Every Good Queer and Trans Movie Streaming on HBO Max

What movies with lesbian, bisexual, queer, and trans women and/or trans men and/or non-binary people in them can a person find streaming on Max? This is a question you might have, and good news, we are here to answer it. While HBO highlights many lesbian films in its “Pride” section, that section misses so many other titles that are categorized elsewhere.

Historically, HBO has been pretty good to the LGBTQ community, producing a lot of inclusive original content, but much of it is for gay men and only a limited number of these titles are currently available on Max. Their library isn’t as robust as it once was, but it’s still a great streaming destination for really high-quality lesbian cinema.

This post was originally published in November 2020. Most recent update: 2/2/2025.

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Top 10: Our Picks Of The Best and Gayest Lesbian and Bisexual Movies Streaming on HBO Max

Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022)

#70 best lesbian movie of all time 

This movie is fucking incredible, an Oscar-winning “queer masterpiece of Colossal Sincerity.” Queer actor Stephanie Hsu plays Joy, the queer daughter of Waymond (Ke Huy Quan) and Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh), who run a laundromat called in for an audit (their auditor is Jamie Lee Curtis) and it’s honestly impossible to explain what happens next. It is bananas and gorgeous and if you haven’t seen this yet, you simply must!

Bessie (2015)

#78 best lesbian movie of all time

This immediate classic and multiple-Emmy-winner co-written and directed by Dee Rees (Pariah, When We Rise, Mudbound) stars Queen Latifah as bisexual American blues singer Bessie Smith and features Mo-Nique as Ma Rainey. Gabby described this “badass bisexual biopic,” declaring, “this movie is well-done, like so well-done. The vaudeville stage moments and all of the singing in clubs and giant tent revivals are lively and beautiful. The black excellence in this film is something to behold and revel in. Everyone is gorgeous. The costumes, the wigs, the make-up, the dancing: all of it is authentic and just so much damn fun to watch.”

The Watermelon Woman (1997)

#2 best lesbian movies of all time

Our Film Editor’s favorite lesbian movie of all time, this classic from Cheryl Dunye is a genre-bending fictionalized documentary / rom-com that follows Cheryl, a version of filmmaker Cheryl Dunye, a film buff working in a video store while pursuing a passion project about an obscure Black lesbian actress of the 1930s pigeonholed into stereotypical “mammy roles” of the era. “When Dunye didn’t see her story, she made it herself,” wrote Drew. “But The Watermelon Woman isn’t just her story on screen — it’s also the searching, the wanting, the necessity of that story.”

Desert Hearts (1986)

#6 best lesbian movie of all time

“Donna Deitch’s lesbian love story is set in the ’50s and was filmed in the ’80s, and is still, in 2020, a radical piece of filmmaking,” wrote Heather in her review of this classic based on Jane Rule’s novel. “It basically has an all-women cast, and — much like Carol, which is what critics tend to compare it to for all the wrong reasons — it does not center the pleasures or preferences of men, ever.”

Love Lies Bleeding (2024)

#12  best lesbian movie of all time

Kristen Stewart is Lou, a reclusive gym manager who’s sucked into a self-destructive, druggy relationship with Jackie (Katy O’Brian), a bodybuilder dreaming of winning a championship in Vegas. There’s violence and dirt and sex and trust me, you’re gonna love it — we sure did!

Janet Planet (2024)

read our review of Janet Planet

“Annie Baker’s feature debut joins a small group of films — Eve’s Bayou, El Sur, Aftersun — that really capture childhood. It has all the wonder, all the magic, all the loneliness,” writes Drew of this film with a queer kid at its center. “Yes, the writing is excellent, yes, all the performances are excellent, but they’re both enhanced by a clear grasp on film language and the unique possibilities of the screen. I’ve talked to so many people who saw themselves in this movie, not because it achieves some sort of universality but because that’s what great art makes possible. It holds a reality so much more recognizable than real life.”

Gia (1998)

#36 best lesbian movie of all time

An underrated film I have personally discussed so much on this website that it may have at some point crossed the line from underrated to overrated, Angelina Jolie plays the tragically beautiful (and very bisexual) titular figure Gia Marie Carangi, known as “world’s first supermodel.”

Working Girls (1986)

#55 on best lesbian movie of all time

“Focusing on a day in the life of lesbian Molly, Working Girls reveals the boredom and mundane difficulties of working at a Manhattan brothel,” writes Drew in the entry for Working Girls in The Encyclopedia of Lesbian Cinema. “The film doesn’t romanticize sex work or sensationalize it — instead it just lets it be like any crappy job. The dynamics between Molly and her boss, her co-workers, and her clients are all compelling as they reveal more about her, the job, and society’s relationship to sex work. This is a landmark work of cinema that’s finally getting its due and a landmark work of lesbian cinema as well. ”

Je tu il Elle (1975)

#29 best lesbian movie of all time

“Je Tu Il Elle obviously centers a woman with depression,” writes Drew of this seminal entry in the cannon of lesbian cinema. “It does it wonderfully and to deny that would do the work and [Chantal] Akerman a disservice. But can there not be pleasure within? Pleasure in painting your furniture, that small amount of control, pleasure in the first taste of sugar, before it makes you sick, pleasure in crafting a letter, before it feels impossible, pleasure in meeting a stranger, before he reveals his full self, pleasure in fucking your ex, before you have to leave.”

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All The Other Good Queer Movies on HBO Max

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022)

“Laura Poitras’ remarkable documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is about Nan Goldin and her work,” wrote Drew Gregory of this award-winning film about legendary bisexual photographer Nan Goldin. “It’s also about Goldin’s campaign to take down the Sackler family, the owners of Purdue Pharma, the company who manufactured Oxycontin. The brilliance of the film is it shows these aspects of her life to be one in the same.”

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Am I Okay? (2022)

Lucy lives in Los Angeles, works at a spa, loves her best friend Jane and feels increasingly annoyed by her friend, Ben, who yearns to develop a romantic connection with her. But when Jane reveals that she’s moving to London, Lucy’s ensuing spiral leads to her revelation that she is in fact gay! There’s a lot of the talent involved in this cinema (directed by Tig Notaro and Stephanie Allyne! Starring Dakota Johnson, Sonoya Mizuno and Kiersey Clemons!), but despite all that…  but it’s not always put to effective use. YMMV!

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Birds of Prey: The Fantabulous Emancipation of Harley Quinn (2020)

“There’s the gay that you know because the movie says it with their words,” Carmen wrote of the film she described as “the chaotic sparkly queer misandrist comic book movie of my dreams,” “and there’s the gay you know because you can see it with your eyes. Birds of Prey, with its neon pink and blue hues, glitter bomb grenades, pet hyenas in rhinestone collars, and car chases on roller skates, gives us both.”

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The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972)

Drew writes that this “cruel movie about cruel women” is worth it for its “camerawork, costume design, and incredible performances from Margit Carstensen, Hanna Schygulla, and Irm Hermann.”

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Black Swan (2010)

Beauty and brutality are twisted sisters in this ballet psychological thriller packed with haunting performances. I know people are mixed on what “really” happens between Nina (Natalie Portman) and Lily (Mila Kunis), but that ambiguity is a big part of the draw of this film, and to deny its queerness is to overlook so much of the character-level storytelling.

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Call Me Miss Cleo (2022, HBO)

With commentary from celebrities like (gay) Raven-Symoné, Cleo’s friends and her partners, this documentary sheds light on the mysterious life of a psychic hotline guru — “her rise to fame, fall from grace, and eventual embrace of her truest self.”

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The Color Purple (2023)

Steven Spielberg’s 1985 adaptation of Alice Walker’s novel notoriously buried the book’s very clear queerness, and this adaptation of the musical promised to do better. While this version “makes clear Celie’s attraction to Shug and Shug’s interest in Celie in return,” it didn’t go quite as far as we’d hoped. Still; it’s a beautiful film full of extraordinary performances, particularly Taraji P. Henson’s turn as Shug Avery.

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Disobedience (2018)

It’s the lesbian spit movie! Ronit returns to her Orthodox Jewish community following the death of her rabbi father, thus stirring a reunion with Esti (Rachel McAdams), who never left and is married to Ronit’s cousin David, as her family expected. “Disobedience brims with irrepressible, sweaty-palmed longing and anticipation,” writes Kayla in her review.

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The Fallout (2021)

During a school shooting, bisexual high school student Vada (Jenna Ortega) ends up hiding in the bathroom with her schoolmates, dancer Mia (Maddie Ziegler), and Quinton (Niles Fitch), whose brother os killed in the shooting. As Vada’s trauma makes her feel increasingly isolated from those closest to her and school itself, she begins spending all her time with Mia. “The two girls have nothing in common,” writes Analyssa in her review, “except for literally the most important thing to ever happen to them.” Their relationship gets increasingly intense.

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I Saw the TV Glow (2024)

Two weirdo high school students become fascinated with a television show, The Pink Opaque, until it bleeds into their real (queer and trans) identities. “I Saw the TV Glow is about the art that shapes us, even if someday we grow beyond it,” wrote Drew in her review. “The film warns against looking at this art with dismissal or disdain. To do so is to look at our past selves with these same negative emotions. To do so is to deny our full personhood. To do so is to deny the tools we need to move confidently into the future.”

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The Laramie Project (2002)

Moises Kaufman’s 2000 play about the murder of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming was a piece of “verbatim theater,” drawing on hundreds of interviews his theater company conducted with Laramie residents and published news reports. HBO adapted the play into a grounded, emotional GLAAD-award-winning film in 2002, starring Christina Ricci, Laura Linney, Camryn Manheim, Joshua Jackson and Clea Duvall, among others.

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Multiple Maniacs (1970)

“John Waters lives up to his title Pope of Trash with this raucous celebration of counter-culture deviancy,” writes Drew of this film that opens with “a group of cishet normals making their way through a free exhibit titled The Cavalcade of Perversions” followed by Divine robbing them all at gunpoint. “Waters starts his filmography with a statement and never lets up.”

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Notes on a Scandal (2006)

Judi Dench is Barbara Covett, a lonely history teacher ambling towards retirement who becomes obsessed with the school’s newest hired Sheba Hart (Cate Blanchett), who she catches having a sexual encounter with a 15-year-old student. After exacting Sheba’s confession, Barbara uses it to manipulate the object of her affection. Yes, it’s the crazy lesbian trope! But, you know. Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett.

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Suited (2016)

This documentary focuses on Bindle & Keep, a Brooklyn-based custom-suit company who caters to queer, trans and gender-non-conforming humans, including a trans man preparing for his wedding and a law student struggling through job interviews.

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Tangerine (2015)

Shot entirely on an iPhone, this iconic film follows two trans sex workers, Sin-Dee and Alexandra, on Christmas Eve, as just-out-of-jail Sin-Dee tracks down the pimp/boyfriend who’s been cheating on her and Alexandra’s on a journey towards her singing performance that evening.

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Unpregnant (2020, HBO)

A charming little buddy comedy about a popular, successful high school girl who gets pregnant and must road trip from Missouri to New Mexico to get the abortion her boyfriend doesn’t want her to have. She recruits her former friend — weirdo lesbian Bailey (Barbie Ferreira) — to join her on this journey. Look out for a very charming Betty Who cameo!

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Valentine Road (2013)

The tragic story of the murder of 15-year-old trans student Larry King by his classmate Brandon McInerny is the topic of this documentary, which loooks at the circumstances that led to the crime and its complicated and far-reaching aftermath.

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Whoopi Goldberg Presents Moms Mabley (2013)

Iconic African-American standup comic Jackie “Moms” Mabley is honored in this documentary featuring performance footage as well as interviews with stars like Eddie Murphy, Joan Rivers, Sidney Poitier and Kathy Griffin. The film also gives space to Moms’ lesbianism — she was out to her friends and other entertainers during her career, but it was kept a secret from the public, who were drawn to her “frumpy mom in a housedress” persona.

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Letter From the Editors: We Want To Hear From You

Hello AF Media and AF+ Members,

We (Riese, Kayla, and Drew) are writing to you, because we assume we’re all feeling a lot of the same things: fear, confusion, anxiety, despair, frustration, anger. It’s the first stretch of a second Trump presidency, something none of us wanted, but alas, here we are. Here we all are together!

The media industry has been a tough landscape for a long time, and it feels especially fraught now in a time of escalated misinformation exacerbated by AI, an administration visibly endorsed and supported by an oligarchy of tech giants, social media algorithms that favor fascism and isolation over community-building, and politicians and lawmakers who seem intent on pedaling false and harmful ideologies about the most vulnerable members of our community: queer, trans and gender-nonconforming individuals. Autostraddle remains committed to fighting these forces. We are proud to be a QTPOC-owned company and continuing to survive as a queer- and trans-led magazine that isn’t owned by a corporation and maintains editorial freedom in a way few other publications do.

We’re going to keep doing the things we do best, whether that’s straightforward and candid political explainers that skip the bullshit and the fear-mongering, even if that means our headline isn’t quite clicky enough; in-depth coverage of queer art and entertainment that doesn’t hinge on respectability politics; hyperlocal reporting on queer communities and scenes; or bringing you the best personal essays by emerging and established queer and trans writers. We will keep publishing queer and trans content that’s for LGBTQ people and not merely about us. This administration can try to legislate queer and trans people from public life, but we’re not going anywhere, and we’re not backing down from putting out complex, authentic, and real stories of queer and trans life.

We wear a lot of hats on our three-person editorial team, and we want to make sure we’re using our time and energy in ways that ultimately serve you best, because we need you to make all of this happen and because there isn’t a point to our work if it’s not connecting with our communities meaningfully. So you tell us: What do you want more of? What stories do you want to read? What kind of news do you want to read? Where are you getting your news — are you stepping back from certain social media platforms and if so, what’s the best way to reach you? If you have thoughts on any of these things, feel free to just write back to this email with any of ‘em.

Autostraddle is in a unique position to deliver news with a clear point of view and eye toward collective justice and challenging the status quo. We don’t have the biggest staff or the most resources, but we’ve got a lot of heart and hustle! We’d love to hear from you about how and what you’re reading now. We hope to always provide a good balance of fun articles that can bring our readers joy, but we also want our audience to remain informed. Sometimes the stories we’re really excited about don’t end up being read as widely as we hoped, so we want to better connect with our most loyal readers — you, our members — to make sure we’re getting the things you want to read to you.

We can’t control the algorithms that put content in front of you on social media, and we cannot control the proliferation of AI-generated search engine results. But we can control our priorities in what we want to cover and what our readers want to read, especially if we’re all working together here. We can bring you the queerest news and culture writing you’ll read all day, and even if the algorithms don’t value it, we know you do. So we also hope you’ll consider going back to some old school news/media habits and actually physically go to our homepage and make Autostraddle a part of your daily routine. Relying on social media to deliver news you actually want to read means being as beholden to biased algorithms as we are, and this is one small way you can circumvent that.

And if you like a story you read, tell us in the comments! That really means so much to us! Whereas other publications keep comments sections around to encourage trolls and endless internet fights (that thereby increase traffic and encourage people to return to the page), we have comments sections because we actually want to have conversations. We read all of them! And our writers love to hear compliments! It also helps them know what readers want and therefore what to pitch and prioritize.

While we won’t pretend like sustained reader and member growth isn’t important for our longevity, we aren’t merely interested in quantity when it comes to our readership; we’re also deeply interested in the quality of our readership, by which we mean having readers that are engaged with the work we’re doing and less distance between our readers and ourselves. We take a community-based approach to journalism, and often our best stories are born out of reader requests and conversations we organically have as editors based on what we see people responding to.

All of this is to say: We genuinely want to hear from you. We want to feel connected. Tell us what you want.

50 LGBTQ+ Movies To Stream on Netflix With Lesbian, Bisexual and Trans Characters

What are the best lesbian and trans movies are on Netflix? This is probably a question you have typed into a search box before. Perhaps you typed that into a search box really recently, like ten seconds ago, and that’s why you’re here, now, with all of us, wondering about the best streaming lesbian movies on Netflix, or the best lesbian bisexual queer and trans movies on Netflix. In this case we are using “lesbian” as an adjective referring to romance and other activities between two women.

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The Best Lesbian and Trans Movies On Netflix

Badhaai Do (2022)

read our review of badhaai do

“Despite its blind spots, Badhaai Do is the movie I always wished Bollywood would make, the sweet and silly story I was desperate to find beneath the cheerful cruelty of Dostana,” writes Anamika Gopalan. “The smallest moments in the film were electrifying — Sumi holding Rimjhim’s hand at the doctor’s office, Rimjhim putting her arm around Sumi’s shoulders, Sumi blowing kisses up to Rimjhim on the balcony — I was watching two Indian women fall in love, and for 150 minutes the world felt open and full of possibility.”

Carol (2015)

#5 on the Best Lesbian Movies of All Time // our review of carol

I mean, it’s Carol! You know Carol. Cate Blanchett is Carol with a terrible ex-husband and lots of fur coats, Rooney Mara is Therese who wants to be a photographer and works in a department store.

Disclosure (2020)

read our review of Disclosure. 

This thorough documentary traces the history of trans representation in cinema and television, featuring voices including Laverne Cox, Daniel Sea, Lilly Wachowski, Yance Ford, Mj Rodriguez, Jamie Clayton, and Chaz Bono.

Do Revenge (2022)

read our review of do revenge

This delightfully dark homage to ’90s teen flicks is a colorful, slick comedy starring Camilla Mendes as mean girl Drea who, after seeing her video sexts leaked by her boyfriend, teams up on an intricate revenge plot with Eleanor (Maya Hawke), a lesbian transfer student dead-set on punishing the girl who bullied her at summer camp as a pre-teen.

The “Fear Street” Trilogy (2021)

read our review of fear street

“What makes The Fear Street Trilogy go from a solid good time to a grand cinematic event is its understanding that intelligence and fun are not antithetical,” writes Drew in the Lesbian Movie Encyclopedia. “Like The Slumber Party Massacre Trilogy, Fear Street doesn’t make us choose between campy horror and an engagement with reality. It’s proof that “good politics” are also good storytelling.” The first installment of this series based on the Christopher Pike movies does the unthinkable: it lets its queer heroines live.

The Half of It (2020)

#17 on the Best Lesbian Movies Of All Time List // read our review of the half of it 

Alice Wu’s lesbian take on Cyrano de Bergerac follows Ellie Chu (Leah Lewis), a shy, Chinese-American 17-year-old who splits her days taking care of her grieving father and writing essays for her peers for extra money. She forms an unexpected bond with the crush of a sweet football player who hires her to write her love letters. “It may not be a “love story” in the traditional sense, but it is about love,” wrote Malinda Lo in her review. “It’s about young people discovering what it is, what it isn’t, and what it could be. It’s about searching for your other half and finding that the other half might be within you. And yes, it’s about a queer Asian American girl — still a revolutionary subject for a mainstream film.”

The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls In Love (1995)

Wanna see Laurel Holloman in the role that initially endeared her to our community? Well have I got the movie for you: Holloman plays scruffy tomboy Randy, who cuts class to run her aunt’s gas station. She falls for Evie (Nicole Ari Parker), the popular girl at school who hails from a wealthy family. But can they be together right where they are?

It’s Only Life After All (2023)

Using decades of archival footage, this documentary attempts to grasp the entirety of the impact of lesbian folk-rock duo The Indigo Girls.

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020)

read our review of ma rainey’s black bottom

Based on August Wilson’s Tony-award winning play, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom sees Viola Davis as the titular character, a Black queer blues singer and one of the most successful Black women of the era. In her hands, Carmen writes, the triumphant and emotional film “becomes a complex portrait of a queer Black woman hurricane whose footprints loom over the last 100 years.”

Mars One (2022)

read our review of mars one

In this Brazillian family drama from writer/director Gabriel Martins, Eunice (Camilla Souza) — a college student ready to leave home and even more ready to explore her sexuality — is one of four protagonists. Writing about Eunice’s relationship with her girlfriend Jo in her rave review of the film, Drew wrote “their hotter than cute meet cute at a club, their dinner with Jo’s wealthy family, the way they love each other in the sort of impassioned yet insufficient way college students love. It all just feels so real.”

Ahead of the Curve (2020)

There would be no Autostraddle if there had never been a Curve — a pioneering glossy magazine for lesbians helmed by legendary publisher Franco Stevens. From its debut in the 1990s to the present, this documentary follows it all.

The Mitchells vs The Machines (2021)

read our review of the mitchells vs the machines

“The Mitchells is a genuinely hilarious animated film, full of cutting cultural jokes, visual gags, smash cuts, bonkers animation, and frolicking dialogue,” writes Heather of this delightful story about a family driving cross-country to drop off their daughter, Katie Mitchell (Abbi Jacobson) for film school. Although Katie’s queerness isn’t the focus of the film, it’s an essential element of her very relatable character.

Mutt (2023)

read our review of mutt

Over the course of 24 hours, a trans man named Feña experiences the extremes of human emotion when he bumps into his ex-boyfriend and then a whole host of people who disappeared when he transitioned have suddenly returned to his life. Drew wrote that in a world full of films that don’t portray the trans experience very well, this is the rare film that does.

Nimona (2023)

read our review of nimona

“One of the most interesting things about the film is how both Nimona and Ballister want revenge for what happened to him, but she wants it because she wants to watch this tyrannical heteronormative world burn, whereas he just wants this terrible world to accept him,” writes Heather. “They both learn a lot about themselves as their hijinks find them working seamlessly, side-by-side, and also find them often at odds, motivationally and ethically, because they want the same thing for vastly different reasons.”

Nyad (2023)

read our review of nyad

“Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin’s NYAD is a rousing masterpiece of a sports movie,” writes Drew. “Focusing on Nyad’s Herculean swim from Havana to Key West, the film is a thrilling tribute to its stubborn protagonist and the power of queer friendship. Annette Bening captures Diana in all her prickly complexity and Jodie Foster as Bonnie, Nyad’s best friend and coach, gives her best performance since the 90s.”

Prom (2020)

read our review of prom

This Netflix adaptation of the hit Broadway musical, produced by Ryan Murphy, follows a handful of out-of-work Broadway actors as they insert themselves into a small Indiana town to advocate for a teen to attend the prom with her girlfriend. It left Valerie with “a happy, joy-filled, unruly heart.” It wasn’t a critical favorite, but we as a community had a very nice time!

Ride or Die (2021)

“This is easily my favorite two and a half hour lesbian murder drama about bourgeoisie class betrayal with a Norah Jones needle drop. Based on the popular manga Gunjō, Ryūichi Hiroki has made the bonkers, gratuitous lesbian movie I’d hoped Benedetta would be. ” – Drew Gregory

Shiva Baby (2021)

#50 on the best lesbian movies of all time // read our review of shiva baby

“This is officially a comedy, but with its horror movie score, claustrophobic cinematography, and premise of running into your sugar daddy and your ex-girlfriend at a shiva, it’s safe to say this is one of the scariest movies on this list,” writes Drew of Shiva Baby

A Simple Favour (2018)

read our review of a simple favor

Blake Lively is Emily Nelson, a “whirlwind monster of a Mommi” who walks into the life of widowed mommy vlogger Stephanie Smothers (Anna Kendrick) with intriguing mystery, eventually ensnaring her in a web of duplicity when Emily suddenly disappears. Kayla writes, “it’s dishy and fun and prods all sorts of tropes from the Lifetime canon in a way that feels more playful than derivative.”

Will & Harper (2024)

This touching documentary follows comedian Will Ferrel and his dear friend, Harper, on a cross-country road trip shortly following Harper coming out as a trans woman. “There’s a real joy to spending time with Harper and Will and their relationship,” writes Drew in her review. “Not only are they funny, but here they’re funny in a way only possible with intimacy. The documentary feels like sitting in on the very best of inside jokes.”

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All The Other Bisexual, Queer, Lesbian and Trans Movies On Netflix

Anne+: The Movie (2022)
The 90-minute dramedy follows the titular Anne as all the happy endings from her beloved crowd-funded two-season Dutch webseries Anne+ come unraveled. The film “simply does not care that straight people exist, as characters or as audience members,” writes Heather Hogan in her review, praising its “low-stake storytelling” and “queer-acted and queer-directed sex scenes.”

Beautiful Rebel (2023)
“Based on the life of real-life pansexual rockstar Gianna Nannini, Cinzia TH Torrini’s film follows Gianna from childhood to international stardom. This is a very standard music biopic, hitting all the tropes,” writes Drew. “We also have the drugs, the spiraling, the emotional outbursts in the recording studio. None of these beats are inherently bad — after all, they happen in real life — but, when not done with any specificity or inventiveness, they become tiresome.”

Beauty (2022)
Netflix barely promoted the existence of this film, probably because it’s not very good! Described as the story of “a young singer on the brink of a promising career who finds herself torn between a domineering family, industry pressures and her love for her girlfriend,” it is very clearly intended to be about Whitney Houston. Niecy Nash plays her mother.

Bruised (2022)
“If you’re anything like me and your main reasons for seeing Bruised were to see Halle Berry fight and make out with girls, you won’t be disappointed,” wrote Carmen in her review of this film in which Berry plays an MMA fighter grabbing one last shot at redemption when the son she left behind returns to her life. “But you might walk away wishing it had stuck to just those two things.”

