Lesbian Rendezvous
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Lesbian Rendezvous
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Vikings ' Sapphic Twist Surfaces a Powerful, Modern Woman
Katheryn Winnick, who plays Lagertha on the History Channel's Vikings , provides insight into her character's Season 4 lesbian rendezvous.
From Left: Astrid (Josefin Asplund) and Lagertha (Katheryn Winnick). Photo by Bernard Walsh.
The fearsome female ruler Lagertha will go to war with her nemesis when the History Channel’s Vikings returns for its midseason premiere next week, but actress Katheryn Winnick says that’s just the beginning of the changes for her character. After years of betrayal by the men in her life, Lagertha falls for a woman, the shield maiden Astrid (Josefin Asplund).
This sapphic switch sounds sudden considering Lagertha will battle Queen Aslaug (Alyssa Sutherland), the woman who stole her first husband, Ragnar Lothbrok (Travis Fimmel). But during a recent chat with reporters, Winnick explained how it isn’t that surprising—and that she doesn’t think Lagertha suddenly has become a lesbian.
How did this relationship with Astrid come about? Lagertha didn’t just wake up one day and decide to be a lesbian, did she?
Katheryn Winnick: Lagertha has been betrayed by so many men throughout her life. Obviously, Ragnar cheated on her and asked her to be a second wife. Her second husband was abusive. Then Kalf, who she groomed to be a leader, tried to usurp her own rule. She had to kill him on their wedding day. So her relationship with men [wasn’t great]. I'm not sure she will ever trust a man again.
So it did make sense that she would find comfort in another human being and that that human being happened to be a woman. I don’t feel that Lagertha necessarily is a lesbian; I never played it that way. But she did find a love with Astrid that men have never been able to give her.
The time jump at the end of the first part of Season 4 was about 10 years. How long have they been together when we return for the new episodes?
Their relationship has been more than six or seven years. Astrid is considerably different and brings a breath of fresh air to Lagertha’s life. Josefin has a lot of humor and wit and that’s evident in [the way she plays] her character. Her sense of style and...the way she deals with Lagertha is unique, and that was really a lot of fun to play [opposite Josefin]. I think you’re going to like that relationship.
Lagertha definitely grooms her to be the warrior that she is. It was nice to see that it’s not, “Oh, here are two women who are in bed together.” Their strong bond is not necessarily the sexual part of a relationship, but more of an emotional bond. It’s really beautiful to see.
Lagertha has been betrayed, but she also comes up with some great schemes herself. Does she have an end game with Astrid?
No, I don’t think there is any end game. I think that she sees Astrid as someone who is very comforting. At this stage Lagertha truly feels alone, I feel, because of all the betrayals against her. Even though she has Astrid, I'm not sure how emotionally close she is going to let anybody into her life. But with Astrid there is no other motive other than caring for her.
It seems from the previews that there is going to finally be a reckoning between Lagertha and Aslaug. How will Lagertha take care of business there?
Yes, there is definitely a big scene where Lagertha and Aslaug come face to face. I will say it’s pretty epic; it’s juicy and it’s memorable. I wish I could actually give away more, but it was a great scene to shoot. Lagertha felt that she needed to take back control of Kattegat. She believes Kattegat is being run so badly...and she feels that she is doing the right thing by reclaiming it. Nobody would rule it better than she would because she truly cares about her people.
How has Lagertha kept her moral center in the face of all the changes in her life while a lot of the other characters have not?
It’s the fact that she is constantly getting challenged, her moral compass and her ethics are getting challenged. I think that’s what keeps her honest and it keeps her who she is as Lagertha.
She is formidable, she is strong, but she is also a woman. She is allowed to be vulnerable, she is allowed to be feminist. She is allowed not to have her [crap] together at times and that’s what makes this character so real and fantastic. I think a lot of people identify with not just the strengths of her character as a warrior, but her personality and her strong sense of will.
