Were We Ever So Young: Couples We Used To Ship and Were Extremely Wrong About
As the saying goes: There are tall ships and small ships and ships that sail the sea, but the best ships of all are the super toxic ships we used to romanticize because we were too young to know better. Or something like that.
We’ve all been there. From the Disney movies that taught us to be quiet mermaids and forgive beasts to the early queer shows that confused soapy drama for romance, our earliest views of love were shaped in some of the wrong directions.
But now we are older and wiser! We can look back on our favorite toxic ships with compassion or horror or both. As adults, we would never fall for a toxic ship.
Well, sorry, except sometimes when they’re queer and super hot.
Carol Aird and Therese Belivet (Carol)
Drew
By the time I came out, Todd Haynes’ masterful melodrama Carol was already a big part of my life. In fact, I discovered Autostraddle while still closeted because of all our coverage. At first, I insisted my attachment to the movie was not for gay reasons. After all, I’d been a fan of Haynes since I was a kid and this represented some of his and his collaborators’ most expert craft. The score! The cinematography! The costumes! The acting! But once I came out, I admitted the biggest reason I loved it was because I was a lesbian.
This movie holds a fascination for baby queers, because, on the surface, it’s a fantasy. A rich older woman invites you to lunch and ushers you from shy heterosexual to passionate queer. I romanticized this relationship and longed for my own Carol Aird. I loved Carol because I thought it was romantic — now I love Carol because I know it is not.
Over time, I’ve become more attuned to Carol’s side of the story. She latches onto Therese due to a longing of innocence, a longing of control, a longing of escape. Her best friend Abby is right to suggest caution. It’s not that age gaps in relationships are inherently bad, but in this case age is only one part of what makes this pairing imbalanced. Queer age is its own arguably more important age. Class is another big gulf between them. When Carol writes, “You seek resolutions and explanations because you are young,” my romantic heart protested right alongside Therese. Now that I’m older, I see she was right.
The beauty of Carol is that it still manages to end on romantic possibility. With time apart, Therese has grown, and it’s possible upon reunion they will find a new, more balanced love where Therese is less passive. Or, maybe, like Carol and Abby, they will instead fall toward friendship. Our lovers can change our lives in so many ways even if the love isn’t meant to last.
Annabelle and Simone (Loving Annabelle)
Valerie Anne
I’ve written a bit about this, but when I was 19, I genuinely loved the romance in Loving Annabelle, because I had been that teenager who had crushes on her female teachers, but I was so deep in the closet I couldn’t have ever dreamed of actually doing anything about it. Of course, as an adult, and one who went to school for education at that, the idea that a teacher would date her student is abhorrent. I’m mildly horrified I didn’t see it then, but I think I grew up with a skewed view of how adults should treat children (including teenagers) and it took me until I was older to see it as problematic. Like I knew it was “wrong” but when I was 19 it was “wrong” the way being queer was “wrong” according to the Catholic church; now I know it’s “wrong” as in abuse and that being queer isn’t wrong at all. It’s amazing how watching a movie at two different stages of your life can shift your perspective entirely.
Buffy and Angel (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
Valerie Anne
I shipped Buffy and Angel with my entire 9/10/11-year-old heart. That heart broke whenever they had to part, and I wept during the Buffy/Angel crossover episode I Will Remember You. (So I guess my 12-year-old heart, too.) David Boreanaz was my go-to answer whenever someone asked me who my celebrity crush was because I didn’t like boys but knew I was supposed to have an answer that wasn’t “Eliza Dushku.” No matter how many times he turned into Angelus, I wanted Angel and Buffy to find their way back to each other.
Now that I’m an adult… I don’t feel the same. I still remember that feeling, but it’s not strong or present. Angel was too protective over the girl who was literally born to kick his ass, and there’s a reason Angelus came out as soon as they slept together for the first time. I think he was meant to be a metaphor, the type of guy who will be nice until he gets what he wants and doesn’t have a “use” for you anymore. It was a toxic dynamic, from his lurking in the shadows to his jealousy over any other guy who was interested in Buffy. It’s possessive and it’s not cute. I’ve watched this series more times than I can count, but every time I watch, I lose patience with Angel earlier and earlier in the show. I’m at the point now where I can’t get past him KILLING JENNY CALENDAR. “That wasn’t me” isn’t a valid response to becoming suddenly violent and terrible. Buffy deserved better.
Related, the more I watch the series the angrier I get (and I STARTED angry) at the hypocrisy of everyone shunning Faith for ACCIDENTALLY killing one (1) man, when they all forgave Angel for cruelly killing everyone’s favorite technopagen and torturing Giles with it. Harrumph.
Bette and Tina (The L Word)
Natalie
In the waning moments of the L Word pilot, Shane happens by the Porter-Kennard house after a night out. The sun’s just come up and Bette and Tina are on their front steps, reading the morning paper. They’re intertwined in each other: a barefoot Tina leaning against Bette, a white-tee clad Bette holding Tina’s hand in hers. Even as they chat with Shane, Bette can’t help but steal a glance at the woman she loves, the woman she wants to make a baby with. The glimmer from their post-coital glow is obvious and Shane can’t resist calling them out. But then, she adds something else.
“You see? That gives me hope,” she says, “because I love knowing that two people who’ve been together for so long can still make each other that happy.”
In that moment, a version of Bette and Tina imprinted on so many of us. It became who we always imagined them to be. Even through the fights and the cheating and the break-ups, they were still that couple on the steps and we longed for them. Every other relationship felt like an unnecessary impediment because Bette and Tina were always going to be that couple from the pilot. They’d always be two people who could still make each other that happy.
I’m not even sure why I held onto that vision for so long; why I longed for and cheered their reunions. Perhaps because television had been — and still is, to an extent — devoid of depictions of long-term lesbian relationships and I just wanted to see that represented somewhere. Maybe the chemistry between Jennifer Beals and Laurel Holloman drew me in. Or maybe the thought that two people — two queer women, in particular — who’d been together for a long time could still make each other that happy painted a picture of a future that I’d hoped would one day be mine. I don’t know why I coveted the idea of Bette and Tina being, forever, that couple on the steps.
Upon rewatch, that scene on the porch feels like an anomaly. A reflection of that post-coital glow, not a true reflection of their relationship. It wasn’t happiness, it was just a respite from their usual toxicity. That moment on the porch was a rare moment of intimacy between them, but the bulk of their relationship was intensity masquerading as intimacy. I’m almost embarrassed I didn’t recognize it initially.
Bette Porter was a narcissist. She was, at once, someone who was drawn to people who could match her and someone who retreated the moment she realized she wasn’t the smartest, most creative, most woke person in the room. She settled for boredom — she settled for Tina — because the only thing she hated more than being bored was being challenged. For her part, Tina was horribly co-dependent: Even when she wasn’t with Bette, every move Tina made was with her in mind. In the moments when it appeared like Bette had found happiness or growth, Tina would come rushing back, convincing Bette to regress to her former self — and then punishing Bette for that regression.
They fought all the time. They brought out the absolute worst in each other. They were apart more than they were ever together. They were our Carrie and Mr. Big — just as insufferable, just as toxic — and today they serve as a cautionary tale to not mistake intensity for intimacy.
House and Cuddy (House M.D.)
Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya
In my youth, I basically loved any ship that had the same vibe as Benedick and Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing. When two people are mean and rude and disrespectful to each other? Sign me up baby! That’s called charm! It’s called banter! It’s called fraught romance! House and Cuddy were prime examples of these kind of couples.
Even then I knew they were probably ill-advised, but I lapped them up anyway!
Monica and Quincy (Love & Basketball)
Nic
Normally, I’m not one to bring straight people’s business to the chat, but as a Black millennial of a certain age, Love & Basketball had an absolute chokehold on me growing up. I thought I was Monica. I related to her on so many levels; I too hated sitting still to get my hair done and would have rather been outside playing basketball. The story is a tale as old as time: Childhood friends have a love-hate relationship all the way through elementary, middle, and high school, eventually realizing they have feelings for each other when they take different people to the prom and subsequently have a jealousy about it. (“Who you goin’ to the dance with? Spalding?” lives in my head RENT FREE to this day.)
Now that I think about it, Monica and Quincy might actually be one of my first “friends-to-lovers” obsessions. It seemed like the best case scenario to me, as someone who couldn’t imagine “trying” to get a boyfriend like some of my peers. Having one essentially built-in sounded perfect. As a viewer, I couldn’t believe Monica and Quincy didn’t see that they were meant for each other. And when they finally got together, my heart swelled.
Monica and Quincy both go to college to play ball, but they have very different experiences, what with all of the sexism in college sports. In fact, Quincy even tells her that she doesn’t need to worry about being anything other than “Quincy McCall’s wife.” (I KNOW.) Monica has a hard time proving herself while Quincy is the star player. Things get a bit dicey in their relationship when Quincy learns that his idol of a father has been cheating on his mother. He asks Monica to break coach’s curfew rule in favor of helping him through some emotional turmoil he’s dealing with. When she decides to follow the rules, Quincy is pissed and turns to flirting with other women instead of celebrating with Monica. This is what we like to call a RED FLAG. After college, Monica plays overseas and Quincy ends up in the NBA before suffering an ACL injury. When Monica comes to visit, she learns that Q is engaged and of course realizes that basketball doesn’t mean as much to her without Quincy in her life.
This leads to the iconic “play you for your heart” scene where Monica loses a hard fought game, only to have Quincy counter with “double or nothing”, showing her that he was willing to fight for them. The movie ends on a shot of a WNBA game and Quincy in the crowd with a baby girl, cheering on his wife, Monica. And at the time, I thought this was the greatest and most romantic thing ever, but now, I can barely get through the movie without cringing at the blatant selfishness and misogyny that Quincy exhibits. He expects Monica to drop everything for him, even though it could mean giving up a roster spot that she worked her ass off for. He perpetuates the idea that Black women’s needs and successes wouldn’t be celebrated as much as her male partner’s. Monica deserved better than having her dreams put on hold for this man. Gina Prince-Bythewood was at Game 3 of the WNBA finals the other night, and I’m choosing to believe she was doing research for a non-toxic wlw version of Love & Basketball.
Joey Potter & Dawson Leery (Dawson’s Creek)
Carmen
The thing about Joey and Dawson is that they are actually the toxic tether of what remains to this day my favorite romance trope. I am a “friends-to-lovers” girlie — always have been, likely always will be. It probably stems from my own introversion, I imagine. The dream and hope that someone could love me, like really love me, not from the awkwardness of putting myself out on dates or first impressions (which I’ve never excelled at, to be honest!) but from getting to know me over time. That by being myself, goofing off and eating cheetohs or obsessing about too much media or nerding out on some obscurity that no one else would even care about, that by doing those things I could magically have found my partner right in front of me all along. Isn’t the common refrain that you’re supposed to marry your best friend?
So then go back in ancient time to 1997 and imagine me in my sixth grade English class, eating Dawson’s Creek UP. Did we have social media? Baby, we barely had dial up. How did people find their fandoms? I have no idea. But every Wednesday morning, me and my three closest friends huddled our desks together to eat vending machine junk food for breakfast and compare notes. At one point my best friend got put on punishment for some lackluster grades and I solemnly swore to record each episode on VHS and deliver them to her during homeroom, so that she could catch up over the weekend. And it was there that I fell in love with Dawson Leery and Joey Potter.
Joey, with her perfect sideways crooked smile (that I trained myself to copy in photos and now as an adult, still have to remind myself to stop doing), loved Dawson — and I wanted Joey to have everything she loved. I wanted more than anything for Dawson to look up and realize that his perfect girl was right next to him, climbing through his window, all along. Before there was #TeamJacob or #TeamEdward, I was Team Dawson and when Pacey Witter, the supposed troubled “bad boy” with the heart of fucking gold, first stepped up to the plate to tell Joey that she deserved more than to be some narcissist’s second choice, I hated him. I could not, did not, refused to, live in a world where your first love — the person that you pinned over for years would not also be your happy ending.
I was wrong, of course. Joey and Pacey were teen me’s first example of a messy, grown up, real shit kind of love story. They understood not only each other’s light, but each other’s darkness, in ways that didn’t feel romantic to me back then. They challenged each other to do better and I couldn’t yet wrap my head around why that is swoon worthy, to find your true match instead of what you thought was your ideal. But now? Pacey was a legend. Lives were changed. Mine was one of them.
(And no, it’s not lost on me that Pacey and Joey are technically also “friends-to-lovers” too. Like I said, the trope remains unmatched.)
Jordan Catalano & Angela Chase (My So-Called Life)
Riese
Obviously I related deeply to Angela Chase and I think Jordan Catalano was definitely the archetype for the kind of boyfriend I thought I needed, and by “needed” I meant “could save.” That was basically the deal if you were a little bit smart and weird and not conventionally attractive, that perhaps a brooding mysterious boy without much aspiration would be, somehow, drawn to you for all the reasons no other boys were. Jordan Catalano: an iconoclast!
Angela… likes the way he leans? She thinks Jordan Catalano is hot. I thought he was hot also! Great blue eyes. Was in a band, wrote songs, and had a car I think. Very aloof. Had literally nothing to offer the relationship. Consistently did the least. Most importantly Jordan was cool, and if Angela could date Jordan, then she would also be cool instead of being weird. The most interesting thing Jordan ever did was develop an interest in Angela Chase and the second-most interesting thing he ever did was sleep with Rayanne Graff, because that situation was very much like — two people being with each other instead of the person neither of them felt good enough for, you know? I think adults do that, too. (See also: the Jenny/Carmen/Shane love triangle.)
I watched the scene where Jordan held Angela’s hand in the hallway to “Late at Night” by Buffalo Tom about ten thousand times. I couldn’t imagine a greater gift a boy could bestow upon a girl. But could he ever offer her, like, emotional support of any kind? Do they have anything in common? Did he challenge her intellectually? NONE OF THAT MATTERS! He held her hand in the hallway and I cried!!!!
Then I grew up and wrote an essay called “why Shane is the new Jordan Catalano” after seeing the first season of The L Word, and now here we all are today. Gay.
What were your favorite toxic ships? What are the toxic ships you still love?
Welcome to Horror Is So Gay 2: A Queer Sequel
I talk about this a lot. I’ve written about it some. It’s something I keep turning over and over, like a kaleidoscope. Or, if we’re staying on theme, like a haunted puzzlebox whose mysteries I’m trying to solve, whose contents might bring forth fresh discoveries, fresh horrors. I hated horror until I didn’t. More specifically, I hated horror until I came out.
Again, I talk about it a lot. It seems too simple almost. I hated horror when I was closeted, and then I came out as a loud and proud dyke and suddenly loved horror, craved it even. Maybe horror was too hard to look at when I was living as someone else. Maybe I had to show up to horror as the real me to really get it, to really let it consume me the way I have over the past decade-ish of my life.
It took me a while to arrive at my love of horror, but once I did, it felt as much a part of me as my queerness. It probably still surprises my family. I had a reputation as a child of being a scaredy cat. I screamed and cried at the annual fireworks show every summer in our neighborhood, terrified of the booms. I thought the movie E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was the scariest movie ever made and carried that particular phobia well into adulthood. Once old enough to stay home alone, I hated to be, especially at night. I told myself my little sister sometimes slept on the floor in my room instead of in her own bed because she was scared, but I know it was also me. Or maybe only me. I was known as a scaredy cat, and so I thought that’s what I had to be, forever and always. In college, I declared to my friends I hated horror, refused to go to the movie theater with them if they wanted to see anything spookier than an action-thriller. Eventually, I made an excuse for Black Swan.
That movie wasn’t the key to unlocking my love of horror but rather just one key on a whole ring of them. It took time, much like it took time to accept the other parts of myself I’d been resistant to.
For much of my life, I never could have imagined I’d be here, doing this, helming a series of queer and trans perspectives on horror for an LGBTQ+ publication. I would have sooner believed in vampires.
Not only that, but I’m here doing it for a second time. The first Horror Is So Gay package brought so many delights and frights, and I’m thrilled to do it again with this sequel. Just like last time, we’ll have a mix of essays, lists, deep dives, retrospectives, and takes hotter than the flames of hell. Horror asks us to imagine strange, monstrous, surreal, twisted, non-normative possibilities and stories. Come imagine with us.
Horror Is So Gay is an annual Autostraddle series of queer and trans reflections on horror.
How to DIY an “A League of Their Own” Halloween Costume
Let me preface this DIY League of Their Own Halloween guide by saying: I am not a DIY expert in the traditional sense! I don’t know how to sew. I don’t have a lot of artistic abilities. And while I enjoy crafts, I wouldn’t really consider myself crafty. That said, as aforementioned, I am incredibly resourceful when it comes to costuming — especially on a budget! I’m good at cobbling together costumes with a mix of store-bought and handmade items that don’t require too many technical skills. Some of my most iconic Halloween costumes — including a DIY Silk Spectre costume in 2011 — have been made entirely from thrifted components. I’m here today to tell you how to make an A League of Their Own Rockford Peaches costume that’s going to have a DIY, scrappy approach but ultimately still have you looking fine and recognizably like the Peach you are. You won’t be building something from scratch, but you’ll be fashioning together a costume that’s distinctly yours.
There are of course some shortcuts you could take. Spirit Halloween has an official licensed Rockford Peaches costume for $50, but it appears more inspired by the film than by the new series. It also is only offered in sizes S-XL. (Am*zon’s also got some.) Spirit can sometimes work in a pinch for pop culture costumes, but if you have the time to plan a little more, I think you could end up with something more comfortable and more customizable. Starting at $55, Etsy has options that are customizable and come in more sizes.
For around the same price, Etsy also has these dresses that look kind of like the uniforms but have more an actual dress look than a uniform look, but I suppose it could also be a workaround. And if you can sew, there are also patterns available for the dresses.
Another shortcut you could take is to skirt around the uniform approach and instead dress like a specific character from the show. I made a series of style guides for Greta, Carson, Max, Jo, Jess, and Lupe that are geared more toward channeling their looks in an everyday, practical sense rather than to costuming, but you could look at them for inspiration! A Greta/Carson couples costume could be very cute! Or a Max/Clance joint costume with your best friend could also be cute!
But if you have your heart set on a Rockford Peaches uniform, let’s get down to business. I’ll break down the essential components you’re going to need and link some purchasable options, but I also encourage you to use this as an inspirational guide rather than a super strict how-to. Go forth and thrift some of the pieces or add your own touches.
Also, as we all know, A League of Their Own was devastatingly canceled this year before we could even get the short season two we were initially promised. While I am indeed still mourning this fact, I think it could be a fun nod to the cancellation (and perhaps cathartic!) to dress as undead versions of ALOTO characters. Just incorporate some fake blood and/or zombie-style makeup into your look.
This post was originally written in 2022 and was most recently updated on October 6, 2023.
1. Skirt (or pants!!!!!!)
Yes, to be completely authentic, you actually need a dress. But short of those limited (and perhaps not very good quality!) shortcut options above, “baseball dress uniform” is not something you can find easily online or in a store. So, instead, I recommend going with a skirt + shirt combo as a workaround. The main Rockford Peaches uniform is a pale pink, though tbh I think you could get away with a cream or even white colorway. This Forever 21 skirt ($36) could work though it’s more of a mauve color, and once again Amazon does have some options, but I understand if you don’t want to purchase from there. Here’s the key if you want to hunt around online for a brand/sizing/price point that best suits you: If you want a shorter skirt (think: Slutty Rockford Peaches, which tbh is a vibe), then search for “tennis skirt” or “pleated mini skirt” and then filter for color (the tough thing here is the color! it’s like a VERY pale pink!). If you want a slightly more authentic skirt, search for “skater skirt” and add “knee length” to get more specific. This is also an opportunity to be resourceful at a Spirit Halloween or similar costume shop. A lot of those chain costume shops sell costume separates in addition to full sets, and it’s possible you could find a pale pink or cream skirt meant to be part of a cheerleader costume or something similar and repurpose it. I somehow have more than one cheerleading skirt from Spirit.
Also, here’s something to keep in mind: You don’t have to wear a skirt! Just because the Peaches were forced to wear skirts does not mean you have to be. Want to add some butch touches to a Peaches costume? Buy some track pants or joggers in cream or pale pink! I’m sure you’ll get lots of wear out of them beyond the holiday. And for what it’s worth, I actually found a lot more pants options in the correct shade of pink than I did skirts, so this might be the move in general! Also, if you live somewhere cold, this’ll be more comfy.
2. Shirt + Patch
If you’re going the skirt route, then you’re gonna need a shirt. Yes, you could shell out for a real baseball jersey, but it’s going to be 1. expensive and 2. not even all that accurate looking, because the dress uniforms worn by the Peaches button-close off-center, and most baseball jerseys button down the center. This is the part where I plug one of my favorite chain stores on the planet: Michael’s craft store. I know I said I’m not crafty, but I do have a Michael’s rewards program membership. Here’s my cheater uniform recommendation: Get a t-shirt from Michael’s that best matches the color of your skirt. Get a Rockford Peaches patch ($14+) and attach it with fabric glue. VOILA. If you want to add an extra layer of cuteness/baseball-ness, you could throw an unbuttoned baseball jersey over the shirt and even customize it if you want to. You could even get wild with it. For example, you could get a baseball jersey that says ROCKFORD DYKES rather than Rockford Peaches on it. Just an idea!!!!!!
3. Belt
You don’t even need a skirt with belt loops to rock the signature belted Peach look. Don’t overthink things, baby! This is definitely an item you could pick up at a thrift store. Or you could buy this reddish brown one from the Gap for $26 (and hey, the best thing about buying real clothes/accessories for a costume rather than costume pieces is that you can probably get a decent amount of wear out of them beyond Halloween!).
4. Athletic Socks
I am extremely biased, but I think you should go off-book here and wear the Autostraddle Gay Chaos socks. But if you want something more authentic, go with a knee-high sock in a shade of red similar to whatever belt you end up with. Fun fact: Most of the athletic socks — other than the Autostraddle Gay Chaos socks — I own were indeed purchased from Spirit Halloween. I’m realizing now just how often I shop at Spirit Halloween????? But also I feel like I’ve never purchased one of their complete sets before. It’s so much more fun to customize/cobble!