Close To You (2024)
Largely comprised of improvised dialogue, Close to You follows a trans man (Elliot Page) coming home to see his estranged family after years apart.

Deadly Illusions (2021)
“If Netflix had wanted my attention on Deadly Illusions any earlier than when I got very sad around noon on Thursday, what they should’ve told me is that the lines between STRAIGHT and GAY will start to blur. Because my friends, they do. This is like, high camp, but also a gay movie for straight people? This is heterosexual camp. This is fan fiction but about two characters we’ve never heard of except one of them is Charlotte from Sex and the City.” – Riese Bernard

Duck Butter (2018)
“Duck Butter was a lot like a Naima and Sergio’s failed experiment: the sex was good but the delirious lesbian mumblecore didn’t leave a lasting impression.” – Heather Hogan

Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga (2019)
Closeted lesbian Swweety Chaudhary (Sonam K Ahuja) is being pressured by her conservative and traditional Punjabi family to marry — but what she really wants to do is come out.

Elisa & Marcela (2019)
“Not the art film its showy Black & White cinematography and more creative flourishes seem to be aspiring for, but nevertheless an enjoyable period romance. Based on the true story of Spain’s first same-sex marriage, Isabel Coixet replaces an average looking queer woman and her androgynous love with two beautiful high femmes. It’s a bit silly and a bit long, but hey the sex scenes are great.” – Drew Gregory

Emilia Perez (2024)
Rita Moro Castro (Zoe Saldana) an under-appreciated lawyer in Mexico granted the opportunity to hook up a drug kingpin (Karla Sofía Gascón) with a surgeon for gender affirmation surgery while whisking away her wife (Selena Gomez) as Emilia fakes her own death. She later has a romantic subplot with a trans woman Epifanía. There is a grating musical number about vaginoplastys. This movie is fucking wild and also in many ways very bad. “I don’t understand why a movie that’s so bonkers in other ways chooses to undercut its strengths with this shallow understanding of its titular character,” wrote Drew. “And it is bonkers in ways I enjoyed.”

Familia (2023)
Leo, the family patriarch who lives alone with his son Benny, brings his whole family together once a month to catch up over a meal hosted in a resplendent landscape — and this time he wants to talk to his three daughters about the future of his idyllic olive farm. One of those daughters, Mariana, brings her new girlfriend to the lunch. Mariana’s pregnant, but refuses to disclose the identity of the father.

FanFic (2023)
“The movie is a delight when it’s showing Tosiek’s exploration and discovery,” writes Drew of this Polish sweet, gay, trans coming-of-age story, “less delightful when it’s telling us about it. It has similar problems in its approach to mental health.”

Happy Ending (2023)
After a year of secretly faking orgasms with her aimless artsy boyfriend, Luna pitches a threesome to her boyfriend, Mink, and they seal the deal with a climate change activist, Eve — an experience that turns everything upside-down.

I Care A Lot (2021)
“If you don’t like to watch movies about horrible people doing horrible things, you’ll probably want to skip J Blakeson’s I Care A Lot,”  recommends Kayla in her review. But, if you do like those movies, “then you might have fun with this cynical, clinical movie steeped in the horrors of capitalism and greed.” I Care A Lot is wicked and callous, but vivid and sharp, with a heartless lesbian protagonist played by Rosamund Pike and her girlfriend/partner played by the VERY hot Eiza González.

Late Bloomers (1996)
In a suburban Texas high school, geometry teacher and basketball coach Dinah ends up falling for Carly, the principal’s assistant who is married to a high school algebra teacher.

Let It Snow (2019)
“The inclusion of a queer romance in a film like this is exciting enough on its own. But what makes it all the more exciting is both Hewson and Akana are queer in real life! Hewson is non-binary and gay and Akana is bisexual. They’re both so good in their roles, bringing their charm and authenticity. ” – Drew Gregory

Lovesong (2016)
Riley Keough and Jenna Malone star in this “gentle, lyrical film about enduring love between women that surpasses friendship and defies boundaries of sexual identity.”

Loving Annabelle (2006)
“As much as I’d love to pretend I can write this movie off for the problematic aspects,” writes Valerie of a film centered on affair between a boarding school student and her teacher, “the truth is this movie was vital to my queer evolution.”

Moxie (2021)
A 16-year-old is inspired by her Mom’s Riot Grrrl and zine-making past to strike back against INJUSTICE, misogyny and toxicity at her high school. Josie Totah plays a trans girl frustrated that her classmates and teachers won’t use her name. There is a subtle lesbian storyline that emerges quietly without much fanfare, which is fine — what’s less fine is that this film is centered on a white cis straight protagonist who is surrounded by women of color with far more interesting stories to tell. Read our review of moxie.

Passing (2021)
Passing is definitely one of the best films on this list, but its queerness is very subtextual, thus not being included up top! Carmen Phillips wrote of the film: “Passing has me in such a chokehold, I still don’t know where to start. There’s the craft of the storytelling, the questions it presents about understanding race — for once! — from a Black gaze. It’s singular in its grab and should be on the short list for any awards season conversation. But more than anything, I can’t stop thinking about the way that Tessa Thompson looks at Ruth Negga.”

The Perfection (2019)
“This recent Netflix horror movie would be offensive for a multitude of reasons if it wasn’t so incoherent. Instead it’s just an absolutely wild, incredibly shallow thrill ride with a queer woman romance(??) at its center.” – Drew Gregory

Pray Away (2021)
“There is no emotional catharsis in Pray Away,” writes Heather of this documentary about the dangers of conversion therapy, “no promised paths to victory for those who were abused by the teachings of the people featured in the documentary, no accountability, no looks at the exponential global repercussions of conversion therapy. It is, at best, picking at a scab — and, at worst, poking a dirty finger into a gaping wound.”

Scream VI (2023)
Four survivors leave Woodside to start a fresh chapter after the Ghostface killings. Queer actor Jasmin Savoy-Brown is lesbian character Mindy Meeks-Martin, the first openly LGBTQ+ character in the ‘Scream’ franchise with a significant storyline.”You’re gonna get AN ON SCREEN KISS BETWEEN A QUEER BLACK WOMAN AND A QUEER ASIAN WOMAN,” writes Lex in their review. “THAT SHIT IS BEAUTIFUL ON THE BIG SCREEN. NO HAIR HIDING FACES OR NOTHIN’ WE COMIN UP QUEER!”

A Secret Love (2020)
A heartwarming documentary about former All-American Girls Professional Baseball League player, Terry Donahue, and her partner, Pat Henschel, who met in Canada in 1946, fell in love, started a business together, all while keeping their relationship a secret.

Someone Great (2019)
“At its core, Someone Great is a comedy about getting high and drunk with your girls and listening to some great pop music and growing up a little in the process.” – Carmen Phillips

Shortcomings (2023) 
This comedy-drama, based on Adrian Tomine’s comic, follows struggling filmmaker Ben who manages an arthouse movie theater and has a girlfriend who works for a local Asian-American film festival who moves to New York for an internship, leaving Ben alone in Berkeley with his typical behaviors to keep him warm: obsessing over unavailable blondes, watching Crtiterion Collection DVDs, and hanging out in a diner with his LESBIAN BEST FRIEND Alice, a “serial dater” played by queer actor Sherry Cola.  But now he must figure out what he really wants in life.

So My Grandma’s a Lesbian (2020)
This Spanish comedy follows a young Spanish lawyer whose plans to marry some rich Scottish dude from a conservative family are put into jeopardy when her 70-year-old grandmother, Sofia, comes out and announces her intention to marry her best friend. Good for them!

Time Cut (2024)
This time-travel horror finds a protagonist haunted by a sister she never met after said sister was killed in a murder spree two years before she was born. On the anniversary of said sister’s death, she finds a time machine, heads back in time, and has a chance to stop the murders before they occur. Also there is a “sweet sapphic subplot“!

To Each Her Own (2018)
Although this French film got bad reviews, Sally informed us that she in fact has seen it and furthermore; liked it. I trust Sally so here we are. The plot is described as “Just as Simone works up the courage to tell her conservative Jewish family she’s a lesbian, she finds herself attracted to a man.”

The Valley of a Thousand Hills (2022)
This South African drama tells the story of a woman in a conservative village community who must choose between the husband her father chose for her or her secret true love, a woman.

Wendell & Wild (2022)
“This is an animated kids movie about how private prisons are way more evil than literal demons. How could I not love it??,” wrote Drew of this stop-motion adventure. “Not only does this give us a goth Black girl lead — it also has a Latino trans boy at her side. This isn’t just inclusive children’s entertainment — it’s inclusive children’s entertainment that actually engages with the realities of the people it represents.”

Wine Country (2019)
Paula Pell plays “a lesbian antique shop owner from Portland with a new set of knees and thirst for love” in this film Heather described as ” improv funny and physical comedy funny and sight gag funny and punny funny — and  a story about how sometimes our little personality quirks can only be distilled into their truest form and made manifest as our lurking anxieties and insecurities and maladaptive coping mechanisms when we’re in the company of the women who love us best and most.” Also, Cherry Jones is in it!

Your Place or Mine (2023) 
This rom-com from Alline Brosh McKenna (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend) sees Debbie (Reese Witherspoon) and Peter (Ashton Kutcher) as best friends forever who swap houses for a week — him taking care of her son in LA, her spreading her wings in NYC — to discover themselves et cetera you know how it is with heterosexuals. Tig Notaro has a side role in this film as Debbie’s sardonic lesbian pal, although her queerness is never directly addressed.

You People (2023)
This movie is so objectively, unsettlingly, depressingly terrible, that I considered not even telling you that it existed at all. But alas, it does. Ezra (Jonah Hill) is a white Jewish guy and Amira (Lauren London) is Black and their families are very different and now they all have to meet and see who gets along! Ezra’s best friend and coworker, Mo, is a masc lesbian played by Sam Jay, and his sister, Liza (Molly Gordon) is also gay.

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Prime Video’s 33 Best Movies With Lesbian or Bisexual Women Characters

Like the retail website from which Prime Video sprung, Prime Video’s library of films featuring lesbian and bisexual characters is massive, incoherent, and very difficult to ascertain from a casual browse — but Amazon Prime Video subscribers actually have access to a larger and more diverse library of lesbian cinema than any other streamer is currently offering. Luckily, we are here to inform you of the best lesbian and bisexual movies currently available on Prime Video. Prime Video specifically seems to be a home for a lot of (at least 25) super low-budget lesbian films you’ve never heard of, most of which are pretty bad, but if you love Elena Undone or Anatomy of a Love Seen or Heterosexual Jill, I am happy for you although they will not be included here!

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Appropriate Behavior

Year: 2014
Runtime: 1h 26m
Director: Desiree Akhavan

#22 on our list of The 100 Best Lesbian Movies of All Time

Shirin is knee-deep in bisexual chaos after a breakup with the woman she thought she’d spend the rest of her life with. “Writer/director/star Desiree Akhavan is a once-in-a-generation talent and her humor makes this an easy movie to watch even as Shirin is seeped in melancholy and crisis,” writes Drew.

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Addicted to Fresno 

Year: 2015
Runtime: 1h 25m
Director: Jamie Babbitt

Natasha Lyonne plays a lesbian, as usual, in the dark comedy Addicted to Fresno, which also stars Aubrey Plaza and Judy Greer. Shannon (Greer) and Martha (Lyonne) are codependent sisters in a cycle of Martha picking up the pieces for Shannon, the recovering sex addict.

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AWOL

Year: 2017
Runtime: 1h 22m
Director: Deb Shoval

“Talking about class can be ugly,” wrote Sarah Fonseca in her glowing review of AWOL, a love story set in a rarely-portrayed rural landscape and confronts new conversations issues of class, race and gender. “Yet as AWOL asserts, when you dare to comment, sometimes it frees up room for beauty to unfurl.”

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Birds of Paradise

Amazon Original Movie
Year: 2021
Runtime: 1h 53m
Director: Sarah Adina Smith

“Birds of Paradise is a fine little lesbian diversion for a moody day,” writes Heather of this psychological thriller set at an exclusive ballet academy in Paris, where two top American dancers — a scholarship kid and an ambassador’s daughter — develop one of those tortured homoerotic adolescent bonds that in fact eventually becomes sexual. It’s campy without knowing how campy it is but otherwise is exactly what you might expect from such a film.

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Blush

Year: 2015
Runtime: 1h 24m
Director: Michal Vinik

“This Israeli coming-of-age film draws parallels between protagonist Naama’s burgeoning sexuality and her country’s troublesome politics,” wrote Drew in our Encyclopedia of Cinema. “While she’s having the usual queer teen experiences of first love, first heartbreak, and first post-heartbreak head shave, she’s also forced to deal with her violent home life and racist father. It’s a tale of intolerance across identities that’s affecting even as it follows familiar beats.”

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Bombshell

Year: 2019
Runtime: 1 hr 48 minutes
Director: Jay Roach

Telling the true story of the three women who exposed Fox News CEO Roger Ailes for sexual harassment, this star-studded film is compelling, smart and full of strong performances. On the other hand, it does uncritically celebrate racist bigots like Gretchen Carlson and Megyn Kelly for their perseverance against Ailes, despite their ongoing contribution to the culture that enabled him! A highlight of the film is Kate McKinnon’s character, a liberal lesbian who couldn’t get a job anywhere else. She has a little thing with Kayla Pospisil (Margot Robbie), a fictional composite character of a new anchor on the team.

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Bottoms

Year: 2023
Runtime: 1 hr 30 minutes
Director: Emma Seligman

#9 on our list of The 100 Best Lesbian Movies of All Time

This instant lesbian classic follows two horny teenagers, PJ (Rachel Sennot) and Josie (Ayo Edebiri), who start a fight club at their high school with the goal of getting laid. Kayla writes: “With a score co-composed by Charli XCX, a bold color palette, and more than one actual bomb, Bottoms is a boisterous and biting teen comedy that’s very on-the-nose and over-the-top about high school being a violent hellscape of social hierarchies and skin-tingling horniness.”

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Boy Meets Girl

Year: 2014
Runtime: 1h 39m
Director: Eric Schaeffer

21-year-old bisexual trans woman Ricky is a Kentucky barista dreaming of studying fashion in New York. She spends all her time hanging out with her since-childhood best friend Robby. Her life takes a turn when a friendship with new friend Francesca blossoms into an affair. Mari called it “heartwarming” and “groundbreaking.”

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Boys on the Side

Year: 1995
Runtime: 1h 51m
Director: Herbert Ross

A deeply beloved 90s classic in which Whoopi Goldberg plays a lesbian musician on a post-crime road trip with Mary Louise Parker and Drew Barrymore. The Indigo Girls! Nineties lipstick! Southwestern landscapes! There is so much processing and bonding in this movie, it’s almost like it’ll never end (just like a real lesbian relationship!).

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Carmen y Lola

Year: 2018
Runtime: 1h 43m
Director: Arantxa Echevarria

Arantxa Echevarria’s Carmen & Lola “focuses on two young Romani women who are being pressured into marriage and struggle to be together instead,” writs Drew. “Zaira Romero and Rosy Rodríguez play the titular characters and their chemistry further elevates the film. There is an engagement party dance scene that will burn into your memory forever.”

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The Carmilla Movie

Year: 2017
Runtime: 1h 34m
Director: Spencer Maybee

Karly declared the film, inspired by the popular lesbian vampire webseries, “everything I’ve ever wished for a movie adaptation of a beloved series.” Queer actors Elise Bauman and Natasha Negovanlis play Laura and Camilla, enlisting the help of their friends to uncover a supernatural threat with connections to Carmilla’s past.

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Circumstance

Year: 2011
Runtime: 1 hr 46m
Director: Maryam Keshavarz

#27 on our list of The 100 Best Lesbian Movies of All Time

Set in Tehran, Circumstace revolves around Atafeh (Nikohl Boosheri), a rebellious teenager from a wealthy family and the romantic relationship she develops with Shireen (Sarah Kazemy), her classmate, in a culture and society where homosexuality is forbidden. “My favorite thing about Circumstance is Keshavarz’s deeply erotic and gorgeous visual approach to the storytelling,” writes Kayla in her review of Circumstance. “The plot brims with darkness and drama.”

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Cloudburst

Year: 2013
Runtime: 1h 33m
Director: Thom Fitzgerald

Lesbian couple Dotty (Brenda Fricker) and Stella (Olympia Dukakis) break free from their nursing home and venture out on a road trip to Canada where they intend to tie the knot. in her review, Vanessa noted that it was fantastic to “see a true honest story about two old women in a real relationship with feelings and nuance and layers and depth.”

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Collette

Year: 2018
Runtime: 1 hr 51 minutes
Director: Wash Westmoreland

This bipoic stars Keira Knightley as Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette. “Certainly there’s a hint of salaciousness in the depiction of Colette’s early forays into lady-love,” writes Heather, “but the film treats her relationship with Missy with the utmost respect and tenderness.”

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Drive-Away Dolls

Year: 2024
Runtime: 1h 24m
Directors: Ethan Cohen and Tricia Cooke

This raunchy lesbian caper set in 1999 finds Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan), an uptight lesbian, and her best friend Jamie (Margaret Qualley), a serial cheater from Texas, taking a cross-country road trip to Florida (Marian to visit some family, Jamie to get away from her abusive cop ex (Beanie Feldstein) — but things take a turn when they discover a mysterious suitcase in their trunk. “It’s a road trip movie, a crime farce, and a romcom all rolled up into one smart and messy 84 minute package,” writes Drew.

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Gray Matters

Year: 2006
Runtime: 1hr 36m
Director: Sue Kramer

Gray (Heather Graham) and Sam (Tom Cavanaugh) are codependent adult siblings who decide to solve their romantic woes by finding partners for each other. Sam quickly falls for zoologist Charlie (Bridget Moynahan) — but things get very complicated when Gray falls for her, too.

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The Handmaiden

Year: 2016
Runtime: 2h 25m
Director: Park Chan-wook

#7 on our list of the Best Lesbian Movies of All Time

This intricate, seductive South Korean psychological thriller, inspired by Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith, is set in 1930s Korea and tells the story of Sook-hee (Kim Tae-ri), a con artist who cons her way into getting hired as a handmaiden to a wealthy Japanese heiress Hideko (Kim Min-hee) who lives in an isolated estate with her uncle, a collector of graphic erotica. But when they fall in love, the con is in peril.

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House of Hummingbird

Year: 2018
Runtime: 2hr 13m
Director: Kim Bora

#86 on our list of The Best Lesbian Movies of All Time

This “remarkable 1994-set coming-of-age debut” follows Eun-hee, a lonely and sensitive kid stumbling through her adolescence in an abusive home. Despite the tragedy and hardship of Eun-hee’s life, Drew writes, “an optimism and hopeful spirit runs deep throughout even its toughest moments.” She continues, “This is a movie for all the queers who ate lunch in a teacher’s room, this is a movie for all the queers who wondered if a future was possible and then, one day, stopped wondering and started to believe.”

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The Feels

Year: 2018
Runtime: 1h 27m
Director: Jenée LaMarque

Andi (Constance Wu) and Lu (Angela Trimbur) go into the woods of California wine country for a pre-wedding co-bachelorette party, where an unexpected confession throws a wrench in the weekend: Lu drunkenly reveals that she’s never had an orgasm. Everybody wants to help, and the conversations snowball from there. “Lesbian mumblecore is practically its own genre at this point,” wrote Heather in her review. “With its boundary-less relationships, improvised dialogue, characters who remind you of your own friends, and those stifled hiccups that give way to just enough drama to make the happy ending rewarding.”

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Jules of Light and Dark

Year: 2019
Runtime: 1h 26m
Director: Daniel Laabs

Winner of the Grand Jury prize for Outstanding American Feature at Outfest 2019, Jules of Light and Dark stars Tallie Medel as Maya, a heartsick lesbian struggling in the aftermath of a car accident. She makes an unlikely connection with a lonely gay man with an estranged daughter, “While a bit underwritten and at times as lost as its characters,” Drew writes, “the film ultimately works because of its central performances and Laabs’ impressive visual style.”

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Kajillionaire

Year: 2020
Runtime: 1h 44m
Director: Miranda July

#63 on our list of The 100 Best Lesbian Movies of All Time

Bisexual writer/director/weirdo Miranda July’s third film is “a careful, long-game-playing meditation on how we can learn to parent ourselves when our own families refuse to do the job.” Starring Evan Rachel Wood, the film is both a “dreamy, golden-hour queer love story set amidst the friendly outlandishness of contemporary Los Angeles” and an “unsettling, fluorescent portrait of familial betrayal.”

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Lizzie

Year: 2018
Runtime: 1h 45m
Director: Craig William Macneill

As a homosexual, the abject badness of this film — which is inspired by the the story of Lizzie Borden who killed her parents with an axe — was indeed overcome by furtive lesbian barn sex. Chloe Sevigny is Lizzie Borden and Kristen Stewart is her maid, Bridget “Maggie” Sullivan, who forms a close bond with Lizzie to eventually become her accomplice.

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Loving Annabelle

Year: 2006
Runtime: 1h 16m
Director: Katherine Brooks

Rebellious 17-year-old lesbian Annabelle Tillman (Erin Kellyman) is sent to a Catholic boarding school where she finds comfort, inspiration and eventually a clandestine inappropriate homosexual affair with her poetry teacher, Simone (Diane Gaidry). This tale as old as lesbian fictional time was inspired by Mädchen in Uniform.

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Mean Girls

Year: 2024
Runtime: 1h 47m
Director: Samantha Jayne

Queer icon Renee Rapp stars as Regina George in this adaptation of the musical based on the movie with queer actor Auli’i Cravalho playing the canonically queer Janis Ian. “Turning a musical into a movie is hard. So being a movie turned musical turned movie musical, Mean Girls (2024) had a lot of hurdles to overcome,” wrote Valerie. “It gracefully leaps over some and stumbles over others, and that’s what Nic and I are here to discuss today. One thing is for certain though: this is the gayest adaptation of Mean Girls yet.”

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The Miseducation of Cameron Post

Year: 2018
Runtime: 1h 30m
Director:  Desiree Akhavan

#38 on our list of The 100 Best Lesbian Movies of All Time

“The best adaptations capture the essence of their source material with a new set of tools,” wrote Drew of The Miseducation of Cameron Post. “That’s exactly what Desiree Akhavan’s movie of Emily M. Danforth’s contemporary classic accomplishes. Chloë Grace Moretz playa Cameron as “dykey and angsty and headstrong with that depth of vulnerability always peaking through” in this coming-of-age story that follows our heroine to gay conversion camp in the mid-90s.

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Monster

Year: 2004
Runtime: 1h 48m
Director: Patty Jenkins

#95 our list of The 100 Best Lesbian Movies of All Time

A heartbreaking, brutal drama based on the true story of lesbian sex worker Aileen Wournos, who’d suffered a lifetime of abuse and neglect and as an adult, began killing and robbing her clients before eventually earning the moniker of “America’s first female serial killer.” Charlize Theron plays Aileen Wuornos and Christina Ricci plays her lover Selby.

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My Days of Mercy

Year: 2017
Runtime: 1hr 47min
Director: Tali Shalom-Ezer

Elliot Page is Lucy and Kate Mara is Mercy in this film that mixes politics with passion. Lucy and her sister are anti-death-penalty protestors fighting to get their father, Simon, off death row. At a protest in Illinois, Lucy meerts Mercy, the daughter of a cop with dies to the death penalty case being protested. Despite their potential political tensions, a romance begins to grow.

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My Old Ass

Year: 2024
Runtime: 1hr 28 min
Director: Megan Park

A mushroom trip on an 18th birthday transports free-spirited lesbian Ella (Maisy Stella) face-to-face with her much older self — played by the incomparable Aubrey Plaza. Their relationship gets tricky when older Elliot starts doling out advice about what her younger self should and shouldn’t do, including her advice to avoid a boy named Chad. Ella of course ignores this advice as soon as she meets him, working on her family’s cranberry farm that summer, and they embark upon a romance that really divided audiences. “Watching Stella and Plaza riff off one another as the same character ages apart was delightful,” writes Gabrielle Grace Hogan. “The humorous chemistry between them is palpable, and enjoyable to watch. However, what begins as a promising tale of exploring love and queerness, and the joy and fear inherent to the passage of time, ultimately falls short of expectation.”

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Petit Mal

Year: 2022
Runtime: 1 hr 25 min
Director: Ruth Caudeli

Queer Colombian auteur Ruth Caudeli cast her real-life girlfriends and past collaborators Silvia Varón and Ana María Otálora as her co-stars in this visually experimental semi-autobiographical film about a throuple figuring out how to begin again. “We are watching these three artists create drama together,” writes Drew in her review. “Which definition of drama is unclear. I assume it’s a little of both. Revealing and not. Exaggerated and not. Truth and not.”

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Princess Cyd

Year: 2017
Runtime: 1 hr 36 min
Director: Stephen Cone

#43 on our list of The 100 Best Lesbian Movies of All Time

Heather called this the most hopeful queer film of 2017, and it made plenty of mainstream magazines’ best-of lists too. It hits all your coming-of-age hotspots about first queer love and sexual discovery. What’s especially refreshing about this one is that there’s no hand-wringing from anyone about their sexuality and every woman with a major part comes away from their summer together more content and connected.

