Pop Culture Fix: Stephanie Beatriz Is a Non-Magical Disney Heroine In the Enchanted “Encanto”

Welcome to your Monday Pop Culture Fix, friends! I hope your week is off to a chill start!

+ Spephanie Beatriz is finally voicing a leading Disney character! She’ll play Maribel, the only non-magical member of her family/the entire town in the upcoming Encanto. I cannot wait!

+ Our TV Team has been very excited for Benedetta ever since it was announced, and once we read Gregory Ellwood’s review from Cannes, we kind of got hysterical with anticipation: “Benedetta is the lesbian visions of god camp melodrama you’ve been waiting for! It’s an extravaganza!”

+ The trailer for Ryan Murphy’s documentary about Exodus International, the largest gay conversion therapy group in U.S. history, is here and, um, if you grew up evangelical like me it’s pretty fucking intense.

+ Hmm. Well.

+ The Cut has watched the new Gossip Girl and would like you to try to even imagine being that hot in high school.

+ Lil Nas X and pop’s gay sexual revolution.

+ Loki’s director hopes the character’s sexuality gets explored more in upcoming Marvel projects, which sure is a thing Marvel directors love to say about their gay characters!!!!

+ Delta’s Queer Eye safety video never saw the light of day because of Covid (same).

+ How R. L. Stine’s Fear Street had its super gay movie evolution.

+ Should we be cautious about the rise of the queer TV elite?

+ Black Girl Nerds interviewed the cast of grown-ish ahead of senior year.

+ Paramount+ is getting one of its biggest viewership boots from an unlikely source: Legend of Korra fans!

+ Generation EPs Daniel and Zelda Barnz talk season two cliffhangers and making s show that celebrates queer joy.

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Heather Hogan

Heather Hogan is an Autostraddle senior editor who lives in New York City with her wife, Stacy, and their cackle of rescued pets. She's a member of the Television Critics Association, GALECA: The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics, and a Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer critic. You can also find her on Twitter and Instagram.

Heather has written 1718 articles for us.

6 Comments

  1. To mention Encanto and not mention the extremely buff lady who is an instant root is very out of character for this site

  2. Benedetta looks amazing – hope it’s released in the US after Cannes! I wish I could get my parents to watch Pray Away. It looks fucking harrowing but my dad knew a couple people in the 80s who claimed to be ex-gay and I hope that would help him understand how thoroughly people deluded themselves.

  3. Pray Away is basically my nightmare come to life. I would like to thank my high school bf for the absolutely fantastic cover to make sure I escaped that. I’m glad Ryan Murphy made it. (Mark that under “sentence I never thought I’d utter.) I am from a place that absolutely still believes in conversion therapy.

    Honestly I hope this movie helps open up a conversation between generations of queer people about these experiences. I’m not an “elder gay”, but there are times I look at people my own age or people a few years younger than me and I know how vastly different our experiences were.

    Thanks to the threat of conversion therapy and the absolutely monstrous shame I was raised with, sometimes I still feel disconnected from the queer community. It will be healing, I think, to see how others cope with that.

    Watching that trailer made me realize how intensely grateful I am now for the closet. It was always a cage, but at the end of the day it shielded me from a lot truly ugly things.

    I will never forgive Ryan Murphy for Finn’s version of “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”, which I assume was a personal attack, but I am intrigued by Pray Away.

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