5. Hat
Here’s the thing: I saved the hat for last even though it is the most important component. I think you can really have a lot of fun with the rest of the costume and go off-book in little, personalized ways. So long as you wear the hat. Maybe you can’t find the exact right length skirt in the exact right color. But if you’ve got the hat, people are going to know what you’re doing. Or, at least, the people who matter will. Lucky for you, there are like SO MANY Rockford Peaches hats on Etsy. An Autostraddle reader, in fact, has a store full of ALOTO goodies, including hats. For $30, you can snag one and you can pay a $3 upcharge to have a player’s name printed on the back. The shop also has t-shirt jerseys for Carson and Greta, which you could easily pair with a pink skirt to create the uniform without the hassle of needing to do iron-on letters or adding a patch.
I also love this vintage one ($30) from another shop. But you could also just buy the patch and take that fabric glue back out and affix it to a plain red ball cap from — you guessed it! — Michael’s craft store.
As for the finishing details, I again encourage you to not overthink things. Wear a pair of sneakers you already own. Borrow a baseball bat from your jock friend or buy a cheap child-size one. Wear a red lipstick to match the red accents of the uniform — or don’t! Again, if you’ve got a couple of the specific touches like the hat and the logo patch, you’re going to recognizably be a Peach. There’s no need to get too hung up on authenticity. I believe Halloween costumes should be identifiable but still showcase personality! Swing for the fences, and have a very League of Their Own Halloween.
Very Special Gay Episode: Queen Latifah Was the Lesbian Fairy Godmother Holding Together Living Single’s Same-Sex Wedding
Welcome to Very Special Gay Episode, a fun little series where I recap standalone lesbian episodes from classic TV shows that are not otherwise necessarily gay. In this installment, we will discuss Living Single Season Three, Episode 22: “Woman-to-Woman”
There are few television shows that I would consider myself a legitimate TV “scholar” of — not in the way I would Living Single. Famously, my obsession with the peak 90s FOX sitcom lead to me having a Queen Latifah-themed birthday party in second grade. I’ve watched it quite nearly daily since it first went off air in 1998, first in after-school reruns and cable syndication, then on DVD (they only released the first season, a tragedy, but that did not stop me), and now on streaming. And every reunion show? Behind-the-scenes oral history? I was there. The Internet loves to joke about “besties” but Khadijah, Maxine, Synclaire and Regine? Those are my besties forreal. Those girls hold me down. Not past tense.
And maybe it’s because Living Single is still so alive for me, such a part of my everyday life, that I was shocked to find out that September marked its 30th birthday. For one, I refuse to be that old. But more to the point, I never thought I’d see the day where, even for a second, Living Single would get the well-earned due it deserves. But there it was… a commemorative sticker underneath its title on Max streaming, a special edition billboard on the same production lot where it used to get paid dust for Friends.
It is hard to talk about Living Single without talking about Friends, because rock ’n’ roll and Elvis Presley vocals barely scratch the surface of what white America has stolen from Black people and Black culture. If you’ve never seen Living Single, first you should remedy that immediately — it’s available for streaming on both Max and Hulu. But also, the basic plot is that a group of twentysomethings learn about love, dating, and the meaning of friendship while stomping through hijinks in New York in the 90s. There’s also a few cross-group dating and big “will they/won’t they” romances peppered throughout. Is that sounding familiar? The show came out before Friends by exactly one year, and they both filmed on the same lot. I don’t have to say more on it, because plenty of others — including Living Single cast and crew — already have.
Plus, I mean, right now we’re here for the gay. And to celebrate Black greatness on its own terms, not in comparison to white people.
The structure of Living Single is that Khadijah (Queen Latifah) lives with her childhood best friend, Regine (Kim Fields), and her cousin, Synclaire (Kim Coles), in a Brooklyn brownstone. Across the street lives Khadijah’s college best friend, Maxine (Erika Alexander), and above the women’s apartment live Overton (John Henton) and Kyle (T.C. Carson). Today we are focused on Max. Let us begin our story.
Max and Khadijah both went to the HBCU Howard University. At Howard, Max’s roommate was Shayla (Karen Malina White) — which is a great winking nod to the fact that Erika Alexander and Karen Malina White played teenage best friends Pam and Charmaine on The Cosby Show, adding a little emotional depth to the story, if you know where to look.
Shayla is traveling up to Brooklyn with her fiancé, Chris, because the whole crew is throwing her a bridal shower that will somehow be only a few days before her wedding. The wedding will also take place in Brooklyn despite the fact that seemingly neither Shayla or Chris live there.
Does this timeline make sense!? No, but nothing made sense in the 90s. Go with it.
Everyone is getting ready for the bridal shower (Synclaire is hand-making little brides and grooms out of toilet paper) when Shayla shows up. We find out that Chris is short for Christina, her fiancée. Synclaire immediately starts ripping apart the toilet paper grooms while cheerfully exclaiming, “Lesbians! NEAT!” And we cut to the opening theme song.
People often wonder what life is like as the Editor-in-Chief of a gay magazine…
To jump around a little bit, because we only have so much time here, the most important thing to know is that even though Living Single is typically a very straight show (obvious lesbian prowess of Queen Latifah not withstanding), it is STUNNING and EXHILERATING how gay this episode is — not only in plot, but also in jokes.
About halfway through the episode, I noticed the trend and tried to keep a running tally of every gay joke I heard, and after roughly five minutes my hand was already cramping. My brain had broken. I gave up. On top of that, nearly every joke, every zinger, lands.
Even the jokes that made me most nervous, end on solid ground. Kyle — a known “ladies’ man” — stands out of Khadijah’s apartment before the lesbian bridal shower, proclaiming he can “change” every woman that crosses his path. When one woman in particular turns him down, he huffs, “You’re just like the rest of them, afraid of men.” Synclaire looks at him, her face in a confused pout, “That’s Khadijah’s friend Jamie — she’s straight.” His bruised ego rightfully becomes his own punchline.
But the star of “Woman-to-Woman,” surprising no one, is Queen Latifah herself.
Khadijah has always been read queerly. Maybe its my imagination, I know that ‘90s Queen Latifah was still far from being out herself, but I swear to you that Queen has never stood more proud, more swaggy, more effortlessly f*cking gay (in the every best possible way) than she does here. It’s not in what she says, it’s in how she says it. Her smirk, her hair bounce, her posture.
I wish for this sign to magically appear every time I walk into a new room.
When Synclaire makes a hot pink sign for the bridal shower that proclaims “WELCOME LESBIANS” — there is Khadijah to rip it down, mumbling to herself “Nah kid.”
When Synclaire proclaims, “I’m not up on lesbian etiquette. It’s not like I’ve ever known any before,” there is Khadijah again: “Aunt Gladys was gay.” (Hilariously, Synclaire’s response? “Aunt Gladys was not gay. She just never found the right man. Like her roommate, Aunt Hazel.”)
When the always exquisitely dressed and extremely straight Regine shows up to the bridal shower in a backwards cap and baggy shirt, arguing “Why put out the banquet, if they can’t eat.” There’s Khadijah with the knockout, “You succeeded. You definitely look like a sack lunch.”
And when Max struggles with her best friend’s coming out, there is Queen Latifah one final time with the simple, non-confrontational, pitch-perfect words of wisdom that every straight person best friend of a gay needs to hear:
Khadijah: Max let me ask you something, the entire time y’all roomed together, did she ever try to come on to you?
Max: No.
Khadijah: Okay, so she played it cool. That’s how much your friendship mattered to her.
Truer words have never been spoken, especially because as it turned out, the reason that Shayla kept her secret from Max for so long (she told Khadijah junior year back when they were all in college) was not because she worried Max couldn’t handle the news that she was gay. It was because she worried Max couldn’t handle the news that Shayla was, for years, in love with her. It’s a scene that plays out beautifully, equal parts raw emotion and well-earned humor, with the kind of charm that you’ll have hard time believing goes by so quickly for how deeply you become invested in it.
Most notably, in a hat trick that a lot of straight shows still would struggle to pull off today, there’s never an ounce of homophobia laced in their confrontation. Max isn’t freaked out that Shayla is gay, or even that Shayla once loved her — she’s bothered that her best friend didn’t feel like she could be her true self around her. It’s that nagging feeling that leads to the two friends making up on the morning of Shayla’s wedding.
Max visits Shayla at the beauty salon and just as the closing credits are about to roll, she can’t help but lament:
“Think of all the time we waisted. All the conversations we didn’t have. All those chances I would have had to diss your dates.”
Release the tape! Release the tape! (ahem. sorry.)
And that final joke, my friends… drumroll.. brings us to the end of this Very Special Gay Episode!
OK, Is It Worth It? I’m biased, but based on the sheer infinite levels of gay jokes packed into 22 minutes, the rareness of Very Special Gay episodes on Black Television, and of course Queen Latifah — this is a clear winner by every known metric. Congrats to series creator and writer Yvette Lee Bowser, a success!! 10/10, Would do it again.
We Need More Sex Scenes
Let’s start with something sexy: a history lesson.
Hollywood in the silent era was a place of queer debauchery. Drugs, sex, and intertitles. There were few rules about what could be shown on-screen and even fewer about what could happen backstage.
Many people know this changed in 1934 with the enforcement of the Hays Code, an on-screen standard that lasted more than thirty years and banned, among other things, any depictions of homosexuality. But this sort of culture-shaping censorship does not occur suddenly. The seeds were planted over a decade earlier due to what most call scandals and I’ll call tragedies.
In 1921, screen comedian Fatty Arbuckle was accused of raping and murdering an aspiring actress. Charlie Chaplin who dated, impregnated, and married multiple teenagers throughout his career defended Arbuckle.
The next year bisexual director William Desmond Taylor was murdered. Some believe he fell victim to a drug dealer; others believe it was the mom of a teenager he was pursuing. Either way, the response to the scandal held all these things equally: murder, sex with a teenager, drugs, and, of course, bisexuality.
Fearing bad press and a loss of income, the studios invited William Hays, former head of the Republican National Committee, to rehabilitate the image of The Movies. For a decade, Hays’ guidelines were taken as mere suggestions — and, therefore, rarely taken at all. Of course, this meant religious groups and state legislatures were not appeased, and, finally, by 1934, the suggestions became commandments. The images allowed on-screen were changed for decades.
There were real issues in Hollywood — issues that remain today. But the solution to those issues was not to flatten everything adult into the same objections. To put it bluntly: rape and murder are not the same as drugs and bisexuality. The only commonality between these things is that banning them from the screen does not ban them from life.
History is cyclical and today we find ourselves at a similar crossroads. What images should be allowed on-screen? What images should be celebrated on-screen? How can we create a better Hollywood? How can we create a better world?
This time, we should do the opposite of William Hays. This time, the solution is obvious: We need more sex scenes.
There were fewer sex scenes in movies during the 2010s than any decade since the Hays Code was in place. Television picked up a lot of that slack, but, in recent years, that too has been on the decline. Even a show like The L Word: Generation Q which had little to offer beyond a great cast and expert sex scenes, cut most of the latter out of its third and final season.
Cultural shifts never have just one cause. When it comes to movies, the push away from artist-driven cinema and toward tentpole franchises has studios trying to appeal to the widest audience possible. This means making work appropriate for all-ages. It also means conforming to the moral judgments of conservatives both domestically and internationally. Sexuality is best for the studios when it can be easily excised — or easy to miss — in certain markets.
But, as television follows suit, I would argue there are three other reasons for the lack of sex on-screen: the Me Too Movement, the introduction of intimacy coordinators, and the increase in queer storytelling
Six years ago, Hollywood again had a series of scandals I would call tragedies. Over 80 women accused mogul Harvey Weinstein of harassment and assault and an industry-wide reckoning began. More people came forward about more people, the rot of Hollywood clearer than ever.
Most of the accused were compared to Weinstein and, failing to meet that high bar of monstrosity, were allowed to return to work. But the lack of consequences for individuals was at least paired with a change in how sex was filmed on-screen. Intimacy coordinators became a common position on set. Sex could now be choreographed with the care and safety of stunts rather than an abuse-pron spontaneity. Not only did this create safer environments — it created better sex scenes. Shows like Vida and the aforementioned Generation Q redefined what we could expect in terms of specificity and eroticism. It’s also not a coincidence that both of these shows were queer.
Even before 2017, queerness on-screen was on the rise. And, more importantly, the queerness more frequently came from a queer perspective. I love the erotic thrillers of the 80s and 90s and will happily defend the goofy lesbianism in something like Wild Things. There’s still a big difference between Neve Campbell and Denise Richards’ pool makeout and the queer sexuality of Vida. Tanya Saracho’s show isn’t just more realistic — it’s hotter.
If reading about Fatty Arbuckle raping a woman makes you want to enforce Christian values, you wanted to do that anyway. If reading about the murder of William Desmond Taylor makes you want to ban queerness, you already hated us. If the mainstream Me Too Movement makes you want less sex to be shown on-screen, you’re contributing to the very secrets that movement aimed to uncover.
The current push against sex scenes was not created by people who want to change our culture for the better, but by people who want to keep it the same. Like most moral panics, it’s a small group providing the wrong solutions to real concerns. I don’t think teenagers on Twitter expressing their anxieties around sex want there to be less queerness in our world. But I do think certain people with power are manipulating those anxieties with that goal in mind.
The people in power have looked at a world where pleasure is available to us all and on-set safety has increased and see it as a threat to their patriarchal control.
We do not change our culture by denying its realities. We need more sex scenes on-screen that are hot. We need more sex scenes on-screen that are uncomfortable. We need queer sex and straight sex and everything in between. William Hays banning depictions of rape did not prevent it from happening in Hollywood and beyond. The more we talk about and show the bad, the easier it is to prevent. The more we talk about and show the good, the easier it is to attain. The more we acknowledge that sex and relationships often cannot be split between good and bad, the better equipped we’ll be to live in our complicated world.
It’s unlikely that Hollywood will adopt another Hays Code. Instead, there will be an increase in what has already begun. Certain people with power will get to show whatever they want without losing funding or mainstream support while the rest of us will not. Sex on-screen won’t be defined by work like Vida, this year’s wonderful Passages, or my current favorite show P-Valley. It will be defined by people like Sam Levinson and Lars von Trier. To fight for more sex scenes is to fight for better sex scenes. To fight for better sex scenes is to fight for a better culture on-screen and off.
I want a Hollywood of intimacy coordinators and queerness and open sexuality — not exploitation, abuse, and secrecy.
For the sake of art, for the sake of our world, let’s ask for more and let’s ask for better. A century later, let’s learn from our mistakes and this time reject repression. It’s scarier, it’s riskier, it’s messier. But trust me: some of the best things in life are fucking filthy.
This essay about the need for more sex scenes is here to launch an exciting new series all about sex on-screen! Look for our upcoming revamped list of lesbian sex scenes available to stream and deep-dives on what makes specific queer sex scenes so special.
Gabby’s Tender Queerness and the Tragedy of Heterosexuality on The Bachelorette
Even with Bachelor Nation™ continuing to pump out slightly delusional heterosexual couples, there was never any disguising of the latent homo bonds between same-sex competitors rooming together as they vie for the grand prize. Indeed, there have been many Bachelor stars who have come out as queerish, including Becca Tilley (The Bachelor season 19 and 20) who since 2018 has been famously dating musician Hayley Kiyoko, Colton Underwood who was the first openly gay Bachelor (The Bachelorette season 14 and The Bachelor lead on season 23; though as reader comments aptly point out below, he stalked and harassed his ex-girlfriend and winner of The Bachelor season 23, Cassie Randolph), Minh Thu from The Bachelor Vietnam who fled the show with Truc Nhu, and many others. Most recently, one of the two leads from The Bachelorette’s season 19, Gabby Windey, announced on Instagram she was dating comedian Robby Hoffman. Since then, the two have been posting very tender updates on Instagram that have included reading bell hooks’s All About Love, doing fancy rich girl stuff like sailing on a yacht, and just seeming to be really into each other in what appears to be a very caring relationship.
Gabby’s season was branded as special because it had two female lead bachelorettes rather than just one: Gabby and her more annoying counterpart, Rachel Recchia. What developed over the season that was perhaps actually special was that Gabby and Rachel formed a caring, tender, and supportive relationship with each other, subtly refusing to be in competition over the flock of men. Throughout the season, they often talked about how they supported each other, and they would hold each other’s hands, tenderly cuddling and embracing while engaging in “girl talk” over their men. It became eerily clear watching this season that the true relationship with staying power was not the toxic hetero relationships Gabby and Rachel had with their men — many of whom were pushed to the brink in trying to get in touch with their emotions and face their toxic masculinity — but the relationship the women cultivated with one another. The femmeship, if you will, drawing on femme scholar Andi Schwartz’s formulation. Gabby and Rachel formed a Bachelorette version of femme friendship — or a “political alliance and network of care.” The season became an unintentional suggestion of other ways of forming love and intimacy, forms not only not heterosexual but also not necessarily romantic or sexual either, tender queeerplatonic femmeships that included hair touching and refusing to be downplayed by the multitudes of men seeking their attention.
Yet in the face of this unintentional femmeship queerplatonic subversion, the show — not surprisingly — remained committed to heterosexual visions of love grounded in an affixation to romance, sex, monogamy, and toxicity. Now, do keep in mind that The Bachelor has long been a site for displaying and celebrating toxic masculinity, racism, and rape culture. For example, you might recall that the former host, white Chris Harrison, left the franchise because he made offensive and minimizing comments in an interview with former Bachelorette lead Rachel Lindsay (The Bachelorette lead of season 13), in defense of a contestant who attended an Antebellum plantation themed party. It was so white supremacist that even The Bachelor franchise was embarrassed.
In many ways, The Bachelor and The Bachelorette remain invested in what Jane Ward has discussed as the tragedy of heterosexuality in a book by the same name. Ward argues that heterosexuality is “erotically uninspired and coercive” with “punishing gender roles” and that it is “outright illogical as a set of intimate relations.” For example, Ward points out that while cishet men’s identity relies on them loving women, instead of loving them, men tend to exploit and objectify women, often using women to get closer to other men in homosocial bonding practices. As queers and feminists well know, heterosexuality does not often benefit heterosexual women, but rather decreases their quality of life, increases their workload, and puts them at increased risk of harm, abuse, and sexual assault. And yet, heterosexuality continues to be dressed up as a goal, a dream, a lifelong quest, linked intimately to happiness and commemorated with countless rituals that become the unseen fabric of society. (And, of course, Ward acknowledges that not all straight people are in toxic relationships nor all cishet men are misogynists but that straight culture emphasizes, promotes, and nurtures these values even when there are exceptions).
The Bachelor franchise in many ways traffics in all of those things, suggesting hetero monogamy as an ideal and dream. For example, it undertakes gender segregation and the gender binary as a seemingly natural and obvious part of the dating process, whereby the men and women are kept in separate homes and interact only at specific times and in specific places. In this way, it is suggested that men and women are opposing and separate teams that must be strategically managed, must be made to like, love, and get along with each other through highly scripted dating protocols, extending what Ward names the “heterosexual-repair industry.”
And yet, despite the intense heteropropaganda Gabby was put through, both as a contestant on season 26 of The Bachelor and as a lead on The Bachelorette’s season 19, she remained what appeared to be tender, kind to her “competitor” women, and astoundingly queer. Is it possible that Gabby’s tender queerness is a resounding sign to all Bachelor Nation fans and contestants — past and present — that another way is possible? Is Gabby showing the high femme Bachelor women they too might indeed be queer or pre-queer and that a tender, nerdy, non-cis-dude love match might also be on their horizon? I like to hope so. Yet, Ward ends her powerful book by suggesting the way out of toxic heterosexuality is not — or not only — queerness. She argues that in order for heterosexuality as an orientation to be better, cishet men need to be better at heterosexuality, to be in other words less misogynist, less exploitative, and less toxic. Ward argues that cishet men shouldn’t seek to queer heterosexuality but to instead go deeper with their love of and attraction to women — what she calls “deep heterosexuality.” While shows such as The Bachelor ask women to compete for one man and The Bachelorette promotes men’s “erotic competition among men for women’s bodies,” Ward asks that we imagine a heterosexuality for itself, where cishet men actually like women, with a “powerful longing for the full humanity of women” and their collective bodily freedom.
What Gabby offers viewers is the compelling tender queer suggestion that women do not have to put up with toxic cishet masculinities and the heterosexuality they have on offer. In an interview with The View on August 2, 2023, Gabby not so much as came out as “gay” as reflected on her personal history with heterosexuality. She shared that she’s “dating a girl” and in response to The View’s host Joy Behar’s as always invasive questioning — “so is it girls now, just girls, that’s it?” — Gabby pushed back, eluding labels, and offering instead a subtle tender critique of the tragedy of heterosexuality, outlining how she came from “a very heteronormative world … like my whole world was kind of like male gazey” in which “my story has been told for me.” Dating Robby Hoffman, who “makes me feel so safe so loved. Like a love that I always wanted going on these dating shows,” Gabby follows the “whisper in her,” honing a queer critique of toxic heterosexual culture and remaining open and true to her own queer softness.
Author’s Note: I was introduced to Gabby’s season of The Bachelorette by a group of new friends who were watching the season with a feminist gaze. Big thank you and shoutout to Ashton Wesner, Jen Rose Smith, James Taylor, and Kate Altizer.
Additional Author’s Note: Apologies from the author for omitting and misrepresenting the important details of Underwood’s harassment of Randolph in the prior version of this piece, and thank you to readers for pointing this out.
A Guide to Starz Smash Hit “Power” Book Universe (But Only the Gay Parts)
Have you ever watched the Power Book Universe shows on Starz? Produced by 50 Cent, the interlocking web of tv series based around central crime fictional families has become the backbone of Starz’s ratings — I’m talking bonafide smash hits, to the tune of three separate spin-offs — thanks in no small part to Black viewership. This also means that despite being must watch television in certain households, there are a lot of people who have either never heard of the Power shows or, if they have, now that we’re four series deep, feel too overwhelmed to jump in. Which is unfortunate for many reasons, primarily for us because these shows are GAY. And you like gay things!
So if this is you, I am here to be your guide. Power Book IV: Force just began its second season on Starz and it co-stars Lili Simmons as Claudia Flynn, a crime boss lesbian who really puts the blood in blood red lipstick. That means there is no time like the present to jump in. The first rule of the “Power” Book Universe on Starz is that there are no actual books, we’re working purely with aesthetics here. The second rule is that each “Power” spin-off is gayer than the last. Amen.
If I can be serious for a second, there is something very beautiful to me about a television show that is steeped in hip hop, drug, and crime lore — none of which is particularly known for being gay friendly, we can say — getting fucking gayyyyyyer and gayer with each passing turn.
Ok enough with that genuine emotion! We have drugs to sell, the streets of New York to climb, and people to kill.