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Professor Marston & the Wonder Women

Year: 2017
Runtime: 1h 48m
Director: Angela Robinson

#58 on our best Lesbian Movies List

This very sexy and very fun Angela Robinson film tells the story of Harvard psychologist and inventor Dr. William Moulton Marston and his wife, Elizabeth, who together created the Wonder Women character. William hires his student, Olive, as a research assistant, and she becomes part of William and Elizabeth’s relationship. There’s a lot of rope play in this one.

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Reaching for the Moon

Year: 2013
Runtime: 1h 54m
Director: Bruno Barreto

Set in Petrópolis between the years 1951 and 1967, Reaching the Moon tells the story of the love affair between the American poet Elizabeth Bishop and the Brazilian architect Lota de Macedo Soares. “Reaching for the Moon illustrates how creativity and power and passion shape the world through two character’s imagination and strength,” wrote Hansen in her review.

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Seventeen/Siebzhen 

Year: 2017
Runtime: 1h 45m
Director: Monja Art

17-year-old high school student Paula is really into her classmate Charlotte, but Charlotte has a boyfriend, and then there is popular girl Lily, an antagonist of Paula who might actually have a thing for Paula. Also, Charlotte has a boyfriend and then Paula gets a boyfriend ’cause she just wants to be liked. It captures the endless pining and yearning inherent in struggling with your sexuality as a teenager and all the awkward moments that engenders.

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Signature Move

Year: 2021
Runtime: 1h 11m
Director: Fawzia Mirza

#75 on our list of The 100 Best Lesbian Movies of All Time

This late-in-life coming-of-age movie finds a Pakistani-American woman obsessed with Lucha-style Mexican wrestling as an emotional release from her tense relationship with her newly widowed mother. “Fawzia Mirza stars and co-wrote the script,” writes Drew, “and her natural likeability, impeccable comic timing, and chemistry with Sari Sanchez make this movie endlessly endearing. It’s part romcom, part family dramedy, and both threads feel nuanced and real.”

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The World to Come 

Year: 2021
Runtime: 1h 44m
Director: Mona Fastvold

Mona Fastvold’s exquisite skills as a director are on display in this movie which fits most of the lesbian film tropes — 19th century, isolation, white straight cis actresses, lots of longing and period costumes. Two women in bad marriages develop a quick and deep friendship with each other that blossoms into more! In her review of The World to Come, Drew called it “an extraordinary lesbian romance ruined by Casey Affleck.”

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Other lesbian-inclusive movies on Prime Video:

• Along Came Wanda
• A New York Christmas Wedding
• A Perfect Ending
• Becks
• Carmen y Lola
• Carmilla
• Daphne
• Death on theNile
• Elena Undone
• Jules of Light and Dark
• Girl-Girl Scene: The Movie
• The Girl King
• Good Kisser
• Heartland
• The Last Conception
• Late Bloomers
• Let Me Fall
• The Lies We Tell But the Secrets We Keep
• Maybe Someday
• Mercy’s Girl
• My Normal
• Somebody I Used to Know
• Something From Tiffany’s
• Sister My Sister
• The Sleepover
• Spring
• Sunshine Cleaning
• Tru Love

The True Accurate History of LGBTQ+ Performers Competing for Lead and Supporting Actress Oscars

The history of LGBTQ representation in the acting categories at the Oscars is a wild one: we’ve got heaps of possibly-queer actors who are now dead, a handful of actors who weren’t out when they won but are out now, and a small, tiny little teacup of out actors nominated after coming out — including 2022’s historic win from Ariana DeBose, the first openly queer woman of color to win an Oscar for Acting. This year, Zoe Saldaña — who has been fluid in how she describes her sexuality through the years — became the second ever Afro-Latinx woman to win Best Supporting Actress and the fifth queer woman to win the category, only the second to do so while out.

Ultimately we are left with a key question: why have so few LGBTQ+ actors been nominated for acting Oscars? The problem here likely doesn’t start with the Academy, as so many problems do, but with whomst even sees mainstream movie stardom as a possibility and who is able to “get ahead” in Hollywood, an industry still run by cis men who are usually also straight and white.

Although young people have been coming out in droves over the past ten years and audiences are less likely than ever to insist gay people can’t play straight, the average age of Oscar nominees is late 30s – early 40s, and the marquee names that comprise typical nominee cadre remain heterosexual. Many gay or closeted actors still fear or know that coming out can hurt their career. In 2015, Variety wrote that “no A-list film actor has yet to come out publicly while at the pinnacle of his or her career.” I’d argue that Elliot Page did, and Kristen Stewart definitely has in the nine years since that piece was released — but it’s still pretty much true, and top-grossing LGBTQ+ films still tend to star straight actors in gay roles. While I absolutely don’t think only gay people should play gay roles, it’s an interesting trend.

How many queer people have been nominated for Oscars for playing queer roles? 

Not many!

• Jaye Davidson for The Crying Game (1992)
• Ian McKellan for Gods & Monsters (1998)
• Stephanie Hsu for Everything Everywhere All At Once (2023)
• Jodie Foster for Nyad (2024)
• Colman Domingo for Rustin (2024)
• Karla Sofía Gascón for Emilia Perez (2025)

Some (me) would also consider Angelina Jolie’s role in Girl, Interrupted (1999) to be a queer role, but there’s no clear consensus there, and regardless the character wouldn’t have read as explicitly queer to mainstream audiences.

How many straight people have been nominated for Oscars for playing queer roles? 

I haven’t looked back at the entire history of Oscar nominated queer roles because there are only so many hours in the day and it’s not like early film history is stuffed with queer parts. but I have gone back as far as 1990. As far as I can tell, just since 1990, straight women have been nominated for playing queer or trans roles 30 times. Straight men have been nominated for playing LGBTQ+ roles 27 times. 

Straight people seem most likely to win an Oscar for playing a queer character if they’re playing a historical figure or otherwise real person: Charlize Theron as Aileen Wuornos in Monster (2020), Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf in The Hours (2002), Hilary Swank as Brandon Teena in Boys Don’t Cry (1999), Sean Penn as Harvey Milk in Milk (2008), Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Truman Capote in Capote (2005), Olivia Colman as Queen Anne in The Favourite (2018) and Alicia Vikander as Gerda Wegener in The Danish Girl (2015).

Again; these were all performances worth celebrating and I don’t think only queer people should play queer roles. But it does speak to how homophobia in world’s gayest industry made it incredibly difficult for queer actors to be out, let alone play a queer role, until very recently. It also paints a very clear picture of who, historically, audiences and financial backers wanted to see play a gay part to be interested in supporting the project at all.

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Okay, now let’s look back at the history of LGBTQ+ people in the Lead Actress and Supporting Actress categories.

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The Unconfirmed But Possibly Gay Oscar Nominees of Early-to-Midcentury Hollywood

Early Hollywood was a hotbed of lesbian activity, as Silver Screen stardom was one of a very small number of ways for queer women to generate enough wealth to live independently, build thriving lesbian social lives in a liberal environment and eschew traditional expectations to marry young and procreate. Many bisexual stars of the era had relationships with both men and women, some had lavender marriages sold to tabloids as juicy romances, and most had a very good time. Called “The Sewing Circle,” this group of possibly-gay-or-bisexual women encompasses a major swath of the era’s top talent, and documentation of their activities comes from a variety of sources. Thus, the first three decades of Oscar nominations are dripping with “maybe” to “definitely but unconfirmed” lesbian and bisexual women, none of whom ever personally confirmed their own gayness.

The first-ever actress to win a Lead Actress trophy was Janet Gaynor in 1927/28 for 7th Heaven, Street Angel and Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans. Gaynor has been linked romantically to Broadway’s Peter Pan, confirmed bisexual Mary Martin, and it has been said of Gaynor that “Janet Gaynor’s husband was Adrian, but her wife was Mary Martin.” Janet Gaynor was also nominated in 1938 for A Star is Born.

In 1930, bisexual actress Marlene Dietrich was nominated for Lead Actress for Morocco — a film that marked the first time in film history that two women shared a kiss onscreen.

In 1939, Hattie McDaniel, who was rumored to have had relationships with women, became the first-ever person of color to win an Oscar for acting for Gone With The Wind. If Hattie McDaniel was gay for real, she’s the first queer person of color to win an Oscar for acting and Ariana DeBose is the second. But we’ll never know for sure, so!

Almost definitely bisexual Katharine Hepburn was nominated for 12 Academy Awards for Lead Actress between 1934 and 1982, and won four. 

Other probably-queer actors who earned acting nominations or wins in the 1930s-1950s include Greta Garbo, Jeanne Eagels, Billie Burke, Edna May Oliver, Claudette Colbert (who won for It Happened One Night in 1934), Barbara Stanwyck, Jean Arthur (another former Peter Pan), Spring Byington, Joan Crawford (who won for Mildred Pierce in 1945), Elsa Lanchester and Ethel Waters. (Waters, who was 100% queer for sure, was also the second Black actress nominated for an Academy Award.)

In 1966, actress Sandy Dennis, who allegedly had “many lesbian relationships,” won Best Supporting Actress for playing Honey in the film adaptation of gay playwright Ed Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Eva Le Gallienne, another member of the Hollywood “Sewing Circle,” got her first nomination for Resurrection in 1980, making her the then-oldest nominee. She was definitely a lesbian but refused to confirm it.

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The Out or Eventually-Out LGBTQ+ Nominees For Lead and Supporting Actress Oscars of the 1970s – present

Tatum O’Neal, 1974

Tatum O’Neal was a literal child when she won a Supporting Actress Oscar for “Paper Moon” in 1974 — the youngest winner in Oscars history. O’Neal came out in 2012, making Tatum O’Neal the first eventually-out queer actress to win an Oscar.

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Lily Tomlin, 1975

In 1975, Lily Tomlin was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for Nashville. Although she began dating Jane Wagner in 1971 and it was widely known within show business and the LGBTQ+ community that she was gay, she didn’t officially come out to the world until the 2000s.

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Jodie Foster 1976 – 1995

In 1976, 14-year-old Jodie Foster earned her first nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her role inTaxi Driver. Foster, who was always a tomboy and veered from the typical Hollywood startlet mode, was dogged by lesbian rumors and pressure to come out from the jump.

In 1988, Jodie Foster won her first Lead Actress Oscar for playing Sarah Tobias in The Accused. She brought British actor Julian Sands, who she met on the set of the 1987 film Siesta, as her date. This makes her the second eventually-out queer woman to win an Oscar for acting.

In 1991, Jodie Foster won her second Lead Actress Oscar for playing Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs, a film many saw as extremely homophobic. (“The Silence of the Lambs was protested upon its release by cis gay men because Buffalo Bill was read as gay and male,” Drew recently wrote of the film. “But Buffalo Bill is undoubtedly a trans woman.”) Much of that outcry against the film from LGBTQ+ activists held Jodie Foster personally accountable for being both in the closet and in the movie. 

In 1993, Foster began dating Cydney Bernard, and they eventually would have two children together. They broke up in 2008. (Foster is now married to Alexandra Heddison.)

In 1995, Jodie Foster was nominated for Lead Actress for Nell, and brought her gay friend Randy Stone as her date. Stone’s film Trevor, about the suicide of a gay teen, won an Oscar that year, and inspired the founding of The Trevor Project.

In 2007, Foster publicly acknowledged her relationship with Cydney in a speech at a “Women in Entertainment” luncheon, but her “official coming out” is generally cited as her 2013 Golden Globes speech. We’ll get back to Jodie Foster later in this post.

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Linda Hunt, 1983

Linda Hunt won Best Supporting Actress for The Year of Living Dangerously in1983, in which Hunt, who is white, played a Chinese-Australian man. Both Hunt and the character she played have dwarfism. Her physical transformation into the role married drag with “yellowface,” which included prosthetics to alter the appearance of her eyes. She’s among the nine white actors who’ve been nominated for playing East, Southeast or South Asian characters.

Hunt began dating her now-wife, psychotherapist Karen Kline, in 1978, but it appears she was not officially out until the 2000s.

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Anna Paquin, 1994

Anna Paquin was 11 when she became the second-youngest ever Oscar winner, winning Best Supporting Actress for The Piano in 1994. Paquin came out as bisexual in 2010.

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Angelina Jolie, 1999

Angelina Jolie was the first openly queer woman to win or be nominated for an Oscar for acting when she won Best Supporting Actress for Girl Interrupted in 1999. Depending on how you read her character, she could be considered the first openly queer woman nominated for playing a queer or trans role, and the only one until Stephanie Hsu’s nomination in 2023, which was followed by Jodie Foster’s in 2024. (We’ll get there later in this post.)

But that’s not all! The first openly-queer person to be nominated for acting was Nigel Hawthorne in 1995, though the specifics are contestable, as he was outed in the run-up to the ceremony so he technically wasn’t out at the time of the nomination. I’ve also mentioned McKellan (also nominated in 2002) and Davidson.

But none of these guys won, which I think makes Angelia Jolie the first openly queer person to win an Academy Award for acting.

Jolie dated Jenny Shimizu while they worked together on Foxfire in 1996, and never shied away from identifying as bisexual, telling Girlfriends in 1997 that “I probably would have married Jenny Shimizu if I hadn’t married my husband. I fell in love with her the first second I saw her.”

Jolie was also nominated for Best Lead Actress for Changeling in 2008.

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Queen Latifah, 2003

In 2003, Queen Latifah was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for Chicago. (A role which was arguably queer-coded!) The degree to which Queen Latifah is out or not has been a consistent topic of heated debate in our community, but we can safely say she was not out at this time and that she is out now. This makes her the first eventually-out actress of color nominated for an Oscar.

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Elliot Page, 2007

In 2007, Elliot was nominated for Best Lead Actress for Juno. Page came out as gay in 2014, and then came out as a queer trans man in 2020. He was the first transgender Oscar nominee for acting, although nobody knew he was trans when he was nominated. Meanwhile, eight cisgender people have been nominated for playing transgender characters, two of whom won.

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Lady Gaga, 2018

In 2018, openly bisexual actress/musician Lady Gaga was nominated for Lead Actress for A Star is Born. This makes her the second openly queer actor nominated for an Academy Award for acting. She didn’t win for acting, but she did win for Best Original Song.

The first openly queer woman to win Original Song was Melissa Etheridge in 2006.

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Cynthia Erivo, 2019

In 2019, actress/singer/songwriter Cynthia Erivo was nominated for Best Lead Actress for Harriet. She came out in August 2021, telling The Standard, “I am queer… I have never felt like I necessarily needed to come out just because no-one really asked.” This makes Erivo is the first eventually-out queer woman of color nominated for Lead Actress.

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Ariana DeBose, 2022

In 2022, Ariana DeBose won Best Supporting Actress for West Side Story. This made her the first openly queer woman of color, and the second Afro-Latina, nominated for an acting Oscar, and the first openly queer woman of color to win an Oscar for Acting.

She is also the first Afro-Latina and the second Latina woman to win an Oscar for Acting, and she won it for the same role Rita Moreno won it for in 1962. (Some count Mercedes Ruehl amongst Latina winners because her Grandmother is Cuban, which would make Ariana the third winner.)

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Kristen Stewart, 2022

In 2022, openly queer actress Kristen Stewart was Nominated for a Lead Actress Oscar for Spencer, which I enjoyed quite a bit. That year, both Stewart and Ariana DeBose were the first female nominees to bring female dates to the Oscars.

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Stephanie Hsu, 2023

In 2023, queer actress Stephanie Hsu was nominated for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for playing a queer role in Everything Everywhere All At Once. While she didn’t win (the award went to her co-star Jamie Lee Curtis), Everything Everywhere All At Once did become the first film centered on a queer woman’s story to win Best Picture. Hsu is the first Asian-American queer woman nominated for an Oscar.

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Jodie Foster, 2024

And as so many things do, we return now to Jodie Foster — who is now fully out, in a relationship with Alexandra Heddison, and seemingly thriving. In 2024, she was nominated for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for playing Bonnie in Nyad, which is the first time Foster has played such a truly astoundingly gay part.

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Lily Gladstone, 2024

The 2024 nominees for Actress in a Leading Role were incredibly queer. Three straight actors were nominated for playing queer roles: Emma Stone (Poor Things), Sandra Hüller (Anatomy of a Fall) and Annette Benning (Nyad). Carey Mulligan’s nominated for playing the wife of gay composer Leonard Bernstein in Maestro. Then we had the biggest milestone nomination of the year: Lily Gladstone for Killers of a Flower Moon.

Gladstone is amongst a very small group of Indigenous actors nominated for an Academy Award for acting, which is particularly shameful when you consider Hollywood’s rich legacy of redface and the Oscars’ appetite for white savior narratives. In 2019, Yalitza Aparicio became the first Indigenous and second Mexican woman nominated for a Best Lead Actress award. Gladstone was the second.

Gladstone identifies as a member of the LGBTQ+ community and uses she/they pronouns, and told People that doing so is their own way of decolonizing gender, because in Blackfeet there are no gendered pronouns. Gladstone told The New York Times, “It’s kind of being middle-gendered, I guess. I’ve always known I’m comfortable claiming being a woman, but I never feel more than when I’m in a group of all women that I’m not fully this either.”

The award ended up going to Emma Stone, for playing the queer character Bella Baxter in Poor Things.

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Zoe Saldaña, 2025

Does Zoe Saldaña count as a queer woman? This is hard to say! In 2013, Zoe Saldaña spoke about being open to relationships with both men and women in a cover story for Allure Magazine. Since that time, her sexual fluidity hasn’t been at the forefront of her personal narrative — but in a January 2025 interview, Saldana says that her first kiss was a girl, girls are such better kisses, and that she’s attracted to feminine men and masculine women. If yes, then let us take note that she won Best Supporting Actress for Emilia Perez.

Karla Sofía Gascón, 2025

Welp, this was supposed to be a big fucking deal — Gascón, a trans lesbian, was the first out trans performer nominated for an Academy Award when she got her nod for playing the titular role in Emilia Perez, a musical about a Mexican trans woman and former drug lord who fakes her death and abandons her family to transition and leave the cartel, performed in Spanish and in English, written by a white cishet French man who has openly expressed a disinterest in learning anything about Mexico. Perez’s character is also a trans lesbian! Fantastic! Unfortunately, Emilia Perez was bad, and also did not sit particularly well with Mexican moviegoers or trans people. This didn’t stop her from winning the Golden Globe. But even more unfortunate was a journalist digging up a vile, viciously racist tweet history from Gascon, much of it extremely recent, which definitely torched any chance Gascón had at taking home a trophy — as it should.

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Cynthia Erivo, 2025

Cynthia Erivo’s second nomination for Best Lead Actress — this time for her stunning turn as Elpheba, the future Wicked Witch of the West, in blockbuster musical Wicked — comes when she is in fact very out as a queer woman (and holding space for the lyrics etc). While Elpheba is not a queer character technically, she sure does feel that way, and obviously basically the entire cast is gay. Cynthia’s nomination made her the first out queer Black woman to be nominated for a Lead Actress. Impressively she is also the first eventually-out queer Black woman nominated for Lead Actress when she was nominated for Harriet.

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In total, this list of LGBTQ+- related acting nominees now contains:

• Ten people who were openly LGBTQ+ at the time of their nomination for Lead or Supporting Actress (Karla Sofía Gascón, Cynthia Erivo the second time, Ariana DeBose, Kristen Stewart, Angelina Jolie, Stephanie Hsu, Jodie Foster, Lily Gladstone, Lady Gaga, and Zoe Saldaña), of whom three won while out (Ariana DeBose, Angelina Jolie, and Zoe Saldaña).
• Eight people who were not openly LGBTQ+ at the time of their nomination for Lead or Supporting Actress, but are now, one of whom was nominated five times (Jodie Foster).
• Since 1999, 30 straight cisgender women who have been nominated for playing lesbian, queer, trans or bisexual roles. Five have won.
• Five cis men and one cis woman nominated for playing trans women, two cis women nominated for playing trans men, and one trans woman nominated for playing a trans woman.
• 17 now-dead women who may have been LGBTQ+ according to historians but never personally identified that way themselves on the official record.
• Three queer women nominated for playing queer roles — Stephanie Hsu for Everything Everywhere All At Once, Jodie Foster for NYAD and Karla Sofía Gascón for Emilia Perez.
  • Arguably, Angelina Jolie was also nominated for playing a queer role and did win, depending on how you read her character in Girl Interrupted.

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this post was originally written in 2022 and has been updated for 2025

Our Most Anticipated Queer Books for March 2025

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Autostraddle’s Top Most Anticipated LGBTQ Books for February 2025

The Unworthy, by Agustina Bazterrica, translated by Sarah Moses (March 4, Horror)

Scorched Earth: Poems, by Tiana Clark (Poetry)

Liquid: A Love Story, by Mariam Rahmani (March 11, Literary Fiction)

Stag Dance, by Torrey Peters (March 11, Literary Fiction)

Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One, by Kristen Arnett (March 18, Literary Fiction)

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March 4

Fable for the End of the World, by Ava Reid (YA Sci-Fi)

They Bloom at Night, by Trang Thanh Tran (YA Horror)

Love Points To You, by Alice Lin (YA Romance)

The River Has Roots, by Amal El-Mohtar (Fantasy Novella)

Woodworking, by Emily St. James (Literary Fiction)

Say A Little Prayer, by Jenna Voris (YA Romance)

The Boxcar Librarian, by Brianna Labuskes (Historical Fiction Thriller)

My Little Golden Book About Pride, by Kyle Lukoff and Michelle Jing Chan (Childrens)

Kirby’s Lessons for Falling (in Love), by Laura Gao (YA Romance Graphic Novel)

Tomes & Tea #3: Tea You at the Altar, by Rebecca Thorne (Romantasy)

March 11

Homegrown Magic, by Jamie Pacton & Rebecca Podos (Romantasy)

Girl Falling, by Hayley Scrivenor (Thriller)

Rehearsals for Dying, by Ariel Gore (Memoir)

Shoot Your Shot, by Lexi LaFleur Brown (Romance)

Paper Doll: Notes From a Late Bloomer, by Dylan Mulvaney (Memoir)

How to Survive a Slasher, by Justine Purcella Winans (YA Horror)

Glitch Girl! by Rainie Oet (Middle Grade)

Arrangements, by Esther Kondo Heller (Poetry)

The Usual Family Mayhem, by HelenKay Dimon (Mystery)

Idolfire, by Grace Curtis (Sci-Fi/Fantasy)

March 18

Killer Potential, by Hannah Deitch (Thriller)

Murder by Memory, by Olivia Waite (Sci-Fi)

13 Ways To Say Goodbye, by Kate Fussner (YA Romance)

Lonely Planet The LGBTQ+ Travel Guide, by Alicia Valenski (Nonfiction)

A Fairytale for Everyone, by Boldizsár M. Nagy, illustrated by Lilla Bölecz, and translated by Anna Bentley (Childrens)

Beyond Personhood: An Essay in Trans Philosophy, by Talia Mae Bettcher (Nonfiction)

Animal Instinct, by Amy Shearn (Sci-Fi)

Aunt Tigress, by Emily Yu-Xuan Qin (Romantasy)

We Contain Landscapes by Patrycja Humienik (Poetry)

The Prince Without Sorrow, by Maithree Wijesekara (Fantasy)

Camila Núñez’s Year of Disasters, by Miriam Zoila Pérez (YA Romance)

Serial Killer Support Group, by Saratoga Schaefer (Mystery Thriller)

Overtime, by Tracey Richardson (Romance)

March 25

Trauma Plot: A Life by Jamie Hood (March 25, Memoir)

Harriet Tubman: Live in Concert, by Bob the Drag Queen (Literary Fiction)

Black. Fat. Femme: Revealing the Power of Visibly Queer Voices in Media and Learning to Love Yourself, by Jonathan P. Higgins and Latrice Royala (Nonfiction)

Reprise: Poems and Photographs, by Golden (Poetry + Photography)

Exquisite Ruin, by AdriAnne May (Romantasy)

Blood On Her Tongue, by Johanna van Veen (Horror)

Cover Story, by Celia Laskey (Romance)

Leafskin, by Miranda Schmidt (Literary Fiction)

Oscars 2025: Two Queers Discuss the Straightest Academy Awards in Years

The 97th Academy Awards are this Sunday bringing us to the end of one of the more chaotic awards seasons in recent memory. But will the show itself have anything to rival the Moonlight/La La Land mix up or The Slap™? You’ll have to watch on ABC or Hulu to find out.

But before then join us in our tradition of discussing the films nominated for Best Picture! We’ve been doing this since 2020 and it’s been fascinating to track as each Oscars got gayer and gayer — until this year. A sign of Trump’s America or a one year exception? Not sure! But even these straight Oscars still have one technically gay musical (derogatory) and one subtextually gay musical (complimentary) and all of the films are worth chatting about!

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Drew: Hello!!

Riese: HI DREW

Drew: Did you know this is our SIXTH year doing this?

Riese: Wow really??!

Drew: Do you want to share why this year is different from all other years?

