, body angling toward her like a plant seeking light. Seeing the fine hairs on her arms prickle with awareness. Revealing the round treat of her shoulder, like an unbitten apple. I made up a lie to comfort myself. Maybe all girls wanted to eat each other. Maybe they also salivated at the thought.

***Survival cannibalism describes the act of eating another person to keep yourself alive when faced with starvation.

I wanted to live, so I ate.

The first girl I had sex with was Catholic. For fun, let’s call her Cathy. We were close friends before we were fucking, which has been the case in every long-term relationship with women I’ve ever had and probably says something about me that begs to be unpacked.

We didn’t tell anyone about the time we spent together. In fact, I would be shocked if Cathy told me today that she’d ever spoken about it out loud. We barely talked about it with each other — rather, fell into blurred intimacy with a wordless, ravenous need that blinded us to the rest of the world. Kissing started on the cheek, then moved to the mouth, as if we could blame it on a mistake. Oops, got your tongue. Secrecy intensified everything. I knew her mouth better than my own. In bouts of affection, I nipped at her wrist, her throat, dug my nails into her thighs to test the limits. Skin seemed like such a tender barrier. Easy to mark and tear. I pushed my own boundaries in search of her revulsion and the bottom of our joint hunger. Over two years, we ate each other in small bites; course after course after course.

Even without a public label, we treated each other like girlfriends. We said all the sweet things that lovers would say. Sometimes, when I had a bad day, Cathy would tell me that she had prayed for me in Mass. And then we would fall into her bed again, mouths on mouths, hands up shirts, hair yanked between rough fingers, devouring, until her tongue lived in my mouth, until it seemed possible to bite down on her shoulder and feel teeth dig into my own. Full was the only way to describe how I felt with her hands on me. Sated at last.

Of course, it couldn’t continue that way. We wanted to live in different states. I was in the throes of an eating disorder that dropped all the weight I would later gain back after college, and she resented my shrinking body. I suspected I was a lesbian, and she insisted our relationship had never been real. Somewhere down the line, it became less about desire and more about mutual destruction.

Showtime’s Yellowjackets tells us in its first episode that a girl will be eaten. Through pagan-esque meals headed by a shrouded antler queen, the show’s cannibalism is portrayed as ritual, sacred, and inevitable. The characters can hope to stave it off, but the need to eat will arrive.

While the show flips between the past, following a group of teenage girls lost in the woods after a plane crash, and a future where their adult selves suffer the psychological aftermath of their violence, I found the high school timeline most compelling, especially in the tenuous bond between Shauna and Jackie. While the two of them are arguably some of the least outwardly queer characters, their messy, codependent friendship begins with Shauna fucking Jackie’s boyfriend behind her back while Jackie latches onto Shauna’s future with territorial resentment, in what feels like a battle for each other’s attention.

After a blowout fight, Jackie freezes to death in the wilderness. Shauna, hallucinating and sick with grief, has a yearnfully romantic conversation with Jackie’s dead body that culminates in Shauna eating Jackie’s ear. Despite Shauna’s grief, Jackie eventually becomes the first one eaten by the girls in a ritualistic bacchanal where they gorge themselves on her roasted body.

Before eating her best friend, Shauna tells Jackie: “I don’t even know where you end and I begin.”

With Cathy, sometimes it felt like we were one body, each satiating kiss taking something from the other person. The closer we pressed, the less I felt like I belonged to myself.

I could be okay with this, I would tell myself. I could be okay with no one ever knowing.

And I thought it was true. I would have done anything to feed on the scraps Cathy and I gave each other, even if it meant never coming out. Weeping, inconsolable, we had vicious fights that now make me cringe to think about, arguments where we accused one another of leaving the other behind. Our hunger trapped us. Together we stagnated, unwilling to push boundaries, like vampires feeding on rats. To grow, rules had to be broken: her belief in God and the weight of her family’s expectations, my desire to be good and my unwillingness to eat, our combined fear of destroying our lives by speaking about the one thing we promised we’d never discuss.

Back then — and even now, if I’m being honest — I was always self-conscious about eating around other people. Choking down the last bites of a meal felt like holding my empty plate up for everyone to scrutinize, so I left dinners unfinished, threw away lunches with half of a sandwich sitting on a tray. Once my mom showed me a home video where I followed her around the house and repeatedly asked her for permission to eat something. Everyone else found it funny. I found it humiliating. Even writing about it now makes my stomach turn.

While I had to restrict myself from what I wanted to devour most, an eating disorder gave me power. If cannibalism was the work of the devil, then anorexia felt closer to godliness. In denial, I had control, as my mutating stomach tried to feed on itself.

We couldn’t survive on bites of each other forever. Eventually, one needed to eat the other.

Cathy insisted that we had done something wrong by being together. I said that we could make it work, that we needed to take time to figure out who we were and what we wanted. We went our separate ways. Time passed. We saw each other only once or twice again and never spoke of what had unfurled between us. After all those years, we eventually stopped speaking entirely. We pretended nothing had ever happened.

But when it came to queerness, like my fatness, it was written all over me. I tried so hard to hide both. I wasn’t fooling anyone. People could always see it on my face.

***Of course, eating has the capability to alter us. Eating can add weight to the body, starvation can wither the body away. Consuming a taboo — flesh, blood — has the power to transform us into something seductively grotesque. Food, in its ties to culture, to family, to affection, to survival, is a way of expressing identity. I am what I eat.

To embrace my lesbianism, I had to accept that hunger — both for intimacy and understanding — was not something to suppress. It was a source of power, connecting me to my most primal self.

Cathy and I were not meant to be together forever, no matter how impossible going our separate ways felt. I wanted to keep her and I wanted to consume her. Eventually, those desires became the same thing. But I didn’t have it in me to self-destruct in the wake of the time we’d spent together. Like Maren with Madeline’s finger in her mouth, I was already too far gone once I’d had the first taste. I needed to bite down and savor it.

The end of our relationship fed into my budding horror obsession and my tentative coming out to friends and family. Surrounded by other horror-loving lesbians, I found that the media that I’d once consumed hot-faced and ashamed as a teenager could now be openly enjoyed. I found new delight in the gory sexual awakening of Raw and listened to Ethel Cain’s album “Preacher’s Daughter” as a daily soundtrack. Despite coming away from Yellowjackets with a wish that it featured a little more girl-eating (sorry!), the relationship between Shauna and Jackie mirrored a codependence that was cathartic to watch. And by the end of Jennifer’s Body, I felt sure that Jennifer’s choice to spare Needy, despite her feral hunger, mirrored my own anxious exploration and restraint with Cathy — afraid of crossing a boundary that might deem me monstrous. It was reassuring to see Needy become her own cannibalistic creature, seeking to satisfy the craving Jennifer gave her.

Community always seemed like it might provide me with permission; if other girls wanted girls, then why couldn’t I? But now living a life where my friends and peers consist almost entirely of queer people, permission isn’t what I needed — rather, companionship. The guilt I felt in my sexuality and my literal starvation is impossible to rationalize when I dedicate my life to living with lesbians, desiring lesbians, reading and watching and listening to media created by lesbians. What used to feel taboo is now my gorgeous, gluttonous life.

Sure, the cannibal and the lesbian are deviants in the most technical sense. We are made different by what we devour, whether physically or mentally. As a lesbian, my body is abnormal in its bending of the rules of heterosexuality and gender. But I find that feeding my appetite allows it to develop into what I always imagined might be my natural state: fueled by primal desire, pleasure invading my gut. There isn’t a single place in my body I can’t feel it.

But maybe all girls know that hunger is liberating. Maybe I’m the last one to learn.

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