Before we go any further, here’s a key guide to my character maps. I tried to make one overarching map to combine all the shows in a family tree, however my Canva skills (and the fact that Jukebox and Kanan exist as both teenagers and adults, ultimately creating a flat time circle) failed me. Instead each map is broken down by show. But maybe you’ll prefer it this way! Let’s find out!
An Autostraddle Power Book Universe Key Guide
- Circle sizes are unscientifically (excuse me, very scientifically) decided relative to the importance of that character to the plot of that particular show or the Power Book Universe overall. The bigger the circle, the greater the importance.
- We are only here for the gay parts, so I’ve only mapped major characters needed to follow the gay story along or the gays themselves.
- An overlapping circle indicates a familial or romantic relationship.
- Purple circles mean gay activities.
- Green arrows mean the those characters are friendly or allies.
- Red arrows indicate enemies.
- A dotted arrow means that the one character killed the other.
- Yes, that means Tariq killed his own father. We’ll get to that.
And now we can begin!
Power The Original Series (Six Seasons, 2014-2020)
Central Crime Family: The Saint Patrick Family
Time Period: 2010s
Power The Original Series is arguably — at times!! The last season falls off — an excellent crime series. If you enjoy mob movies (think more Goodfellas than Godfather) or New Jack City, this is for you. If you’re the kind of person who gets upset when a character who obviously needed to die in order for the crime to be gotten away with, instead somehow gets to live for plot contrived reasons, this is for YOU. One of my favorite things about Power is that the deaths are creative, beautifully shot, core to the thematics of keeping the story going, and always right on time. Yes, I do realize how dark that sentence is read out loud, but I’m working with the assumption that if tv/film violence makes you squick, you already closed this article a while ago. This is for the rest of us.
In Power, you will meet the Saint Patrick Family, who are the backbone of everything that’s going to come after. The Saint Patricks are headed up by James Saint Patrick, a successful businessman by day and a drug dealer by the name of Ghost by night. He wants ultimately wants to clean his money and go legit full time, but the streets keep pulling him back in, you know the deal. His wife, Tasha (Naturi Naughton) is not gay, but is hot and smart, so I wanted you to know. They have a son Tariq and as you can see in the chart above — Tariq does not get along with dear old dad. There is also Uncle Tommy, Ghost’s best friend since childhood and the enforcer and co-captain of his off-the-books business.
Ghost and Tommy grew up with Kanan (50 Cent), before double crossing him in a time period before the series begins. Kanan tries to enact revenge and at first loses, which in Season Three sends him to lick his wounds in DC… introducing us to our first central lesbian character, Kanan’s cousin Jukebox!! Played by the one AND ONLY Anika Noni Rose!! Jukebox grew up with Kanan in them streets, but now spends her time as a dirty cop (a ruthless cover for her own robbery business) and making out with her hot girlfriend. Later Kanan and Jukebox come up with a plan to kidnap Tariq in an effort to blackmail Ghost for more money. The kidnapping goes awry and KANAN ENDS UP KIlLLING HIS OWN COUSIN to cover his tracks. Yiiikes.
Sadly I cannot say that this kind of intra-family yeah is uncommon in Power, because before you know it young Tariq is all grown up 😭 and killing some family members of his own. This brings us to…
Power Book II: Ghost (Three Seasons, 2020-Present)
Central Crime Family: The Tejada Family
Time Period: 2020s
Now you might think that because the first Power sequel series is called “Ghost” that its about Jamie Saint Patrick, however you’d be wrong! Oh now this series (named Power: The College Years in my own head) follows Tariq after he killed his father, thus stepping into the Ghost mantle on his own. Did I mention that most Power fans hated Tariq as a kid? He begrudgingly grows on us here, but also that’s only because Power made the first of many right decisions at this point in our storytelling, and introduces us to our first real queen pin — Mary J. Blige as Monet Tejada.
Mary chews scenery while wearing a cherry red wig, every conceivably imagined type of fur coat, and waving a gun in the air with the best of them. But it’s her son, Dru Tejada (Lovell Adams-Gray) who gets the juiciest of gay plots here. Drew’s known as being the “brains” of the Tejada children, and mommy’s favorite, but his father has reservations about handing Dru over the family business on account of Dru being… a lil friend of Lil Nas X, if you catch what I’m saying, and I think that you do. So far Dru’s had two major boyfriends, a closeted college-aged basketball player and a member of a rival crime family. Yeah. That second one does not end well.
Meanwhile, Tariq gets back together with his high school girlfriend (whom we first meet in the original series) Effie Morales, played by Alix Lapri. Effie’s also grown and in college now, plus some time between the original series and this one, she got herself a girlfriend! Sadly, she leaves that girlfriend for Tariq almost right away — so there’s not much on camera queer action coming from Effie. But we love bisexuals with boyfriends living out their Bonnie ‘n’ Clyde fantasies like they are Beyoncé and Jay-z!
Power Book III: Raising Kanan (Two Seasons, 2021-Present)
Central Crime Family: The Thomas/Starks Family
Time Period: 1990s
There is no easy way to account for this pivot to thirty years in the past, it’s bananas and we have to roll with it because Power Book III: Raising Kanan is easily the best of the Power series and that is directly thanks to two words.: Tony Award-winner Patina Miller. Oh was that more than two words? My bad!
In Raising Kanan, Miller stars as Raquel “Raq” Thomas, the queen pin of the Thomas/Starks family. Now maybe the name Starks is ringing a bell for you at this point in our mini-recaps! Well my friends, that is because we are now returning to Kanan and Jukebox — first introduced to you in Power The Original Series as villains going against the Saint Patrick family, namely Daddy Ghost and son Ghost back when son Ghost was still an annoying teenager. Here we get to revisit Kanan and Jukebox as teenagers themselves, and the entire series is a pretty interesting edition on how villains are created and molded, not innate to who we are.
As teenage Jukebox, Hailey Kilgore stuns. I should mention that Kilgore is also a Tony nominee (Raising Kanan has made excellent use of that NYC talent pool!) and watching her work in scenes alongside Miller is a bit like watching time stop. She can also sing the house dowwwwwwwn, making good use of that ‘Jukebox’ nickname. Watching Kanan and Juke as teenagers is equal parts is a bit like watching an incredibly dark version of The Wonder Years, the 90s nostalgia is impeccable and strong, and its hard not to fall in love with how the two cousins love each other so deeply.
Unfortunately, we also know that despite their bond — which will see them through decades together — ultimately Kanan will kill his own cousin in the future to save his own ass! So! That’s the game. But together Anika Noni Rose and Hailey Kilgore have threaded together one of the most indelible characters of the entire Power Universe in Jukebox. They deserve all their damn flowers.
In other relevant Raising Kanan plots, Jukebox has her first girlfriend, Nicole, who is a rich girl from the Upper East Side. Unfortunately, Nicole doesn’t know about Jukebox’s family business, and when she sees some crack in Juke’s backpack she swipes it — the crack was incorrectly mixed by Kanan, leading to Nicole’s accidental death when she smokes it. This is my least favorite of the Power deaths, not because necessarily of Bury Your Gays (this is a web of series about drug lords, people are gonna die), just because it’s ridiculous. Also, Juke and Nicole both face various homophobic violences — physical for Jukebox, emotional for Nicole — that you should be aware of going in.
While all of this is happening, Detective Burke is snooping around trying to bring the entire Thomas/Starks crime family down! She befriends Jukebox as something akin to a gay mentor (Burke is also a les), but their relationship is more like an uneasy cat and mouse.
As you can see, I’ve had a lot to say about Raising Kanan, but that’s because it’s good as hell and gay as hell! In fact, it’s so gay that we write mini-recaps for the show while its airing, and you can catch up on those here.
This brings us to the real reason we are gathered here today, the latest book in the Power series, airing now on Starz, Power Book IV: Force — co-starring a delightful Irish lesbian, I’ll let her introduce herself!
Power Book IV: Force (Two Seasons, 2022-Present)
Central Crime Family: The Flynn Family
Time Period: 2020s
So in the original Power series, we learn that Daddy Ghost’s best friend Tommy is actually a prince in a New York Sicilian Mafia that no one knew about it! In part reeling from that revelation, Tommy sets his sights west and leaves the series to end up in Chicago, thus bringing us to Power Book IV: Force.
In Chicago, Tommy gets caught up with an Irish mob, the Flynn Family. Claudia Flynn, our lesbian, is also our first queer character to have full co-lead billing, which brings us full circle to a time when Anika Noni Rose had to wait in the wings for three seasons before any of the characters could be gay. How quickly the tables have turned!!
Claudia’s whole deal is that she wants to take over the business but her father won’t let her because she’s a woman — which feels a little reductive in 2023 but whatever I’ll take it. Instead, Claudia works to get her own version of designer drugs on the street and who does she run into to help her on this quest? That’s right, our own Thomas Egan!
Claudia is cold-hearted, viscous, and perfect in that way of Power Femmes who wear blood red lipstick tend to be. Tommy was always the Power Universe’s loose canon. So what will happen when they come together? Only time will tell at this point. But if history has anything to say with it, it’s gonna be fire.
Stunt Queens: The History and Cultural Significance of the “Queerleader” in Film and Television
Gays, let’s rally! I’m here, queer, and ready to dive real deep into a very important dyke media legacy: queer cheerleaders on screen.
I made a list of all the pom-pommed lesbian and bisexual moments from film and television I could think of off the top of my head, which it was already very long! I then researched further and uncovered even more. The Queerleader has long been an image used to both subvert and reinforce notions of girlhood and femininity. As with many tropes and stocktypes when it comes to queer images and stories in film and TV, the Queerleader is complicated: sometimes a powerful image of femme lesbianism and other times intentionally portrayed as disruptive and dangerous, a threat to not only men but the women in close proximity to her.
Before we get into the timeline, let’s start with the roots of the Queerleader’s legacy.
What makes the sport and spectacle of cheerleading a realm so rife with lesbian and bisexual activity? Well, I think the answer is as simple — and as complex when you really drill into it! — as the answer to why settings/contexts such as all-girl’s schools, convents, and sororities are also frequent playgrounds for queerness and sexual exploration. These are, conventionally, highly feminized spaces considered to be largely free of men. And that’s where things also get complicated, because such spaces are often fetishized by straight cis men for that exact reason. It is a place where they are forbidden, and therefore it’s a place where they cast their voyeuristic gaze, peering as if through a peephole. You might not be surprised that when researching this specific topic, I also encountered a lot of cheerleader-themed lesbian porn.
But I think it’d be overly simplistic — prudish, even — to suggest the Queerleader and the homoeroticization of these other “feminine” spaces exist solely for the male gaze. It’d be a stretch to suggest straight men invented the Queerleader, even if the earliest examples of these filmic depictions were indeed constructed by men. While those might compose the majority of our pre-1999 examples, I think that has more to do with who had the means and power to make movies. There are lots of early- to mid-twentieth century examples of women writing lesbian narratives set in some of the aforementioned women’s spaces, including 1917’s Regiment of Women by Clemence Dane, set at an all-girls school. Radclyffe Hall drew from her friend Toupie Lowther’s experiences in a French World War I women’s unit for her famous novel The Well of Loneliness (1928). Prolific lesbian pulp novelist Ann Bannon realized her own sexuality while in a sorority in college and then went on to write Odd Girl Out (1957) about two sorority sisters in a relationship.
Sure, these are examples from literature, but in the early- and mid- 20th century, literature was a more accessible artform than film/television for women and queer people, especially because pen names allowed them to write somewhat anonymously and ambiguously. But on the cinematic side of things, Dorothy Arzner arguably invented the all-girls school film with The Wild Party in 1929, and while the movie features pre-Code compulsory heterosexuality, its lesbian erotics are impossible to miss.
So, cheerleading does seem to fit into this concept of “women’s spaces,” which make for ideal settings for lesbian narratives — especially in decades when homosexuality was widely criminalized and stigmatized — by allowing women to be in close proximity to each other. These are worlds in which women touching and being physically close can be seen as normal and even expected and not strictly forbidden or policed.
But when it comes to the Queerleader, I do think the reoccurrence of this image goes beyond cheerleading being a largely women-dominated sphere. At the risk of starting to sound like an academic paper (or perhaps that line has already been crossed lol), I argue that the cheerleader is an ideal symbol to inject with or project upon queerness due to the dichotomies cheerleaders have long culturally represented. In Go! Fight! Win!: Cheerleading in American Culture, Mary Ellen Hanson digs into these contradictions embodied by cheerleaders:
The cheerleader is an icon, an instantly recognized symbol of youthful prestige, wholesome attractiveness, peer leadership, and popularity. Equally recognized is the cheerleader as a symbol of mindless enthusiasm, shallow boosterism, objectified sexuality, and promiscuous availability. (Hanson, 2)
Indeed, cheerleaders are largely considered the most popular girls at school while simultaneously dismissed as vapid, empty-headed dolls. They’re portrayed as Good Girls who cheer on the boys but they’re also portrayed as scantily clad seductresses. Their femininity is a weapon and a beacon.
I’ll never forget the time a friend rudely dismissed another woman I barely knew and, when I asked why she’d done so, she simply said “she was a cheerleader in high school.” This ex-friend was parroting very common (and boring!) assumptions about cheerleaders that have been around for forever. She sounded not unlike this snide 1974 Esquire article about ex-cheerleaders, but it was 2014. (That Esquire article replicates additional persistent cultural expectations of cheerleaders, including that they be white, blonde, and have an ass in a manner that could read as tongue-in-cheek but is most certainly not.)
Do these dichotomies and paradoxes not sound familiar? Are they not evocative of the ways lesbians are also culturally regarded and portrayed throughout history? Simultaneously sexless and hypersexual. Queering the cheerleader becomes a way to both challenge and reify these dual narratives. Homophobic iterations of the Queerleader see her as a predator and an affront to the feminine ideal cheerleaders are meant to symbolize. But positive and queer-created iterations of the same character ultimately capitalize and play on the same assumptions and cultural symbols. The most successful and compelling ones just do so in a way that confronts those ideas rather than merely replicating them.
When I started writing this piece several months ago, I mostly meant for it to be, well, horny. Horny, funny, and detailed — my sweet spot! Now this final iteration has, like, lite citation work???? But listen I, not unlike a Queerleader, can be many things at once. Please let me live my best erotic-meets-scholarly life. Reference work can be horny, too!!! I’m engaged to a librarian after all.
And with all that context, here’s my painstaking timeline of the Queerleader in film and television.
This post was originally written in January 2023 and updated/republished in September 2023.
1970s: The Sexploitation of Lesbian Cheerleaders
I tried very hard to find some readily available pre-Code films that 1. featured cheerleaders in a significant role and 2. had enough legible lesbian subtext to warrant a place in this timeline, but this proved difficult! Once I researched the actual history of cheerleading itself, the reason became clear.
Cheerleading has not always been a women-dominated sport. In fact, it was mostly for men prior to WWII. This makes sense, as cheerleading started at the college level in conjunction with intercollegiate sports. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, male volunteers would lead cheers to encourage spectator involvement during sporting events (Hanson, 11).
Stunts and jumps started becoming more popular in the 50s, and then the 70s saw the introduction of Title IX, which expanded athletic opportunities and funding for women’s sports. Cheerleading increasingly became more athletic and less about just shouting from the sidelines as a result. So, that’s your little mini history lesson on cheerleading and likely the reason why we don’t see a lot of filmic representations of women cheerleading in the pre-Code or Hays Code eras of Hollywood.
The first real instances I found of cheerleaders engaging in lesbian activity were the aforementioned 70s sexploitation movies in which hookups between women are used mostly as non-sequitur titillations. The Cheerleaders (1973) — in which high school cheerleaders decide to sleep with the rival team’s players so that they’ll be too tired to play well — and the absurdly titled The Great American Girl Robbery (1979), about a bus of cheerleaders taken hostage, were the most overt examples of these.
As that aforementioned Esquire article published in 1974 shows, the idea of the cheerleader as a sex symbol was already firmly in place during this decade, and it’s not at all shocking that we see Queerleaders cropping up in these soft core movies. I cannot in good conscience recommend these two particular films, but the lesbian sex scene in The Cheerleaders that prominently features an exercise bike is…very memorable! If you’ve seen any 70s-era titty movies, there’s nothing here that will shock you too much.
But I’m a Cheerleader (1999)
Jamie Babbit’s satirical teen film starring Natasha Lyonne and Clea DuVall as friends-turned-lovers at a gay conversion camp is easily the most iconic entry on this list — and arguably the prototypical Queerleader Movie even if technically some depictions do predate it. But given that Babbit is queer herself, this feels like the true beginning.
In an interview in 2005, Babbit had this to say about the decision to make the lead character a cheerleader:
Well, the reason we wanted to have the lead character be a cheerleader is because, for us, it was sort of the pinnacle of the American dream, and the American dream of femininity.
Babbit utilizes and flips the same image and assumptions those 1970s sexploitation movies with Queerleaders also put forth — but in a way that’s distinctly queer and subversive. Those 70s movies assume that a cheerleader engaging in lesbian sex is inherently horny (and mainly for straight men) because it seems forbidden and wrong in the context of the All-American Good Girl the cheerleader has come to represent. Cheerleaders exist, by the definition adopted by those movies, to root for and devote themselves to men and men’s accomplishments. To see them having sex with each other (even with the secret presence of a male voyeur, as those 70s scenes tend to involve) is at odds with that. With But I’m a Cheerleader, the primary intent is not necessarily titilation, but there’s something similarly fraught in how Megan’s queerness is considered at odds with her identity as a cheerleader. Even its tongue-in-cheek title nods to this: She can’t be gay because she’s a cheerleader. Only here, Babbit is indeed making fun of such a silly declaration, challenging not only the dominant narrative of how queer women look and act but also of how cheerleaders act, too.
The movie is not just one of the best and earliest Queerleader texts but also one of the greatest lesbian films of all time; in fact, it’s in the number one spot on our list of the 200 best lesbian, bisexual, and queer films.
Bring It On (2000)
This movie is the only one in this timeline that employs lesbian subtext rather than explicitly queer content, but it’d be silly to ignore Bring It On‘s ongoing popularity in the dyke community, especially since a lot of us who are over 30 and often clung to movies in our younger years that were not necessarily loudly queer but had an implied lesbian undercurrent to them (because some of us ourselves were not necessarily loudly queer but had an implied lesbian undercurrent to, like, every movement we made). Bring It On might not be an official Queerleader text, but it is almost too easy to project a Queerleader narrative onto it.
Bring It On, a very good movie, also inspired an entire multiverse of very bad straight-to-video/made-for-TV movies, and you’ll read a little more about that further down the timeline.
Veronica Mars, “Versatile Toppings” (2006) / Heroes, “Hysterical Blindness” (2009)
Season two of Veronica Mars gave us gay cheerleading activity in the episode “Versatile Toppings,” which is, unfortunately, a reference to pizza and not to lesbian tops. The episode feels like a 2006 pop culture time capsule in that it stars Kristin Cavallari of Laguna Beach fame as a closeted cheerleader. There’s also some throwback high school homophobia on display, with Madison Sinclair taunting another closeted character, Marlena, for looking like an Indigo Girl? Anyway, while lesbian cheerleading isn’t exactly a main throughline of this show or even this episode, I’m interested in how the Queerleader trope’s appeal and ubiquity makes it so that it even shows up in small moments like this. We see another quasi-instance of this in the fourth season of Heroes, which manages to combine Queerleader and Sapphic sorority shenanigans. Sure, Claire is no longer a practicing cheerleader at this point, but her college roommate’s obsessive crush on her does seem to hinge on a romanticization of the All-American girl aesthetics that Claire gives off. I’m counting it!
Degrassi: The Next Generation (2006)
Paige Michalchuk (Lauren Collins) is arguably television’s prototypical Queerleader. She first comes to terms with her bisexuality in season five, beginning a relationship with Alex Nuñez (Deanna Casaluce) in “The Lexicon of Love (2).” They have a classic enemies-to-lovers + opposites attract trope trajectory: Paige is the school’s Queen Bee and a popular cheerleader, while Alex is considered a “bad girl” from “the wrong side of the tracks.” They both have more layers to them than these stocktype categories suggest. It’s easy to interpret Paige’s attraction to Alex as directly connected to the fact that she’s different than the other girls Paige tends to associate with. A quick tumblr search reveals their ship portmanteau “Palex” is still popular to this day, and I found a few different fanfics that explicitly make use of Paige’s cheerleading uniform to erotic effect.
It’s quite easy to draw a line from Paige to Glee‘s Santana Lopez.
Across the Universe (2007)
The chokehold this Beatles-themed musical movie had on me when I was 15 and in performing arts school? Impossible to overstate. Though I was too closeted at the time to admit it, a big component of this obsession was the movie’s recontextualization of the song “I Want To Hold Your Hand” to be about a closeted cheerleader’s queer longing. Prudence holds it down for all the small-town Midwestern queerleaders out there. Played by Chinese American actress T.V. Carpio, she also stands out on this list, which incidentally tracks how a lot of on-screen portrayals of cheerleading default to whiteness. After all, queerleaders are known for being many things at once, and oftentimes characters of color are not allowed to be as complex and contradiction-laden as their white counterparts.
Jennifer’s Body (2009)
Underrated — and even maligned — at the time of its release and now accepted and celebrated as a classic after many years of cultural writing that has reconsidered and reframed the conversation around it, Jennifer’s Body is one of the best bisexual horror movies ever made. It was, by my memory, the first time I saw two women kiss on the big screen.
But even before that, Jennifer’s Body stirred within me some sort of feral animal force. It wasn’t the jumpscares or the body horror that got me; the thing that made me want to shut my eyes was the sexual tension between Needy (Amanda Seyfried) and her best friend Jennifer (Megan Fox). It was too much for my closeted self to bear. In their first scene together, Needy watches Jennifer do a routine in her cheerleading uniform — in slow motion — in the high school gym. Perhaps the slow motion is intended for the viewer’s own voyeurism, but my reading is that this is Needy’s perspective; she sees Jennifer’s body (*Beanie Feldstein voice* it’s the TITULAR ROLE) in aching, softened, sexy motion, so that’s what we see, too. She watches so closely, so intently, and with such unfiltered desire registering in her gaze that another student actually leans forward and says “you’re totally lesbi-gay.” To me, this entire moment is far more erotic than their eventual make out.