Riese: This year is different from all other years not just because we dip the parsley in salt water but because 1) I am on family leave right now because we had a baby six days ago and 2) due to the aforementioned situation, I did not actually view all the Best Picture nominees.

Drew: You did REALLY well though all things considered.

Riese: True. The thing about having a nine months pregnant wife is that The Brutalist is a bit of a hard sell for a relaxing night in.

Drew: Hmm shocking. To be fair, when we first started this I didn’t watch them all!

I still haven’t seen 1917. Although I did eventually watch Mank.

Riese: Sad for you.

Drew: Yeah Mank sucked.

Riese: Something cool is that every year the headline has indicated more and more gayness.

Drew: True! But not this year. Did you know we’re in a conservative backlash impacting all areas of life including the film industry?

Riese: Fascinating I had no idea. Deeply upsetting to hear.

Drew: Not great overall yeah.

Riese: I do think next year will be even worse…

Drew: Yes. But this year’s Oscars is unique in a fun way which is that many of the categories are still up in the air.

Riese: What would be your pick for best picture? I’ll start. Wicked.

Drew: Look I do not think Wicked is very well shot or edited but I had a great time and Part Two is one of the things I’m surviving 2025 for. The performances are soooo good

Riese: I had such a fantastic time at Wicked. I thought I LOVE THE CINEMA! I had come there for magic and the magic was delivered.

Drew: I listened to the soundtrack nonstop for weeks and with every listen cared less and less about the film’s lighting.

Riese: Yes, you did evolve on it over time as every Monday meeting we took a minute to discuss which song on the soundtrack was in our current top rotation and which aspect of the film we were currently reflecting upon or making our whole personality.

It was a dark winter and Wicked was glorious and it won’t win Best Picture I guess but in my opinion it was Tops.

Drew: It won the award for movie the most people saw and that isn’t nothing.

Riese: I would say Wicked was the gayest but there is technically a gayer movie…….

Drew: Oh god should we get that out of the way?

Riese: I suppose so.

Drew: I am so sorry I made a wish on a monkey’s paw for a trans lesbian musical to get an Oscar nomination and it resulted in us all having to suffer through Emilia Pérez. I really thought it was gonna be the adaptation of The Prince and the Dressmaker that never happened.

Riese: The first 20 minutes of the movie I was like “ok this is weird but good I think?” and then the next 6500 minutes I was like “I hate this.”

“La Vaginoplastia” was the song of the year but sadly it did not even get nominated for best original song. Although the conceit of the piece of the narrative that enabled that song was also so annoyingly stupid.

Drew: Yeah as I’ve said before I’d like the movie more if it was all as goofy as that viral clip.

Riese: Yeah it needed to lean into that camp.

Drew: The movie is not just transphobic and racist. It’s also bad as a film.

Riese: Yes, completely. The plot was a mess, the characters were empty, the ending was absolutely meaningless.

Drew: I was sooo certain it was going to win Best Picture for months though. But now I think we’re spared that for the worst reason, which is Karla Sofía Gascón having a bunch of racist and unhinged tweets in her past. And by past I mean like the past five years not when she was a wee child.

Riese: Yes. Also she did call you an idiot.

Drew: Yes she did.

Riese: Which I thought, “Hm, that’s a wild thing for someone to say.” But now that i’ve seen her full racist tweet history I think, “Ah, ok, that tracks.”

Drew: I was so nice about it on Twitter. I regret that. Turns out she didn’t deserve me being nice. But I just have a lot of sympathy for how hard it is to be trans in the industry!!

Riese: For sure. It is. You’ve written about this a lot of course, but like yeah it’s never great to be the only trans person on a set of a thing about trans people.

Drew: I do think it’s funny because I reviewed the film out of TIFF and since no trans critics I know of were at Cannes, I was among the first trans people to see it and have become the go to expert on it for a lot of people. I’ve had so many media requests to talk about the film.

Riese: I do love that for you

Drew: I’ve only taken two though because I’m not going on the BBC to talk about trans stuff. That’s insane.

Riese: Right

Drew: My vulnerable truth is everything around Emilia Pérez makes me sad. I wish I could just clown on it and have a good time, but given this moment in time it’s such a bummer that THIS is the representation of trans people and trans art that’s on this stage.

Riese: It really is.

Drew: Gascón being racist on top of that is just like… oof.

Riese: There are so many political and cultural forces converging right now that make this so particularly unfortunate.

Drew: At the same time, one of the reasons I care about the Oscars despite it rarely awarding the actual best movies is that it’s acted as a reflection of our culture for nearly a century. So in that sense Emilia Pérez is the perfect representation for this moment. It’ll just be easier to appreciate that in a decade when things are hopefully better and idk Isabel Sandoval has a directing Oscar.

Riese: Yeah, amongst other things, cis people having unearned and unjustified control over the lives of trans people, executed recklessly and with a lot of narrative manipulation.

Drew: Speaking of misguided representations of marginalized groups… should we discuss Anora?

Riese: It is predicated on my least favorite trope in sex worker stories but the way they executed it was actually not annoying to me at all. Until the end.

Drew: Yeah, I feel similarly.

Riese: But as a former sex worker, stories about sex workers falling in love with clients really does empower clients to see that as not just possible, but likely. And that was one of the most annoying aspects of sex work. So those stories always drive me nuts. But this one felt like it was lamp shading it a bit, and that trope enabled a much wilder story. It wasn’t a straight up Pretty Woman style thing.

Drew: It’s so unlikely — in general and in this case in particular — that I fully thought Ani was just in it for the money. And as the movie went on I was like wait are we supposed to think she actually loves this guy?? That felt like such a divide for me.

But I’d be more generous to that if the film had a different ending.

Riese: Yes, absolutely. Anora was a lot of things and it did some of those things well — just the madcap caper of it all. I guess it’s similar to Tangerine in that way.

Drew: I think it works best as a comedy! And the self-serious ending is so annoying to me, because there’s nothing inherently deeper about making it sad.

Riese: Right it’s a cheap trick and it undermines her agency.

Drew: I haven’t seen it in many years, but my feeling about Tangerine was that it was a good movie with problems that got way over-praised because movies about trans people (especially Black trans sex workers) are usually SOOO bad that people were like wow this is actually not bad!

I think that’s Sean Baker’s thing in general. While he’s talented as a filmmaker, the only reason his perspective on sex work is seen as radical or sympathetic is because the standard in the industry is so bad. But he’s actually falling into a lot of the same tropes and ruining the good things he brings to his work.

Riese: Like saying you’re gonna try a new restaurant and driving all the way there and then just eating at Applebees.

Drew: Yeah and there’s worse food than Applebees but it shouldn’t win Best Picture.

Riese: Correct.

Drew: I’ve loved Mikey Madison since Better Things though so I’m glad she’s getting this success. Better Things should win Best Picture

Riese: I agree. Also the Pulitzer Prize. Everybody should be watching Better Things in 2025.

Drew: PEGOT-winner Better Things.

Riese: I would love to see Better Things on Broadway.

Drew: Someone get Pamela Adlon on the phone.

Riese: To circle back to my own personal life for a minute.

Drew: Yes, please.

Riese: I would not necessarily recommend screening Nickel Boys to a nine months pregnant woman who has a lot of hormones going on. Gretchen is really not a crier but she cried at the end for twenty minutes and said, “Why did you do this to me?” I had to hold it together for the family.

I feel like I keep talking about the endings of movies in this chat. And I obviously don’t want to spoil anything.

Drew: It was a big year for endings!

Riese: Because this year is also the end of the world. That’s cute for us. Not for my tiny baby though.

Drew: The world must live on for Jude !!!!!!! I will fight Donald Trump and Jacques Audiard to make a better world for Jude.

Riese: Thank you so much.

Anyhow Nickel Boys was beautiful and difficult.

Drew: I loved Nickel Boys. I saw it opening night in 35mm and RaMell Ross was there and it was such a special viewing experience and also one of the best Q&As I’ve ever watched.

Riese: Oh wow that’s so cool.

Drew: The film was so meticulously crafted. Stylistically, yes, it’s obviously showy in certain choices (the POV) but it’s just as accomplished in smaller ways and in its subtler moments.

Riese: It took a bit for me to get with the POV.

Drew: Yeah it can be distancing as much as it is immersive.

Riese: I would love a surprise win for Nickel Boys

Drew: It’s not happening but I would really love that too

Riese: It’s very odd to get a Best Picture nom but no acting noms. But also not atypical for the Academy when it comes to films with predominantly POC casts.

Drew: Yeah that’s true. It was starting to change for sure, but we’re in a conservative backslide so.

Riese: Yeah, I mean when it comes to racial diversity this year was overall a step backwards. I feel like the reaction to the first Trump administration was actually quite the opposite. But, of course, the backlash to that reaction is where we are now.

Drew: There were a lot of Black films that were ignored or under-appreciated this year. The Piano Lesson should’ve been a shoo-in for several categories. And the actors in Hard Truths being ignored is so egregious.

Riese: Yes.

Drew: Also this was not a particularly strong year for the Supporting Actress category. Joan Chen should’ve been nominated and even won for Didì.

Riese: I love Joan Chen.

Riese: What was your least favorite film of the batch? Besides Emilia Pérez.

Drew: A Complete Unknown. You were spared. Just like I was spared from Joker. Until Lady Gaga was cast in the sequel. And then I watched Joker. And it was the worst movie ever. And then I didn’t even see Joker 2 even though it had Lady Gaga.

Riese: Yeah Joker was fucking awful as I said at the time.

I did not see A Complete Unknown because I was unable to go to the cinema.

Drew: Yeah they were really stingy with this screener for some reason.

Riese: I do like Bob Dylan though.

Drew: I LOVED Bob Dylan as a teenager.

Riese: Same.

Drew: “Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright” was my favorite song ever at one point. Any time a crush didn’t work out I was like Bob Dylan wrote this song for me.

Riese: “Tangled Up in Blue” means a lot to me. And he wrote a song for me too: “Absolutely Sweet Marie”

Drew: Honestly, I still love Bob Dylan.

Riese: Yeah I will always love Bob Dylan.

Drew: I don’t listen to him a lot but when I do I’m like oh wow he’s great. And that’s the best part of the movie. Whenever there was a song I was like oh yeah this song is good.

Riese: My writing teacher at Interlochen who made me the person i am today was wild about Bob Dylan which also had a major impact on me.

Drew: That’s really sweet.

The unfortunate thing is this movie isn’t very good. The performances are fine, but it not only falls into all the standard biopic traps, it’s not even a good version of them. It’s just so aggressively middling.

Riese: That’s sad for Bob Dylan and for you and for me if I ever watch it.

Drew: Everyone should just watch I’m Not There (2007) instead.

Riese: My least favorite film was Dune: Part Two.

Drew: Rough day for Chalamet.

Riese: Sand dunes? People in costumes and makeup? Blah Blah blah dust and fighting. I had not a single clue what was going on the entire time. You could blame that on me not paying attention but I would argue otherwise.

Drew: I am admittedly not a Dunehead. I’ve seen the Lynch movie and these two movies and I think I’m always waiting for them to be a bit more subversive in their story of metaphorical colonialism than they end up being. Maybe the books would be more interesting to me

I admired the craft and spectacle of Dune: Part Two while still feeling kind of shrug about what it’s doing or saying or anything about the characters. Also this one didn’t have Oscar Isaac. I missed Oscar Isaac.

Riese: SNOOZE

Drew: I do think it’s cool to get a sci-fi epic that’s beautifully crafted in our post-Marvel world. Like even that it’s dense enough to be confusing to you is a good thing, I might argue. I want to get behind Dune! But yeah it doesn’t do much for me.

Riese: Yeah I suppose Ulysses is also dense enough to be confusing to me and I hear that’s a good book.

Drew: I even rewatched the first one with Elise before seeing the second one. I’m really trying here, Duneheads. Is that what they’re called?

Riese: Duners.

Drew: Googling and it seems there’s no consensus. Some are saying duners, some are saying dunies, but my favorite is worm riders.

Riese: Dunies is cute. Or Dunesdayers.

Drew: Ooo Dunesdayers.

Riese: Speaking of people wearing the same outfits, Conclave was good.

Drew: I enjoyed Conclave so much. I drank one (1) White Claw beforehand and had the time of my life.

This is another film where I think the ending is handled poorly and could rant about its representation. But, honestly, I didn’t even care because I had so much fuuuuuun. Cunty cardinals! Isabella Rossellini as a nun!

Riese: Great nun. I had a nice time. I was engaged and didn’t feel bored.

Drew: I love when people vote on things in movies. 12 Angry Men? Great movie.

Riese: Fantastic movie.

Drew: It’s like watching The Traitors.

Riese: Fantastic television show. Yeah Conclave is basically The Traitors.

Drew: Which character from Conclave would win on The Traitors? Would it shake out the same way

Riese: Oh hmmm. Who wins The Traitors? The best liar or the best person?

Drew: Isn’t that the question.

I do think Conclave is the most fun I had with any of the nominees but I don’t think it should win in any of the categories. I would be fine with it winning Adapted Screenplay or Supporting Actress but I think those should be Nickel Boys and… oh god idk Ariana Grande?

Riese: Listen, Ariana Grande killed it.

Drew: She really did.

Drew: Speaking of fun movies… let’s talk about The Substance. Another movie I saw early at TIFF and did not like as much as the critical consensus. But I did have fun with it.

Riese: I think I liked it. It was a little on the nose but also idk, stylistically it was such a fun little time.

Drew: Yeah I’m more in support of it being nominated for director than screenplay because I think its writing is the weakest part. But it also won Best Screenplay at Cannes so what do I know.

I would LOVE if Demi Moore won Best Actress. She’s so good in it

Riese: It would be nice for Demi but also I want Cynthia to win.

Drew: I would also love Cynthia to win but that feels less likely.

Riese: I don’t know if my brain is working worse than usual because I’m tired or if I am usually this level of ineloquent about the cinema.

Drew: I would say every year you are insecure about the sophistication of your takes even though we’re just pals talking about movies.

Riese: That feels true.

I think the film spoke to a problem we are all deeply aware of and that is also quite important, but it didn’t really go deep enough. As a horror movie I loved it and visually I loved it but as a true interrogation of the beauty industrial complex I don’t think it had anything new to say.

Maybe that’s true about a lot of horror movies. I am famously not a horror movie expert.

Drew: See I think there are horror movies that are more nuanced. Not often but the really great ones.

Riese: Right

Drew: I do think this movie works better as an experience than as something to really think about. But Demi Moore elevates it a lot.

Riese: Yeah I would agree with that.

Drew: And hey capturing something emotionally is worthwhile.

Riese: The Substance was a nice piece of art to experience and speaking of experiencing pieces of art… The Brutalist was a very long cinema film.

Drew: My favorite! Or at least tied with Nickel Boys.

Riese: I had a feeling that you would adore it. It’s audacious to make a movie that long.

Drew: At least it had an intermission! That’s always the complaint from people with long movies.

Riese: Who is going to go see that!

Drew: A lot of people! It’s done pretty well!

Riese: Hmph. Well, I thought, you know, this is brutal. I thought, I am unhappy.

Drew: Yes it is not a pleasant film.

Riese: It’s similar to Zone of Interest in that way! Where I was like, why did I do that to myself?

Drew: But it’s so rare to get a movie about historical tragedy that engages with the years afterward instead of the tragedy itself. I really appreciated that.

Riese: That’s a good point. We need more of that.

Drew: I think it’s a really moving film about the ways people can self-destruct and hurt others in the years post-trauma when society (capitalism) continues to add on a bunch of smaller traumas. The film seems to be saying that you can either be like the brother-in-law and assimilate into a violent existing power structure or you can be like the niece and go to Israel and create a new violent power structure. It’s very bleak. Very very bleak.

Riese: Exactly! It is very bleak.

Drew: But it feels appropriate for the moment.

Riese: Yes, it has bleakness in common with the moment.

Drew: I also think it’s a really moving film about trying to make art within these broken systems and amid this trauma.

Riese: And also about the compromises of receiving funding for said art.

Drew: Yes, so Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold managing to make a movie this long with an intermission within our current system feels like a hopeful side to the bleakness

Riese: Yeah, it is hopeful that they were able to make a film that had no hope of mainstream appeal and it succeeded.

Riese: Do you think The Brutalist is going to win Best Picture?

Drew: I hope so. I think it has a shot.

Riese: I think it will win.

Drew: That’d be great. But I think it’s going to be Anora.

Riese: Oh really?? Anora? I would slap Chris Rock in the face for that.

Drew: Anora won at PGA and usually those align.

Riese: Oh interesting.

Drew: But who knows! It’s been a crazy year.

Riese: I don’t have as strong of feelings about the films this year as I have in other years. Besides my displeasure with Emilia Pérez. But that’s almost its own story. That has become bigger beyond even the awards themselves.

Drew: Yeah for sure.

We have one more.

Riese: We do.

Drew: Another movie that deals with fascism but the beginning rather than the end.

Riese: Jude’s first cinema.

Drew: Did he like it?

Riese: At first he didn’t like it, but then I put my finger in his mouth and then he liked it more. Then he sort of found it a snooze apparently.

Drew: Hmm a tough but fair review

Riese: Yeah, I mean, he was five days old so it’s a lot to consider.

Drew: I showed my eight month old cousin 2001: A Space Odyssey the first time I babysat and thought I would brainwash him into being a cinephile but now he’s in high school and I think he wants to get into finance.

Riese: You tried. That’s what’s important.

Drew: Jude should be a Rotten Tomatoes top critic.

Riese: I did think maybe I should start a Letterboxd account for my baby.

Drew: Would follow.

Did you like I’m Still Here? Was it worth watching amid raising new life?

Riese: Yes! Because I finished it today, this very day, I have yet to have time to learn everything about the historical circumstances which surrounded it.

Drew: Oh you’ll love doing that. That’s your favorite thing.

I will say when I did that it made me like the movie less only because I feel like there’s so much interesting story left unexplored. I think I might have liked a movie more that took place in the 20 year gap. Or I would’ve liked this one more from the perspective of the daughter who went to Europe. But I did still like it. A very solid film with good acting.

[two minute gap]

Riese: Sorry Penny just got back from her hike and wants to eat the baby.

Drew: Hmm I don’t think you should let her imo

Riese: Or not eat the baby but lick the baby like an ice cream cone.

Drew: Better but still questionable.

Riese: Yeah, I mean, Penny often licks her own asshole so idk if we want that on Jude’s tender skin.

Drew: At least not until week two.

Riese: Totally.

Anyhow, I feel like I didn’t get my footing in the movie at first. Although it’s hard to say if that’s because of the movie or because of the tiny peanut baby.

Drew: Right, that’s fair.

Drew: I would be very happy if I’m Still Here won foreign film over Emilia Pérez. I will say that much.

Riese: It certainly should.

Drew: Since those are the only two with Best Picture noms it feels like it’s between those. But The Seed of the Sacred Fig is the nominated movie I haven’t seen that I most want to watch. I’ve heard great things.

Riese: I like the way figs look when you cut them open.

Drew: Shane McCutcheon is voting for The Seed of the Sacred Fig as a member of the hair and makeup branch of the Academy.

Riese: Those sweet little sacred figs.

Drew: The Girl with the Needle, also in that category, is one of the most brutal films I’ve ever seen. Makes The Brutalist look fun.

Oh I also really want to watch Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat. l feel like the doc category is really strong this year. I’ve only seen No Other Land and Black Box Diaries but really liked both.

Riese: I think I saw fewer movies this year than normal because now I live with my Wife so we have to decide what to watch together.

Drew: I personally support you watching fewer movies but having a lovely wife and adorable baby.

Riese: You know what was fun though is Challengers.

Drew: CHALLENGERS SHOULD’VE SWEPT

Riese: Do you think if they had released it during awards season it may have had a shot?

Drew: Yeah or at least Zendaya might’ve had a nom. And score.

Riese: Yeah score seemed like an easy nom for them? So weird.

Drew: Now that we know she sucks as a person and not just as an actor I feel confident saying it’s INSANE Karla Sofía Gascón got a nomination this year. That category was so competitive.

Marianne Jean-Baptiste for sure but also Nicole Kidman and Angelina Jolie and Zendaya ! You could make a Best Actress category of performances not nominated stronger than the ones nominated.

Riese: 100%. Marianne Jean-Baptiste was fantastic. Babygirl was fantastic. KRISTEN STEWART IN LOVE LIES BLEEDING WAS FANTASTIC.

Drew: Omg yes.

Riese: Wow Drew I only saw 36 2024 releases.

Drew: But you brought LIFE into this world!

Riese: That’s true I did.

Drew: I saw over 100 but brought in zero life.

Riese: You are full of life.

My top five films of 2024 for everybody who cares: Wicked, Challengers, Babygirl, Love Lies Bleeding…. and Fantastical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara.

Drew: Great list.

Riese: I thought that A Real Pain was nominated for Best Picture but it wasn’t.

Drew: No but it was good.

Riese: Yeah, I liked it a lot.

Drew: My top five was Challengers, Evil Does Not Exist, Bird, Love Lies Bleeding, and Alam.

Riese: I think that’s a great list because I trust your taste.

Drew: That’s so nice. Well if Jude is craving some more cinema I’d be curious his thoughts on Evil Does Not Exist.

Riese: That is one you’ve mentioned a lot so it is definitely on my list to watch. Maybe Jude would like The Wild Robot.

Drew: Oo or Flow. I want to see both of those.

Riese: I haven’t seen any animation all year because I kept thinking “save it for the baby” as if this baby can even literally see color. (He cannot yet.) Apparently he can only see 8 to 10 inches ahead of him.

Drew: Wow. Babies are so cool. When can he start to see colors??

Riese: They start seeing red and green in 2-4 weeks. For Christmas, I suppose.

Drew: Wow.

Riese: At a month is when they can detect the brightness and intensity of colors. Apparently they struggle with yellow.

Drew: Okay so start him off with black and white films. Not Mank though.

Riese: Gonna fire up Steamboat Willie.

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The 97th Academy Awards begin Sunday, March 2 at 7pm EST on ABC and Hulu.

Maybe Gabrielle Korn Set Her Queer Dystopian Climate Novel ‘The Shutouts’ Too Far in the Future

feature image photo of wildfires by David McNew/Getty Images

In Gabrielle Korn’s Yours for the Taking, set a mere 25 years from the year in which we currently struggle to live, a reclusive billionaire / women’s rights activist is selected to preside over The Inside Project, a weather-safe, city-sized structure built atop Manhattan’s decaying bones. The world has succumbed to its predictable, climate-change-enabled demise, and few sustainable solutions remain. An ostensibly “fair” lottery system is established to select who can live Inside and whomst will be left to fend for themselves in the wasteland. As often seems to be the case when anybody is given power, anywhere, Jacqueline’s does not, in fact, intend to preside over an equal system of admission, but rather to build a new society in line with her own personal feelings about what society needs. Only women were permitted Inside, per Jacqueline’s political agenda. At first, her utopia really does feel utopian. Until of course it doesn’t.

The Shutouts, Korn’s sequel to Yours for the Taking, was released this past December, and it is the story of what happened to those who didn’t make it into climate-safe spaces like Inside or Jacqueline’s spaceship. Most humans, it turns out, ended up as “climate refugees,” loose bands of chosen family traveling the country together, escaping an ongoing series of wildfires, hurricanes and floods. When Ava and Brook escape The Inside Project, they join these others, stories crossing and mixing as time plows forwards. The Shutouts also follows Max, a nonbinary teenager raised in a cult called the Winter Liberation Army, a group who found their own way to live in a climate-ravaged world. On another timeline, starting in 2041, a computer genius with a rebellious past is blazing across the country, chased by climate catastrophes, writing letters to her daughter, sharing stories about the uncertain, chaotic years that led up to the whole world turning on its own head.

It was a weird coincidence of timing that I was scheduled to interview Gabrielle about The Shutouts the same week that a “wind event” led to a series of devastating wildfires across the city where we both live, coming for mansions with infinity pools and city views, for the studios of young artists, for beloved family homes in the hills of Altadena. I’d found myself thinking not infrequently of The Shutouts that week — of queer kids tearing through the forest, fucking in tents, waiting for each other in the woods, of a world in which home wasn’t a place, just a group of people you loved, and were still looking for.

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Riese: As we’re having this conversation, we’re on the tenth day of wildfires in LA. I’ve found myself thinking about your book a lot — specifically the group of people running around Canada, hopping from one safe location to another while being chased by weather events. I keep thinking — “is that our future? Is that what we’re going towards?” What has been going on in your mind, as the person who wrote this book, as fires tear through this city?

Gabrielle: I think, for the first time, I started to wonder if I set it too far in the future.

Riese: Oh, really?

Gabrielle: Because in the world of these books, LA has already burned to the ground by the 2040s, and just this week, that didn’t feel that far off. It feels like all it’s going to take is one fucking palm tree to scatter the embers, and there it all goes. But also — The Shutouts is a worst-case scenario, and it’s a worst-case scenario based on the potential for inaction, and whether or not Trump will be able to drill on more federal lands, as he promised.

I try to be optimistic. Most of the time, I’m able to channel hope when I think about all the amazing things that scientists are working on, and then there are weeks like this week, where I really struggle with imagining a future that doesn’t just feel worse and worse.