Going into the rest of Season 4, I think she is really on one hand an everyday woman. I think there are a lot of women who identify with her as a strong person and not necessarily just someone in the Viking era in that time period. She is really a modern woman that everyone can relate to.
Vikings returns at 9/8c, November 30, on the History Channel.
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I wanted to see myself as the cool, hip queer I hoped I was: someone who doesn’t have to subscribe to retrograde and patriarchal notions of what love is, or could be.
“My friends and I don’t wanna be here if this isn’t an actively trans-affirming space. I’m only coming if all my sisters can.”
Our identity hasn’t been able to shake the anti-gay stereotypes of lesbians as uncosmopolitan boomer TERFs, sporting Tevas and cargo pants covered in cat hair.
“I don’t have a husband,” I said. “I’m gay. We’re all gay.”
Olivia is one of the last dedicated venues for lesbian debauchery still standing.
From the very beginning, we moved as if we’d known each other a long, long time.
I saw how much pride she took in her butch womanhood, which wasn’t some androgynous nowhere zone — femininity’s absence — but a whole universe unto itself.
We did a lap around the upper deck before sunset, arms linked, and when we arrived back on the main deck, a big group of lesbians literally cheered .
She told me she’d lived on this earth for 53 years. She knew what she wanted. And now it was my turn to figure that out for myself.
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I didn’t expect that spending a week with a couple thousand lesbians on a cruise ship would push me to radically reconsider the future I’d planned for myself.
It’s night four of the cruise — karaoke night — and everybody’s been picking slow, sad songs. So I decide to wake the place up a little.
The second dinner session has just let out, and the Rendezvous Lounge (which is as tacky as it sounds) is overflowing with lesbians. They’re mostly middle-aged or older; they’re wearing brightly colored tourist T-shirts purchased on our excursion earlier today to St. Kitts; they’re cheering for their new friends; they’re here to have a good time.
I’m determined to do something showstopping, but our offerings are comically limited. No Sheryl Crow, no Michelle Branch. Not even “Total Eclipse of the Heart.”
“These choices are homophobic,” I tell my new friend Dana. She’s technically my press handler, tasked with making sure I see the best that the tour operator, Olivia Travel, has to offer. So far, she’s more than delivered, but the weak karaoke selection — not Dana’s fault! — is a rare low point on a trip that, four days in, has already slowly but surely begun to change my life.
I settle for some Kelly Clarkson, and after my screechy but enthusiastic rendition of “Since U Been Gone,” five (!) different women approach me, complimenting my performance. One of them tells me her friend thinks I’m really cute, and could she buy me a drink?
I’m loose and light and a little sleepy from my second Corona and a blossoming sunburn. Sure, I say, why not, thinking all the while: If any other 27-year-old lesbians could use a self-esteem boost, all they need to do, clearly, is get themselves on an Olivia cruise.
I had only a vague idea of what to expect when I boarded the Celebrity Summit in April for a weeklong excursion to the Caribbean. Olivia, a groundbreaking women’s record label turned lesbian travel company, named for the hero of a Dorothy Bussy novel, has catered specifically to lesbian vacationers since its maiden voyage in 1990. When I reached out to Olivia, the company offered me a press ticket for one of its Celebrity-partnered cruises so that I could get a sense of how it's become one of the most successful lesbian companies of all time . I generally expected to meet some nice older ladies with interesting life stories, to explore the tensions of intergenerational lesbian culture and the fraught future of lesbian spaces, to laze about on a beach in the Virgin Islands and get to say I was swimming and sunbathing “for work.”
What I didn’t expect was everything else that would happen to me — and is still happening to me — thanks to this one little week in my otherwise pleasantly uneventful life.