This is less a movie about cheerleading and more a movie about Jennifer turning into a flesh-eating succubus, but given that opening scene’s slowed-down, cheer uniform-clad, “lesbi-gay” iconic visuals, it’s an important film in this timeline. Jennifer’s status as a popular cheerleader is a big part of why she’s able to get close to men and subsequently kill them. She threatens natural social order at their school not because she’s maybe in love with her best friend but because she’s… a literal demon.
Fired Up! (2009)
Do I regret the hour and a half I spent watching this movie? Mostly! Was it perhaps worth it for the scene where all of the attendees of a cheer camp recite lines verbatim in unison while watching Bring It On? NOT QUITE. Fired Up! is about two football dudes who decide to go to cheerleading camp in order to up their body counts, so perhaps you will not be surprised to learn that the humor here is of the crude, bro-y sort.
The only Queerleader in this movie is a textbook example of a predatory lesbian, and I almost didn’t include it in this timeline for that reason. But I ended up wanting this exploration to feel really comprehensive and layered, and that means including the bad shit, too.
There’s a running gag in the movie that one of the airhead cheerleaders doesn’t realize the Queerleader is aggressively hitting on her. Fired Up! positions the Queerleader as an impure perversion of the cheerleader, as a stark deviation from what Fired Up! believes cheerleaders should represent. In a way, there’s even a parallel between her and the straight dude protagonists, whose proximity to cheerleading is predicated on them just wanting to have access to cheerleaders and their bodies. Only, the guys get to be the goofy and ultimately redeemable protagonists, while she remains a bit character we’re meant to think is gross.
Fired Up! came out when I was in high school, and I don’t think I saw it at the time, but this was an image of lesbianism I was very familiar with, and it’s actually this sort of casual representation of the lesbian as inherently creepy and aggressive within feminine spaces that did way more psychic damage on me than any overt examples of the lesbian as a villain or even as a killer. Remember how I wanted to shut my eyes during the opening cheerleading scene of Jennifer’s Body? It was exactly because of this; because I felt like a creep for looking at her the way Needy does.
Fun Fact: There’s a blooper reel during the credits, and in it Juliette Goglia’s Poppy — who is one of the main guy’s little sisters — actually says the word Queerleader during a runner of various alternative punchlines. It’s absolutely meant as an insult in this context, but again, I’m looking at alllllll filmic representations of this topic, baby! The good, the bad, and the ugly!
Glee (2009)
Ah, yes, if Across the Universe had a chokehold on me when I was a musical theater student in high school, well, Glee tightened that grip even more. Though about a glee club first and foremost and only sometimes about cheerleading by way of its central villain Sue Sylvester (Jane Lynch, unfortunately not playing a queerleading coach), the image that comes to mind most readily and potently when I think of Glee is this: two girls in cheerleading uniforms, holding pinkies.
Santana Lopez (Naya Rivera) and Brittany Pierce (Heather Morris) were formative queerleaders for me — and arguably they are THE Queerleaders in this timeline. The first time we ever see them kissing, they’re in bed together in their cheerleading uniforms. Those uniforms are inextricable from these characters. Brittany’s bisexuality isn’t really a source of conflict, and Santana’s whole thing is that on the surface she’s the prototypical Mean Girl trope but then there’s so much more to her. Indeed, she’s mean to just about everyone except Brittany. And they go from high school sweethearts to wives!
Fun Fact: One of the gayest things I ever did when still identifying adamantly as straight was when I wrote an “article” for a “pop culture zine” on my college campus about the merits and nuances of Santana Lopez’s coming out arc on Glee.
Hellcats (2010)
This series about college cheerleaders only ran on the CW for one season and is nearly impossible to stream these days. But during that brief run, Elena Esovolova played Patty “The Wedge” Wedgerman, an out lesbian on the squad. However, Patty only appeared in five episodes and never really got a fully fleshed out storyline. Despite having a lesbian character, there are no lesbian relationships in the series, and if anything the gayest parts actually seem to be the subtext between the show’s main characters Marti (Aly Michalka) and Savannah (Ashley Tisdale).
Apparently during a press tour in 2011, Michalka noted that Patty had been dropped from the narrative because the writers “found that it was really hard to involve her with the Hellcats and dividing all the story lines.” While supposedly Michalka noted this had nothing to do with Patty being a lesbian………….I’m not convinced. It sounds to me like another instance of the Queerleader rendered an “outsider,” and instead of that becoming a meaningful and potentially even powerful image dismantling ingrained images, it becomes an inconvenience for the writers. I genuinely enjoy lesbian subtext, but if you’re only willing to go there and not into more explicit queerness WHEN THERE IS ALREADY A LESBIAN CHARACTER AROUND, that’s a no for me.
All Cheerleaders Die (2013)
I watched this movie for the first time recently and was quite delighted by it! Is it perfect? No. But it’s fun horror trash with occasionally glimmers of brilliance. All Cheerleaders Die centers on Mäddy (Caitlin Stasey), a girl whose best friend dies during a cheerleading stunt gone wrong. (The found footage-style scene that establishes that death at the beginning of the movie is fantastic; I always love portrayals of cheerleading that acknowledge just how brutal the sport can be, which we’ll get into further down the timeline.) The following year, Mäddy joins the squad, which is very confusing to her recent ex-girlfriend Leena, who btw is a witch.
When an altercation with the football team leads to the cheerleading squad’s deaths, Leena brings them all back from the dead. The catch? They’re basically linked succubus/vampire-like creatures who have to collectively feed on men’s blood to maintain their strength. There’s body-swap shenanigans, body horror, all my favorite things. All the while, Leena seems to get a very kinky pleasure out of basically being in charge of the lives of these cheerleaders. And like a good monster lover, she lets Mäddy feed on her.
A double-feature screening of Jennifer’s Body and this movie would be very fun! I like my Queerleaders to be murderers of men!
Wynonna Earp, “Gonna Getcha Good” (2017)
In season two, episode three of the beloved sci-fi Western series Wynonna Earp, bisexual character Waverly (Dom Provost-Chalkley) dons a cheerleading costume and puts on a seductive routine for her girlfriend Nicole (Katherine Barrell). This show isn’t even a little bit about cheerleading, but this is a very important Queerleader moment in that Waverly is explicitly doing cheerleader roleplay to turn on her girlfriend. The scene directly acknowledges the erotic appeal of cheerleading for lesbians and bisexual women.
“I didn’t know if it was your thing,” Waverly says after she’s done with the cheer. Nicole’s jaw is on the floor. “Baby, that’s everybody’s thing,” she says. Which is basically my entire thesis for this piece in a nutshell.
Riverdale (2017)
Season two of Riverdale saw the official introduction of queer storylines for Cheryl Blossom (Madelaine Petsch), but some of us ahem SCHOLARS were picking up on the gay vibes emanating off of the red-haired and sharp-tongued cheerleader since basically episode one.
Indeed, Riverdale‘s pilot actually features a Queerleader moment — a kiss between Veronica (Camila Mendes) and Betty (Lili Reinhart) during their Vixens tryouts that Cheryl immediately dismisses as pandering and dated: “Faux lesbian kissing hasn’t been taboo since 1994.” But later in the series, Cheryl goes on to co-captain the Vixens with her literal girlfriend, the bisexual icon Toni Topaz (Vanessa Morgan). I strongly believe Cheryl is evidence of Santana Lopez’s lasting Queerleader impact. Here, too, is an on-the-surface Mean Girl stocktype who actually harbors a quiet vulnerability and softness in her, brought out by the fellow Queerleader she falls in love with.
In the final season of Riverdale, the characters are transported back to the 1950s and in high school again. In addition to on-and-off Vixens Betty and Veronica finally becoming canon — recontextualizing that kiss from the pilot — the series ends with Carol and Toni coming out as a couple to their fellow Vixens and a few of the other cheerleaders also coming out in response. Queerleading is inextricably baked into the wild world of Riverdale.
The Babysitter (2017)
Here’s another slight stretch, but I’m nothing if not thorough. Horror-romp The Babysitter‘s only Queerleading-adjacent moment comes when Samara Weaving’s Bee tongues Bella Thorne’s Allison during a game of spin the bottle. Allison is in her cheerleading uniform for the purposefully over-the-top make out sequence, during which Bee puts her gum in Allison’s mouth???? There’s no overt textual evidence of Allison’s bisexuality or queerness in the film — unless you count her very apparent arousal during this extended kiss, WHICH I DO??? Plus, I feel like every Bella Thorne character just radiates Bella’s own bisexuality.
We do see this slow-motion scene unfold from the perspective of an adolescent boy, so I can see how it might be viewed as a continuation of the sort of male fantasy of Queerleaders from back in those 70s movies or in modern-day porn. But the scene is also so long and so exaggerated that it actually feels like its poking fun at the voyeur and quite LITERALLY being tongue-in-cheek.
Dare Me (2019)
Yay, I get to now participate in one of my favorite hobbies: Screaming at people to watch Dare Me.
WATCH DARE ME!
No movie or show has captured the baked-in brutality of cheerleading as a sport as searingly as Dare Me, a slow-burn thriller full of blood, crunched bones, and contorted bodies. It also lives in another hyperspecific subgenre I’m drawn to: stories about toxic mentorship. In this instance, that takes the shape of a really fucked up coach-athlete dynamic. It doesn’t go the ways you think it might. But coach Colette French’s (Willa Fitzgerald) need for total control over the body and mind of Addy Hanlon (Herizen F. Guardiola) and the ways she manipulates the young girl are a true source of horror.
And that violent power dynamic never becomes overtly sexual, because queerness itself isn’t villainized in Dare Me — abuse of power is. Instead, there’s a slow-burn queer romance at the core of the show, sizzling just on the sidelines for much of the series. but ultimately hugely important for character motivation and development. Addy’s co-dependent friendship with bff Beth (Marlo Kelly) is gradually revealed to be something more. The subtext becomes bolder text in measured, scintillating increments rather than some gaudy big reveal, and it feels all the more real for that. And throughout, Dare Me explores just how dangerous and intense cheerleading itself can be, sticking up its middle finger to portrayals of the sport as something cute and fluffy. Femininity in Dare Me has sharp edges and bite.
I recently read the pilot script for Dare Me and was struck by some of the language it uses in its descriptions of actions. It describes the girls putting glitter on their faces as putting on their “cheer masks.” When a character falls, the script notes that this is what cheering really is. Here is a show that understands well the performance, risk, and almost battle-like stakes of cheerleading, which makes its exploration of Queerleading all the juicier.
Knives and Skin (2019)
A surreal psychological thriller that has been described as like if David Lynch made a teen movie without ever really living up to that admittedly alluring interpretation, Knives and Skin is a very strange movie that includes clownfucking, haunting a cappella renditions of pop songs, and strong use of color. For an experimental film, it just doesn’t quite take enough risks and could also have done with a tighter edit.
One of its many teen girl characters (the movie is largely about, among other things, the unbearable sadness threaded through girlhood) is a Queerleader named Laurel (Kayla Carter). Presumably, she’s in the closet or otherwise still figuring out her sexuality. She’s in a highly visible relationship with a boy but a shadow relationship with another girl. Even if they never officially “date,” they find a lot of homoerotic things to do together, including passing handwritten notes to each other that were kept…inside their vaginas.
The Prom (2020)
Ariana DeBose’s closeted Queerleader Alyssa is easily the best part of The Prom, a movie musical I wish I liked more! It is very heartwarming and lovely in moments, but there’s an emptiness to it that makes it almost instantly forgettable. But! Alyssa! Alyssa is a great character, and her relationship with her queerness is different than that of the film’s main character. The stakes are different for her.
Alyssa’s solo in the movie “Alyssa Greene” is all about her mother’s (Kerry Washington) molding of her into a perfect girl. She has to be beautiful and smart (“The hair has to be perfect / The As have to be straight”). She has to be the best at everything she does (“Trophies have to be first place / Ribbons have to be blue”). Cheerleading is one of the many things Alyssa has to ascribe to in order to achieve the level of perfection her mother demands and the level of perfection that ultimately buries her queerness deeper and deeper. It’s a tactic a lot of queer folks employed in our teenage years, myself included: You think there’s something “wrong” with you so you fight like hell to make everyone else see “perfection.” Her cheerleading uniform is like the rest of her life: a costume and an act. Or, maybe, armor to protect herself.
The music video for “Cheerleader” by Sir Babygirl (2020)
Queerleading-themed music videos have become a very specific canon of art, so while they technically fall outside of the realm of movies and television, I have now encountered so many that I feel they undoubtedly belong on this list.
In this example from nonbinary pop singer Sir Babygirl, the Queerleader is present in both the text of the song and its visual accompaniment — a true delight of a music video in which cheerleaders of all genders and body types lust for each other in the locker room and beyond. “Everybody wants to watch the cheerleader,” Sir Babygirl sings over it, which is basically one of the theses of this piece.
My favorite thing about this music video, though, is that queer comedic genius-freak Meg Stalter is in it as one of the many Queerleaders!
Fear Street Part One: 1994 (2021)
I find Sam to frankly be the least interesting character in the Fear Street trilogy, but she is a Queerleader! We first meet Sam (Olivia Scott Welch) in the first installment. She’s in her cheerleading uniform on the football field at Sunnyvale High, where she has recently transferred from Shadyside. Up to this point, we know protagonist Deena (Kiana Madeira) is going through a dramatic high school breakup, but we don’t know it’s of the queer variety until this moment, Sam finally dropping the facade of her picturesque performance, wrapped in the arms of a football player, to have a full-on dyke fight away from everyone else with Deena. Sam’s clearly going through it, thinking that the only way she can have a happy and healthy life is to become this textbook, idealized cheerleader-dating-a-football-player high school trope. And frankly I think Deena should let Sam figure that out on her own and date someone more secure, but teens will be teens!
The music videos for “Somebody I Fucked Once” by Zolita and “Silk Chiffon” by MUNA and Phoebe Bridgers (2021)
Two Queerleader music videos came out in 2021.
MUNA’s “Silk Chiffon” directly references and reproduces images and storylines from But I’m a Cheerleader, a cute and fun tribute that feels fitting for the bubbly queer love pop song that seemed inescapable the summer it debuted. Phoebe Bridgers also appears in the tribute.
Zolita’s take for “Somebody I Fucked Once” is arguably the campier video of the two. It’s less of a straight riff and more like a mix-and-match collage of early 2000s aesthetics, teen movie tropes, and Queerleader imagery! In it, the blonde, pink-clad cheerleader falls for the goth brunette who’s into pottery. Yes, there is a sensual pottery wheel moment! Simply put, this is the hornier of the two music videos, still bubblegum pink and corny throughout but with more teeth to it.
The main reason I wanted to include the Zolita music video is because I feel like it’s ultimately doing the same work I set out to do with this list by paying tribute to the Queerleader and recognizing her stronghold in lesbian pop culture in a way that acknowledges that, yes, some of us queer women do indeed find the mere concept of Queerleaders very sexy! The Queerleader as an erotic image does not solely belong to the realm of male fantasy. This music video gets that in the same way the scene from Wynonna Earp does.
Bring It On: Cheer or Die (2022)
This made-for-TV entry in the Bring It On universe is not very good, despite having a solid hook (a cheerleading slasher) and being the first of ANY of the Bring It On movies to be directed by a woman (how!!!!). I did say going into it “if this movie doesn’t have a Queerleader, I’m rioting.” Thankfully, it does technically deliver, even if it’s only in the most minuscule way, near the end of the movie. But sure enough, one of the members of this cheer squad harbors a secret crush on a fellow cheerleader, and instead of leaning into the predatory vibes the way Fired Up! does, we get something much more sincere and sweet. Also, as far as slashers go, I didn’t hate the killer reveal here. But no, it’s not a very good movie, so consider yourself warned. Now, someone let me write Bring It On: Queerleaders Rise.
The music videos for “Cheerleader” by Ashnikko and “Cheerleader” by Liza Anne (2023)
There are so many songs called “Cheerleader” out there by queer and trans artists! A specific sub-trend I found within this overall specific media trend.
Pansexual and genderfluid artist Ashnikko’s song “Cheerleader” makes direct references to the movie Bring It On, but the music video is decidedly more horror-leaning. In it, demonic cheerleaders do routines in the woods. The song is steeped in themes of beauty standards and gendered expectations. The music video is a Queerleader Nightmarescape.
Gay and nonbinary musician Liza Anne also has a “Cheerleader” song with a very gay music video to match. Queer makeouts happen in the locker room, in the stadium stands, and on the football field. The video recreates classic high school tropes with queer and punk aesthetics. I love that this entry also continues the niche trend of “Queerleader music videos starring queer alt comedians” established by Sir Babygirl — that’s Eva Victor making out with Liza Anne the whole time!
Bottoms (2023)
Ah, yes, my personal movie of the summer for 2023. My Queerleader north star. The feature film Bottoms.
Directed by Emma Seligman, Bottoms is the latest Queerleader movie to grace our timeline, and it is quite the gem! In it, best friends Josie (Ayo Edebiri) and PJ (Rachel Sennot, who co-wrote the movie with Seligman) start a fight club at their high school in order to woo hot cheerleaders Isabel (Havana Rose Liu) and Brittany (Kaia Gerber) into getting physical with them.
I found myself often thinking about 2009’s Fired Up! while watching the movie, as both belong to the genre of raunchy teen comedy. Whereas teen straight boys pretend to be cheerleaders in that movie in order to up their body count, here we have a movie about teen lesbians pretending to have gone to juvie and know how to fight in order to up their body count. Whereas the only lesbian or lesbian-coded character in that movie is very minor and is portrayed as a joke and a creep, here we have two lesbian protagonists whose queerness isn’t a joke but who are, indeed, kind of creeps! I think this comparison and deep dive into contextualizing Bottoms within the history of teen sex comedies rendering lesbians as predators deserves an entire separate essay from this timeline (at some point, I imagine there being an Appendix to this article). But what I’ll say for now is that while it might be controversial for some, I am delighted by the ways Bottoms doesn’t eschew those damaging tropes we see crop up in a movie like Fired Up! but rather lean in to the idea of manipulative queer teens and yet in a way that doesn’t ultimately feel homophobic but rather just true to horndog teenagehood in general.
During my research, I did not encounter any specifically trans representations of Queerleaders outside of the music videos, suggesting that even queer representations of cheerleaders come with rigid assumptions about gender, girlhood, and who gets to be a cheerleader. This was a disappointing finding. I’m glad music videos, at least, are holding it down for nonbinary and trans interpretations and visualizations of the trope.
Clearly, the Queerleader isn’t going anywhere — the character’s appeal is vast and lasting. Some stories use her to reinforce social rules and roles, some to subvert them. The built-in homoerotics of the sport makes it a terrific playground for lesbian activity, but it’s also the sheer position of the cheerleader as this mythical symbol of perfection and heightened femininity that makes it so enticing to inject queerness. The Queerleader is much more than a sex symbol, but at the same time, the character’s potential for distinctly lesbian erotics cannot be denied!
If you think there’s anything I’ve missed, please let me know! I love an excuse to watch Queerleading movies for my job, and as I’ve demonstrated, I want this to be as comprehensive as possible! I know cheerleading is distinctly American but any international movies I should check out? Let me know!
“And Just Like That” Didn’t Need Che
At the Dyke March this year, former gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon took pictures with fans.
Her magnetic celebrity wasn’t because she almost spared us more years of Andrew Cuomo or because she once performed in two different — TWO DIFFERENT — Broadway shows at the same time — AT THE SAME TIME. No, these dykes wanted pictures because Cynthia Nixon is Miranda Hobbes.
To me, making Miranda gay was the raison d’etre for a Sex and the City reboot. Not only did Miranda always seem gay, but after the end of the original series, Nixon herself came out and started dating her now-wife Christine Marinoni. A lot of reboots in recent years have acted as apologies as much as continuations. But making Miranda queer wouldn’t feel forced — it was a natural adjustment to the original’s fraught relationship with queerness. This plotline was ready-made for a fun and modern take on coming out late in life.
Instead we got Che Diaz.
Enough words have been written about Che Diaz — on Twitter, in online publications, even in print. From “comedy concerts” to “strong enby person,” Che Diaz and their storylines have gifted us some of the reboot’s most painful and unrealistic dialogue. Che is less a queer fuckboi comic who seduces Miranda out of the closet, and more the creation of an AI chatbot that has only read the GLAAD website.
This season addressed the criticisms by sometimes appearing in on the joke that Che is a bad person and a worse comic. They even went as far as having Che receive bad test group responses for their sitcom. And yet, the show was still unwilling to let Che be a full villain. To write a good villain, you need to write a good character. As fun as it can be to hate-watch them, Che is not a good character.
The most notable event this season for Che — and Che’s position on the show — is that they break up with Miranda. This frees Miranda to have the chaotic queer dating storylines we always deserved. I’m watching And Just Like That to see Miranda step in her date’s cat litter, not to receive empty speeches about nonbinary acceptance.
But as Miranda starts to date, a pattern emerges. While she only gets two potential love interests, both are cis white women who are her age and her body type. There’s even an episode where she laments her queer confusion, questioning whether she wants to date women now. Of course, on-screen and in life, queer confusion is common upon first coming out. But there’s something about the way it’s written that implies dating nonbinary Che was itself an expression of confusion.
Actually funny trans comedian Nori Reed tweeted yesterday: “Omg I just realized that they created Che as a narrative device to transition Miranda’s sexuality from dating men to dating women…”
This feels obvious after the finale. Not only does the season leave her out for drinks with one of those cis women, but she tells her ex Steve she’s never going back to men. Maybe she’ll date more nonbinary people in future seasons, but for now the show leaves us with Miranda as a lesbian on a date with a cis British woman who works for the BBC. I hope she isn’t on Mumsnet.
Where I disagree with Nori is her next tweet that says nonbinary people aren’t used as a bridge. I actually think it’s very realistic that Miranda would use Che this way. I’m not even nonbinary and I’ve been used this way. (I made a movie about these complicated feelings!) Cis people are often drawn to trans people because of what they view as an overt queerness. But once we’ve helped them discover that part of themselves, they retreat to a more normative gay life.
The problem isn’t that Miranda used Che — the problem is the show itself did, too. The show used Che to teach their audience about queerness, to seem hip due to a misguided idea that transness is new. They didn’t take the time — or have the ability — to make Che a real person who could stand on their own.
Post-breakup closure it feels like an easy choice to write Che and Sara Ramirez off the show. There’s another world where Che’s solo storylines could be good — or, if not good, the fun kind of bad like the rest of the show.