Riese: Do you ever feel a mental shift in your head from feeling hopeful about what scientists are working on to combat climate change towards wondering what they’re working on to allow us to exist despite it?

Gabrielle: Well, we need to prevent climate change that we can’t adapt to. While I was doing research for this book, that’s what I kept coming up against — “What is it actually going to look like?” and it’s like, “Well, it won’t look like anything to us, because we won’t be able to survive it.”

Riese: Right.

Gabrielle: So, that’s where the fiction comes in.

Riese: I keep seeing these pictures of the Getty, right? And reading about how it will survive the fires because of its state-of-the-art technology. Obviously a person can’t survive in the same locked steel vault that a piece of art can. But I do think of your book when I think about the Getty, too — a world where climate change ravages everybody, but the most wildly wealthy people can survive it. Like the Inside Project — an exclusive, weather-safe, enclosed city. But of course I mean the ultra wealthy, like the Gettys and Jeff Bezos can build weather safe vaults, I’m not sure if Anna Faris has that cash on hand.

Gabrielle: Right, even in our lifetimes — you survive if you have the money to get yourself out, and not everybody does. And so, to me, it’s becoming clearer and clearer how class is what’s going to determine who survives.

I think the billionaires have already, literally, built their bunkers. They have already future-proofed their lives and their children’s lives, and then there is an entire upper middle class of people who will also probably find a way to be okay, unless their house catches fire, but this is the class of people who can afford to rebuild or move somewhere else. Anything short of that is becoming less and less sufficient for survival.

Riese: When it comes to writing climate fiction, how much would you say that writing about this future that you’ve imagined involves researching the past?

Gabrielle: Not a lot of looking back. I mostly was researching currently developing climate technologies. The stuff that seems really futuristic in the book is actually real. All I invented was the super bean. Everything the Winter Liberation Army [an insular group who survives climate change through their own self-created technology] has is real, including magnetized houses for flood zones.
All of this incredible technology has so little funding and so little publicity, so what’s in the book is very much a metaphor for the feeling I had while discovering all of this. There are people pulling carbon out of the air and putting it back in the ground. Why isn’t that getting a gajillion dollars in funding to just do?

Riese: Right, like nobody truly cares about the future, long term. So — how would you describe the relationship between climate justice, so to speak, and climate fiction?

Gabrielle: I think that the barrier to entry is lower in climate fiction. I think you can kind of Trojan Horse your way into getting people to care about climate justice through fictional stories. I’ve been kind of shocked at the amount of really well-educated, really well-informed people who have told me that these books were the first time they felt alarmed about climate change.

I was worried that people wouldn’t want to be reading it or thinking about it right now, but I’ve had a lot of people reach out to me about it with increasing frequency.

Riese: Oh, that’s interesting. That’s always my instinct, too, when something is bad I want to get into stories about it, like reading pandemic fiction during the pandemic. So how do you see your work fitting into the overall lineage of climate fiction?

Gabrielle: I don’t know if climate fiction is the right lens to look at my work through. Yours for the Taking was a queer satire with climate change as a backdrop — The Shutouts, to me, is more of an examination of the problem with one-issue politics and using climate as an example, so I don’t know if it fits neatly into the canon. I think it fits more into dystopian fiction.

Riese: Right, in Yours for the Taking, you literally took everyone out of the climate, so it was no longer an active character. But in The Shutouts they were really out there! In the climate!

Gabrielle: I did want to show what was happening to America, and I read The Great Displacement by Jake Bittle, about what climate migration is going to start to look like, and it goes through every part of the country and says, “What’s going to happen here, in climate change?” I used that as a roadmap for Kelly’s journey. The specific places she stops are because I wanted to say, “This is what’s predicted to happen in those years.”

Riese: Did you ever read something and think like, “people need to know that this technology is happening so I will tell them about it in this novel”?

Gabrielle: I tried not to do that. I tried to keep the most important thing the story and the storytelling, because I think it gets annoying when you have an agenda. I would do anything to not be annoying.

Riese: So with Vero, we have a character with a really complicated relationship to upbringing and privilege. We see this a lot in activist or socialist groups, or queer groups, that there’ll be one person there with a lot of class privilege who makes it possible for everyone else to have access to resources, but when push comes to shove, that privileged upbringing can ultimately be really difficult to outrun. When the shit hits the fan, you see that sense of — i’m better than these other people, I know what’s right come out, or just the sense of someone who knows they have a bigger safety net than others, taking certain risks. Do you think anyone can truly betray, truly let go of that sense of privilege?

Gabrielle: I don’t think so. I think Vero thinks he’s doing good. But because of his upbringing, he also thinks that he should decide the future of the program. He’s so entitled under the guise of being an empowered leader. The others, who weren’t raised being told how special and perfect they are, didn’t think they should be making those decisions.

Riese: Switching gears here for a sec — a lot of this book is about chosen family, and how we support ourselves and each other through impossible times. Near the start, Camila talks about how she feels a constant need to know where all her people are, and to have them close. Do you imagine the future being a place where home is not so much a place, but people? We’re able to stay in touch with people that we can’t see, now, with technology, but in The Shutouts, there’s no technology, but there’s also no shared location.

Gabrielle: Camila is a character who fled her home when she’s 13, and her sister goes to space, and her mom dies on the side of the road. All she has is her aging father and the ragtag people they pick up along the way, and so, to me, it stands to reason that she would be very anxiously attached to everybody that she comes to love.

Even though they find this place to live and they settle in it for a few years, it’s like — she is a mess. She’s so scared, and she stays behind with Max out of care for Max, but also because how can she leave this place that has finally been her home? And so, I think all the characters struggle with the tension between where is safe, where they want to be, and who they want to be with. They don’t have the internet. They can’t call each other, and so the physical proximity is really important, and the promises they make to each other about coming back are really important,

Riese: That’s something usually happens in books about the past rather than the future — the sense that you just have to trust somebody is gonna come back to where you said you would wait for them or they said they would wait for you. But we used to do that all the time, every day!

Gabrielle: Yeah. It’s like making plans in the 90s.

Riese: “Yeah. I’ll see you at the mall at noon on Thursday,” and then you just got there, and either they showed up or they didn’t. You could call them from a payphone, but only if they were home.

Gabrielle: You asked at the beginning of this conversation about if I had looked into the past and I said, “No,” but I guess what I did look into is the fact that humans used to be migratory.
A lot of this book is about returning to a pre-industrial revolution, pre-agriculture way of living with the earth, which is you go where you can survive, and when you can’t survive there anymore, you go somewhere else, and that’s how humans live for more years than not.

Riese: But right now we’re all digging in our heels, and that’s not really realistic, I guess?

Gabrielle: Yeah. I mean, at the same time, I know I’m not cut out for life on the road.

Riese: I’m definitely not cut out for life on the road. I’m like, “I don’t even know what to put in my go-bag. Everything? I want to bring everything.”

Gabrielle: I’m like, “If I don’t have a really soft, warm, dark bedroom to sleep in, I am no use to you the next day.”

Riese: When people are like, “Those things can be replaced. They’re just things,” I’m like, “Well, but I really liked my things.” I feel like it should be okay for people to miss their things, let alone their homes.

Gabrielle: I think it is, and also, it takes time to acquire the right things. It’s not just like you can do it all in one shopping trip.

Riese: So when you talk about climate change doomers, which I assume some of that was inspired by doomsday preppers — do you think that mindset makes sense? Not the wealthy people building bunkers, but others who are literally prepping for it.

Gabrielle: I don’t think doomers are a preparation mindset. It’s more a mindset of, “We’re fucked, and there’s nothing we can do, so I’m not going to change any of my behaviors because climate change is happening.” There’s something kind of nihilistic about it.

Riese: Is that just as dangerous as denying it?

Gabrielle: It’s apples and oranges, because the doomers are doing nothing, but the people denying it are the ones in government who are fracking.

Riese: Right.

Gabrielle: So yeah, it doesn’t feel like a fair comparison. I mean, climate scientists say that they’re equally dangerous, because also, denialists’ minds can be changed, and it’s like, if you know about climate change and you still don’t want to change your behaviors — then honestly, fuck you.

Riese: What were the stories that you were the most excited to tell in this, that you feel like you didn’t give enough or that you didn’t have enough space for in the first one?

Gabrielle: I was excited to build out the world more and zero on in why the climate crisis was allowed to get so bad. I was glad that I was able to do that through Kelly’s storyline in The Shutouts.

Riese: What was your inspiration for wanting to create Max and for the Winter Liberation Army?

Gabrielle: I was specifically inspired by the animal rights movement of the early-2000s, which had a rampant sexism problem. I’m always interested in just playing with the idea of leftists who think they’re good, because they care passionately about one thing, and then treat the women among them like shit. That was compelling to me. Then, I was just thinking — what if this group continues and flourishes, because everyone else dies? What can fester and erode because these activists are given power over each other? Then with Max, I needed a character that you root for, who connects everyone.

Riese: That feels like a resonant theme throughout your work — people jumping in to do something “for good” only to learn it doesn’t really align with your ethics after all.

Gabrielle: If you’ve participated in capitalism in any way, I think it’s a constant compromise between what you believe in and what you need to survive. We all do it, and it doesn’t make you inherently bad because we live in a society.

Riese: One element of the very queer friend group that forms near the start of the book is that they’ve all experienced so much trauma. And they’re all experiencing a collective trauma together, which in a way we all did with the pandemic. So then these individual traumas are compounded — family experiences, gender stuff, splits with their families or communities — what’s the best thing that can come out of that, and what’s the worst thing that can come out of that?

Gabrielle: I think the best thing is finding the people who will actually take care of you and you will take care of through the trauma we’re all experiencing.

Riese: What’s the worst case scenario?

Gabrielle: I think it can lead to people having unrealistic expectations of each other. I think if you’re replacing a mommy shaped void in your heart, that’s a lot of pressure to put on someone, and I think that’s something queer people love to do to each other., We try to make each other parent each other. I guess that’s not a worst case scenario, because re-parenting is part of any relationship, but I don’t know, I guess in terms of post-pandemic trauma, I don’t know if we’re seeing the rise of the found family. I think we’re seeing loneliness.. I think we’re just isolating and watching TV for 10 hours, instead of going to the lesbian bar, because it’s closed now.

Riese: You’ve talked about working with your writers group on this book — how does that impact the writing process?

Gabrielle: With Yours for the Taking, I wrote in isolation and I felt really paranoid and superstitious about talking about it. Over the course of writing The Shutouts, I realized you have to talk about it and tell people about it. I really love getting feedback as I go. This book is about community, so it made a lot of sense to write it while being in community with other writers.

Riese: How do you decide what to disregard and what to keep?

Gabrielle: I can’t remember what I disregarded, but I’m sure it was a lot. You also have to be able to stay true to your vision while taking feedback, but a lot of practical feedback was given to me, and a lot of things that changed the book, like someone pointed out, I think the specific note was, “There is no way these crust punks are monogamous.”

Riese: Right, yeah. Fair! I feel like when I get feedback, I’m always like, “Well, they must be right. What do I know about anything?” How do you learn to trust your gut?

Gabrielle: You just have to. There was a moment with Hannah, my editor, who I love and is amazing, where we went back and forth about and she wasn’t thrilled with the chapter with the inbred family. She felt like it was too dark, but, and that was the only major change she wanted to make, and I really dug my heels in about it. I really felt like we needed something super dark and scary to explain why Inside was such an appealing option., and when I explained it to her, she agreed with me. We moved forward with that scene intact, and I think it ended up being one of the strongest parts of the book.

Riese: I agree!

Gabrielle: I think it’s just trusting how you feel about it.

Riese: Right even though I just said that I would take any feedback — you know your characters better than a reader, and not every reader is a close reader. I struggle to trust myself in all things but then, sometimes I do.

Sorry for the hard pivot here but — when you look at your book cover from a distance, do you ever think it’s a picture of a perfume bottle?

Gabrielle: It definitely looks like a cubed object, which I like.

Riese: So you’ve never looked at it from a distance and thought it looked like a perfume bottle?

Gabrielle: Not specifically. Have you?

Riese: Yeah, believe it or not. I’ve looked at it from a distance and thought, “Is that a perfume bottle?” But I love it. I really love the cover for this one. It’s really nice.

Gabrielle: Thank you. It’s funny that you bring up perfume, because there was someone in my writing group who decided to find a perfume for each book that everybody was working on.

Riese: Oh, that’s cute.

Gabrielle: And the one she found for The Shutouts has notes of gunpowder and sounded really stinky.

Riese: Well, I have a great idea for the design of that bottle.

20 Best LGBTQ+ TV Shows on Paramount+ Showtime

Paramount+ Showtime is encompasses a collection of brands with minimal thematic overlap, which makes it a challenge to market but also fun to subscribe to — there’s something for every member of your family!

Paramount+, prior to aligning so clearly with Showtime, was basically a channel for white upper-middle-class moderate Dads — Taylor Sheridan projects, procedurals, the Frasier reboot. But it also had the full library of new Star Trek shows and a few one-offs like The Good Fight and Why Women Kill, inherited from its former identity as CBS All Access. Then we have the CBS library, a network that built its reputation on I Love Lucy, The Andy Griffith Show and M*A*S*H, who courted an older audience in the ’80s and early ’90s with core programs like Murder She Wrote and Everybody Loves Raymond, before building itself up as a reality competition and procedural powerhouse in the 21st century with genre-defining programs like Big Brother and Survivor. Then there’s the bratty cousin MTV, who invented music television, provocative animation and game shows and modern, youth-focused, narrative reality TV, truly creating Gen X and elder millennial culture. A Viacom merger in the mid-2000s married MTV with the first major LGBTQ+-focused TV network, Logo, which has largely faded from memory aside from its enduring, signature property: RuPaul’s Drag Race.

Now Paramount+ has also fully merged Showtime into its game, which has its own specific identity, carved out beneath HBO’s looming shadow: a pioneering space for queer content (Queer as Folk, The L Word) and edgy, high-brow dramas and comedies like Weeds, Californication, Shameless and Dexter.

Unfortunately, Showtime’s entire gay library isn’t available on Paramount+Showtime. Work in Progress and The L Word: Generation Q were removed to annoy me and Shameless is still playing out its licensing deal with Netflix. But the original series remains, and other gems worth watching.

Here’s the best television on Paramount+ Showtime with lesbian, bisexual and queer women characters.

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20 Best LGBTQ+ Shows on Showtime

Yellowjackets

2021 —, Showtime

25 years ago, a plane carrying a New Jersey high school soccer team crashed in the Ontario wilderness and survivors including Shauna, Taissa, Natalie and Misty witnessed their thriving team turn into clans of warring cannibals! Now, adults who’ve done their best to put their past behind them find they can’t outrun it forever. Queer actor Jasmin Savoy Brown plays Taissa Turner, a lesbian who is a married Mom running for senate in the present day. The powerhouse cast also includes Melanie Lynskey, Sophie Thatcher, Christina Ricci, Juliette Lewis and Tawny Cypress.

Read our coverage of Yellowjackets.

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The L Word

2004 – 2009, Showtime

If you’re on this website you’re likely familiar with this particular television program: centered on a social group of very hot Los Angeles lesbians: badass art gallery director Bette, her trying-to-get-pregnant wife Tina; closeted tennis player Dana, ladykiller hairdresser Shane, gossipy bisexual journalist Alice and the new girl in town: writer Jenny who moves in with her boyfriend Tim only to find herself falling for vaguely European cafe owner Marina. That’s just Season One. It gets more weird and sometimes terrible from there!

Read our L Word content here.

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Queer as Folk

2000 – 2005, Showtime

Based on the successful British series by the same name, Queer as Folk follows a group of gay friends in Pittsburgh navigating life, love and having the coolest queer ally Mom of all time. From getting blow jobs in the backroom of Babylon to tackling issues like HIV/AIDS and drug addiction, Queer as Folk does it all! Lindsay and Mel are the lesbian couple of the social group. They have a baby! But it was the friendships and storylines of the male characters that I fell in love with, despite the lesbian couple being what earns the show a spot on this list.

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Broad City

2014 – 2019, Comedy Central

Simply iconic, a game-changer for female comedy

This iconic Comedy Central series follows best friends Abby (Abbi Jacobson) and Ilana (Ilana Glazer) as they navigate their twenties in Brooklyn as very unique and special romantic friends. Ilana is bisexual and Abby has her own awakening later in the series. This show changed the game for female-fronted comedies.

Read our coverage of Broad City.

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Couples Therapy

2019—, Showtime

It will truly shock you how compelling it is to watch other people go to therapy, especially when their therapist is queen mother Orna Guralnik (Orna is queer, but this doesn’t come up in the show). Each season or sub-season follows 3-4 couples through their woes, including Season One’s queer married couple Lauren & Sam (Lauren is trans and Sam eventually comes out as non-binary) and Season 3b’s lesbian couple Nadine & Christine.

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Killing Eve

2018—, BBC America

Where do we begin? To tell the story of how great a love can be… between a very hot socipoathic assassin with great fashion, Villanelle (Jodie Comer), and British Intelligence Officer Eve Polastri (Sandra Oh), who’s cat-and-mouse game with Villanelle and their eventual mutual obsession with each other was one of the most homoerotic delights of our lifetimes.

Read our coverage of Killing Eve.

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Twenties

2021—, BET

One of the most under-appreciated lesbian programs of all time, Lena Waithe’s sharp comedy Twenties follows Black masc lesbian Hattie (queer actor Jojo T. Gibbs) and her two (straight) best friends as Hattie yearns to make it as a screenwriter in an unforgiving industry. Natalie writes: “One minute you’re celebrating her growth — joining a writers’ group! getting out of a toxic relationship with Ida! a real relationship with Idina! — and the next minute she backsliding into a problem entirely of her own making — lashing out after receiving critical feedback and (possibly) cheating. It was a rollercoaster but it was fun, entertaining and… if we’re being honest, highly relatable.”

Read our coverage of Twenties.

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The Good Fight

2017-2022, CBS All Access

This is one of those shows that is so good and compelling that I’m compelled to recommend it despite its relative lack of lesbian representation. This spinoff of The Good Wife finds Diane Lockhart joining an all-Black firm in Chicago for some of the wackiest and most incisive political commentary of its era — striking “the right balance between being real but also not a total downer.” Rose Leslie plays lesbian attorney Maia Rindell for the first few seasons, and Charmaine Bingwa joins as new queer associate Carmen Moyo for the final two.

Read our coverage of The Good Fight.

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Star Trek: Discovery

2017-2024, Paramount+

“Hot women in space” was noted for its inclusion of a gay male couple in its primary cast (played by Anthony Rapp and Wilson Cruz, at that) and being the franchise’s most diverse property yet with a Black woman captain, hottie Mirror Universe pansexual Philippa Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh), a bit lesbian part from Tig Notaro and, in later seasons, a romance between a human non-binary human character (played by non-binary actor Blu del Barrio) and a Trill named Gray (played by trans actor Ian Alexander). Set at ten years prior to TOS, the series begins with commander Michael Burnham’s actions starting a war between the United Federation of Planets and the Klingon Empire.

Read our review of Star Trek: Discovery.

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Fellow Travelers

2023, Showtime

I tuned in to Fellow Travelers, a historical series centered on the relationship between two men (played by Jonathan Bailey and Matt Bomer) who first meet at the height of 1950s McCarthyism. I tuned in because I’d heard it had a Stormé Delarverie — an iconic butch lesbian performer and civil rights icon who’s a far more rare appearance in the cannon. Unfortunately, her character was woefully underused. But I was compelled by a series packed with nuanced performances, particually Jelani Alladin as Black journalist Marcus, and characters torn between political, personal, spiritual and romantic urges. Fellow Travelers deftly avoids sentimentality, but evoked so much of it, like all the best tortured love stories do. I love our history, and all the flawed, terrible, beautiful struggling people who found themselves in its pages.

Read our review of Fellow Travelers.

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The Chi

2018 -, Showtime

Produced by Lena Waithe, The Chi is a coming-of-age series set in a Black community on the South Side of Chicago where “real dangers threaten daily to squelch dreams, and the simplest decisions can have life or death consequences.” Nina is a lesbian Mom who marries her girlfriend Dre in Season Three, and Lena Waithe also shows up in her own show as a lesbian mayoral candidate. Season Six was especially appreciated for, as Natalie wrote, its “proliferation of all this beautiful, melanated queerness.”

Read our coverage of The Chi.

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Special Ops: Lioness

2022-, Paramount+

Politically unforgivable, Taylor Sheridan stocked this project (about female agents who infiltrate targets in the “war on terror” to obtain confidential political information) with big talent, like Nicole Kidman, Morgan Freeman and Zoe Saldana. Also, for some reason, this — again, politically unforgivable — show is also stocked with extremely hot lesbian storylines, most notably those involving Cruz (Laysla De Oliveira), who looks really fantastic in a muscle tee with dirt on her face. Jill Wagner is butch team leader Bobby.

Read our review of Special Ops: Lioness.

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Billions

2016 – 2023, Showtime

This series about terrible people centers on hedge fund manager Bobby Axlerod, who ruthlessly pursues money and power in a manner that often attracts attention from the U.S government. Notably for our purposes here, Billions is considered the first American TV series with a non-binary character. Non-binary actor Asia Kate Dillon plays Taylor Manson, who plays an intern with a sharp eye for the work who joins the series in Season Two.

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Colin From Accounts

2023—, Foxtel

This underrated comedic gem from Australia is about Ashley (Harriet Dyer) and Gordon, two self-absorbed, chaotic people  thrust together in life by the dog they accidentally injured and then nursed back to health together. Ash’s best friend, Megan (Emma Harvie) is queer and she gets a building romantic subplot arching into the second season.

Read our review of Colin from Accounts

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The Real World

1992 – 2019, MTV

MTV’s nascent reality show that promised to stop being polite and start getting real was groundbreaking for its portrayal of LGBTQ+ people. While gay men were more heavily featured, lesbians entered the building starting with “Beth A” in Season 2. Sadly the Paramount+ library doesn’t include Seasons 5-7 (Thus missing out on Boston’s Genesis Moss and Hawaii’s Ruthie Alcaide), and the show began its transformation from “fascinating documentary about a social experiment” to “drunk hot people fight and make out” circa Las Vegas (Season 12). But The Real World always had something interesting to show us about the social and cultural landscape.

Read our coverage of The Real World

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NCIS: Hawai’i

2021 – 2024, CBS

“It’s not unusual to see a queer character on a procedural but NCIS: Hawai’i was in a class of its own when it came to showcasing their stories,” wrote Natalie. Its three seasons included an ongoing romance between FBI Special Agent Kate and junior field agent Lucy. “The show’s legacy — Kate and Lucy’s legacy — is that it set a new bar when it comes to this genre and its portrayal of queer relationships; I hope future shows strive to meet it.”

Read our coverage of NCIS: Hawai’i 

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The Good Wife

2009 – 2016, CBS

While Juliana Marguiles is no longer welcome here, we must recognize the iconic formative character Kalinda Sharma (Archie Panjabi), who delivered hot bisexual investigator storylines to this long-running and very smart network legal drama back when we didn’t see a lot of characters like her on TV.

Read our coverage of The Good Wife

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The RuPaul’s Drag Race Cinematic Universe

2009 -, Logo TV, VH1, MTV

We’ve got 16 seasons of RuPaul’s Drag Race, nine seasons of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars, one season of RuPaul’s Drag Race Global All Stars, five seasons of RuPaul’s Drag Race All-Stars Untucked, seven seasons of RuPaul’s Drag Race Untucked, two seasons of Secret Celebrity RuPaul’s Drag Race. If you are looking to race in drag, have we got the network for you!

Read our coverage of RuPaul’s Drag Race

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The Real L Word

2010 – 2012, Showtime

This show was… a time. It was a moment in time and we all shared it together and it was what it was, and what it was was… mediocre. But also to be honest, my recaps were really good and important, and so were the parodies that we made, which should’ve won Academy awards. Anyhow this was a reality show about lesbians in Lois Angeles (but also in New York City for a season), Whitney Mixter and all the girls who loved her, and also Romi, and also LA Fashion Week and Hunter Valentine. Here’s where they all are now, in case you were wondering!

Read our coverage of The Real L Word

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Are You The One Season 8

2019

This MTV Reality show has run for ten seasons, but the only season you need to know about is Season eight. The bisexual season. It was fucking glorious and they really ought to consider doing it again!

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love ALLways
Year: 2023
Length: 1 Season, 10 Episodes
the “first pansexual dating show” is a little tepid (its Gen Z cast is on the whole too young to drink, thus

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Other shows on Paramount+ Showtime with regular or recurring lesbian or bisexual women characters:

• Criminal Minds: Evolution
• SkyMed
• Teachers
• Star Trek: Lower Decks
• Detroiters
• Ray Donavan
• Tracker
• S.W.A.T.
• Matlock  (the new one)
• Star Trek: Picard

Hulu’s 30 Original TV Shows With Lesbian and Bisexual Women Characters

What TV shows could you watch on Hulu if you want to see some gay, lesbian or bisexual women characters? Hulu’s original content keeps getting more queer and there are so many television programs for the LGBT audience, and if you’re looking for the answers to these questions — and I think you are, because here you are — boy have I got the post for you, my friend! (We’ve also got a list of the best queer movies on Hulu if you’re in the market for that.)

