Is It a Date or Just Coffee?: The Gay Girl's Guide to Dating, Sex, and Romance

by Mo Brownsey

A dating guide for lesbians helps readers navigate through the tricky waters of gay romance, offering advice on a host of important topics, including personal ads, sex, and more. Original.

Genres: Nonfiction, Humor, Queer, LGBT, Sexuality, Lesbian

250 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2002

About the author

Maureen (Mo) Brownsey is a writer, filmmaker, college professor, and stand-up comic whose humor on the page, stage, and screen, has been described as a cross between Gertrude Stein and Midge, Barbie's friend-the one with personality. She lives in San Francisco and plans on taking a long nap in the year 2015. (From Is It a Date or Just Coffee?)

Reviews

[Tara · Rating 5 out of 5]

What did I learn?? Hmmmm I learned that Mo Brownley is freaking hysterical and that I am not unique in my responses to failed romances, or in my approach to figuring out who is, who isn't, who is interested, etc.
It CAN be a struggle to figure it all out that is for sure!
Mo's book didn't really help me get to my current state but it sure made me laugh about some past ones!
I think the bottom line that she is trying to teach other women is to learn from the past mistakes, don't be so hard on yourself when you make them and try to remember the good stuff but don't romanticize a former relationship that is over... move on with your life and find the one that really works! ;)

[Fikri · Rating 1 out of 5]

Of course I knew going in that this book was dated (to say the least), but I was still expecting a quick, amusing read only to find it... a drag, mostly. I can excuse, say, iffy terminology as relics of a bygone era, but I’m not sure this book was fit-for-purpose even for the time it was written in when it fails to go beyond the most surface-level explorations of issues that do actually shape the world of queer dating, like butch/femme dynamics and polyamory. Not so much advice as a haphazard collection of anecdotes, too frequently with no clear purpose. (I often had to flip back to the chapter titles to remember what the point was supposed to be. And each chapter was like, five pages long on average, so that gives you a sense of just how far and how quickly off-track these tangents would go.) As far as I can tell this was genuinely intended as a guide, not as an autobiography written in a creative format or something, so it’s a bit baffling to me how little a reader would get from it. Some interesting bits to make you think on how much things have changed and how much they’ve stayed the same, but overall I’d recommend leaving this in the early 2000s.

[Myridian · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a book of essays about love, sex, and relationships in the gay girl community. While the majority of the essays were funny, and some were really funny, Brownsey makes a number of really obvious factual errors that (as a college professor) should have known better than to make: sperm are not XX's and XY's (they only carry one of the sex chromosomes, duh), and pheromones have not been shown to have any appreciable impact on humans (see: unsuccessful attempts to incorporates pheromones into perfume). Now, I realize that she was intentionally loose in many of her arguments, but that was sufficiently distracting to me in my OCDness that it interfered with my enjoyment of the book. Also, in the course of covering each of these topics in a humorous way, I felt like the depth of the topics got lost. When it's done well, humor is great in making depth palatable, but, when it's done badly, humor just obscures dept. Brownsey was guilty of the latter.

[Sonia · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not so much a guide as a collection of disorganized, rambling anecdotes. As anecdotes, the chapters are amusing in the way that hearing second-hand gossip about people you don't really know is amusing. And it's nice that such anecdotes/gossip are about gay women and that they are available in a book. However, the author repeatedly alludes to her various gigs as a stand-up comic, artist, and professor, and this is rather tragic because the book is not funny or well-written, and it does not appear to be the product of any research or in-depth analysis.

[Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

This came as a recommendation, and a good recommendation it was! This is a highly enjoyable read, worthy of reading twice. And it rings true for all couples, gay or straight!

[Jose · Rating 4 out of 5]

I know the Mo pretty well and she's great. Yes it is a lesbian dating book but its pretty universal.

[Louise Chambers · Rating 3 out of 5]

I would recommend this to the under 40 woman. But then again, I may just be an old fogey. LOL

[Kishalynn Elliott · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was my dating bible in my early coming out days. Women are so confusing, even if you are one!

[H. Givens · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lightly funny, and I found it quite reassuring and charming when I was super new on the queer scene.