For one thing, I didn’t expect to have nearly so much fun. I’d been on one cruise before, also to the Caribbean, but I was too little at the time to really remember it. And were it not for this story, there’s no way I would have voluntarily set foot on a cruise ship again. Even though cruise companies are actively trying to capture the millennial dollar , which is sort of working , cruises still aren’t exactly a popular travel option for my peer group; we tend to favor more “ authentic ” travel experiences (whatever that means). And we have plenty of reasons to avoid cruises: Operators exploit their workers ; passengers experience alarmingly high rates of sexual assault ; and the ships destroy the environment , disrupt local communities , and generally disgorge terrifying crowds of oblivious and often racist white people into historic ports, where they can cause a few hours’ worth of chaos before sailing off to their next destination. It’s a particularly ugly (and expensive ) brand of tourism.
So I’m surprised to say I might actually travel with Olivia again, skeptical as I remain of cruise ethics in general. And that’s because of all the things that happened in the eight days I spent aboard the Summit — things I wasn’t remotely expecting.
I didn’t expect to have a profound reckoning with my relationship to my own lesbianism and womanhood. I didn’t expect to make friends I hope to keep for a long, long time. I didn’t expect that spending a few days with a couple thousand lesbians on a floating hotel/casino/mall/amusement park would push me to radically reconsider the future I’d been carefully and painstakingly planning for myself.
Most of all, I didn’t expect to meet Lynette.
When I boarded the cruise at the end of April, my partner of nearly five years and I had been experimenting with nonmonogamy. When we met, we’d been two postgrad dirtbags, drinking beer out of paper bags in the park on weekday afternoons, sleeping on air mattresses and in hallways. I had a full-time media fellowship that paid me $20,000 a year; they were a bike courier, delivering food to rich people’s apartments, and working the late shift at REI, stocking while I slept. We’d see each other early in the mornings; they’d bring me donuts in bed.
Then somehow, all of a sudden, years passed. We became two professionals in our late twenties, living in our dream apartment on the top floor of a Brooklyn brownstone. We weren’t allowed to have pets, but, like good millennials, we had plenty of plants, and interests outside of each other: my roller derby, their ultramarathons. We were busy, stable. Happy enough.
I tried to tell myself that lesbian bed death isn’t real , all the while heartily blaming myself for our increasingly diminished sex life. I was the one who never really felt like initiating, or at least not with anywhere near the regularity we’d had as a hormone-crazed new couple. I assumed, at best, that all passions cool somewhat over the years; at worst, I thought something might be wrong with me.
My partner was patient and kind. But as time went on, they got frustrated — understandably — and they suggested, as a reparative measure, that we open up our relationship.
I was hesitant for a couple reasons. The first was that they’d slept with someone else, just once, when they were on a solo vacation, before we’d agreed to any sort of open-relationship terms; I felt like they’d forced my hand. (It’s hard for me even now to say they cheated on me, though that’s precisely what they did.) The second reason was that I’d watched some of my friends in long-term relationships experiment with nonmonogamy, only for the experiment to end in disaster: Somebody, inevitably, fell for somebody else.
In the end, I decided to give it a shot. I was starting to get nervous, nearly five years in, about what our future had in store for us. I’m a long-term kind of planner, while my partner was more likely to fly by the seat of their pants. I wanted kids; they were less sure. I wanted to spend our shared time and money on building a true home together; they were happy to live indefinitely out of milk crates. I wanted to stay in New York; they were feeling pulled back toward the Mountain West, where they’d grown up.
Nonmonogamy, then, seemed like a sort of part-time solution to much deeper issues I wasn’t yet ready to grapple with. So I decided to believe in the potential of openness to enrich a relationship, rather than to unravel it.
Before I went on the cruise, not much had actually happened in the nonmonogamy department. Once, after a friend’s party in Brooklyn, I drunkenly took a cab into Manhattan alone and picked up a girl at the borough’s only good lesbian bar, Cubbyhole. It was a perfectly nice experience, but when I got home and spent the day on my couch, sick from binge-drinking my way into someone else’s bed, I tried to figure out how to feel. Later, when my partner started sleeping with a friend of a friend, I was no more equipped to sort through my mess of emotions (sadness, ambivalence, relief).