Although Hulu famously hosts content from a variety of studios and networks, this list is focused on Hulu originals, collaborations and exclusives — shows you can expect to remain on Hulu in most of the markets they serve. Except for, of course, the ones they’ve removed. (Dollface and Marvel’s Runaways, so far.)

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The 10 Best and Most LGBTQ+ Hulu Original Television Shows

The Bisexual

2019 // One Season // 6 Episodes

The Bisexual sets itself apart by featuring a diverse group of lesbian friends in addition to focusing on the queer protagonist’s narrative and the entire show just feels so undeniably authentic. “Akhavan has done something truly brilliant here,” wrote Heather Hogan in her review. “She’s created a show for an audience that understands the joke ‘Bette is a Shane trying to be a Dana’ and then centers it on a character who’s meant to make everyone who gets that joke a little uncomfortable.”

Watch The Bisexual on Hulu

Such Brave Girls

2023- // One Season // 6 Episodes //  BBC3 Co-Production

Such Brave Girls is a riotous, disgusting, in-your-face comedy about a dysfunctional family (two sisters and a single mom, all of them varying degrees of delulu) trying and often failing to get their shit together that Kayla describes as “discomfort comedy at its finest.” Josie, fresh out of a psychiatric ward, knows she’s gay but can’t seem to break up with her boyfriend. This is an underrated gem you truly should not miss.

Watch Such Brave Girls on Hulu

Creamerie

2 Seasons // 12 Episodes // TVNZ Co-Production

Set in New Zealand, Creamerie focuses on three best friends (played by Ally Xue, JJ Fong and Perlina Lau, who also serve as creative producers) living on a dairy farm in a world where everyone with a Y chromosome was wiped out by a virus, sperm has become “white gold,” and everyone is under control of Wellness, a white-robed matriarchy with secretly sinister operations. Xue is Alex, a gutsy lesbian who is an outspoken critic of the organization and wants to take it all down. Creamerie is funny and smart, there’s a lesbian makeout scene almost immediately and it has interesting things to say about gender, power and family.

Watch Creamerie on Hulu

Reboot

2022 // One Season // 8 Episodes

Hannah (Rachel Bloom) tells Hulu (it’s meta!) that she wants to reboot classic sitcom Step Right Up… but make it edgy. What she doesn’t tell them in the original pitch is that the original showrunner was in fact her father, with whom she has a contentious relationship, and that Step Right Up was his way of re-telling his own story in a less-horrifying manner. And, as Heather wrote in her glowing review, “basically every single woman on this show is, in some way, gay! Surprisingly gay! Hilariously gay! Subversively gay!”

Watch Reboot on Hulu

Little Fires Everywhere

2020 // Limited Series // 8 Episodes

This brilliant adaptation of the bestselling book adds some queer elements that weren’t explicitly present on the page for the characters of Izzy and Mia Warren (played by Kerry Washington, who produced the series with co-star Reese Witherspoon). Set in an affluent Ohio suburb in the ’90s, Little Fires Everywhere is a searing investigation of class, race and the idea of “good white people.”

Watch Little Fires Everywhere on Hulu

Black Cake

2023 // One Season // 8 Episodes

After her death, two siblings who’d been estranged since one of them came out at Thanksgiving eight years prior, learn about their mother’s dark past from recordings she leaves to them. Based on Charmaine Wilkerson’s novel of the same name, Nic writes that, “Black Cake is part family drama and part murder mystery, Black Cake is about family, identity, and the ways our choices reverberate through our future. It’s about the stories we tell and more importantly, the ones we don’t, whether out of love, protection, fear, or survival.” 

Watch Black Cake on Hulu

Shrill

2019-2021 // 3 Seasons // 22 Episodes

Aidy Bryant stars in this adaptation of writer Lindy West’s memoir, in which she navigates the world as a young journalist in a fatphobic world, including working at an eccentric Seattle newspaper with a very weird person named Ruthie played by our favorite weirdo Patti Harrison. Her best friend, Fran, is a black British lesbian with all the self-confidence Annie herself lacks, and her romantic storylines eventually land her in a delightful relationship with Emily (ER Fightmaster).

Under the Bridge

2024 // Limited Series // 8 Episodes

Based on Rebecca Godfrey’s book by the same name, Under the Bridge tells the tragic story of the assault and murder of 15-year-old Reena Virk, a precocious Canadian teenager lured into the night by friends who turned out to be her attackers. Rebecca is a writer from New York, back home to write a book about “the troubled girls of Victoria” when the murder occurs, thrusting her back into orbit with Cameron (Lily Gladstone), with whom she shares a complicated past, and a very queer present.

Watch Under the Bridge on Hulu

Wreck

2023- // 2+ Seasons // 12 Episodes 

Hulu picked up this British comedy horror about a young gay teen who gets a cruise ship job to investigate the disappearance of his sister on said ship. On said ship he works with Vivian (Thaddea Graham), a lesbian who works on the ship after fleeing her homophobic family and Rosie (Miya Ocego), a trans woman who works as a Cher impersonator. Kayla loved the show for its portrayal of a gay guy/lesbian friendship, the relationship between Vivian and her eventual love interest Lily, and its “stunning horror.”

Watch Wreck on Hulu

I Kissed a Girl

2024 // 1+ Season // 10 Episodes // BBC

This UK import, launched after the success of I Kissed a Boy, is an entirely sapphic dating show that challenged its contestants to kiss immediately upon meeting each other and go from there! Twenty lesbians hang out around The Masseria, gossiping about who fancies whomst. “If you’re the kind of person that enjoys spending the morning after a big night dissecting everything that happened, more than you enjoyed the night itself, you will get a lot out of this show,” wrote Sally.

Watch I Kissed a Girl on Hulu.

Pose

2018 – 2021 // 3 Seasons // 26 Episodes // FX

A brief, brilliant moment in television history, Pose focused on the Black and Latinx trans and queer people who competed as “houses’ in New York City’s thriving underground ball culture of the ’80s and ’90s and face the growing HIV/AIDS crisis. Cast members include Angelica Ross, Sandra Bernhard, Michaela Jaé Rodriguez, Billy Porter, Indya Moore, Evan Peters, Kate Mara, James Van Der Beek and Dominique Jackson.

Watch Pose on Hulu.

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All The Other Hulu Original TV Shows With Lesbian and Queer TV Shows

The Handmaid’s Tale

2017— 2025 // 5+ Seasons // 56+ Episodes 

Based on Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale is one of Hulu’s signature properties, a daring and atmospheric journey into and beyond the book’s groundwork of a chilling anti-feminist dystopia. There’s a few lesbian and queer characters across the seasons, including Samira Wiley is Moira Strand, June’s lesbian best friend since college forced to work as a Jezebel after escaping Handmaid training.

Watch The Handmaid’s Tale on Hulu

Harlots

Hulu/ITV // 2017 – 2019 // 3 Seasons // 24 Episodes

I declared Harlots the most accurate portrayal of indoor-market sex work ever represented onscreen in Season One — surprisingly more resonant to me as a former sex worker than any contemporary portrayals — and its extra queering in Season Two made it moreso and then some. If Season One was about sex work, Season Two is about the reality that what’s done to sex workers is inextricable from what’s done to all women — the lessons about power, violence, solidarity and struggle in stories about sex work are ones that the larger conversation about gender ignores at its peril. Season Three I would prefer not to discuss, thank you. // Watch Harlots on Hulu

Dopesick

2021 // One Season // 8 Episodes

Based on Beth Macy’s non-fiction book, this acclaimed limited series tackled the opioid crisis from multiple angles: The Sackler family who got rich lying about a highly addictive drug, the Purdue Pharma salespeople trained to exploit doctors and shortchange patients, the D.A.s and other government employees who dared to build a case against Purdue and, finally, the residents of a small coal mining down in Virginia that became ground zero for the epidemic. In that town we meet Betsy (Katelyn Dever, who earned an Emmy nomination for her role), a closeted lesbian coal miner whose on-the-job injury leads to a prescription that leads, soon enough, to addiction. // Watch Dopesick on Hulu

Mrs. America 

2020 // Limited Series // 9 Episodes // FX co-production

Sarah Paulson, Niecy Nash, Cate Blanchett, Tracy Ullman, Rose Byrne, Uzo Abuba and Melanie Lynskey are just some of the wildly talented women at the forefront of this history of the feminist movement in the 1970s and its fight against conservative activist Phyllis Shalafley (Cate Blanchett), specifically. Bria Henderson plays Black lesbian early Ms. magazine editor Margaret Sloan-Hunter. In episode five, Ari Graynor shows up as Brenda Feigen, a feminist activist and attorney who falls for Jules, a lesbian photographer portrayed by the one and only Roberta Colindrez. In Episode 7, we briefly glimpse Midge Costanza and Jean O’Leary, a lesbian couple who pushed for inclusion in the feminist agenda and within the Carter administration. // Watch Mrs America on Huliu.

The Other Black Girl

2023 // Limited Series // 8 Episodes

This adaptation of the bestselling thriller finds a young publishing aspirant, Nella, the only Black girl in her office, thrilled when a second Black girl is hired. But her relationship with the new girl, while promising at first, eventually turns suspicious and is the ticket to unveiling some larger forces at work. Nella’s queer best friend, Malaika, is the show’s unsung hero and a breath of fresh air. // Watch The Other Black Girl on Hulu

High Fidelity 

2020 // One Season //10 Episodes

Although Rob’s relationships with women aren’t central to the plot, Zoe Kravtiz’s character is a smart, wry, endearing hot bisexual mess on this truly delightful re-imagination of the original film (which starred John Cusack as Rob), which was based on a Nick Hornsby book. Updated for the current era with a diverse cast of clever, passionate and musically-obsessed hipsters. Unfortunately, it was cancelled after merely one short season. // Watch High Fidelity on Hulu

Love, Victor

2020 – 2022 // 3 Seasons // 28 Episodes

Carmen wrote of this LGBTQ Hulu TV show: “Love, Victor has always led with its sweetness! Even when grappling with serious themes (one of Victor’s love interests has had an alcohol addiction, this season another gay character is almost involved in a hate crime, a different member of their friendship circle has a mom who struggles with clinical depression) the angst level never moves much beyond ‘way harsh Disney Channel.'” And Season Two ends on a gay cliffhanger for perpetual high school popular girl Lake making eyes with Lucy, the ex of the school’s biggest jock, and picks back up in Season Three exactly where you want it to. // Watch Love Victor on Hulu

Only Murders in the Building

2021 – // 4+ Seasons // 40+ Episodes

From our beloved Jamie Babbit came the Hulu TV show Only Murders in the Building, an immediately buzzy whodunit set in a New York City apartment building where a murder is followed by a homegrown true crime podcast hosted by nosy neighbors Charles (Steve Martin), Oliver (Martin Short) and Mabel (Selena Gomez). In Season One, we had a lesbian cop who remains in the series, but in Season Two Mabel ends up enchanted by a lesbian art gallery owner played by noted agent of chaos Cara Delevingne. Unfortunately it never gets quite that gay (for the ladies) again. // Watch Only Murders in the Building on Hulu

Past Lies

2024 // Limited Series // 6 Episodes

At the center of the story is Rita (Elena Anaya from Room in Rome), a successful lesbian film director, returns to her hometown with her girlfriend to settle her mother’s estate, only to find herself there for an unexpected event: the remains of a high school classmate, who disappeared on their senior trip 25 years ago, turns up. Her high school friend group, still intact and in her hometown, are shaken, and old ghosts come rattling to the surface in more ways than one. The series is available in Spanish or dubbed in English. // Watch Past Lies on Hulu

This Way Up

2019 – 2021 // 2 Seasons // 12 Episodes // Channel 4 Co-Production

This cute comedy centers on Aine, an Irish woman living in London who returns from rehab to re-make her life. Her sister, Shona (Sharon Hogan), realizes she is bisexual and dates a co-worker, Charlotte (Indria Varna) in Season One. Soooo… it’s not a big storyline but also don’t you want to see Sharon Hogan be gay for a second?? // Watch This Way Up on Hulu

Utopia Falls

2020 // One Season // 10 Episodes

It’s hundreds of years in the future and New Babyl, the last living colony on earth, has divided into different sectors for specific industries, from which 24 candidates are chosen to compete in The Examplar performance competition. Six of these candidates are followed by the show’s narrative, including sexually fluid Brooklyn and dancer Sage. // Watch Utopia Falls on Hulu

When We Rise

2017 // Limited Series

From ’70s San Francisco through the HIV-AIDS crisis and into the repeal of DADT and DOMA, When We Rise is an ambitious overview of many decades of LGBTQ+ history, with a star-studded cast playing some of queer history’s most memorable activists. It tries to do too much, honestly, and thus falters and oversimplifies at times (particularly when it touches on collaborations between lesbians and gay men). But it’s still worth a watch for anyone looking to know more about queer history. // Watch When We Rise on Hulu

Tell Me Lies

2+ Seasons // 18 Episodes // 

What begins as a story of toxic heterosexual college students in love with and lying to each other becomes, eventually, something more queer (particularly in Season 2) — but there’s a lot of hot idiots drinking and manipulating each other to get through first. But it’s got a solid amount of little twists to keep you engaged throughout. // Watch Tell Me Lies on Hulu

Casual

2014 – 2018 // 4 Seasons // 44 Episodes

Smart, irreverent family comedy Casual centers on Valerie (Michaela Watkins), who, along with her daughter Laura (Tara Lynne Barr), moves in with her dating-app-founder brother Alex (Tommy Dewey) after her divorce. In Season One, Alex dates a poly bisexual woman named Emmy, and in Season Two, Laura has a thing with a female friend — and it seems for a bit that that is the end of it, but nope! Laura is bisexual and continues dating and having things with other women through the series’ four seasons. However, you do have to suffer through four seasons of Alex, a very entitled white man! // Watch Casual on Hulu

Class of ’09

2023 // Limited Series // 8 Episodes // FX co-production

Queer actress Kate Mara and L Word Generation Q fave Sepideh Moafi star with Brian Tyree Henry in this suspense thriller that follows a class of FBI agents at three points in time as they attempt to grapple with massive changes in the criminal justice system. Moafi plays Hour Nazari, a lesbian who becomes a data specialist with big ambitions and Mara is Ashley Poet, a former nurse who specializes in undercover work. // Watch Class of ’09 on Hulu

Death and Other Details

2024 // One Season // 10 Episodes

This murder mystery set upon a luxury cruise ship is teeming with queers: Anna (Lauren Patten), an heiress to her father’s milling company, and her wife Leila (Pardis Saremi), an eccentric former “clickbait journalist” paranoid after a head injury and Eleanor (Karoline), a member of the family with whom Anna’s family is planning a partnership. Eleanor and Anna also share a complicated romantic past. // Watch Death & Other Details on Hulu

The Girl From Plainville

2022 // Limited Series // 8 Episodes

This Hulu docuseries traces the very bizarre case of Michelle Carter, who was prosecuted for involuntary manslaughter after her internet boyfriend killed himself following some encouragement via text message from Carter. Elle Fanning’s stand-out performance as Carter, who was bisexual (which is addressed in the series) is amongst many elements giving this psychological complicated story some heart without dwelling heavily in sensationalism. // Watch The Girl from Plainville on Hulu

A Murder at the End of the World

2023 // 7 Episodes

Another show that’s hard to place because it is so good but also not particularly queer — the lead character is, but that queerness is largely irrelevant to the story. It’s a crime drama set in the world of tech, starring Emma Corrin as Darby, a queer hacker trying to solve a series of murders at an isolated resort owned by a tech billionaire. “Darby’s journey isn’t just to solve these two crimes but to reckon with the grief of her childhood that weighs on her and the grief of our world that weighs on us all,” writes Drew in her review. // Watch a Murder at the End of the World on Hulu

East Los High

2013-2017 // 4 Seasons // 61 Episodes

Ser Anzoategui (Vida) made their small-screen debut playing Daysi in this show about a group of interconnected friends at a high school in East LA. The first season has a coming out arc that ends pretty brutally, but it’s a show that tackles a lot of social issues and was Hulu’s first with an all Latino cast and crew. // Watch East Los High on Hulu

The First

2018 // One Season // 8 Episodes

Lisa Gay Hamilton plays Kayla Price, a former mission commander and a lesbian, in this show about the first human mission to Mars. Her wife is played by Gay for Pay Queen Tracie Thoms, of course. Kayla is part of the main ensemble but her sexuality doesn’t come up very often. // Watch The First On Hulu

How I Met Your Father

2022 – 2023 // 2 Seasons // 26 Episodes

In this spin-off of How I Met Your Mother, the framing device is Sophie (Hillary Duff in the present, Kim Catrall in the future)’s story of meeting her son’s father, Jesse. Jesse’s adopted sister, Ellen (Tien Tran) is a farm-owning lesbian who’s just moved to New York City looking for love following her divorce with her wife. Her character was “criminally underused” at first but stepped closer to the spotlight as the season progressed. // Watch How I Met Your Father on Hulu

Light as a Feather

2018-2019 // 2 Seasons // 26 Episodes

Light as a Feather started out as a fun campy horror/teen drama that happened to have a gay character in its main ensemble, and it was all fun in games through Season One and most of Season Two. It had the Final Destination “cheating death” kind of spook factor, mixed in with some supernatural twin stuff and secrets upon secrets upon lies. Season Two gave the queer lead, named Alex of course, a girlfriend, but the end of Season Two took a bit of a turn re: its queer characters. // Watch Light as a Feather on Hulu

Tiny Beautiful Things

2023 // Limited Series // 8 Episodes

This adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s Tiny Beautiful Things (which was a compilation of her Dear Sugar advice columns ) stars Kathryn Hahn as Claire, a writer who finds herself heading up an advice column while her own life falls apart. In a deviation from its source material, Claire’s husband, Danny, is Black, and their daughter, Rae, is queer and biracial. “The problem with this series,” Drew wrote in her review, “is it wants inclusivity without acknowledging how that changes its central narrative.” // Watch Tiny Beautiful Things on Hulu

Woke 

2020 – 2022 // 2 Seasons // 16 Episodes

Keef Knight is a Black cartoonist on the up-and-up who avoids controversial material in his work — but after being traumatized by an encounter with the police, he gains the ability to see and hear inanimate objects talking to him and is increasingly aware of the racial microaggressions that infiltrate his life. He eventually befriends Ayana (Sasheer Zamata), a lesbian reporter who calls him out. // Watch Woke on Hulu

Letterkenny

2016 – 2023 // 12 Seasons // 81 Episodes

Valerie describes this quirky Canadian comedy as “full of quick-witted, fast-talking folks with very specifically Canadian humor that somehow seems universally hilarious.” Though many of the women are canonically queer, the on-screen proof of that is not always central.// Watch Letterkenny on Hulu

Saint X

2023 // One Season // 8 Episodes 

Saint X is many things, “good” is not one of them, but it has some things going for it. Emily Thomas (Alycia Debnam-Carey) moves to a Caribbean neighborhood in Brooklyn 15 years after her older sister died on a Caribbean island during a family vacation. Authorities said it was an accident but the Thomases believe otherwise, and of course all of this is now resurfacing in Emily’s present-tense life. Her best friend, Sunita (Kosha Patel), is a gay lady! // Watch Saint X on Hulu

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TV Shows From Other Networks With Strong Lesbian / Bisexual Storylines That You Can Watch on Hulu:

• Skins (UK)
• Grey’s Anatomy (ABC)
• Broad City (Comedy Central)
• Claws (TNT)
• 9-1-1 (ABC)
• The Bold Type (Freeform)
• The Fosters (Freeform)
• Glee (Fox)
• Good Trouble (Freeform)
• Pretty Little Liars (Freeform)
• Station 19 (ABC)
• True Blood (HBO)
• Vida (Starz)

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Other streaming TV lists:

• 60 Best Lesbian, Bisexual and Queer TV Shows on Netflix
• 40 Queer TV Shows with Lesbian and Bisexual Characters Streaming on Prime Video
• The 40 Best LGBTQ+ TV Shows on HBO Max With Lesbian or Bisexual Characters

Baby Steps #6: The Best Laid Birth Plans

Sometimes you don’t know what you don’t know until you know it — and if there is anything I can say about the six-hour Prenatal & Birthing class we attended, in two separate sessions, this past Saturday and the Saturday prior, it is that it turns out there was a lot I didn’t know. And now I am basically a midwife? Which is great because Gretchen is really tired of being pregnant and would like to give birth immediately.

Whatever Happened to Lamaze Classes?

I’d imagined the class would resemble the “Lamaze classes” I’d seen on television, but it turns out  Lamaze, a psychoprophylactic method popularized in the 1950s by an apparently very mean French OB, has fallen out of favor since its peak circa my own birth. But the basic jist of it, from my limited research, is that Lamaze classes aimed to build the confidence of pregnant people to consider a more natural birth with less medical interventions by becoming well-versed in relaxation techniques and managing pain through movement and massage. Also, according to this 1984 piece about Lamaze classes, “one of the main tasks of the Lamaze teacher was to give parents the push and the ammunition they needed to stand up to their doctors—never an easy thing to do.”

On TV it always looked the same. An impossibly crowded room, women on mats in rows or a circle, husbands supporting from behind or sitting in front. Dad would help her spread her legs and she would practice breathing. Often, hijinks or drama ensued, like in Friends when, in Carol’s unexpected absence, Ross and Susan fought over who was the Daddy, or in The L Word’s unfortunate sixth season when Tom begrudgingly accompanied Max to a birthing class held in a hotel conference room (??!) to get aggressively misgendered.

We wanted to take an in-person class (we both have ADHD), a challenge when we have limited financial resources and also, so much of the birthing class industry has shifted to virtual-only. Eventually our only option was a class that took place a mere four weeks before Gretchen’s due date.

After many months of anticipation, there were were,= sitting on floor chairs in an airy little room on a quiet street, eating focaccia and hummus, looking at pictures of the womb and learning about membrane sweeps and the magic of cord blood.

Suddenly The Birth Plan Makes Sense

We’d initially looked at our “birth plan” with uncertainty — did we need to have preferences if we trusted our doctor to do what needed to be done? Why would I, an elder maiden who was very bad at science, have any opinion about birth positions, c-sections, vaginal seeding — more important than the opinion of our doctor?

When our instructor opened the class by telling us birth would be the most important day of our lives, I simply wasn’t so sure about that. For us, labor was not something we’d long dreamed of experiencing, it  was just the means to an end. She admitted her position was a specific one. She’s a midwife and is highly skeptical of doctors and modern medicine, a philosophy very much in line with the “natural birth is better” angle that Lamaze classes promoted. I suspected the truth was somewhere in the middle, and left our first session a little unsure. But we had time to talk about what felt right and what felt off about it afterwards — what we learned, what behaviors of ours we were still confident would not “cause” autism. So then we came to the second session with a more targeted perspective on what we wanted to know more about, and it was great simply to have someone who’d witnessed so many births talk to us about them. Our doctor appointments have always been quick affairs, but we could take our time with her. We left the second session feeling honestly very held. Most importantly, I finally got the backup support I needed on the importance of good lighting in the hospital room.

The most I’d ever consciously learned about childbirth prior to the class remains this essay by our former Queer Mama columnist, Haley — the original piece included a short film, too, which seems to have vanished from the internet. That photo of Haley on all fours in the hospital — I never forgot it, because that was the moment I learned that “lying on your back” isn’t the optimal position for giving birth. I never sought out labor or birth stories because my own prospects for having one of my own were so uncertain, really only tuning in when the story was published on my own website. I didn’t really absorb the fact that labor didn’t always begin with water breaking and a mad rush to the hospital until watching Laboring Under An Illusion: Mass Media Childbirth vs. The Real Thing this past November.

While we didn’t decide to relocate the birth to our own bathtub, eat our placenta in capsules or eschew circumcision, we are now aware of all the ways in which What’s Good For Mom and Baby won’t always be What’s Good For Doctor and now, finally, we fully understand the purpose of the birth plan. She explained what early labor looks like, detailed potential complications, guided us through various birth positions, shamed us for eating so many cookies, reminded us that our bodies know how to give birth and gave tips for postpartum care. Then she made us food? It was really nice?

She strongly recommended having a birth doula, and we’ve gotten that suggestion a lot! But we just don’t have room in our budget for one, and would rather save for a postpartum doula.

Preparing for Family Leave

Both of us work at small companies. Gretchen’s looking at about five months paid leave while I’ve got three. I’m doing six weeks up top and then another six at the end of her leave, to avoid paying over $2k a month for childcare for as long as possible.

It’s a weird time to be on leave because I have been processing my fear and panic about the current state of affairs in the united states of america by writing or editing or otherwise pitching in to create content that’ll help queer people cope with said time. Because this is a bad time. I mean things are really bad and here we are having a child!!?!!