Nonbinary people are not a bridge toward gayness; they are not a stepping stone. Trans people aren’t a curiosity or a representation of overt queerness. We’re people. And the best writing of us on-screen understands that.
And Just Like That didn’t need Che. It could have looked to real life and had Miranda fall for a masc of center cis woman her own age. But, hey, it’s not too late. With Gen Q and A League of Their Own canceled, I hear Rosie O’Donnell is available.
Revisiting Some of the Most Sapphic Moments in Riverdale History
Tonight, Riverdale ends its seven-season run. You can expect a review of the series finale by yours truly tomorrow, but for now, I wanted to reflect on some of the most homoerotic moments in the show’s history. This is a show that delivered us gorgeous lines of poetry like “I’ll lock this saucy sapphic wench in the chapel if you’re not back within an hour with the vicar!” I will miss it dearly.
Earlier this week, I presented 10 essential episodes to revisit during Riverdale‘s final week. Some of those episodes contain scenes that I’ll revisit below, delving deeper into specific Sapphic scenes and images that are forever emblazoned in my brain. Let’s take a walk down gay memory lane, shall we?
This list is long, but it is far from exhaustive, because let’s be real, from meaningful looks to instances of intimate touch or sexual tension, Riverdale‘s Sapphic moments are too numerous to round up in one place!
Betty and Veronica kiss, Chapter One: The River’s Edge
Fans have a range of ambivalent feelings about this kiss, which is technically a stunt Veronica initiates during cheerleading tryouts in the pilot when Cheryl accuses Betty and Veronica of being too boring. “Check your sell-by date, ladies, faux lesbian kissing hasn’t been taboo since 1994,” Cheryl replies, calling out the performative nature of the kiss.
But was it really just an act? I think the sexualities and desires of Riverdale‘s main characters — including the core four of Archie, Jughead, Betty, and Veronica — have always been more complex than initially meets the eye. The kiss could be viewed as textbook queerbaiting. But an alternative reading, and one I prefer, is that Veronica was acting on a genuine desire in a way that felt accessible to her. I think of the Carmen Maria Machado essay on Jennifer’s Body, bisexuality, and what arguments about queerbaiting sometimes miss. She writes:
I went to college in 2004. I saw so many allegedly straight girls kissing each other at frat parties it would’ve made you want to burn down an Abercrombie & Fitch. Sometimes it was stiff and strange and sometimes it was organic, and yet far be it from me to say who really wanted what, or if the kiss itself wasn’t a gateway, or if one of them (or both!) wouldn’t be wrist-deep in a date in twelve years’ time. People always talked cynically about this gesture as if men were the reason, but it felt like no one ever considered that men were the excuse.
Machado goes on to quote José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia: “We can understand queerness itself as being filled with the intention to be lost. To accept loss is to accept the way in which one’s queerness will always render one lost to a world of heterosexual imperatives, codes, and laws . . . [to] veer away from heterosexuality’s path.” “A girl kissing her best friend,” Machado writes, “because she wants to see how it feels, because she’s curious, because a boy is nearby, because she’s in love, because she once bent her mouth to her best friend’s bleeding hand in supplication and this just feels like the next logical step — is the acceptance of loss, the veering from the path. No matter where she goes afterward.”
I’m sure you did not expect me to quote queer theory in a piece about Riverdale‘s gayest moments, but here we are! Is this Betty/Veronica kiss all an act or is it an acting out of real desires? There aren’t even boys present for it; the kiss is for Cheryl, a character who eventually does come out as queer. And then, in season seven, we see Betty become lost in queer fantasies about Veronica over and over, further cementing the idea that there’s something more to their friendship, even if it’s never explicitly explored. But we’ll get to that later.
Also, shortly after they kiss, there’s a close up of Veronica zipping Betty into her cheerleading uniform that reads as another instance of physical intimacy, further complicating that kiss. A lot of the locker room scenes on this show ping as homoerotic — including for the boys.
It also feels significant that Veronica and Betty’s arc in the pilot hits a lot of the same beats as Veronica and Archie’s arc. Veronica is the new girl at school, and she instantly has chemistry with both Archie and Betty — and, in some ways, that chemistry with Betty is actually more potent and narratively significant.
Cheryl does Betty’s makeup, Chapter Two: A Touch of Evil
Yes, technically Cheryl is just cozying up to Betty to get intel on Polly, and yes, the Cheryl/Veronica dance-off is the more overtly homoerotic moment of this episode, but Cheryl is practically straddling Betty as she pumps her for information. Also, doing another girl’s makeup is theeeee classic closeted femme tradition. It was such an easy and socially acceptable way to touch another girl or be touched by her intimately. There are a lot of ways Cheryl could have chosen to interrogate Betty; the fact that she specifically chooses this? She didn’t have to make it this intimate! As such, this early scene was one of the first times when I personally clocked that Cheryl could be queer, and I made sure to tell anyone who would listen. I’m so glad I eventually turned out to be correct!!
Sure, eventually we find out these two are cousins, but we don’t know that yet! And Polly and Jason being distant cousins didn’t prevent them from being a romantic pairing on the show SO. The fact that a sign literally says LOVE behind them really drives home the gay optics of this scene.
Veronica reacts to the first appearance of Dark Betty, Chapter Three: Body Double
I always wished Riverdale would do a little more with “Dark Betty,” but her first appearance remains iconic. Veronica and Betty team up to take down bad guy Chuck. And not only do we see Chuck’s reaction to Betty waltzing into the pool house in a black bra and brown bob, but we see it unfold through Veronica’s gaze as well. Her reaction is ambiguous; there’s fear and curiosity there. It also feels worth noting that Betty’s bob actually makes her look more like Veronica, and this doubling/emulation in and of itself feels very queer.
Cheryl brings Polly to prom, Chapter Eleven: To Riverdale and Back Again
Enemies-turned-co-conspirators Cheryl and Polly decide not only to attend prom together but to also run as co-queens. (Cheryl running with someone as prom co-queens will become a Riverdale tradition.) First Betty, now Polly: Cheryl Blossom simply loves to do a Cooper girl’s makeup.
Betty threatens Cheryl and they both seem very into it, Chapter Fifteen: Nighthawks
Another homoerotic locker room moment! Betty threatens Cheryl, and Cheryl seems both afraid and…aroused? It’s never when Cheryl and Betty are getting along that they seem queer; it’s always when they’re menacing each other.
Toni comes out as bisexual, Chapter Nineteen: Death Proof
After hooking up with Jughead, Toni tells him she’s not interested in being his post-Betty rebound and throws in a bit about how she’s more into girls anyway. By this point, the show already had out queer characters like Kevin and Moose. But this was the first explicit textual queer line for a woman on the show. And what a thrilling moment it was!
Cheryl and Toni have a Grease moment, Chapter Nineteen: Death Proof
In the same episode where we learn Toni is bisexual, we also get this brief but powerful Grease cosplay moment between Cheryl and Toni, during which Toni very clearly eyes Cheryl up and down! As usual, Cheryl’s best and most compelling chemistry usually has a bit of venom to it. She loves an enemies to lovers trajectory.
Betty flexes her auto-repair skills, Chapter Nineteen: Death Proof
Yes, this episode gets three shoutouts on this list, but it feels right that Riverdale‘s Grease-inspired chapter is rife with bisexual subtext and text. Every once in a while, Betty Cooper likes to remind us she’s an amateur car mechanic. And every time, I’m like: Just come out as bi already, Betty!
Cheryl sketches a portrait of her and Josie, Chapter Twenty: Tales from the Darkside
I know some folks have mixed feelings about the reveal that Cheryl is Josie’s stalker who left a pig heart in her locker, as it could be seen as playing into stereotypes about queer women as predators or a pathologization of the closet (Cheryl isn’t out at this point, but she comes out just seven episodes later). But I think it makes a lot of sense on a character level that Cheryl might have confusing and even disturbing ideas about what intimacy looks like. After the traumatic death of her brother (at the hands of her father), the abuse from her mother, and her tendency to push others away, she doesn’t have a great grasp on what healthy relationships look like. Whether she’s experiencing romantic feelings for Josie that scare her or just developing an obsession rooted in her own fractured sense of identity and intimacy, Cheryl’s fixation on Josie here feels distinctly queer, even if it’s also potentially toxic.
Something I talk about a lot is how it’s easy to make really self-destructive and damaging choices when we’re closeted. I see this as a complicated example of that rather than an implication that Cheryl’s dangerous or predatory due to latent queerness.
Cheryl comes out, Chapter Twenty-Seven: The Hills Have Eyes
After a screening of Love, Simon at the town theater (literally!), Cheryl Blossom comes out to Toni over milkshakes, making all of my dreams come true! I received so many texts on the evening this episode aired, and I wish I could bottle and preserve the sheer elation I experienced at the confirmation that a character I was obsessed with and also knew in my heart was queer was indeed very queer.
Cheryl tells Toni all about her best friend Heather, who she loved in junior high. When her mother Penelope caught them in the same bed together, she called Cheryl a deviant. Love, Simon plugs aside, it’s a moving coming out scene!
Toni supports Cheryl at her dead dad’s public will reading, Chapter Twenty-Eight: There Will Be Blood
Almost immediately after coming out to her, Cheryl starts spending A LOT of time with Toni. In fact, it almost seems like Toni moves in with her right away? They’re maybe not officially dating yet, but I think inviting a girl to the public reading of your evil dead father’s secret will basically counts as going steady! Also, Toni helps Cheryl pick out a sexy outfit to wear before the two are interrupted by homophobic Penelope. But even Penelope’s ire is just further proof that something very gay is going on here.
Cheryl’s lesbian hairplay slumberparty, Chapter Twenty-Nine: Primary Colors
There are actually too many homoerotic hairplay sequences on this show to count, but this line of hair brushing at Cheryl’s requisite slumber party easily takes the cake as the #1 in that specific subgenre of queer images. Though they happen off screen, we also learn that this sleepover — which again, Cheryl tells the other girls is mandatory — features “parlor games.” It’s easy to imagine some of the games having a sensual bend to them, especially given the setting of Thistlehouse, Cheryl’s gothic manor that replaces her ancestral home that she burned to the ground as an act of revenge against her mother. It’s the perfect setting for some gothic-tinged queer activity!!! They all pretty much look like they’re doing vampirecore here.
Unfortunately, this episode does end with Penelope sending Cheryl to conversion therapy at the town’s evil nunnery, and Riverdale ends up biting off way more than it can chew with that storyline. But we’ll always have hairbrush train!
Cheryl and Toni’s first kiss, Chapter Thirty: The Noose Tightens
Toni, Kevin, and Veronica (dressed in a catsuit!) break into the conversion therapy facility where Cheryl is trapped and get her the hell out. Toni and Cheryl kiss for the first time. I have mixed feelings about this kiss! I have mixed feelings about this conversion therapy storyline in general, especially because it’s revealed that out gay character Kevin knows about it but doesn’t seem to care that much?
Also, while there’s something lovely about the glow of the movie projector behind Toni and Cheryl as they’re kissing, the fact that their first kiss is only really seen in silhouette is a little frustrating. There’s a level of remove to it — just look how shadowy that screenshot is. It’s like you can barely see who’s kissing, and when you compare that to even the “fake” kiss between Betty and Veronica in the pilot, this kiss just lacks the closeness and emphasis of that one. Cheryl has so many big, bold, and literally colorful sequences on the show — the fact that this kiss is so dark and obscured feels wrong.
I love Choni a lot; I don’t say any of this to disparage the ship. I just sometimes feel as if some of Riverdale‘s most compelling queer moments are somewhat subtextual, whereas some of its actually explicit queer storytelling can feel less developed and more like instances of tokenizing queerness. Also, immediately after this kiss, subsequent episodes really didn’t show Cheryl and Toni interact very much at all, and a Choni number was even cut from the first musical episode, which aired right after this one. Queer viewers got a kiss and then…not a whole lot for several episodes! You would think Cheryl and Toni would especially have a lot to talk about after Toni rescued her from conversion therapy.
Cheryl saves Toni with her bow & arrow, Chapter Thirty-Four: Judgment Night
Now it’s Cheryl’s turn to save Toni! She dons Little Red Riding Hood drag and threatens villain Penny Peabody at arrow point, delivering a great Cheryl one-liner in the process: “Untie her, you Serpent hag.”
Toni tells Cheryl they should make it official, Chapter Thirty-Five: Brave New World
By “make it official,” Toni means Cheryl becoming a Southside Serpent. But it can easily be read with a double meaning of also making their relationship official. Cheryl also gets her own custom red Serpents jacket, and joinging your girlfriend’s gang is definitely an important part of defining the relationship.
Cheryl lets the gang know she spent the summer riding on a motorcycle cross-country with Toni, Chapter Thirty-Six: Labor Day
In the season three premiere, Cheryl makes a grand entrance by walking into Pop’s in slow-motion and wearing her new red Serpents jacket, a red bra, no shirt, and jean short shorts. She tells the core four she spent the entire summer riding around the country on the back of Toni’s motorcycle. I wish we could have seen footage of this, but alas!
Young Alice gleefully beats up Young Penelope, Chapter Thirty-Nine: The Midnight Club
I’m a big fan of this flashback episode of Riverdale in which the younger cast all play teen versions of the show’s adult characters. Lili Reinhart is especially great in the episode as a younger version of Alice Cooper, a bad girl from the Southside. She’s positively HORNY for the cat fight she instigates with young Penelope, and it’s delightful to watch.
Cheryl asks Toni to move in with her, Chapter Forty-Three: Outbreak
After a frightening opening when Toni collapses at Vixens practice, Cheryl brings her home to Thistlehouse to recuperate and then asks her to move in with her. I want to enjoy this moment more, but season three really drives home just how differently Cheryl and Toni are treated as a couple than a lot of the other romantic pairings on the show. We rarely see them kiss, never see them have sex, and now they’re moving in together? Toni says she wants to be the big spoon, which actually makes me think Toni might be the bottom, but I digress!
Early on in the arc of Choni, it felt like the couple was rendered both too chaste and too adult. We don’t really get to see the same brand of steamy teenage love between them that we get to see with the others. They mostly just wear coordinated outfits and appear in scenes near each other, sometimes touching sometimes not, and aren’t really developed fully as a couple on an emotional level or a sexual one — which only stands out because the show is so horny in so many other ways!
Jughead’s hot mom appears, Chapter Forty-Three: Outbreak
I’d be remiss not to also mention this scene from “Outbreak”: Meeting Jughead’s hot mean mom, played by Gina Gershon. Listen, she’s never officially established as a queer character, but we meet her as she’s literally welding.
Cheryl and Toni get off on stealing from the rich, Chapter Forty-Four: No Exit
This episode picks up after a one-month time jump, and Jughead’s signature narration catches us up on the lives of all the characters. Archie is living his best flannel lesbian life at a cabin in the mountains with his dog. And Cheryl and Toni are taking their relationship to the next level: regularly dressing in catsuits and stealing from Riverdale’s richest townspeople. How do they celebrate said victories? By having sex on a bed covered in cash, naturally. We cut away before we see much, but this feels like the first Choni sex scene, brief as it may be. And I love that it happens right at the start of the episode. More episodes of television should start with gay sex.
Cheryl and Toni being rapturously gay together, Chapter Forty-Seven: Bizarrodale
Toni has fully moved into Thistlehouse, and here we have her and Cheryl in post-coital bliss. Is Cheryl’s flannel over a red lacey bra a little on-the-nose? Sure. But it was great to finally see these two experiencing an actual intimate moment, especially as they were glaringly left out of the previous episode, which emulated noir and would have been a great chance for a Bound-esque Choni homage.
This scene is followed by the couple’s first real fight, sparked by Cheryl intentionally outing Moose during morning announcements. After coming out, Cheryl is able to be her more authentic self, but she doesn’t shed her mean girl tendencies, and we see that surface here. Toni opens up to her about how she was rejected by her uncle for liking girls and why that’s a big part of her joining the Serpents, who provided a support network. Cheryl then surprises Toni at the end of the episode with…
Cheryl gifts Toni a gay girl gang, Chapter Forty-Seven: Bizarrodale
I don’t think it’s ever explicitly stated that the Pretty Poisons — the girl gang led by Toni and Cheryl — are all queer, but I mean look at them!!!!
Cheryl teaches the Pretty Poisons archery, Chapter Forty-Eight: Requiem for a Welterweight
Cheryl jumps all the way into being a gang mom, teaching her Pretty Poisons how to nail targets with their bows and training them to be her little Sapphic army. She does not take it well when Toni informs her that Jughead referred to the Poisons as her vanity project. And the Pretty Poisons actually fully beat up Sweet Pea and Fangs in the episode, which Toni isn’t thrilled about but kinda rules tbh!
This tension between Cheryl and Toni about how to run the Poisons (Cheryl wants them to be gay, do crimes and Toni wants them to just sort of…be a family? idk) drives a wedge into their relationship. In the following episode, Cheryl actually asks Toni to move out. To be fair, they moved in together way too quickly! Especially given the fact that they are teenagers!
Cheryl and Toni process their breakup via song and dance, Chapter Fifty-One: Big Fun
The series’ second musical episode makes up for the fact that the first cut its Choni number by spotlighting Cheryl and Toni’s dramatic breakup. Toni considers having a rebound threesome with Sweet Pea and Peaches, one of the Pretty Poisons. At the last second, she decides she doesn’t actually want that, and she has a real conversation with Cheryl about what’s going on between them. Cheryl admits that her idea of love has been poisoned by her family, which was all or nothing when it came to their love.
By the end of the episode, they’re back together. The power of musicals!
Toni distracts Cheryl from The Farm via sex, Chapter Fifty-Three: Jawbreaker
In addition to becoming a gang mom in season three, Cheryl also becomes embroiled in a cult when they convince her Jason is alive. Desperate to cling to the memories of her dead brother, Cheryl loses herself to The Farm. Toni doesn’t know how to best support her girlfriend, but she knows The Farm is bad news. She attempts to distract Cheryl from the cult by making moves on her, and it almost works! Cheryl misses a cult meeting. But unfortunately, she’s only pulled in deeper when asked to choose between Toni and The Farm. Classic cult tactics! Toni then also decides to join The Farm so she can stay close to Cheryl.
Cheryl and Toni run for co-prom queens, Chapter Fifty-Five: Prom Night
Like I said, Cheryl loves a co-queen moment! Betty Cooper ultimately wins prom queen this time around, but we aat least get Cheryl and Toni dancing together in their dependably over-the-top prom looks.
Veronica, Cheryl, and Toni perform “All That Jazz”, Chapter Fifty-Nine: Fast Times at Riverdale High
Honestly, I could include most of Riverdale‘s musical numbers on this list. Not only does this series deliver several actual musical episodes, but it also just loves a random musical interlude dropped into the middle of an episode. And even though sometimes the thematic underpinnings of the songs chosen are a bit of a stretch on a narrative level, these sequences always feature very Sapphic, very erotic choreography.
Cheryl and Toni conspire to push evil Blossoms out of their home under the threat of cannibalism, Chapter Sixty-Four: The Ice Storm
Cheryl and Toni’s relationship takes a twisted turn in season four when Cheryl gaslights Toni by making her believe their house is being haunted by her dead brother. There are clear reasons for Cheryl’s behavior throughout the season — namely, long-festering familial trauma — but that doesn’t make them excusable. I found myself rooting against Cheryl and Toni in season four, and that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. I preferred this messy, troubling storytelling to the stretches of season three when they just didn’t have real, meaningful storylines at all. The problems in their relationship were what made the relationship interesting to me.
A pair of evil Blossoms arrive at Thistlehouse, and Cheryl and Toni eventually have to scare them off by making them believe they’ve eaten human meat pies. It’s a devilish trick, and it’s nice to see our girls up to their old habits of being gay, doing crimes together. But Cheryl’s unhealthy coping mechanisms are worsening at this point in the series. And even though she and Toni still connect on a sexual level, there’s a ton of disarray in their relationship emotionally.
Hermosa, Toni, and Cheryl on the dance floor, Chapter Seventy: The Ides of March
Veronica’s secret sister Hermosa arrives in season four to shake things up. She attempts to spy on Cheryl and Veronica’s burgeoning rum business, but Toni and Cheryl are onto her. They dance with her, but it’s less about seduction and more about DECEPTION. Which is even hotter, in a way. Again, Cheryl and Toni are at their best when scheming.
Archie’s mom gets a girlfriend, Chapter Seventy-One: How to Get Away with Murder
Listen, Mary Andrews is not who I predicted might be Riverdale‘s first queer mom, but here we are! Every time I rewatch season one, I become convinced something happened between Hermione Lodge and Alice Cooper when they were teens, but alas, nothing officially comes to fruition in that regard. Instead, we get Archie’s mom awkwardly introducing Archie to her new girlfriend. Good for you, Mrs. Andrews!
Cheryl and Toni — at last — are prom queens, Chapter Seventy-Seven: Climax
All of Cheryl’s gay co-prom queen dreams finally come true in the season five finale, but it’s a bittersweet conclusion to Riverdale‘s last prom. Cheryl learns Toni’s family doesn’t approve of their relationship — not because of their queerness, but because Cheryl is a Blossom, and her ancestors are responsible for the genocide in Riverdale that still affects Toni’s family to this day. That is…all very understandable! But even though Riverdale has a teen soap format, this feels like such a huge bomb to drop on its central queer relationship out of nowhere. For much of season four leading up to this, it was as if the writers only knew how to make Choni sexy or traumatized. Those were the only two options for most of their scenes together. As I wrote at the time: We got co- queer prom queens, but at what cost?
They don’t break up right away, and Cheryl sets herself on a path to try to distance herself from the bloody Blossom legacy. But then two episodes later, they do break up. And even though it’s a conclusion that makes sense for them at this point in the series, like much of the Choni arc from season three to now, it feels unevenly plotted.
Toni’s serpent dance, Chapter Eighty: Purgatorio
Riverdale famously time-jumps after its graduation episode in season five. Suddenly, all the characters are seven years older and have moved away from Riverdale. Except for Toni. She’s the Serpent Queen now, still lives in town, works at the high school, performs at the local speakeasy, is a graduate of Highsmith College (both a riff on Smith College and a shoutout to lesbian author Patricia Highsmith), and is pregnant! Her sexy pregnancy Serpent dance is very important to me! This is also a turning point in the series for Toni as a more fleshed out and central character on the show. At long last!
Cheryl also still lives in Riverdale, but the two have grown distant as Cheryl has lived a mostly reclusive life and believes herself to be cursed never to experience happiness due to her family’s violent past. She mostly does oil paintings now. It’s all very lesbi-gothic.