Nonmonogamy is hardly scandalous or even really notable these days. In some of my queer circles, in fact, monogamy is the rarer beast. There’s nothing inherently more ~radical~ about either lifestyle. Still, in opening up my relationship — and in trying to convince myself that maybe I didn’t want marriage or kids or the trappings of conventional adulthood — I wanted to see myself as the cool, hip queer I hoped I was: someone who doesn’t have to subscribe to retrograde and patriarchal notions of what love is, or could be.
The night before I left on the cruise, two of my best friends got married. Watching one of my friend’s dads talking at the wedding dinner about how much he loved his daughter and her new wife, I teared up a little and said something to my partner about it: “This is actually pretty nice, huh?” But they wrinkled their nose at me. They’re not a fan of weddings — the pomp and circumstance, the big, grand displays of public affection.
I know this. And I get it. But this particular wedding, for friends we love, wasn’t something ostentatious and flashy; it was a tiny ceremony at city hall, a simple dinner, drinks at a bar afterward in Brooklyn. Was that so bad, really, to want?
My first day on the cruise, Saturday, I was hungover and exhausted. I’d been up late celebrating at the wedding, slept through my alarm, and barely made my flight to Puerto Rico. After deplaning and bumbling my way through the cruise check-in, I crashed in my quarters for a two-hour hangover nap. When I woke to the gorgeous sight of water and sun outside my personal patio, I felt a little sad and a little lonely. I wished I could have scooped up the entire wedding party and taken them with me to San Juan.
This was Dana’s first Olivia cruise too, though she’d been working for a while as the company’s content strategist. The staff thought that since she and I had similar backgrounds, it would make sense for Dana to take me under her wing this trip. She’s a pink-haired ball of zany energy who, from the moment I showed up on the dock in San Juan, made me feel like I was where I belonged. And we had plenty to talk about, since she’s an LGBT media person too — the managing editor of Bella Media , a ClexaCon moderator , lesbian romance author , and a veteran editor and writer of the site AfterEllen, from back when it used to be good (nowadays it’s an anti-trans pile of garbage ).
When we boarded, Dana introduced me to the adorable boomer-millennial pair in charge of Olivia’s Solos Program, which caters to women (single or partnered) who decide to go on trips alone. I got my own Solos dog tag and a pink Olivia bracelet to signify my newbie status.
Even though the Solos Program meant that at every meal there’d be a designated Solos table where I could sit with other single travelers, I was still a little intimidated by the prospect of finding people to hang out with all week. So I felt grateful to Dana, who accompanied me to my first Solos dinner that night. Later that week, we’d have a couple long dinners, just the two of us, indulging in the obscene number of courses you’re afforded during a cruise meal and bonding over the strange particularities of being a professional homosexual. I knew I was supposed to be becoming pals with fellow cruisers, not the staffer who was basically being paid to be my friend. But I figured I still had time.
When I first pitched this story to my editors, I thought I’d be reporting on a lesbian cultural artifact in its twilight years. The women who’ve faithfully gone on dozens of Olivia trips over the decades are getting older, and I didn’t have a lot of faith that younger queer people were going to step in and save companies like this from extinction. Other elements of lesbian culture have been steadily dying ; why should Olivia be any different?
The first time I thought that Olivia might actually stand a chance at survival was Sunday, the first full day of the cruise, when I attended the welcome mixer for “Generation O,” which is how Olivia refers to its precious few millennial and Generation X clientele. As I walked around the ship, which holds over 2,000 passengers, it was already clear that the average woman here was a couple decades older than me. But it turned out that there were a few other twenty- and thirtysomethings who’d managed to find their way to Olivia.
Dana was at the mixer, as well as another staffer, Ingrid, a cheery femme redhead and Olivia’s program manager. The three of us were, for the first few minutes, the only pe
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