I haven’t felt like Autostraddle was really “my baby” for five or six years now, at least not in the sense that I’m protective of any aspect of it besides the simple one of wanting it to exist, although even that simple desire has consistently proven more complicated than I’d hoped. At this point it’s more like my child who is going to college out of state. But I do wonder how this extended break will feel. This place was, at one time, my baby, something I swaddled (with multiple co-parents), and I wonder how it’ll feel to be away from it and focused on bringing something else into the world. I think the last time I was able to completely check out of work 100% for more than a week was in 2017 when I was moving back from Michigan to Los Angeles, because I was driving cross-country with my then-partner.

So this will be new. As I imagine it is for many parents. As so many things will be, and are. And I will tell you all about it, soon enough.

Give Me Recommendations: Baby Books and Birth Movies

I’ve kept a diary my whole life, but my journaling practice tends to fall off whenever I’m living with a partner, as it has in recent months. But I want to be sure to write everything down when the baby’s here, to have a place for pictures and ephemera and saving it all for him to see one day. I bought a Moleskine Baby Journal a few months back, but despite my best efforts, I just can’t get into a routine with it. Honestly, the pages are just so thin! Even the thin, glossy ultrasound printouts bulk it up beyond measure, I can’t imagine putting more photos in here. If you kept a baby book and you liked it, let me know which it was!

Also if you’ve seen any documentaries or TV shows that you think would be good to watch to prepare for our own BIRTH STORY, let me know!

The Most Anticipated Queer Books for February 2025

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Autostraddle’s Top Most Anticipated LGBTQ Books for February 2025

A History of Transgender Medicine in the United States, by multiple authors (February 1, Nonfiction)

Reading the Waves, by Lidia Yuknavitch (February 3, Memoir)

Mutual Interest, by Olivia Wolfgang-Smith (February 4, Historical Fiction)

Alligator Tears, by Edgar Gomez (February 11, Memoir)

All the Parts We Exile, by Roza Nozari (February 25, Memoir)

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February 4

Drag Queen Story Hour,by Tessa Quinones & Luke Shaefer, illustrated by Heather Sawyer (Children’s)

The Lamb, by Lucy Rose (Horror)

Under the Same Stars, by Libba Bray (Historical Fiction)

Fearless and Free,by Josephine Baker (Memoir)

Why on Earth: An Alien Invasion Anthology,edited by Rosiee Thor and Vania Stoyanova (Sci-Fi)

The Secret Public: How Music Moved Queer Culture From the Margins to the Mainstream,by Jon Savage (Nonfiction)

The Trial Period,by Auburn Morrow (YA Romance)

Queer Lasting: Ecologies of Care for a Dying World, by Sarah Ensor (Non-Fiction)

Cleavage: Men, Women and the Space Between Us,by Jennifer Finney Boylan (Nonfiction)

This Ends in Embers, by Kamilah Cole (YA Fantasy)

A World Worth Saving,by Kyle Lukoff (YA Fantasy)

Shoot the Moon, by Ava Barry (Mystery)

Feb 6

Fragments of Wasted Devotion,by Mia Arias Tsang (Memoir)

Thank You For Calling the Lesbian Line, by Elizabeth Lovatt (Nonfiction)

Feb 11

Loca,by Alejandro Heredia (February 11, Literary Fiction)

But Not Too Bold,by Hache Pueyo (Horror)

Where Shadows Bloom, by Catherine Bakewell (YA Fantasy)

It’s All Or Nothing, Vale,by Andrea Beatrix Arango (YA)

Mountain Upside Down, by Sara Ryan (YA)

The Princess Protection Program #2: After Ever After, by Alex London (YA Fantasy)

Feb 18

Queering the Asian Diaspora: East and Southeast Asian Sexuality, Identity and Cultural Politics,by Hongwei Bao (Nonfiction)

Hungerstone, by Kat Dunn (Horror)

The Girl You Know,by Ellie Gonzalez Rose (YA Thriller)

The Antlered King (The Raven’s Trade #2), by Marianne Gordon (Fantasy)

Cursebound (Faebound #2), by Saara El-Arifi (Romantasy)

Limitless: Poetry of an Aromantic & Asexual Journey, by Patrick Bex (Poetry)

Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen and Girlbosses Against Liberation,by Sophie Lewis (Nonfiction)

WASH, by Ebony Stewart (Poetry)

February 25

Beyond Bananas and Condoms: The LGBTQIA+ Inclusive Sex Education You Never Got In School, by Dee Whitnell (Nonfiction)

On Her Terms,by Amy Spalding (Romance)

The Other March Sisters, by Linda Epstein, Ally Malinenko & Liz Parker (Historical Fiction)

Bea Mullins Takes a Shot, by Emily Deibert (Middle Grade)

Wicked Pursuit, by Katee Robert (Dark Adult Romance)

Life Drawing: A Love and Rockets Collection, by Jaime Hernandez (Graphic Novel)

Big Name Fan, by Ruthie Knox and Annie Mare (Romance)

February 2025: What’s New, Gay and Streaming on Netflix, Hulu, Max, Paramount+, Prime Video and Peacock

After a relatively robust January, we are now barreling into February, perhaps often in search of effective methods of disassociation that also feature the motherlode of lesbian, bisexual, queer, gay women and/or trans characters. Unfortunately there is not a lot happening for us this month but there are some Yellowjackets! And isn’t that nice? Here are 100 movies you could watch.

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Netflix’s LGBTQ+ February 2025

Celebrity Bear Hunt // Season One // Feb 5
So, like twelve celebrities are sent to a beach house in Costa Rica, given survival-related tasks (e.g, jump off a moving boat, build a shelter) and if they fail they are released into a jungle known as the “Bear Pit” where British adventurer / writer Bear Grylls hunts them down? Amongst the celebrities in question are bisexual Spice Girl Mel B, gay journalist / TV presenter Steph McGovern and pansexual fashion model Lottie Moss.

Apple Cider Vinegar: Limited Series // Feb 6
Belle Gibson was a single Mom in Australia who lied about having cancer, lied about “curing” herself through a specific diet, and created a widely acclaimed and super-popular app, The Whole Pantry, aimed at promoting her “cure” to others. This series tells her story and in doing so invents (I assume) the character of Chanelle (queer actress Aisha Dee), who does seem to be framed as a queer character (you’ll see what I mean) — but her queerness isn’t really adressed, let alone central to the narrative. Chanelle is the best friend and eventual manager of Belle’s idol, Milla (Alycia Debnam-Carey), an influencer who actually did have cancer and attempted to cure herself through juicing and coffee enemas, as well as Belle’s eventual manager. This series is a ride. I’m still trying to parse through how I feel about it, honestly!

Spencer (2021) // Feb 8
Our very own Kristen Stewart plays our very own Princess Diana in this critically acclaimed (by me) film that also features her royal dresser, Maggie (Sally Hawkins), who is gay!

Valeria: Season 4 // Feb 14
In the final season of Valeria, the four close friends at the story’s epicenter are venturing into their thirties and facing new challenges. Our resident queer character, Nerea (Teresa Riott), will be seeking “balance between her professional life as a freelancer and stability with Georgina (Mima Riera).”

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Hulu’s New February 2025 Queer Movie

In the Summers (2024) – Feb 5
Queer director Alesandra Lacorazza Samudio’s directorial debut is a semi-autobiographical film about two sisters, girly Eva and tomboy Victoria, who live in California and spend fraught summers with their father in New Mexico. ”The greatest strength of In the Summers are these well-written, realistic, complicated characters and watching how the change — or don’t — and how their relationships change — or don’t — over time,” wrote Drew.

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Prime Video’s Trans February 2025

Milk (2009) // February 1
The Harvey Milk biopic follows the influential leader and the group of activists that came up around him, including Allison Pill as LGBT rights activist Anne Kronenberg.

Clean Slate: Season One // Feb 6
Laverne Cox stars as Desiree Slate, a gallerist who returns home to Alabama for the first time since fleeing for New York as a teenager, in this smart little comedy that’s been in development for seven years. Now an out trans woman reeling from a series of dysfunctional relationships with men, she’s going back to the root of it all and trying to reconnect with her father, carwash owner Harry Slate (George Wallace), after 23 years of estrangement.

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Paramount+ Showtime February 2025

Yellowjackets: Season Three Premiere // Feb 14
At last we have arrived at the long-awaited third season of Yellowjackets, and yes of course Kayla will be recapping every minute of this event as we do a little time jump in both timelines, grappling with cannibalism, an unexpected murder from the cliffhanger finale and Natalie’s reign as queen. Hilary Swank and Joel McHale are joining the cast. We cannot wait!

Tracker: Season 2B Premiere // Feb 16
Season Two of this wildly popular program about a guy who tracks people down, sometimes with the help of his handler, butch lesbian Velma Bruin (Abby Mc, returns to CBS.

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Peacock LGBTQ+ Movies for February 2025

I’ll Be Right There (2024) // Feb 28
Sepideh Moafi and Edie Falco play lesbian lovers in this “sweet indie dramedy” centered on Wanda, a bookkeeper at a bar stretched thin as a mom, daughter and ex-wife — while also hooking up with Sophie (Sepideh Moafi) and hooking up with her boss, Marshall (unfortunately played by Michael Rapaport).

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HBO Max February 2025

Life Partners (2014) // February 1
Leighton Meester is Sasha, a lesbian who’s entrenched in a deeply co-dependent best friendship with Paige, who is straight — a friendship that’s tested when Paige meets a man (Adam Brody) she actually likes and Sasha hates sharing. B Nichols called it “a film in which everything that could go usually wrong in a lesbian film inexplicably doesn’t!” Beth Dover and Gabourey Sidibe are delightful as Sasha’s queer friends.

90 Day Fiancé : Season 11 Premiere // February 16 (TLC)
Big news for 90 Day Fiancéfans (Nic) — the series will be introducing its very first throuple — Matt, Amani and Any. Any, an exotic dancer from Tijuana, is invited to Matt and Amani’s married family life in San Diego, as the couple must decide if they’re ready to divorce so one of them can marry Any, thus enabling her to immigrate to the U.S. Returning couple Alliya and Shawn face new challenges as Shawn finds that Alliya, a trans woman, “is evolving into a very different person than the one he first fell in love with as she continues to transition and explore surgical options.”

The White Lotus: Season Three Premiere // February 16
We have spent a lot of time scrutinizing a lesbian kiss in the initial teaser for White Lotus, attempting to determine whomst is involved and if it is perhaps a storyline or just a thing that is happening for some other reason. It appears that the characters played by Charlotte Le Bon and Aimee Lou Wood are kissing in a scene that I think is some kind of wild hotel room party. But Aimee’s character, Chelsea, is there with her husband, so who knows! Anyhow I think we will all watch it regardless.

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How To Argue Effectively Against Trump’s Executive Order Banning Health Care For Transgender Youth

feature image photo by Kevin Dietsch / Staff via Getty Images

Trump’s latest Executive Order — and boy has he been busy with Executive Orders! — takes aim at gender-affirming care for transgender youth. He claims this life-enriching and medically sound practice is, in fact, a collective effort by Radical Doctors to ravage confused children with aggressive and unnecessary surgeries, thus permanently preventing them from ever being able to birth a child into the planet he actively seeks to destroy.

Protecting Children From Chemical and Surgical Mutilation directs the Office of Health and Human Services to establish new guidelines for “promoting the health of children who assert gender dysphoria” or other “identity-based confusion” and to re-evaluate the DSM-V. It directs the Secretary of Defense to ensure trans children of military service members cannot get medical care. It asks the Attorney General to “prioritize enforcement of protections against female genital mutilation,” despite the objective fact that a phalloplasty is not female genital mutilation.

This order will face substantial legal pushback before any of it can be realized, but we’re already seeing early compliance in hospitals across the country, and there’s no understating the impact of orders like these on the broader cultural landscape.

It’s Not Just Conservatives Who Support Trump’s Views on Gender Affirming Care

Unfortunately, many of our own political allies share some of the views that enabled zealotry against trans people to reach this fever pitch. They are regularly fed anti-trans ideology and propaganda from the very same media outlets that are presumed to support liberal, left-wing causes. Some of the worst anti-trans journalism in recent memory comes from The New York Times and The Atlantic. Newsweek just declared that JK Rowling “won the culture war.”  Liberal pundits blamed trans allyship for the Dems’ 2024 losses, despite Harris never taking an explicit pro-trans rights stance during her campaign. When Sarah McBride’s ability to pee at work was under attack, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez seemed to be the only Democrat interested in defending her.

Democrats are backing down on trans rights, and they need to stand up. In this post, I’ll attempt to go over some of the major talking points that might come up when speaking with potential allies about gender-affirming care.

What is Gender-Affirming Care?

It’s not “Junk Science,” like Trump says. Gender-affirming care is evidence-based care that affirms the patient’s sense of their own gender. It can include talk therapy, speech therapy, or medications like puberty blockers or hormone therapy, depending on each patient’s individual needs. This care reduces depression and suicidality amongst transgender youth, and every major medical organization has condemned efforts to criminalize and curtail it.

With minors, doctors have very specific guidelines, advised by WPATH (World Professional Association of Transgender Health) to be intentional and careful while providing treatment to ensure the child’s gender incongruence has been longstanding, they’re mature enough to provide informed consent, mental health concerns have been addressed, and the youth is aware of potential reproductive health effects. The WPATH Guidelines is hardly the radical document Trump claims it is, it’s actually quite cautious and often acknowledges when research lacks conclusive determinations.

It’s often claimed that gender nonconforming and neurodivergent kids are being swiftly misdiagnosed as transgender and rushed into surgery when they are simply tomboys, or gay, or autistic. WPATH standards of care acknowledge that diverse gender expressions in children do not always indicate a transgender identity and directs providers to rule out other potential causes of incongruence. They recommend healthcare professionals working with gender diverse children receive training in autism and neurodiversity. While professionals are advised to support children who desire to be acknowledged as their identified gender, there’s no recommendation for immediate medical interventions.

Good parents and doctors can work together to understand the child’s feelings and choose the right course of action.

People Under 18 Rarely Undergo Gender Affirming Surgery, and Actual Children Almost Never Do

Sec.1 of the executive order claims growing numbers of impressionable children are being “maimed” and “steralized” under “radical and false claims” that “adults can change a child’s sex through a series of irreversible medical interventions.”

This is not true.

A study from Harvard analyzing 2019 data found “little to no utilization of gender-affirming surgeries by transgender and gender-diverse (TGD) minors in the U.S.” In fact, cisgender males comprise the vast majority of minors’ gender-affirming surgeries, accounting for for 80% of gender-affirming breast reduction or removal procedures. It’s much easier and more common for teens to get irreversible cosmetic surgeries (which are often gender-affirming in their own ways).

Generally accepted guidelines are to wait until a patient becomes a legal adult to perform surgeries, but exceptions have been made. For teenagers (16-17), generally only “top surgery” is offered, and only after the patient has been “consistent and persistent” in their gender identity for multiple years. It’s not a choice made lightly, quickly, or in isolation. Phalloplastys, which Trump defines as “female genital mutilation,” are only performed on adults. Phalloplastys actually aren’t very popular amongst trans adults, either — only 4%-13% of trans men will receive it.

The process of obtaining gender-affirming surgery is cumbersome, consisting of numerous appointments, approvals and tests. Waiting lists for surgical appointments can be up to two years long. There are truly so many steps! For example, patients seeking vaginoplasties are required to do a full year of hair removal treatment on the surgical site before their surgery. 

Ultimately, regardless of age, these are decisions that should be made by a patient, their parents and their doctors — not by the government.

Puberty Blockers Are Not “Chemical Mutilation”

Puberty blockers have been used to treat cis kids with precocious puberty since the 1980s and their application to trans youth is supported by all major medical organizations. They don’t actually “block” puberty, they “pause” it, giving kids a chance to hold off on physical changes that could harm their mental health and/or be expensive or invasive to repair later in life. Discontinuing blockers returns them to a pre-destined pubertal development, which can be assisted by gender-affirming hormone therapy.

They’re also not widely prescribed. In England, where the National Health Service began issuing new guidelines prohibiting doctors from prescribing puberty blockers to minors? Less than 100 minors in England were already receiving them.

What is the Impact of Hormone Blockers on Fertility?

The Executive Order also argues that “mutilated children” will eventually “grasp the horrifying tragedy that they will never be able to conceive children of their own or nurture their children through breastfeeding.”

Firstly, this assumes an ascription to a value system that prizes reproduction as an empirical and universal desire. Getting breast implants or reductions can also potentially harm a woman’s ability to breastfeed, but that remains legal, even for teenagers. Ultimately, many lifesaving medical interventions offered to children can hinder future reproductive options.

That said! Puberty blockers do not impact one’s ability to conceive in the future. The science on hormone replacement therapy’s long term impact on fertility is still evolving — but those concerned about it can hedge their bets by freezing sperm or eggs prior to starting treatment. Trans men generally seem to be able to get pregnant a few months after stopping testosterone. For trans women, it’s still unclear, some find testicles fail to bounce back to their initial robust levels, other researchers have found the opposite. Honestly it’s hard enough to get answers about what drugs impact the fertility of cis women, let alone trans women, because there’s so little funding for women’s health research. With Trump’s new mandates, there will most certainly be even less.

The reference to breastfeeding is honestly unclear to me — I’m confident that recipients of chest surgery are not horrified or shocked later in life to learn that removing their breasts may impact their ability to breastfeed. Hormones don’t permanently impact milk supply in humans who would otherwise be able to breastfeed, and depending on a variety of other factors, some trans men and trans women could potentially breastfeed.

Doctors disclose these possibilities to their patients and they can make decisions from there based on what they feel is best for their health and family. It’s not a surprise.

Do People Regret Gender-Affirming Care?

Trans youth who transitioned at a young age report “high levels of satisfaction with their care,” and only 3% discontinued hormone therapy. Regret is also rare for gender-affirming surgeries. There’s no singular conclusive study, but rates of regret seem to generally hover around 1% but could be even less.

This is an extraordinarily positive outcome. Nearly half of gastric-bypass surgery patients experience some regret about their surgeries, one in five patients regret knee replacement surgery and breast implants. Rates of satisfaction with antidepressants are far lower, but we accept that as par for the course.

In other words; no other medical procedure requires a 100% satisfaction rate to be legal and we shouldn’t expect that of gender-affirming care.

But What About All Those Stories I’ve Seen and Read About People Who Regret Gender-Affirming Surgeries?

Nobody can speak for every de-transitioned person, and we don’t have to deny the possibility that people undergo surgeries or treatments they later regret in order to promote more access to trans health care for everyone. But; we also live in a transphobic world, and many eventual detransitioners face discrimination, bullying, vulnerability to violence and ostracisation post-transition.

These stories do seem to be everywhere sometimes, which is also by design. Some de-transitioners, undergoing a vulnerable and traumatic experience and feeling estranged from LGBTQ+ community, have been recruited by right-wing, anti-trans communities to become spokespeople for anti-trans causes. “I had no limits on how far I would go to please people and help them win,” says Elisa Shupe, a trans woman who briefly detransitioned and became a right-wing hero by doing so. “At every turn, I had people heaping praise on me, which motivated me to do more and more.”

Stories about de-transtitioners are often shared as evidence that the gender-affirming care model is broken, like this recent New York Times piece, which describes behavior from a doctor that, if true, isn’t consistent with any model of care, let alone gender-affirming care. Criminalizing gender-affirming care due to doctors like that would make as much sense as criminalizing back surgery because of Christopher Dunstch. But, often failures in standards of care are a result of healthcare in this country being a total shitshow that incentivizes expedience and makes mental health care nearly impossible to access!

The world and gender and sexuality and our bodies — it’s so fucking complicated. Literally everyone, even the people who hate us, would benefit from a more expansive idea of what it means to “look like” any specific gender and to open our minds to the possibility of gender journeys that take unexpected turns, or outright change mid-life, rather than curtailing and limiting options of gender expression and medical treatment.

“A transition can be beneficial to some people and ‘hellish’ for others,” write trans academics Daniela Valdes and Kinnon MacKinnon in The Atlantic.”These are not opposing viewpoints. They simply reflect a wide range of real outcomes of medical interventions that can fundamentally transform a person’s body and their life.”

In Conclusion….

Let’s be clear: these efforts are not really about concern for the bodies of children, nor do they reflect an actual problem that requires political intervention. The right-wing is seizing trans issues not because they’re relevant to many Americans but because trans issues are ripe for sensationalization, it’s popular amongst many Democrats too, it makes big money for anti-gay groups running out of LGB issues to oppose, it fits in with an overall push towards conservative and traditional gender roles, and, honestly, it somehow remains culturally accepted to be vile and cruel to trans people, particularly to trans women. Also, trans people are a small and vulnerable group with little political capital. These efforts are a distraction and a waste of time and resources. Ensuring cis kids and trans kids get the healthcare they need requires more research, not less, certainly not defunding any hospital or medical school that performs gender-affirming surgeries.

The directives in this order are at worst illegal and violent. At best — they save nobody, help nobody, and harm everybody.

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Trump’s Latest Attempt to Ban Trans People From The Military Comes With Extra Malice

After installing noted Christian Nationalist Misogynist Pete Hegseth at the helm of this nation’s Department of Defense, the Trump administration is already making moves to realize Hegseth’s dream of a more “masculinized” military by declaring its intent, via Executive Orders, to make a series of emotional, illogical and counterintuitive decisions about the military’s future. This includes an EO aimed at banning transgender people from the military, “Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness.”

There are a little over 14,700 transgender troops serving in the U.S military, which in total boasts 2.86 million members, including active-duty troops, reserves and civilians. 73% of currently enlisted trans service members are senior personnel, meaning they’ve served for between 12 and 21 years and thus have amassed some significant expertise. The Palm Center projects that recruiting and training replacements for these service members would cost another $1 billion.

The Executive Order gives Pete Hegseth 60 days to come up with a plan to make Trump’s dreams come true. Hegseth was confirmed as Secretary of Defense last week, with Vice President J.D Vance casting the tie-breaking vote because Hegseth is such an unqualified and abhorrent piece of shit that even three Republican senators summoned the moral fortitude to vote against his appointment.

Hegseth’s bigotry, as well as his “concerning stances on the Geneva Conventions, the use of torture, and the potential for the use of the U.S. military against the American people” should have disqualified him from securing this particular job. Unfortunately, it did not! He got the job and here we are.

Trump’s military-focused Executive Orders encompass a few objectives aside from removing trans service members, like ending all of the military’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs and reinstating service members who were previously expelled for refusing to get vaccinated for COVID-19, a virus that is highly transmittable in enclosed spaces such as military bunkers, airplanes, trucks and tents. Reinstated soldiers would also receive back pay.

After wasting all of that money to replace trans service members and back-pay ex-employees for spreading a contagious virus to their friends and neighbors, Trump also Executively Ordered the Defense Department to somehow inspire the military to build a next-generation missile defense system similar to Israel’s, an “Iron Dome” that would guard against a variety of ballistic, hypersonic and cruise missiles.

Why Does Trump Want To Remove Transgender People From the Military?

Kicking trans people out of the military has been an ongoing passion project for Trump. His trans military ban in 2017 was proposed on the grounds that medical care for transgender people was too expensive and disruptive. This is objectively not true. Gender-affirming care for trans people would constitute, at most, .04-.14% of the military’s $6 billion healthcare budget.

This time, medical costs are mentioned but not centered. What is centered is the idea that, in violation of widespread medical consensus, transgender identity is a mental illness reflecting a break from reality. Emboldened by anti-trans rhetoric across the political spectrum, Trump is simply outright declaring trans people both imaginary and insane:

“Consistent with the military mission and longstanding DoD policy, expressing a false ‘gender identity’ divergent from an individual’s sex cannot satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for military service. Beyond the hormonal and surgical medical interventions involved, adoption of a gender identity inconsistent with an individual’s sex conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life…. A man’s assertion that he is a woman, and his requirement that others honor this falsehood, is not consistent with the humility and selflessness required of a service member.”

This focus on an “honorable, truthful and disciplined personal life” is really rich when considering that Pete Hegseth, a military veteran, was pressed during his confirmation hearings and refused to answer for personal life events including “paying off a conservative group staffer who accused him of sexually assaulting her in a hotel room.” Hegseth, who claims their sexual encounter was consensual, was married at the time. He also cheated on his second wife with a Fox news producer, an affair which resulted in the birth of a child.

Also — and this is neither here nor there, I just wanted you to know — he permanently injured a West Point drummer with an axe during an axe-throwing Flag Day segment on Fox News.

What Happened Last Time Trump Tried to Ban Trans People From The Military?

In June of 2016, the U.S military began allowing transgender Americans to serve openly. Then Trump became president and in July of 2017, Trump announced on Twitter that “after consultation with my Generals and military experts, please be advised that the United States Government will not accept or allow transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the US Military.” This apparently was a reaction to Trump’s unhappiness regarding a fight in the House over a spending bill that included amendments to ban military healthcare funding for gender confirmation surgery and treatments for transgender active-duty personnel.

A former service member wrote in this roundtable we did in 2017 with former and current trans service members with a diverse range of experiences in the military: “To have the Commander in Chief get on Twitter and say that trans people are essentially subhuman – well, that’s a disgrace, and it’s dangerous, and it’s certainly not representative of a country that I would have ever put my life on the line for.”