Toni brings back the Vixens, Chapter Eighty-Two: Back to School
Toni Topaz dons her own version of ex-girlfriend Cheryl’s iconic HBIC shirt, and just like that becomes Riverdale‘s top queerleader.
Toni makes Cheryl prove herself with a dance-off, Chapter Eighty-Three: Fire in the Sky
Toni and Cheryl’s new frenemy-exes dynamic in season five is a welcome development! It’s tense; it’s sexy; it’s very queer. Riverdale‘s dance-offs are some of my favorite moments on the show (the original Veronica x Cheryl one remains my favorite), and Toni knows she’s making a power play here. This results in them deciding to share the Vixens. Again, peak queerleader activity!
Cheryl gifts Toni a baby nursery in New Thornhill, Chapter Eighty-Four: Lock & Key
Here’s the problem though: Toni never asked for this gothic nursery. Cheryl asks Toni to move into her manor after freaking out about the fact that Toni is having a baby with Fangs and Kevin. Instead of supporting her ex-girlfriend in this journey toward building a nontraditional queer family, Cheryl acts out and reverts back to old patterns. The crux of this episode is that Cheryl is throwing a key party for all the old friends, but I wish it delivered more steaminess with this premise! Instead, we mostly get queer angst. But I’ll take that, too. And fear not, because…
Cheryl kisses Minerva the art dealer, Chapter Eighty-Four: Lock & Key
They key party may be a bust, but shortly after, Cheryl smooches up on Minerva, the art dealer she has been working with (and also scamming…Cheryl’s latest be gay, do crimes endeavor is counterfeiting artwork).
Cheryl and Minerva harvest some sweet sap, Chapter Eighty-Six: The Pincushion Man
And no, it isn’t a euphemism! They frolic through the woods on their way to harvest some maple syrup, but when they arrive at a tree, it doesn’t produce anything. Cheryl’s Nana says it’s because of the Blossom curse. Maple won’t come if Cheryl is happy. The episode ends with the Blossom women suggesting they might need to sacrifice Minerva to break the curse, but she runs away before anything too macabre can happen. Talk about a dramatic lesbian breakup!
Melody has a girlfriend, Chapter Ninety-One: The Return of the Pussycats
Josie McCoy and her Pussycats return to Riverdale! Josie split off to pursue a solo career, and meanwhile Melody became a published author AND got a girlfriend. Statistically, it seemed certain that at least one of the Pussycats had to be queer.
Just everything about this episode, Chapter Ninety-Nine: The Witching Hour(s)
It’d be impossible to pick just one or even just three moments from this episode of Riverdale to highlight. The entire episode is a three-timeline Sapphic saga about queer witches from the Blossom bloodline through the ages. This episode was part of Riverdale‘s experimental five-episode run known as Rivervale, all leading up to the show’s 100th episode. The five episodes take place in a pocket universe of Riverdale‘s main universe and explicitly takes the show into a supernatural space. This installment is also a crossover event with Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.
Madelaine Petsch plays Abigail Blossom (1892), Poppy Blossom (1957), and Cheryl Blossom (present day), three Blossom women with interlocking queer stories through the centuries. Abigail has a secret lover in Thomasina, an ancestor of Toni of course. Poppy, meanwhile, runs a women’s group in the 50s and strikes up an illicit affair with married housewife Bitsy, played by Lili Reinhart.
The episode has horror, romance, and a ton of fun aesthetic details to flesh out the three settings. But most importantly, it’s queer as fuck. Cheryl comes from a long line of queer women with cursed love lives. Inherited trauma is kind of Cheryl’s whole thing, so that feels right.
Cheryl receives letters from Heather, Chapter One Hundred and Seven: In the Fog
Let’s just say that things get a little weird in season six of Riverdale — yes, even by this show’s wild standards! Cheryl learns she’s pyrokinetic, and she tortures her mother in this episode using her powers. Before Cheryl is finally able to banish her mother for good, Penelope presents a final peace offering. Remember how Cheryl came out to Toni by telling her about her best friend from junior high who moved away after Penelope drove them apart? Apparently, she wrote Cheryl a series of love letters after moving, and Cheryl’s wicked mom kept the letters from her this whole time.
The pain of Cheryl’s past surfaces in such a gutting way here, and it’s a strikingly grounded scene amid all the supernatural chaos of the season. There are times when Cheryl’s arc feels overly tragic, but I think that works best in zoomed-in, fleshed-out moments like this where the emotional stakes are so raw and real.
Heather arrives at Thornhill, Chapter One Hundred and Nine: Venomous
Cheryl’s past comes crashing into her present when Heather arrives at her doorstep. And guess what! She’s a witch!
Heather and Cheryl kiss, Chapter One Hundred and Twelve: American Psychos
Cheryl gets to act on her young, closeted queer desires that her mother tried so hard to stomp out of her in the back half of season six, when she and Heather pair doing witchcraft together with doing makeouts together. The witchy Sapphic vibes of Riverdale always felt like part of its fabric, but that becomes very literal in season six.
Heather casts a spell so that Abigail Blossom and Thomasina Topaz can be together in Cheryl and Toni’s bodies, Chapter One Hundred and Seventeen: Night of the Comet
Yes, you read all of that correctly! This is honestly one of my favorite queer hookups in Riverdale history. Body-swapping, time-traveling, witchcraft — it’s so wonderfully over-the-top and matches the tone of the season, whereas sometimes past queer hookup scenes felt disconnected from the central narrative of the show. All television shows should get continuously queerer over time, and Riverdale does exactly that. By the time the show’s final season hits, it almost seems like everyone is queer.
New queer character Lizzo arrives in 1955, Chapter One Hundred and Nineteen: Skip, Hop, and Thump!
The comet that hits at the end of season six triggers a cosmic event that sends the Riverdale characters back in time to the 1950s and also ages them down to teens again. Consequently, Cheryl and Kevin go back into the closet, which I have mixed feelings about. But we also meet a new queer character in Lizzo, who taunts Toni for going for the “straight-laced, square girls.”
Toni and Cheryl fantasy-makeout, Chapter One Hundred and Nineteen: Skip, Hop, and Thump!
This episode also features a “makeout party” hosted by 1950s-ified Veronica. In a fantasy sequence, Cheryl and Toni act on their desires for each other, even if Cheryl isn’t ready to do so in their real lives. The things this final season is doing with fantasy and repressed desire are really intriguing!
Cheryl and Toni repeat the…future, Chapter One Hundred Twenty-Five: Hoop Dreams
History begins to repeat itself with Cheryl and Toni’s arc in the 1950s…or, history begins to repeat…the future? Sometimes time travel storylines hurt my head. But the characters on Riverdale don’t remember their lives before the comet, so I suppose it’s more like they’ve been rebooted entirely.
Betty fantasizes about Veronica, Chapter One Hundred Twenty-Six: Betty & Veronica Double Digest
Betty’s arc in season seven largely concerns her struggles to understand herself sexually. She fantasizes about sex constantly — with all of her peers, including Veronica. These bisexual desires, even though they’re expressed entirely in a fantasy space, make for some of the most intricate queer storytelling the show has ever done. I’ve written a lot of words about it this summer. And it even made me reconsider that kiss from the pilot. Here’s some of what I wrote about this Betty storyline:
Sure, the show does have openly queer characters, even in this 1950s timeline, insinuating that if Betty is queer, she could just act on it more explicitly. The way Cheryl does, the way Toni does, the way Kevin does. But there isn’t a one-size-fits-all arc when it comes to queerness. And in some ways, I’m more personally drawn to Betty’s storyline in season seven than I have been to any queer storyline on the series that came before. Cheryl represents a queer youth I never had but wish I did. Betty represents the repressed queer youth I did have and, on some level, regret, even if it was out of my control.
Betty and Veronica choose each other instead of Archie, Chapter One Hundred Thirty-One: Archie the Musical
Riverdale‘s final musical episode opts for original music, and Kevin has Betty and Veronica sing a love song. The episode initially sets things up as if they’re going to fight over Archie, but Betty and Veronica reject that storyline in favor of this one. It feels like a deliberate confrontation of the love triangle set up in the pilot.
Once again, Betty and Veronica kiss in a fantasy sequence. Again, the fact that it’s imagined makes it actually feel more real. So many characters are exploring possible bisexuality in this season — even Archie and Reggie.
The Cost of Pepper, Chapter One Hundred Thirty-Three: Stag
A couple times in season seven, we see a copy of The Cost of Pepper, a spoof of The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith. In the episode “Stag,” Toni and Cheryl do an entire boudoir photoshoot together that prominently features the novel, and it’s peak Sapphic camp in a way only this show is capable of pulling off.
I mean, let’s be real, there’s a lot of queer shenanigans going on this episode largely about the characters discovering porn for the first time. Betty and Veronica also eagerly want to watch porn together — you know, as friends!
Cheryl teaches Betty to masturbate, Chapter One Hundred Thirty-Four: A Different Kind of Cat
Cheryl helps a pal out by introducing Betty to the wonders of self-pleasure. She’s really channeling Poppy Blossom by spreading sexual liberation to her fellow 1950s girlies! See, there are some good things about Blossom blood!
Cheryl also loans Betty a copy of Femme and In magazine, a feminist and lesbian mag she and Toni are fans of, and Betty brings it into the tub with her for a masturbation sesh. She’s literally getting off to a queer erotica magazine!!!
Cheryl comes out to her Vixens and they come out to her, Chapter One Hundred Thirty-Six: The Golden Age of Television
In the penultimate episode of the series, Cheryl tells the River Vixens she wants to stand in the light, opening up to them about going steady with Toni. In turn, some of her cheerleaders decide to tell her they want to stand in the light, too. Even in 1950, Cheryl’s Vixens are of course a bunch of homos! This show may have gone back in time, but that doesn’t stop it from ramping up the queerness!
And with that very long stroll through the show’s wild, dramatic, horny, and winding queer history, I’m finally ready to head into Riverdale’s last episode of all time tonight. What are some of your favorite (subtextual or explicit!) queer moments from the series?
10 Essential Episodes of Riverdale
With Riverdale coming to a close this week, I thought it would be a good idea to put together a viewing guide of sorts for folks who either 1. Want to revisit some of the most iconic moments in the series’ history or 2. Want to plunge into Riverdale for the first time but want to get a taste of what it’s all about first (or, you know, just not commit to 137 episodes). This proved to be a difficult task! So much has happened over the course of seven seasons (I mean, just peep my Riverdale quiz for a small sample), and the thing I love about this show is that it constantly reinvented itself. Selecting just 10 episodes to represent the series as a whole is a fool’s errand, but it’s one I have attempted nonetheless.
With a one exception, I tried to avoid just making this a list of premieres and finales. Of course all the premieres and finales are great! That’s pretty standard for a long-running network drama. But to really get into the meat of this series, you have to reach into its middleparts, where the show experiments and plays with form, style, and story with reckless abandon. The episodes of Riverdale most often made fun of online are actually some of the finest installments of the series, showcasing just how strange and surreal the series is willing to go. I’ll have more to say on that as the final week of Riverdale unfolds, but for now, let’s dive into the 10 episodes I think you should check out right now, whether you’ve seen them before or not!
As a note, the list does not include any episodes of the final season, as it’s not yet readily available to stream online in full. Also, it’s meant to be more of a retrospective, so the new season is a little too fresh. Also, because this is a list specifically for Autostraddle, I’ve focused intently on a lot of the show’s queer moments in the episodes I’ve highlighted — though not all of them will be explicit/obvious in that regard. A list highlighting some of the show’s gayest moments is coming soon.
Again, there’s no way to capture all of the show’s bizarro magic in just 10 installments, but if you watch all of these, you’ll meet just about all of the Biggest Bads, the most significant serialized storylines, and a lot of the show’s many MANY ships. It will be a disorienting mini marathon, sure, but it will also be delightful! So in Cheryl Blossom’s honor, light a hundred candles, put on an elaborate outfit, and press play on the following 10 must-watch episodes of Riverdale.
Spoilers abound for all seven seasons of Riverdale!
1. Chapter One: The River’s Edge (Season 1, Episode 1)
Here, we have my one exception to the no premieres or finales rule, but of course I had to include the show’s pilot. Rewatching it feels like visiting a simpler time, and there are fittingly lots of parallels between it and the penultimate episode of the series — Chapter One Hundred Thirty-Six: The Golden Age of Television — which aired last week. If you watch the Riverdale pilot without having seen any episodes before, you might be surprised that the show really did start out as a pretty straightforward teen drama with a murder mystery plot. It was about a town undone by the death of a teen boy and all the familial secrets, lies, and histories that death kicks up.
I’ve seen this pilot a lot — to the point where I have much of it memorized. Something that stands out to me is how laden with queer subtext it is from the start, even as its supposedly about mostly heterosexual teen romance and drama (with the exception of Kevin Keller, who really did used to be so much more fun back in the day!). Archie going to find the “girl next door” (aka Betty) at Pop’s only to instead find Jughead? Romance! Veronica choosing friendship right away with Betty even though they’re set up to be rivals with a typical love triangle premise? Romance! The other thing that stands out to me is how Lili Reinhart’s acting is leagues above the rest of the younger stars from the start. They catch up to her, but whew Reinhart, along with Cheryl Blossom one-liners, were definitely the initial hook that made me stay up for two late nights in a row catching up on season one when I first dove into the show.
Veronica and Betty share a kiss in this first episode, and while it’s played off as “not real,” which soon-to-be-queer character Cheryl rolls her eyes at, events in the final season cast that kiss in a new light in my opinion.
2. Chapter Twelve: Anatomy of a Murder (Season 1, Episode 12)
In a big swing, Riverdale reveals what really happened to Jason Blossom in the penultimate episode of the season rather than in the finale. We learn Jason was killed by his own father Clifford Blossom and that Jughead’s father FP made a false confession because Clifford threatened to kill Jughead the same way. Kevin, Archie, Veronica, Betty, and Jughead all watch a horrific video of Clifford shooting Jason in the head at close range, and look, I don’t want to wander too far into the weeds of trying to justify why Riverdale allows its narrative to go so off the rails from pretty much this point on, but in a lot of ways, Riverdale‘s sharp evolution into a show that dabbles in the absurd, the surreal, and the straight up supernatural actually does make sense when you consider this act of violence to be the firestarter. How can these teens ever go back to normal after seeing that? The town is never the same, and Riverdale pushes that to outrageous proportions. But did anyone really want seven seasons of a formulaic suburban crime/mystery narrative? Seems like there are plenty of shows out there that do that! Riverdale does something different. Very different.
3. Chapter Twenty-Four: The Wrestler (Season 2, Episode 11)
Remember when queer film icon Gregg Araki directed an episode of Riverdale?! Because I will never forget!!! This show has always felt queer in its marrow, even when that queerness isn’t explicitly at the surface. The homoerotics of all the wrestling sequences in this?! Araki’s touches are distinct and evocative. Sometimes I swear this show is at its most queer when dealing mostly with subtext/ambiguity than with its more straightforwardly gay storylines.
Season two sets up two Big Bads: a serial killer dubbed The Black Hood who is introduced in the season premiere when he shoots Archie’s dad Fred and also Veronica’s father Hiram Lodge, who remains a villain over the course of the series until Veronica eventually has him killed. (Sometimes fathers kill their sons on this show, and sometimes daughters kill their fathers.) At this point, the Black Hood is assumed to be dead and assumed to have been the school janitor. Neither of these things will be true by the end of the season.
In this episode, Jughead also learns the truth about Riverdale’s violent, genocidal history and its residual effects on the town. You’ll meet Chic, thought to be Betty’s long-lost half-brother (and product of the teenage relationship between Betty’s mom Alice and Jughead’s dad FP), but his real identity is more complicated than that. But most significantly on a plot level, this episode sets up the intense and toxic mentor/mentee relationship between Hiram and Archie. Daddy issues! Everyone’s got em in Riverdale.
4. Chapter Twenty-Seven: The Hills Have Eyes (Season 2, Episode 14)
Hiram Lodge’s villainy ramps up in the background of this episode, in which central couples Veronica/Archie and Jughead/Betty head out to Veronica’s family’s gorgeous lodge in the woods for a romantic getaway. Acting out after being hurt she wasn’t invited, Cheryl calls Jughead right as the couples arrive for their fun weekend and tells him she saw Archie and Betty kiss outside her house around Christmas. Not such a fun weekend anymore! Archie had already told Veronica about the kiss, so the two just bang about it, which is kind of their whole thing. Jughead and Betty eventually work through it, too (and also have sex, Betty donning a wig and embodying her sexy alter ego Dark Betty who’s initially introduced in season one), and the core four drink too-green margaritas while having a horny — albeit fraught — weekend away.
Veronica decides that the best way to resolve the tension is for Jughead and her to make out, and at first it reads as pretty fanservicey, thrusting under-explored ship (at the time; in season seven, they become more solidly canon) Vughead together. But it all unexpectedly comes together rather organically in a later scene when Jughead talks to Archie about how it’s both a good and a scary thing that the friend group is all tangled up together and intimate in a way that sometimes leads to new romantic feelings for each other? If the final season of Riverdale highlights anything, it’s that literally any ship on this show works convincingly — even queer ships for characters previously believed to be straight.
The weekend is mainly made fraught not by the shipping wars but by Hiram’s background behaviors, which include buying up the trailer park Jughead lives in, the newspaper run by Betty’s parents, and additional properties throughout the Southside of Riverdale.
Yes, that’s right, one of the big evils of this season of Riverdale is GENTRIFICATION and the devilish acts of developers determined to destroy small towns for their own capitalist gains! Even at its most over-the-top, Riverdale does manage to weave in some real world stakes to its dramatics.
This is also the episode in which Cheryl Blossom officially comes out as queer! I have mixed feelings about it, because the moment sort of doubles as a promo for Love, Simon, Cheryl deciding to come out to out bisexual character Toni Topaz (who will go on to be her girlfriend) after a screening of the movie in Riverdale. But I suppose it is believable that a small town closeted teen wouldn’t really be exposed to queerness on-screen until a big studio release like Love, Simon, so I’ll accept. It helps that Madelaine Petsch nails Cheryl’s brief but effective monologue about her junior high friend Heather who she loved (also, for a very good and classic Cheryl Blossom moment, go back to the season two premiere).
It was immediately following this episode that I started doing episodic recaps of Riverdale, which continued through mid-season five.
5. Chapter Thirty-Nine: The Midnight Club (Season 3, Episode 4)
I love when Riverdale does a gimmicky episode (and as a result, there are several on this list). This one operates as a flashback episode as well as a twisted homage to The Breakfast Club (which has an extra layer of meta to it, considering Archie’s mother is played by Molly Ringwald). The cast’s younger actors get to try something new by playing younger versions of the parent characters, and it’s very fun! Cole Sprouse is particularly good at evoking the physicality and general vibe of his older counterpart, Skeet Ulrich. And no one is having as much fun as Lili Reinhart playing a teen Alice Cooper, who was a bad girl with a penchant for starting fights. We get to see some of the relationships between the parents that later play into the dynamics of the present timeline, starting in season one, like Hermione/Fred and Alice/FP.
The episode is also the clearest overview of Gargoyles & Gryphons, the Dungeons & Dragons-inspired tabletop game that spreads like virus throughout Riverdale in season three, teen characters so drawn into the game and also the drugs that seem like a requisite for playing that it leads to multiple suicides and deaths. You must accept you’ll never fully understand the inner-workings of G&G, but that’s okay! The point is that the game makes its players into monsters…or, perhaps, brings out the monsters already within. As with a lot of Riverdale storylines, the meaning is a pick your own adventure situation.
There are many Riverdaleisms throughout the series, like the drug Jingle Jangle or the…other drug, Fizzle Rocks, which you’ll see here. They’re like pop rocks but drugs!
6. Chapter Fifty-One: Big Fun (Season 3, Episode 16)
IT WAS VERY HARD FOR ME TO CHOOSE WHICH MUSICAL EPISODE TO HIGHLIGHT. The first one — which takes on Carrie: The Musical — made me cry the first time I watched it. But the more I considered what exactly I love about Riverdale‘s reality-bending musical episodes, the more I kept coming back to the second one, all about Kevin’s decision to put on a production of Heathers: The Musical. Hermione Lodge says it all in the episode’s opening: Doing a musical about teen violence and suicide in RIVERDALE? A town wracked by those exact things?! There’s only one way to grapple with the macabre fates that have befallen this town, and it’s to lean into camp!
While it’s introduced earlier in the season, this episode also paints a picture of the season’s (second?) central conflict. In addition to a wicked D&D-like game, there’s also a cult in town called The Farm, and they’re sponsoring the musical. The cult is led by a man named Edgar Evernever, played by Chad Michael Murray, a sentence I like to type out because it sounds totally an entirely made up.
Reggie and Veronica are together in this part of the show, and I’ve always thought they were an underrated ship. Cheryl and Toni are full-on exes at this point, too, and Cheryl returns to her baddest mean girl ways, and that descent fits very well with the musical’s themes. But the episode also hints at the eventual rekindling of their relationship, which is on and off for the rest of the series.
7. Chapter Sixty-One: Halloween (Season 4, Episode 4)
I love when this show tilts into horror territory, and I love when any show does a special installment for Halloween, and this checks both those boxes! It opens with a very unsettling setup: Several of the families in Riverdale receive VHS tapes containing hours of footage of their front steps. Everyone, it seems, is being watched.
What follows is a Frankenstein of classic horror tropes and references. Scream, When a Stranger Calls, Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, and more all have their DNA woven into the episode, which provides several scary stories to tell in the dark at once. Betty Cooper, dressed up as Laurie Strode, receives a call coming from inside the house. Jughead Jones is drugged and locked in a coffin by his creepy rich literary freak classmates at Stonewall Prep, the private school he has transferred to. Cheryl Blossom’s manor — where she currently lives with her girlfriend Toni — is being haunted by the spirit of her dead brother (whose corpse she has been conversing with as if he’s alive). A stranger shows up late at Pop’s where Veronica is working in search of a hot meal, and a news story casually reveals a serial killer recently escaped a local hospital and is on the loose. Archie goes full 80s grunge thriller at the boxing gym/youth center he’s trying to run. The episode is a fun and stylish exploration of genre, but there are still some very real and very frightening emotional layers to it all, especially for Cheryl/Toni, as the true source of the haunting is much more fucked up than if we’d just been dealing with a ghost.