Of course, a tweet is not a law, so nothing actually happened. He followed up his tweet with a memo in August.

All five service chiefs testified that the trans-inclusive policy had been successful thus far and did not harm the military budget or its readiness. 56 generals, admirals and other leaders from every service branch published an open letter condemning Trump’s policies, saying it would “degrade readiness even more than the failed ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy.”

This aim was essentially tied up in dozens of court cases for the next many months, while trans people continued to serve openly. In March of 2018, then-Defense Secretary James Mattis unleashed a policy allowing trans troops to remain in the military if they did so in their biological sex, which, as trans service member Vivian Valentine explained in this post, essentially constituted a trans military ban. In March of 2019, following a court lifting the last of the orders preventing that policy from taking effect, the Pentagon signed a directive to implement it.

The ban went into effect on April of 2019, citing “the financial costs of inclusive service as well as a threat to readiness, cohesion, and lethality.”

Research found that the ban, which remained in place until Biden’s executive order reversing it in January of 2021, harmed military readiness.

What Happens Next?

The HRC and Lambda Legal have pledged “quick action.” Lambda Legal called the order “cruel,” noting that “It compromises the safety and security of our country and is particularly dangerous and wrong. As we promised [the first time Trump banned trans people from the military], so do we now: we will sue.”

Rep. Leigh Finke, the first out transgender member of the Minnesota House of Representatives said on CNN: “These are glorified press releases meant to scare people and to create uncertainty, meant to push people towards discrimination of transgender people and will be very difficult to enforce, and will take upwards of a year to figure out if this is even going to be possible. In the meantime it’s going to expose trans folks and make our lives more difficult.”

As we wait to see how and when the ban will be implemented and what legal challenges it will face, these policies encourage stigma and discrimination against trans people in all fields of life, to dehumanize them out of existence and, seemingly, to shame them into returning to presenting as their gender assigned at birth. As journalist Erin Reed writes, the rationale behind this order is not, as it was in 2017, “about faulty arguments laundering falsehoods as science” but instead is a strategic attack on trans people’s “honor and worth as human beings.”

Regardless of how any of us feel about the U.S military in general, military service has long been one of the most available options for employment, stability and education for many U.S. citizens, and a ban would likely constitute the largest mass layoff of transgender people in history. That is a lot of trans people losing their jobs and healthcare amid a government effort to dismantle healthcare and employment protections for trans people.

Monday night was a busy one for Trump, who also issued a sweeping directive to pause federal grants, loans and other forms of financial assistance. Numerous lawsuits were filed in response to the directive, and a judge has temporarily blocked the order from going into effect. Trump’s administration claims the freeze, which interrupted the Medicaid system and Head Start programs for young children amongst other necessary federal programs, was merely following up on its claim to halt “the use of federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism and green new deal social engineering policies” which he considers “a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve.” Fantastic!

“We can and will fight back,” wrote lawyer Chase Strangio today on his instagram, following this order and another aimed at preventing gender-affirming care for transgender youth. “We will hold and guide each other. We will litigate and educate. We will dream and not shrink. We will build on the legacy of our ancestors who survived and thrived and made magic every day.”

As I was writing this, Trump issued another anti-trans Executive Order, this one aimed at health care for transgender youth. We’ll have a piece about that for you as soon as we can.

Quiz: Which Lesbian Pants Are You?

While I prefer to live my life in the comfort and ease of daily sweatpants, I am but one lesbian, and the world is filled with so many more lesbians. Perhaps they are curled up in the corner of their local bookstore in some jewel-toned corduroys reading a slim book about gardening, or perhaps they’re in their carpenter jeans, painting your house. Or maybe they are embodying the spirit of a different pair of pants altogether. Let’s get started, it is time for you to discover your true authentic self!

Hundreds of LGBTQ+ Couples Eagerly Wed as Thailand Legalizes Same-Sex Marriage

Last June, Thailand became the first country in Southeast Asia to legalize same-sex marriage when the King signed a a historic bill that went into effect today — resulting in hundreds of Thai couples across the country emerging into the glory of legal marital recognition. Festivities included mass weddings in luxury mall Paragon Hall, organized by Thai rights group Naruemit Pride. Couples walked hand-in-hand down a makeshift rainbow runway — sometimes with their children in tow — while friends clapped and snapped pictures, posing before “Love Wins” backdrops under colorful balloon arches. There were photo booths, ice cream trucks, free cupcakes and even vacation giveaways at celebrations hosted by district officials across the country.

Ploynaplus Chirasukon and Kwanporn Kongpetch told the BBC that they were proud to be the first lesbian couple to register in their district and that they’d been waiting 17 years to marry — since they were both 16 years old.

CNN spoke to 42-year-old Nina Chetniphat Chuadkhunthod, a trans woman who has been unable to marry her boyfriend of 22 years because in Thailand she cannot legally change her gender identity. “I feel like, wow, my dream is close to coming true,” she explained. “I felt the proudest moment of my life that I could do this and let people know, let the industry and friends around me know that I could do it.” The couple held their wedding party three weeks ago, and registered their union as soon as it became legal.

LGBTQ+ activists in Thailand have been pushing for marriage equality for decades. Thailand’s first Pride march took place 25 years ago, but the event struggled with cohesion and police approval. Only two Pride marches took place between 2006 and 2022. A 2009 march was cancelled amid threats of violence. In 2015, a poll found that a majority of Thai citizens would not object to same-sex marriage.

“We were not accepted, by our own families and by society,” Bangkok Pride organizer Ms Waaddao told the BBC. “There were times when we did not think marriage equality would ever happen, but we never gave up.”

In 2019, an election returned Thailand to civilian rule and Future Forward — a new young reformist party that fully supported equal marriage — had a significant showing. A controversial court verdict dissolved the party a year later, which led to widespread protests, led by students, calling for reforms and a curbing of monarchy power. Many credit pressure from that new generation of pro-democracy youth activists for  pushing the fight over the finish line. The Marriage Equality Bill was first introduced in June of 2020.

Thailand is the third country in Asia, after Taiwan and Nepal, to legalize same-sex marriage. Under the legislation, same-sex couples who marry will have full legal, financial and medical rights, including those related to adoption and inheritance.

“23 January is the day that we all mark in history, that the rainbow flag has been planted in Thailand gracefully,” Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra posted in Thai on her Instagram account last week. “All the love from all the people is accepted legally with respect and dignity.”

On January 15th, the Prime Minister invited same-sex couples and other LGBTQ community members to the Government House in Bangkok to celebrate the newly minted “Marriage Equality Day.”

Thailand has long been a favorite travel spot for LGBTQ+ leisure travelers, as well as a destination for trans patients seeking affordable gender confirmation surgery.

Thailand has also been ahead of the curve when it comes to queer representation in media with its growing BL (Boys Love) and GL (Girls Love) television series, available worldwide on YouTube. There’s been an explosion in sapphic content specifically over the past two years, following the success of the 2022 GL (“Girls Love”) series “The Gap,” which inspired ramped-up GL production, leading to the “Thai Girls Love Renaissance” we’re all lucky enough to be alive to experience. The percentage of Thai production company GMMTV shows produced each year focused on queer storylines skyrocketed to 55% in 2024, up from 5% in 2016.

“Nowadays [Thai TV dramas] represent us as normal characters, like you see in real life,” Thammasat University professor Tinnaphop Sinsomboonthong told the BBC. “The kind of LGBTQ+ colleague you might have in the office, or your LGBTQ+ neighbour. This really helped change perceptions and values in all generations.”

By Thursday’s conclusion, over 1,832 same-sex couples had married.

This is how the world changes — brick by brick, day after day. Progress is made in one area and recedes in another, young people find their voice, politics shift and recede, media visibility rises and pivots and finds its sweet spot. And then, finally, one day, after decades of fighting for equality, lesbian couples can finally get married at the mall, as the goddess intended.

Let the photographs of these extremely happy couples fill your heart today. Sometimes love really does win.

60 Best Lesbian Movies on Tubi

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Classic Lesbian Cannon

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Queer Documentaries

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Lesbian Romance

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Indie Queer Movies

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Hahahahaha Comedies

Thrills and Chills

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Queer Arthouse Movies

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Dyke Drama

Baby Steps #5: Fixing the Window

Welcome to the fifth edition of Baby Steps, a column about every single thought and feeling I am having about this kid we are having in LESS THAN A MONTH

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The “wind event,” as it had been labeled thus far, was in its early hours two Tuesdays ago as I was writing the last edition of this column. Our group chats had already lit up with panic as fires sparked in the hills. The wind was blowing with anguished fervor. Los Angeles is an enormous swath of land, famously larger than the entirety of Rhode Island and Delaware combined, and Gretchen and I live relatively close to its middle. Prior to moving in together last April, both of us lived in parts of town that would eventually fall under evacuation orders that week, but where we live now is relatively safe when it comes to wildfire risk.

Most of the windows in this house are casement-style, secured poorly by lever-style latches. There are three tall ones in the dining room, which is also my office. The lever handle and its washer friend on the far right window fell off its mounting plate months ago and had been jury-rigged by my wife into remaining closed but was quickly blown out on Tuesday. We didn’t have duct tape so I plastered the window shut with packing tape, its efficacy unlikely, but this act felt like an act, I guess. It blew open again, so I moved a heavy chair right up against it. This seemed to do the trick, at least temporarily. Which is how everything suddenly felt, like something that had done the trick — but not for long.

By Tuesday evening, wildfires were raging in the Pacific Palisades and in the Altadena area and the winds were raging everywhere. By Wednesday, a day experienced as a high pitch panic whistle, a friend who’d recently been in our yard painting a onesie at our baby shower reported that she’d lost her home, eventually sending a video of her torched Mazda a few days later, blistering and grey. Whole neighborhoods were getting wiped out. The smoke was visible from every angle, the air thick and foggy, smelling of campfire.

If I’d made it this far into the pregnancy without being forced to face the reality that has inspired many of my generation to forego reproduction altogether, I could do so no longer. The intentionality of conception for a gay person makes me feel particularly culpable. Displacement and disorder, pandemics, epic natural disasters and the post-disaster cycles of repair and rebuilding will perhaps seem routine to him. Masking certainly will. As Kayla wrote last week: “It feels like everyone I know is taking turns living through something environmentally unprecedented or, if not entirely unprecedented, still nightmarish in scale.” Late capitalism and unchecked corporate greed will continue to exacerbate the problem.

Is it ethical to bring a child into a world on its way out, onto a planet in crisis, a crisis guaranteed to worsen over the next four years of a Trump presidency, a crisis that may inspire our son to opt out of having kids of his own? (It is also unfortunate that many humans who are also climate change deniers are intentionally having as many children as possible to ensure an ongoing political and religious majority!) And with so many environmental situations spiraling out of control, it feels absolutely apocalyptic to witness the rise and mass adoption of AI, which will further destroy our planet and our collective minds. Every day we’re told to accept that A.I. is here and we’ll be left behind if we don’t adopt it, but it will leave all of us behind, eventually, too.

Now here we are, a month away from birth in a city on fire. Thousands of families lost everything here, and so did their kids — kids’ artwork, photographs on the fridge, play programs, bikes in the yard. Entire schools burned down. Many were forced to go virtual, again, just like we did at the height of the pandemic. Other expectant mothers, all their baby shower acquisitions, vanished.

But here we are, nevertheless.

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We hadn’t originally planned on doing a “babymoon” because we couldn’t afford it, but a few months back we were so very generously gifted an all-expenses-paid weekend in Ojai, set to begin on Thursday, January 9th. Now, amid everything happening in Los Angeles, we didn’t know what to do — was it stupid to still go, should we try and reschedule? (Could we, even?) Or was it stupid to stay?

We’d both already requested the time off work. If we left, would we be clogging up already congested roads needed for evacuees from fire zones? We could leave a key in the lockbox for any friends who needed a place to go. But Penn’s kennel in Santa Monica was two blocks from a mandatory evacuation zone on the edge of the 0% contained Palisades fire, could we really leave her there? Many roads were closed, although every time I checked Google Maps (hourly), they claimed our drive would be swift and clear. Everybody had a different opinion about our best course of action.

But after Wednesday night, the anxiety whiplash was overwhelming, with the Sunset fire, the gridlock, the confusing and myriad evacuation orders — all our friends, who lived mostly in Los Feliz, Frogtown, West Hollywood, Venice — had started evacuating to safer parts of the city, or making plans to leave LA altogether for a few days or a week or more. When we woke up, ash was falling from the sky like smoke. We had to go. Gretchen could not breathe this air; the risks to pregnant women were too severe.

But we also couldn’t leave Penn at a kennel so close to the fires, and that is how the world’s craziest dog earned an invite to our babymoon.

We were so incredibly blessed to even have the option, ultimately, that we already had a room booked for us out of town that we didn’t have to pay for. The drive was, in fact, swift and clear. Google Maps had not been lying about that. In Ojai, the air was clean, the grass was green, actual rich people with their own pets and families drank lattes in their athleisure while talking on their phones, roasting s’more kits with their shaggy-haired children over small, controlled, contained fires. We went on a lot of walks. We ate wonderful food, and went to the gym. I compulsively checked my news apps and the endless stream of horror they relayed, donated to GoFundMes. I read. We went to Beatles Yoga and rode bicycles into town, checking out antique stores and a library book sale. Penn ran through an orchard. 

I had an allergic reaction to some essential oil placed over my eyes during a massage on Friday, waking up on the last full day of our vacation with half-swollen eyes, my eyelids and the skin beneath my eyebrow red and inflamed, as if they’d just been aggressively waxed by Satan himself. But when you have one last full day of breathing clean air unmasked with your pregnant wife for an indefinite amount of time in the nicest place you have ever vacationed in your entire life, you are going to go outside and experience it, even if you look like a red raccoon!

With something so big happening, and so many losing so much because of it, it feels so selfish to talk or care about needing to protect Gretchen from air that could harm the kid. We definitely had people urging us to somehow remain beyond city limits because of the air quality, but with her due date around the corner, we’ve gotta be close to our doctor and the hospital. She is masking. We are sealing the windows.

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As I type this, Donald Trump is announcing his intention to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord while claiming “we had the cleanest air and the cleanest water this nation has ever seen under the Trump administration.”

My brother went to New Orleans for college and was a sophomore when Katrina hit. He stayed after graduation, got married, started his family there. They live with the knowledge that another major natural disaster could happen at any time, it’s just a part of their lives, and they don’t want to leave, at least not yet. That’s where their community is, where their friends are.

In many ways, California is one of the best states to live in during a Trump administration. In other ways, we have been reminded, it isn’t.

I fastidiously organize the nursery, air purifiers blowing heartily into the void. 

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After publishing my last Baby Steps, I felt surprised with myself for writing two things in as many weeks that ended on a vaguely optimistic note, a vibe I’ve generally only truly embodied in my personal writing when swept up in the spell of this or that charismatic friend or lover or colleague who’d recently walked boldly through the perpetually unlocked door of my life with a soft cradle for my ego and big promises they never intended to keep. But this optimism about my personal and family life felt rooted in a tangible reality, even while other aspects of my life remain uncertain. I’m glad, ultimately, that I got to really sit in that feeling for a moment — appreciating my wife, my friends — before getting yanked back into a more compromised reality.

Reagan was president when I was born. The first day of a new Trump presidency has simply affirmed what has always been true, and has been especially felt by people who lack the privileges I’ve had in my life — that progress is not always linear, and that applies to our individual lives but also to politics and cultural change. Something good happening doesn’t mean we’ve figured out how to make things good forever and it’ll keep improving from here. It just means that something good happened.

Ultimately, we cannot count on anything but each other. The people who really know us and care for us. Our own communities, wherever they are.

It’s probably ultimately not objectively ethical for us to bring a child into a world with such a perilous future, but I knew that when we decided to do it and did it anyway. Maybe one day we’ll have to answer to that. For now, there’s nothing I’ve ever looked forward to with more hope than I am looking forward to seeing his face for the first time. A good man is hard to find, but I’m hoping really hard that we can create one.

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Our landlord has been thus far uninspired to fix our window or the wire that fell from its apparent perch during the winds. The window sealing tape seems to be doing the trick. For now, at least.

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If you’re looking for ways to help people impacted by the wildfires in LA, here are some resources for doing that.

Let me know in the comments how you’ve grappled with or think about climate change w/r/t having kids! Also you can let me know about anything else too. I am convinced that my wife’s pregnancy is making my period weird has this happened to anybody else

What Will Trump’s Anti-Trans “Gender Ideology Extremism” Executive Orders Actually Do?

One thing about our somehow once-again President Donald J Trump is that the man loves to sit at a desk like a feudal lord, surrounded by his (usually standing) Dear Supporters, and sign a piece of paper with a pen while having his picture taken. On inauguration day, he did so with even more theatrics than usual, signing over 100 executive orders, many of them signed on a small table placed atop a red carpet in an arena crowded with his fans. He signed Executive Orders for hours and hours and hours, like a performance art piece, throwing Sharpies into the audience to provide them with lasting souvenirs from this Monumental Day. Eventually he relocated from the arena to the Oval Office to sign even more orders. And as both leaked and predicted, some of those orders came directly for the LGBTQ+ community generally and trans people specifically.

Trans Human rights lawyer Chase Strangio posted on his instagram Sunday, in advance of these orders, a warning — “The administration will issue some executive orders that do not and cannot change the law. They will be glorified press releases designed to create confusion and chaos… the media will exacerbate the chaos with inaccurate headlines designed to stoke fear and gain clicks, rather than provide information and context. All while diminishing the power and presence of organized resistance.”

This is an important thing to remember and hold close as we grapple with the potential outcomes for our community from Trump’s Executive Orders.

What Are Executive Orders?

Executive Orders are not laws. They are “written instruments through which a President can issue directives to shape policy.” They instruct federal agencies within the executive branch on how to interpret existing law, but they can’t give the president authority he doesn’t already possess. They are temporary — they can be reversed by the next president. Those that exceed presidential authority can face legal challenges — and likely will, from orgs like the ACLU. Only Congress can pass laws that create lasting change.

For example, he cannot simply end birthright citizenship by signing an executive order. The 14th Amendment guarantees citizenship for those born in the United States. That EO is already facing legal challenges.

Other important limitations of Executive Orders: They cannot change state law. They cannot amend any existing federal statutes, such as the Violence Against Women Act, which as of 2022 includes provisions to bolster access for survivors of all genders and created a LGBTQ services program. They have no jurisdiction over private entities, such as private schools, private sports leagues and camps.

What Will Trump’s Anti-Trans Executive Orders Actually Do?

Firstly, Trump cruelly revoked 150 Biden-era Executive Orders, including a handful related to apparently distressing causes like preventing discrimination on the basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation and guaranteeing an educational environment free from anti-LGBTQ discrimination. Trump announced the disbandment of the Gender Policy Council again — a group established by Obama, removed by Trump in his first term, re-established by Biden and now, once again axed by Trump.

Trump repealed a Biden-era Executive Order that allowed transgender troops to serve in the military. This does not mean trans troops are effectively banned from the military starting now. However, his EO clears the way for that to happen. Once the ban is in place, it will engender “one of the largest layoffs of transgender people in history.” It could face legal challenges, but as per the 19th: “Without the federal protections granted under Biden, the legal precedent over the ban implemented in Trump’s first term remains: The Supreme Court in 2019 allowed him to enforce the ban after four separate courts had blocked it from taking effect.”

The centerpiece of his anti-trans agenda, Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government Act, is a remarkable and frightening piece of writing. Trump has decided to frame his anti-trans goals as a Women’s Rights initiative, protecting women from having “biological men” in their bathrooms and on their sports teams, which it seems he hopes will obscure his administration’s actual lack of support for Women in all other areas of life, including reproductive rights.

The EO sets out to “establish male and female as biological reality and protect women from radical gender ideology” and codify the existence of just two “sexes.” The definition of sex/gender in the Executive Order is itself problematic and scientifically questionable, as it ignores intersex people and also is based on the human production of a “reproductive cell” (e.g, egg, sperm), despite the fact that not even every cis person produces such cells.

He defines “Gender Identity” like so:

“Gender identity” reflects a fully internal and subjective sense of self, disconnected from biological reality and sex and existing on an infinite continuum, that does not provide a meaningful basis for identification and cannot be recognized as a replacement for sex.

And “Gender Ideology” like this:

“Gender ideology” replaces the biological category of sex with an ever-shifting concept of self-assessed gender identity, permitting the false claim that males can identify as and thus become women and vice versa, and requiring all institutions of society to regard this false claim as true. Gender ideology includes the idea that there is a vast spectrum of genders that are disconnected from one’s sex. Gender ideology is internally inconsistent, in that it diminishes sex as an identifiable or useful category but nevertheless maintains that it is possible for a person to be born in the wrong sexed body.

The EO directs federal agencies to change language and enforce laws in accordance with these definitions, asking all agencies to remove “all statements, policies, regulations, forms, communications, or other internal and external messages that promote or otherwise inculcate gender ideology.”

Sec. 3 includes a directive to ensure that government-issued identification documents refer to the holder’s “sex,” as defined by the EO. Since 2022, non-binary people have been able to use an “X” gender marker on their passports, and this EO indicates Trump’s intention to remove that marker going forward, and also to seemingly require trans women and trans men to identify on their passports in accordance with their gender assigned at birth. Trump’s administration will face challenges here, too, due to already established rulings, laws and precedents. The White House Press Secretary has confirmed that the order will not be retroactive and thus will not rescind valid passports. But this would impact what gender could be used for passport renewals.

Sec. 4 asks the AG and Homeland Security Secretary to ensure “males are not detained in women’s prisons or housed in women’s detention centers.” How this will pan out is also, believe it or not, unclear! It’s worth noting that The Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA), which gives trans people who feel their safety is threatened a voice in determining where they are housed, holds more power than this EO, because it was passed unanimously by Congress in 2009. He called for an amendment to be made to that act, but only Congress can do that.

Trump’s directive to agencies to not consider transgender people when enforcing sex discrimination laws is also scary to consider. This is an area of law that has been hotly debated for many many years now. However, it does not leave trans people entirely unprotected, as many federal judges have found discrimination against trans people to be a form of sex discrimination. Trump’s directive is in direct conflict with “much of the opinion” of the Supreme Court’s binding precedent established in Bostock v Clayton County, which held that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity constitutes illegal sex discrimination. Trump is asking his AG to defy this precedent, which he describes as a “misapplication” of the decision.

Trump has also directed the Attorney General to issue guidance that would ensure freedom of expression around “the binary nature of sex and the right to single-sex spaces in workplaces and federally funded entities.” This would give people the right to refuse to use somebody’s correct pronouns and relegate trans people to using bathrooms based on their sex assigned at birth in federally funded spaces and any workplace covered by the Civl Rights Act of 1964. So, for example, in Trump’s imaginary ideal world, a public school teacher would be able to file suit against a school that fired him for refusing to use a student’s stated pronouns. But, according to the HRC, the EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) is the primary agency that enforces these rules and it is a quasi-independent agnec that is not legally required to follow directives issued by the President via Executive Order. Also, there is legal precedent in place surrounding respectful use of pronouns and bathroom access at work which would be in conflict with this directive.

What Do We Do Now?

The California Legislative LGBTQ Caucus sent a release to its followers imploring them “to remember that the impacts from these orders are neither immediate nor permanent. It will take time for these orders to work through their respective federal agencies and there will be opportunities for California to weigh in on behalf of Transgender, Gender Nonconforming, and Intersex (TGI) people. When those opportunities arise we will be ready.”

Regardless of their ultimate impact — which could very well be devastating —these Executive Orders have already made Trump’s supporters feel like he is Doing Stuff and Making Changes at an Unprecedented Rate due to his Immense Power and Popularity. This “shock-and-awe” approach to Executive Orders will tie up the courts for years to come, wasting endless piles of tax dollars, and at the very least, they set a certain tone. Biden’s Executive Orders that directed federal agencies to expand rights and protections for LGBTQ+ people still gave us hope, and Trump’s withdrawal from those initiatives does, accordingly, rip a lot of that hope out of our hands. While not all of the directives in these Executive Orders will come to fruition, many of them will in some form, and we will have to keep fighting and figure out how to rely on each other and support each other under these trying circumstances.

Speaking of supporting each other, Trump’s effective takeover of most major social media platforms is especially alarming considering how they have been used as tools to organize and share political information. X is owned by Trump’s boyfriend Elon Musk, Facebook is owned by Trump’s new best friend Mark Zuckerberg, and TikTok announced its reinstatement with a blistering ode to our Beloved Leader Donald Trump. If those platforms begin hiding the resistance from us, that doesn’t mean it no longer exists.

Maha Ibrahim, a program managing attorney at the Equal Rights Advocates, told the 19th that young LGBTQ+ people should pay attention to what’s happening and demand action from their elected officials: “We’ve got a lot of students in university right now, where all of their formative years, with the exception of one small gap, were spent under an administration that was trying to erase them. I’m less concerned about the force of law — I’m more concerned about the will and the energy and belief in LGBTQIA students that these rights have been fought for for decades in their name, and that we’re here to continue the fight and we haven’t abandoned them.”

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Feature image by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images

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