8. Chapter Seventy-Five: Lynchian (Season 4, Episode 18)
By this point, Jughead has already faked his own death and revealed that he faked his own death. It was all a ruse to expose those Stonewall Prep classmates and the nefarious doings of their secret literary society Quill and Skull. I know it sounds like we skipped a lot of plot, but we really didn’t!
Cheryl and Veronica are just two teen girls running a rumpire — that’s right, a rum empire! They’re full-on business rivals with Hiram, and my favorite brand of unrealistic things the teens of Riverdale get up to are the unrealistic BUSINESS ventures. I love the commitment to giving the teens adult storylines before they’re adults. High school drama gets too repetitive, you know? But on the high school drama front, Archie and Betty are once again feeling feelings for each other despite still being in relationships with Veronica and Jughead, having just kissed in the series’ third musical episode, which I wasn’t really a fan of at the time but might revisit. Betty revisits old journal entries in which she yearned for her neighbor Archie as a little girl. I love how often over the course of the series we delve into Betty’s psyche in terms of her desires. While this season four entry mainly looks at early, youthful conceptions of love and romance, season seven is largely about her exploring the messy contours of her sexual fantasies. I feel like every season provides a new challenging of Betty as the “girl next door” trope.
The voyeur tapes sent in “Halloween” have escalated to now feature a recording of someone in an Archie comics-like Betty mask bludgeoning someone in an Archie comics-like Jughead mask in the woods. Jughead uncovers a seedy underground video rental operation, which has a library that includes a sex tape of him and Betty filmed without their consent. As its title suggests, strange and cinematic images are the name of the game for this freaky episode, which also has a subplot about Reggie, Kevin, and Fangs getting into the very specific business of making tickling videos.
While there were certainly a lot of more explosive moments on the show (literally, season six involves a bomb that triggers a new pocket universe), the voyeur tapes were some of the most legitimately scary things to happen in Riverdale history. Art imitating death, as Jughead puts it.
9. Chapter Eighty: Purgatorio (Season 5, Episode 4)
Speaking of the teens becoming adults…they’re adults now! After season five’s high school graduation episode, we do a seven year time jump into the new mid-twenties lives of our main characters. The gang has been away from Riverdale for a while, and Archie calls them all back to the roots of their various traumas by asking them to return to town for Pop’s retirement party.
The episode has one of the most nonsensical cold opens of the show’s history: In a nightmare sequence, Archie is haunted by recent memories of war (? it’s never clear what active combat zone he has been in in the time between graduation and the time jump) and distant memories of high school — from football to longtime nemesis-daddy Hiram Lodge.
Betty, meanwhile, is an FBI agent specializing in serial killers (which is fitting, since it’s revealed in previous seasons that she has something called the “serial killer gene,” another Riverdaleism). She’s haunted by a murderer called the Trash Bag Killer (TBK, a play on BTK) and fucking her superior, because these characters will simply never learn any lessons about toxic and ill-advised relationships! Veronica is married to a rich man named Chadwick and living a secret Uncut Gems life. Chad’s basically a Hiram wannabe. Don’t worry, she’ll eventually kill him! Cheryl is living a reclusive life painting in her manor and gearing up to entire the wonderful world of ART FRAUD. Don’t worry, she’ll get a temporary girlfriend out of this business. Before eventually going back to Toni.
Here’s another one of Riverdale‘s episodes where it feels like we’re getting a smattering of distinct genres all at once — from war drama to serial killer thriller to Jughead’s honestly quite entertaining literary noir narrative. I enjoy these collage-y episodes of the series for the visual stories they tell.
But the most important part of this episode to me personally is Toni Topaz doing a sexy musical number while pregnant. At a certain point, I think we have to all admit Riverdale isn’t just a series that does musical episodes but a musical series period. Toni’s working at the high school, and that’s what the others end up doing, too, after Archie convinces them their new purpose in life is to revitalize the dying town of Riverdale, which has been starved of resources by Hiram as he continues to work on his SoDale luxury community project nearby, a storyline that has somehow been going on since season two. But hey, again, when the true source of evil is money-hungry developers ravaging small town America…consider me hooked!
Another episode from season five that exemplifies the themes of the season is “Chapter Eight-Six: The Pinchushion Man.”
10. Chapter Ninety-Nine: The Witching Hour(s) (Season 6, Episode 4)
I just realized that four entries on this list are the fourth episodes of their respective seasons. I guess Riverdale just really knows how to do a fourth episode!
Building to its 100th episode (Chapter One Hundred: The Jughead Paradox, which is in some ways essential viewing, too, but also so extremely pushes the boundaries of metafiction/paradox/alternate universe storytelling that it’s almost headache-inducing, so if you’re the kind of person who mentally spirals out any time there’s time travel involved, be warned!), Riverdale did its wildest experiment to date and created a five-episode arc called Rivervale — like Riverdale with a V! Jughead turns into a classic horror host for this arc, introducing each increasingly bizarre episode that pushes Riverdale into its most overtly supernatural territory. You see, a bomb goes off in Riverdale leading up to these events, triggering a pocket universe where things are just slightly off and where magic, witchcraft, and mystical comets exist.
This is my favorite of the Rivervale episodes, for obvious reasons (it’s gay gay gay). It tells a three-timeline story about Cheryl Blossom in her ancestral manor Thornhill in the present day; Poppy Blossom in Thornhill in 1957; and Abigail Blossom in Thornhill in 1892. In all three timelines, a comet is set to pass Riverdale. This is the comet that Cheryl will eventually be tasked with melting (using witchcraft), which will lead everyone to time travel back to the 1950s and also age down to teens again…which is where season seven picks up!
But before all that, we get this trio of witchy period dramas, the episode doubling as a Chilling Adventures of Sabrina crossover! In case you were wondering, yes, Poppy and Abigail are also both queer, so this episode contains three magical Sapphic love stories as well as some confusing plot points about bodily possession, but try not to overthink anything that happens in Rivervale, which is very much Riverdale‘s version of doing an experimental art project. In fact, a part of me wishes we had just stayed in Rivervale for the rest of the series! It got to basically be a new show every episode.
And that’s exactly what I love the most about Riverdale: Its proclivity for play. Episodes that feel like costume parties, gimmicky narrative structures built around themes, character arcs that allow actors to go big and bold and theatrical — these are the Riverdale moments I’ll cherish the most.
This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors who are currently on strike, series like Riverdale would not be possible, and Autostraddle is grateful for the artists who do this work.
Guess Which of These Riverdale Storylines Is Real and Which I Completely Made Up
The final week of Riverdale is upon us, and I am not emotionally prepared!!!! So I’m coping the only way I know how, which is to revisit some of the wildest, weirdest, and WTF-iest (complimentary) storylines the show has given us through the past seven seasons. All week, I’ll be serving up some retrospective Riverdale content as I look back on the show that taught me how to embrace the absurdity of life.
First up: this chaotic quiz! Be warned that spoilers abound for the entirety of Riverdale, including season seven, which ends THIS WEDNESDAY. I mayhaps (as Cheryl Blossom would say) had a little too much fun coming up with fake storylines and details for Riverdale. I hope you have as much fun taking the quiz as I had making it!!
A Queer Syllabus for the Writers and Actors Strike
Whenever I love something, and I mean deeply love it, I have an unspeakable nerdy urge to … tear it apart into bits and learn everything I possibly could on the subject. That’s what lead us to our new biweekly series Queer Syllabus, and this week we are diving into histories of queer labor resistance and the Writers and Actors Strike. Join us? 🤝
Art by Autostraddle. Photography: Aubrey Plaza by Rob Latour/Shutterstock // Cynthia Nixon by Erik Pendzich/Shutterstock // Holland Taylor by jfizzy/Star Max/GC Images // Wanda Sykes by MEGA/GC Image // Peppermint with fan by Gotham/GC Images // Elliot Page by Kristin Callahan/Shutterstock
We’ve now past 110 days of the 2023 Writers Guild of America (WGA) Strike, a milestone that now makes it the third longest running writers’ strike in history and has finally brought the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) back to a negotiating table after months of a near standoff. Meanwhile the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SGA-AFTRA) has now been on strike for over a month, marking the first time in 63 years that the two guilds have been on strike together.
We’ve rapidly approached a corner where major studios are cancelling beloved queer shows like A League of Their Own and publicly blaming the strike in the press — despite the fact that there’s evidence suggesting the strike had little-to-nothing to do with it. Meanwhile, certain AMPTP members have anonymously said that “the endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses.” And that cruel goal is proving to be true, we’ve already seen Emmy-winner Billy Porter have to sell his home due to the work stoppages.
To be clear, everyone at Autostraddle has nothing but gratitude to for the writers and actors who create the stories that we all love. And it is my belief that the quickest way for the strike to end would be for the AMPTP to give a fair deal to SAG and the WGA that reflects the essential, immense, foundational value these union members bring to the work that make billions for the studios.
As Hot Strike Summer (in addition to the writers’ and actors’ strike, this summer saw educators, hotel staff, and food workers striking in various capacities nationwide, airline pilots and UPS workers both narrowly missed strikes of their own with down-to-the-wire negotiations for better pay and benefits) rapidly turns into Hot Strike Fall (did you hear that the United Auto Workers contract with the Big Three American auto manufacturers will expire soon?) — I’ve become deeply interested in the trend where the forefront of these labor movements are vocally and visibly, well, gay as hell.
For today’s lesson plan, we are going to split the syllabus into three parts: we’re going to look at Queerness and the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA Strikes, then we are going to step back, look big picture, and put those strikes into a context of Queer Labor Histories in the United States, and finally we are going to discuss Direct Action to Support Striking WGA/SAG Workers.
“You’ve Already Starved Me Out”: Queerness and the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA Strikes
The cast and crew of The L Word (“Corporate Greed Killed Jenny” 🔪) via the WGA West // Peppermint and Elliot Page by Jason Howard/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images // Wanda Sykes by MEGA/GC Image
“To hear Bob Iger say that our demands for a living wage are unrealistic? While he makes $78,000 a day?… I don’t have any words for it, but: fuck you. That’s not useful, so I’ve kept my mouth shut. I haven’t engaged because I’m so enraged… I have to sell my house… Because we’re on strike. And I don’t know when we’re gonna go back. The life of an artist, until you make fuck-you money — which I haven’t made yet — is still check-to-check. I was supposed to be in a new movie, and on a new television show starting in September. None of that is happening. So to the person who said ‘we’re going to starve them out until they have to sell their apartments,’ you’ve already starved me out.”
That viral quote comes from Billy Porter to the British newspaper The Evening Standard, and Porter is far from the only LGBT actor or writer who’s come forward with words to say during the ongoing strikes.
I haven’t acted much as an adult, but I WAS on a recurring character on one of the most critically acclaimed animated shows of all time, as well playing an actual Disney villain.
But thanks to streaming, I have never once made enough to qualify for SAG-AFTRA healthcare.
— Mara Wilson (@MaraWilson) July 13, 2023
Before we dig any further, it’s worth remembering exactly why both unions are in the midst of this historic strike to begin with. As I explained earlier this summer when the actors first went on strike: “Both groups want restrictions and protections as it relates AI technology, which can simulate a performer’s likeness or writer’s style and is setting a stage for unchartered waters in the industry that could be harmful to creatives. Both groups also want a revamped payment structure and business model for their work on streaming networks, which both unions have widely described as currently unfair if not unethical.”
These inequities are most acutely felt by writers and actors who are most marginalized, including queer and trans actors. The New Yorker‘s case study of the perhaps iconically queer show (both in front and behind the cameras) Orange is the New Black best encapsulates this — “Orange Is the New Black” Signalled the Rot Inside the Streaming Economy — discussing how talent behind the show makes pennies per episode in residual payment. As writer and actor Jen Richards pointed out last month, the vast majority of both unions are working class gig workers. It’s not lost on many folks striking that streaming platforms that have been a foot in the door for many queer, trans, and POC creatives also have some of the least regulated business models. And that’s zeroing in on only one issue.
WGA Strike Captain Brittani Nichols gave a longform interview with Out Magazine, Why Queer Fans Should Support the Writer’s Strike, on the uniquely queer stakes of these strikes that I sincerely cannot recommend enough:
“I think queer workers, like a lot of marginalized workers, are sometimes told to wait our turn. Workers in this country are constantly facing an existential threat as corporations want to extract as much value for the least amount of money as possible and keep us consumed with figuring out how we’re going to pay rent so that we don’t have the ability to speak to issues that specifically impact queer people. What queer writers in the guild are saying is that we need to be doing both at the same time. We won’t just sit around and hope that eventually our fight will become everyone else’s fight, too. We’re either all in this together or we aren’t. That’s what solidarity is.”
This predates the strikes by a few years, but in 2019 Autostraddle published a personal essay from a queer person running for office at their regional branch of SAG-AFTRA, and it further echoes many of Nichols’ points: “Tired!” or How I Ran For, and Queered, My Union’s Politics by Kylie Sparks (Kylie is also now a strike captain for SAG-AFTRA!)
Them.us put together a list of all the queer projects that have been put on hold by the 2023 strikes thus far. Though — and I cannot emphasize this enough — no one wants to be back at work more than the writers and actors most affected. As with most labor strikes, the onerous here is on the AMPTP to return to good faith negotiations as soon as possible. Joel Kim Booster, the writer and creator of Fire Island, the first Asian-led gay film backed by a major studio in history, said it best to Rolling Stone, “It’s frustrating to be in this position in the first place. Obviously, nobody wanted to be striking.”
Watch
I found Vox’s explainer on the WGA strike to be especially instructive.
And this one is for laughs, but Niecy Nash providing moral support to the writers by doing live karaoke from their picket line is the kind of cross-strike solidarity that we simply love to see!
Listen
Writer and Director Lily Wachowski joined the Deadline podcast Strike Talk for a little imaginative fanfiction about how she’d end solve the strikes if she had the power of the AMPTP.
“Race-baiting, Red-baiting, and Queer-Baiting Is Anti-Union”: Queer Labor Histories in the United States
All art via Pride at Work Records, University of Maryland.
As I previously mentioned, the writer and actor strikes are not happening on their own. A returned focus to labor movements and workers’ rights has been sweeping across the U.S. in the past few years, and it’s looking mighty queer from the bottom-to-the-top (pun not intended).
I was first introduced to this phenomenon in stark terms last month from from The Nation, “Chicago’s Labor Movement Is Looking Very Queer These Days,” which chronicled the Howard Brown Health Worker Strike, where chants of “queer liberation, not exploitation” could be heard from the picket lines. Obviously, we’re also seeing queer strike captains like Brittani Nichols for the WGA or Kylie Sparks for SAG-AFTRA. And in Louisville, KY queer restaurant workers are organizing a first of its kind, city wide, direct-join union.
Those queer organizers of today are standing on the shoulders of a long and storied history. The most-detailed overview of queer labor history that I found as our introduction came from Teen Vogue, How LGBTQ Union Activists Transformed the Labor Movement by Kim Kelly. Autostraddle also has a round-up of first persona accounts and academic texts that serves well as a primer: LGBT Labor History Is All Our History.
Two full length books stood out in my research:
Out in the Union: A Labor History of Queer America by Dr. Miriam Frank. Miriam Frank is as much a part of living queer history as she is a documentarian of it, which is extremely cool. I’ll talk more about her in a second, but for now this was my favorite review of Out in the Union. It gets right into all the book’s nooks and crannies, including its first person accounts of over 40 years of labor history: “Queer Activism in the Labor Movement” by Dr. Sara Smith for the socialist journal Against the Current.
Love’s Next Meeting: The Forgotten History of Homosexuality and the Left in American Culture by Dr. Aaron S. Lecklider. Yes! Magazine published an excerpt of Love’s Next Meeting, “On Board with Queer Labor and Racial Solidarity,” that you can read for free on their website. The excerpt tells the story of the Marine Cooks and Stewards Association of the Pacific (MCS). By the 1940s the MCS was already known as one of the most progressive unions in the United States, led by values of pro-Black racial solitary and equality for gay workers — and honestly the whole excerpt is a fascinating, satisfying read on its own. Fun fact: this section’s title — “Race-baiting, Red-baiting, and Queer-Baiting Is Anti-Union” — comes from the MCS’ union banner.
Key People, Organizations, and Moments in U.S. Queer Labor History
This is not a complete history! I am not an expert! But there are some key people, orgs, and events that repeatedly showed up, and I wanted to make sure they get highlighted.
There is of course the Marine Cooks and Stewards Association of the Pacific (MCS) which I just mentioned above, but their work at the intersection of Black and queer organizing in the 1940s cannot be overstated.
Fast forward a few decades, and pretty much everyone who talks about queer labor organizing mentions the infamous Coors Boycott of the 1970s, which brought together the Teamsters, the AFL-CIO, thee Harvey Milk, and gay rights activists to protest Coors beer after the company required workers to take a mandatory polygraph test where they could be asked directly about their sexual orientation. They joined Chicano activists who were already engaging in a similar boycott against Coors over racial discrimination, creating a coalition across the Midwest, Southwest and West Cost. You can read more from LA Progressive — “The Coors Boycott. Gay Liberation. Betrayal.” — as well as the gorgeously illustrated “‘Every Can Counts’: Boycotting Coors in Colorado, the Castro, and Beyond” for the website Good Beer Hunting (great name, by the way).
You can also listen to a podcast episode of Unsung History about the Coors Boycott:
In 1990, Miriam Frank (I told you we would return to her!) and Desma Holcomb self-published Pride at Work: Organizing for Gay and Lesbian Rights in Unions, a 100-page handbook with advice on organizing for domestic partner benefits and grappling with the AIDS crisis at work. The full booklet is now available online as historical artifact, hosted by LaborNotes in collaboration with Autostraddle! (You can also read a full interview with Frank and Holcomb on Autostraddle.)
Formed in 1994 in response to the AFL-CIO’s then-refusal to endorse marriage equality in the 1990s, the organization Pride at Work now serves as a conduit of “mutual support between the organized Labor Movement and the LGBTQ Community to further social and economic justice.” You can learn more about their mission and work.
Of course, we cannot talk about queer and feminist labor histories without talking about the great Leslie Feinberg. The late trans activist’s thoughts and work around working class solidarity, Marxism, and labor politics have informed generations of queer activists. You can read Feinberg’s seminal Stone Butch Blues for free. Also read: Leslie Feinberg’s “Lavender and Red” series for Workers World newspaper.
Virtual Exhibits
On of my favorite parts of studying history is that it never happens in a vacuum. Labor and union history overlaps with art, with culture. These exhibits helps make what can otherwise feel like abstract or far away histories into something much more tangible.
Photo Credit: Pride at Work Records, University of Maryland.
Pride at Work: The Movement for Equality. This multimedia history exhibit is hosted by the University of Maryland and includes movement posters, video interviews of organizers, original documents, and photographs from labor protests starting with the 1970s Coors Boycott and continuing through labor actions as late as 2006.
The Work of Love, the Queer of Labor Installation (photo credit: Pratt Manhattan Gallery)
The Work of Love, the Queer of Labor was a 2022 exhibit from Pratt Manhattan Gallery, focused on the art and ephemera of labor movements. The above linked review (“Uncovering the Queer Histories of Workers’ Movements“) comes from the art magazine Hyperallergic. It includes photography of the exhibit for perusal.
Direct Actions to Support the Writers and Actors Strike
Brittani Nichols via Brittani Nichols on Instagram // Cynthia Nixon by Erik Pendzich/Shutterstock // Holland Taylor by jfizzy/Star Max/GC Images // Aubrey Plaza by Rob Latour/Shutterstock
OK! So, you’ve followed along, you’ve learned some things! But my friend, what is the point of that knowledge if you aren’t going to also do something with it? That’s what I thought!
Donate to Affected Workers
- The Entertainment Community Fund — formerly known as the actors fund, they have been around since 1882 (!!) and support film and television workers with social services and financial assistance. Give help here.
- The Union Solidarity Coalition — helps crew members in other unions who are affected by the strike. Give help here.
- The SAG-AFTRA Foundation Emergency Financial Assistance Programs — provides support to SAG-AFTRA members in financial crisis. Give help here.
- The Snacklist — is sponsored by the Democratic Socialists of LA and raises money to deliver snacks and water to LA-based picket lines. Give help here.
- Groceries for Writers — sponsored by the Humanitias Educational and Cultural Institute, its a direction action that does exactly as the title says: provides grocery gift cards for WGA writers. Give help here.
- Green Envelope Grocery Aid – provides grocery assistance to striking writers and actors. (Use the image below for QR codes to help)
Are you in a New York or LA? You Can Respectfully Join a Picket Line.
Solidarity turnout is essential! Walking a picket line day after day is hard effing work. Showing up to picket lines with some joy and enthusiasm is one way to support folks on strike. Remember though, you are there in support of the strike and should be listening to on location strike captains and other union members in charge. You can also bring along some extra bottles of cold water (it’s hot as hell), beverages with electrolytes, and snacks. Here’s the WGA picket schedule and the SAG-AFTRA picket schedule. SAG also has FAQ and the WGA has guidelines available.
Share Information!
There is a lot of misinformation about the writers and actors strike, and framing those on strike as being spoiled, selfish, unreasonable, or lazy is a key tactic used to turn public support away from the workers. You can help stop misinformation spread by amplifying messages from union members about the difficult realities of their day-to-day lives. You can also share informational media that helps bring context to the strike and what workers are up against, like say.. this exact article!
The WGA even has a social media toolkit (including infographics!) for sharing online, and branded merchandise that you can purchase to show support IRL. SAG-AFTRA also has a social media toolkit available.
Last Question! Should You Boycott Streaming Services, Television, or Movies in Solidarity with the WGA and SAG-AFTRA Strikes?
This is important! At this time, neither union has called for boycotting content. Ideally you should wait until we are told by union leadership that a boycott is called for, because a collective action has the greatest impact. And if they decide that a boycott is necessary, you will know! I recommend waiting for their call to action.
That said, if you decide to cancel any of your streaming services, at least be sure that you let your streaming service know in a comment box that you are doing so in solidarity with the strikes. Otherwise it will be seen as a part of normal cancellation cycles and your protest won’t have the hard hit that you’re hoping for.
In conclusion, FAIR CONTRACTS NOW!!!
Class dismissed.
The Subtle Aroace Gaze of “Heartstopper” Season Two
Last week, I took time to binge watch season two of Heartstopper, Netflix’s burst of queer joy written and based on the webcomic turned graphic novels by Alice Oseman. The young adult show about queer love, in its many forms, focuses especially on romantic crushes and relationships (with lots of queer kissing). The characters represent a range of queer identities, including bisexual (Nick, played by Kit Connor and Sahar, played by Leila Khan), gay (Charlie, played by Joe Locke), lesbian (Darcy and Tara, played by Kizzy Edgell and Corinna Brown), aromantic asexual (Isaac, played by Tobie Donovan), and asexual (Charlie’s sister, Tori, played by Jenny Walser might be both aro and ace, but the series has not explored this yet), and include trans characters (most centrally Elle, played by Yasmin Finney). Like the first season, the second season is a joyous exploration of love, boundaries, and growing into ourselves, on queer terms. It is an affirmative queer set of journeys and self-explorations unrivaled by many other shows. And above all, it is so fun to watch.
Heartstopper also does something else, something that is just about unprecedented in mainstream teen shows. It places at its core an aromantic asexual character — that is Isaac — and asks that the audience see the world through his eyes, in something that resembles a sort of ace and aro gaze. The show, by way of Oseman, shows rather than tells us what it is like to be someone who is both aromantic and asexual in a teenage context absolutely affixed to the idea that romantic and sexual attraction are at the heart of what it means to grow up, become an adult, and be queer. The show suggests that growing up and being queer do not require romantic or sexual attraction, and also that Isaac is no less queer because he is aroace.
What is really important to understand is that asexuality and aromanticism are not one and the same, and some people might be asexual and romantic or aromantic and sexual. In Heartstopper, we learn that Isaac is not only asexual in that he doesn’t experience sexual attraction to others but that he is also aromantic in that he does not experience romantic attraction to others. According to the 2018 Asexual Community Survey Summary Report, 32.1% of asexual respondents were aromantic — nearly one third. Importantly, Alice Oseman deliberately wrote Isaac as an aroace character informed by her/their own experiences as someone who is aroace, and they also feature aroaceness in her YA novel Loveless.
Throughout the show, we see Isaac’s journey as someone who is aroace. Early in season two, this takes shape through heartbreaking scenes where Isaac wants to feel that he belongs, but he is carelessly iced out by his friends who take for granted that everyone experiences sexual and romantic attraction. While Isaac’s friends clearly love him and his quirks, such as Isaac’s proclivity to always be reading during social events, and while together they form a strong friendship group, the group often fractures into couple-units, leaving Isaac alone. We get a brief look into this in the very first episode of season two when Charlie hosts a sleepover. Initially all the friends, Nick, Charlie, Darcy, Tara, Elle, Tao, and Isaac are shown hanging out together, queer vibing with each other. But as the hangout progresses, people splinter off into their own coupled universes, and Isaac looks around, unsure of where he fits into all the coupled units. I found this scene, which is rather brief, particularly heartbreaking. And it provides the first instance in season two of an aroace gaze — a look at what the coupled world might feel like from the perspective of Isaac, an aroace character. It is not that Isaac is left out because he wants to be in a couple but isn’t, but rather that he is left out, because he wants to continue queer vibing with his friends in nonromantic and nonsexual ways and gets left behind when others default to their coupled units.
In a world of amatonormativity, as feminist philosopher Elizabeth Brake discusses in her book Minimizing Marriage, most of our energy, love, and care are directed toward both recruiting and keeping our “other half,” leaving people who are aro, as well as those who might not desire being in a couple, behind. Brake writes that amatonormativity is a “disproportionate focus on marital and amorous love relationships as special sites of value, and the assumption that romantic love is a universal goal [and that] a central, exclusive, amorous relationship is normal for humans.” If romantic love and sexual love are valued above all else, including during the period of one’s teen years when sexual and romantic attraction are strongly felt by many, those of us who are aroace, such as Isaac, might readily be set aside by even our closest friends as they prioritize other forms of queer love.
Yet Heartstopper season two ultimately ends on a positive note for Isaac, aligning with the joyfully queer message of the show. In the seventh episode of the season, Isaac along with the whole friend group, goes to a queer art show at which Elle’s work is on display. Two remarkable things happen at that show that I believe exemplify aroace joy and that challenge amatonormativity. The first is that Isaac is drawn to a piece of art with floating pieces of paper in red, pink, and white. Talking to the artist, he discovers that the art piece is a commentary on amatonormativity by an aroace artist, that it speaks to, in the artist’s words, of “being in a world where romance and sex are prized above everything else when you don’t feel those forms of attraction.” At that point, everything snaps into place for Isaac and, as Heartstopper’s illustrated leaves circle, he figures out that, like the artist, he too is aroace. Adorably, this leads to Isaac picking up Angela Chen’s wonderful book, ACE: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex, from the school’s queer library display in the final episode of the season. (One of my favorite series of moments of the season takes place at the friend group’s post-prom hangout in the last episode of the season, during which Isaac carries ACE with him everywhere: from playing beer pong to hiding behind pillows, its title, ACE, visible to everyone, asserting ace presence). The second aroace affirming thing that happens at the art show is that for her art contribution to the show, Elle paints an acrylic painting titled “Safe Place” that renders their friendship group (Charlie, Tao, Isaac, and her) gathered together, reading. This painting is another brief moment that suggests queer friendships are central to queer life, perhaps over and above romantic love, providing a brief undermining of amatonormativity.
In the book Isaac is shown carting around with him in the final episode, ACE, Chen strives to imagine what it would look like to have representations created by asexual people for asexual people. She talks about the endless pressure for ace folks (including aroace folks) to have to educate others on the minutiae of their identities, to have to argue for their inclusion in queer spaces, and to have to bear the weight of continuing to prove their identities to others. Chen also dreams of a time when we “will move closer to not feeling that any explanation is necessary” and “when aces reject the gaze that evaluates our identities so narrowly.” I believe that Heartstopper season two’s rendition of Isaac is one of the first times when this gaze is created by and for aroace people, even while it also does the educational work of showing a general audience what it feels like to be aroace in a context so affixed to the idea of romantic and sexual love at any and all cost.
Glee Fans: Can You Name That Song From Just a Picture and the Episode Number?
Glee, a musical specter horrorshow, infiltrated and earwormed itself into our lives for six seasons of highs and lows. True Gleeks still can’t escape its siren song and hopefully that’ll help you get a high score on this quiz, in which you will be identifying the song in question from two clues: a photo of the song being performed on Glee and the song’s episode number.
Shauna, Jackie, and Those Sapphic Gazes on Yellowjackets
someone will remember us
I say
even in another time
— Sappho 147, If Not, Winter. Translated by Anne Carson.
When I first saw the Yellowjackets pilot, I was so sure there was something going on between Shauna and Jackie. Sprinkled throughout were their soft shared stares, but that one longing sigh with which Shauna watched Jackie at the pre-crash party really made those lesbian vibes so palpable! With subsequent episodes and the triangular equation popping up though, the Shauna-Jackie situation became more and more complex. Yet this queer tension between their glances was never snuffed out.
Two seasons later, the intricacies of their bond still remain — even if Jackie doesn’t — in the finest and tiniest of gestures. In the final moments of season two, for instance, Shauna shows her priorities up front. She instinctively grabs onto Jackie’s Doomcoming dress and her journals before actually waking up her soon-to-be roasted slumbering teammates in the cabin-turned-oven.
Jackie’s dress first, fellowjackets later!
It is most certain that of everything witnessed, experienced, and felt in the wilderness the one thing that continues to haunt Shauna (literally!), in both timelines, is Jackie. There’s guilt but beyond that, the specters surely reek of their pre-crash dynamic, not because of Jeff — rather, in spite of Jeff. Yellowjackets does a brilliant job of making one thing clear from the onset: Jackie was never really into Jeff (ahem, weird fingering scene), and honestly, it doesn’t seem like Shauna was either (even though, in his defense, Jeff could’ve gone strawberry!).
The peculiar triangular situation between the three of them has been dominantly seen as the result of Shauna’s jealousy of Jackie, or as a response to Jackie continually sidelining Shauna. However, Shauna and Jackie’s relationship is way too nuanced to be simply shrugged off as either. Nothing vocalizes it, and Jeff’s position in it, better than Sappho 31:
He seems to me equal to gods that man
whoever he is who opposite you
sits and listens close
to your sweet speaking
and lovely laughing
— lines 1-5, If Not, Winter. Translated by Anne Carson.
An adaptation of those words literally plays out in the pilot episode at the party where we stand with Shauna and see through her: First, there’s singular focus on Jackie as she dances, laughs, then, that focus includes Jeff too, who is also looking at Jackie. Yet, almost synchronously, we’re shown Shauna as well, as she gazes both intimately and sadly, or as Sappho has coined, bittersweetly. The precision in this scene’s direction shines through its sharp emphasis on the manners of looking. Jeff can easily be equated to that man who is only godly in his fortune of being within Jackie’s vicinity. Sapphic as an adjective for Shauna and Jackie’s intense glances, cozy hugs, and fierce dialogue, thus, is not merely enough. Theirs is a complex dynamic that absorbs, and tailoring it to their own taste, also performs, Sappho’s verse.
Sappho was an ancient Greek poet around 600 BCE who belonged to the island of Lesbos (famously where the term lesbian comes from!). Her fragments feature her intricacies of observing, particularly women. They comprise the earliest writings of a woman poet that have managed to survive in the West. Yet almost all of Sappho’s works excavated are incomplete. Either they were deliberately destroyed or lost due to natural causes. In Yellowjackets then, Shauna and Jackie can be seen initiating a process of continuing that which remains irretrievable with this cherished Sappho-flavored dialect of theirs where their stares say so much more than they ever manage to out loud. After all, the girls have gone way too Greek in this series to turn a blind eye to Sappho. Gazing, in a way that smudges the binary between looking and being looked at, is the very punctuation within which Sappho 31 functions:
for when I look at you, even a moment, no speaking
is left in me
no: tongue breaks and thin
fire is racing under skin
and in eyes no sight and drumming
fills ears
and cold sweat holds me and shaking
grips me all, greener than grass
I am
— lines 7-15
Sappho’s manner of looking is one that queers the gaze that is elsewhere scrutinizing, surveilling, and invasive. Her verse embroiders due space for the gazer to look upon themselves, and thus, propels interiority. In the reel world of Yellowjackets, this intimate Sapphic inwardness is adapted in nuanced reflections where the show shows us, often in crisp closeups and crosscuts, the very impact of the characters’ looking upon themselves. The season one poster illustrates this most cohesively.
Here, we see Jackie, we see the Antler Queen as Jackie does reflecting in her eyes, and we see her reaction to it — all of this in a single visual, with some blood and a bee too. After season two, it’s all the more crucial to look back at this poster, as it is this vision of the Antler Queen that the second season’s poster delves into. In the above-mentioned party scene also, we’re sharply shown Shauna as she watches, not just Jackie, but Jeff watching Jackie too. The layers of these palimpsest gazes are inextricably interwoven such that characters’ emotional palettes become discernible. Yellowjackets ensures that when characters stare, hallucinate, and remember, their perspective is always displayed with self-reflexivity. Like Sappho, here a viewer never does become a voyeur.
In Sappho 31, the insight this interiority provides is on Sappho’s very nature of looking, one which produces psychosomatic reactions — a sudden voicelessness, an increase in pulse rate and body temperature, throbbing ears, a hindrance in eyesight, an onset of tremors and sweating, along with an alteration in the color of Sappho’s skin — that makes her feel:
…dead—or almost
I seem to me.
— lines 15-16
Proximity to death, an illustration of passion for Sappho, is actualized in Jackie’s frozen corpse horrifically, yet this parallel opposite still functions in the Sapphic realm. Actual death here sediments Shauna’s phantasmic gaze and creates her deeper, more visceral bond with Jackie. Enter: Ghost Jackie. The choice of the verb seem in Sappho 31 then, which already emphasizes on perspective, takes on a newer meaning when thought of in conjunction with Shauna and how things seem to her now that she’s sees spooky stuff. Conjuring Jackie’s spirit to share stares with, Shauna’s hallucinations materialize her internal dialogue — there’s guilt, shame, and most importantly, a desire that metamorphoses into, and finds release in, ferocious gluttony, initiating with an ear.
that tiny, raspy crunch is chilling!
This ear, an erogenous zone, is queered further when Shauna pockets it, inspects it, and eventually munches on it. This bizarre and peculiar ear eating act is deliciously scandalous — terrifying for sure, its intimacy remains undeniable. Shauna’s bodily need for nourishment intertwines intensely with an urge of erotic devouring. Theirs is a union where the self/other binary is abjectly disturbed. Then, while Sappho’s mechanics of dealing with loss, absence, parting, and longing include memory, imagination, and emotion that sustain the absentee beloved in her gaze, Shauna throws relishing flesh into the mix.
Before savagely savoring Jackie, Shauna tells the others, “she,” meaning Jackie, “wants us to.” These words, and the precise present tense, make two conjectures possible: One, maybe dead-Jackie is actively involved in hosting her own wilderness-themed barbecue feast of a funeral which smells way too delicious to be coincidental. And two, perhaps her supernatural spirit did command Shauna to commence the meal in the diction of Sappho 94:
Rejoice, go and
remember me
— lines 7-8
And Shauna does remember, more than she does anything else, even beyond the bacchanal buffet which is nothing if not fiercely memorable. Adult Shauna distinctly admits to spending “the better part of [her] life thinking about [Jackie] every single day.” Jackie’s absent-presence throbs within Shauna in such subtle yet significant ways — there’s Jackie’s voice at the onset of the dream where Shauna sees her baby alive, the painting of poppies in her house she had told Jeff are Jackie’s favorite, and Shauna’s absurd relationship with rabbits who Jackie apparently loved — it proves their dynamic unending. Also, in one of the densest unresolved mysteries of the show, the link between Shauna and Jackie is yet again underscored: In Jackie’s death dream, an unknown man tells her he’s “so glad you’re joining us. We’ve been waiting for you,” yet it’s Shauna we see waking up from this vision startled. They’re together in the dream and dreaming together simultaneously.
Smash cut from Jackie drinking hot chocolate to Shauna panting, waking up.
Then, evoking Sappho amid these tangled gazes of theirs has made one thing certain: Jackie and Shauna’s is a fraught tussle within the dynamics of (in)visibility. Shauna is really observant when it comes to Jackie and, throughout the first season, we see Shauna’s queer gaze lingering at her. Jackie does reciprocate, but often, Shauna finds herself feeling invisible, which is what her final journal entry before the cabin fire is about. She detests nothing more than being the sad sidekick. Yet Shauna is in no capacity actually rendered invisible in Jackie’s life. The fact that she wouldn’t let Shauna be endangered in saving Van after the crash says a lot. Is Jackie self-obsessed? Yes, but this comes from the normative code of compulsory heterosexuality — i.e., the “perfect little princess” persona — that her parents smother her in (even after she’s dead). Their derogatory treatment of adult Shauna explains a lot about Jackie’s upbringing.
Like Shauna, Jackie has her own flaws, but she is a deliciously dense character too. Puncturing her relentless charisma is a scene rather early on in Yellowjackets where, after she fakes an orgasm with Jeff, she furiously brushes her teeth and studies herself with an introspective impassivity.
The fragility of her identity reeks through the mirrors Jackie is surrounded by here. This is perhaps why looking too closely and facing facts terrifies her. After all, it takes Shauna almost slitting Travis’ throat during the Doomcoming shenanigans for Jackie to finally confront her about Jeff. And then, her dialogue gives away her troubles of gazing when she tells the now unabashed Shauna: “I can’t even fucking look at you right now.”
Theirs is a Sappho-seasoned Greek-level tragedy where hamartia nestles in their refusal to look at, and their inability to show each other, the vulnerabilities that gnaw at them. The final exchange before Jackie steps out of the cabin towards her impending death sums up their insecurities:
Jackie: I don’t even know who you are anymore.
Shauna: Or maybe you never did.
Even then, theirs is a bond that never does cease to exist. Queer in their desire, disgust, and devouring, the Shauna-Jackie wilderness version of the isle of Lesbos is one from which Jackie never returns physically, and Shauna never returns viscerally (no return, no return, no reason!). Though not really buried, Jackie is the sapling I hope to see sprout in the seasons to come, especially once winter is over.
Think You’re a Queer TV Expert? Prove It by Identifying All 50 of These Lesbian and Bisexual Characters
We’re here, we’re queer, we watch a lot of television. And now it’s time to put your recall of all the television you’ve watched to the test:
Top Ten Gayest Moments in Selling Sunset Season Six
Selling Sunset season six came out a few weeks ago, and I’m humbled and thrilled to share that I have done my part for the cause, and compiled this (non-exhaustive) list of the gayest moment from a show that portends to be about real estate in the Los Angeles area, but really is about humanity as we know it. The pain. The drama. The obscene amounts of money. The escrow. The floaties. The closets. And most of all, now more than ever, the gay stuff.
Without further ado, I present to you the top ten gayest moments of Selling Sunset season six:
10. When Emma tells Chrishell to take a shot from her boobs, and Chrishell is like, sure!
9. When all the gals are on their way to a drag bar but one of them has a panic attack right before they get there
8. When Chrishell is on a floatie and Emma jumps on her like this
7. When Chelsea and Chrishell invent a queer bed and breakfast
6. When Davina shows up after being gone for the whole season and is like hey what’s up?
5. When Saweetie forgot how fine Bre was
4. When Chrishell looks at G Flip like this
3. Basically every interaction between Chrishell and G tbh
2. This lower arm situation
And finally… our winner… The gayest moment of Selling Sunset Season Six:
1. When G Flip invites Chrishell to do this (a lick is something on the drums, people!!!!!)
Did I miss any? I’m sure I did! Sound off in the comments!
Murray Hill on “Somebody Somewhere” and His Decades-Long Career in Showbiz
Somebody Somewhere feels like a show from another time — the long ago era of the 2010s. With its patient storytelling, deeply felt performances, and focus on character, it’s an outlier in a TV landscape where greedy streaming platforms are scrambling to have bigger — and less inclusive — programming.
One of the greatest joys of this show with many is Murray Hill’s performance as Dr. Fred Rococo. Fred is a soil scientist, a professor, the emcee of the underground cabaret Choir Practice, and the stable friend to the more chaotic leads. Murray has been a staple of night clubs, drag, and many other areas of showbiz and it’s about time he be a series regular on TV. As Fred, and just talking to him, Murray has a light unlike few others around. His joy is infectious, his humor is plentiful, his talent is immense.
I was lucky enough to chat with Murray and experience some of that light. We talked about his childhood, how he’s dealing with the current moment, and, of course, showbiz.
Murray: Hello?
Drew: Hi!
Murray: I’m figuring out how to use this. Still! After all these years.
Drew: Honestly, same — there you are!
Murray: Oh there we go. Drew! Good morning! Where are you?
Drew: Well, I’m in Toronto so it’s more like afternoon.
Murray: Yeah it’s afternoon here too. But basically anything before 8 p.m. is morning to me.
Drew: Well, that makes sense given your career!
Murray: Showbusiness!
Drew: Exactly. Showbusiness.
What I would love to do with this interview — if it’s okay — is walk through your entire life.
Murray: (screams)
Drew: (laughs) Your life, your career. Whatever stories come up. So to start, where did you grow up? What was your childhood like?
Murray: Jesus Christ.
Drew: (laughs)
Murray: I did a show last night with Sasha Velour in Philadelphia and she asked me the same thing. “Tell me something about your childhood.” I was like (various noises I do not know how to recreate with onamonapia).
Drew: (laughs)
Murray: Well, I grew up a long time ago. And I grew up in a very conservative, religious household. The town that I lived in was also pretty conservative. So my home life kind of sucked to keep it simple and going to school and being out in the world in New England as somebody who looked — we didn’t have the language we have now. You were either butch or femme or a faggot.
Drew: (laughs) Sure. An umbrella term.
Murray: Yeah. And people always thought I was a boy. Tomboy was the name. I was always butch, I always looked like a boy, and I always thought I was a boy. There weren’t any problems in my head, it was everybody else that had a problem — and that’s still how I think about it today.
In elementary school, they separated us by gender — home ec and shop class — and for whatever reason they put me in the shop class. I was making stuff with tools and doing that kind of thing. But then in 2nd grade they were like no more of that. So my first couple of years in school, I was hanging out with the boys, I felt more comfortable with the boys, I sat with them at lunch, played with them on the playground, and then all of a sudden I was sitting with the girls and was like what the fuck is going on?
Drew: (laughs)
Murray: It didn’t make any sense! And I wasn’t even out yet as a kid. I didn’t come out until college. But I was still ostracized and made fun of. I was pretty ignorant to it, but I knew that it was bad from the religious part of my upbringing. My immediate family made it clear that I was not a girl the way I needed to be a girl. They wanted me to wear a dress and do my hair a certain way, and I just could never understand it. Why? Why would I wear a dress?
So I was getting a lot of heat at home and getting a lot of heat out in the world. But I’ve always had a lot of energy. I’ve always had a spirit, Drew. No matter how bad things got, that spirit never got squashed. That little candle inside never went out. Liza Minneli has that. Even now she still has that light. My personality and the way I interacted with people was my saving grace. I made people laugh. I was funny. And that was my way of connecting with people. And it was also my way of disarming people. I say this today too. You can’t hate and laugh at the same time. Even today in my act. At first, the audience was like, what the fuck is going on? There’s no frame of reference for me, I’m not a drag queen. It was in London I decided that I’m always going to do a funny song before I start talking. That’s because it gives them a chance to see that I’m this nice, funny guy and it disarms them. I’m like, hey hey we’re all having a good time.
So to take it back, it was my humor and cracking jokes that helped me survive elementary school, high school, and college, and then when I got to New York eventually that coping mechanism became a career.
Drew: How did you first find drag? Was it in New York?
Murray: Actually I was in 7th grade. I had one cool teacher. There’s always one! I had one cool teacher in this very conservative town. It was a media studies class or something and one day on a little TV with a VCR tape, she popped in two movies: Paris is Burning and The Queen. I saw those two things and I can’t even describe the experience. I’d never seen anything like it! There was such joy and happiness and chosen family. Now I didn’t know anything about chosen family — I didn’t even know that was an option — but I could see in those films that these outcasts and misfits were the star of their own show. They were their own parents, they were their own sisters, they were their own brothers, they were their own daddies. So that was my first conscious awareness of drag.
And then in high school, I used to dress up as my subject matter for book reports and shit like that. As I said, I always thought I was a boy, I didn’t dress feminine at all, but this was drag. I dressed as Schneider from One Day at a Time. You know he was like the guy with the mustache and the toolbelt, the handyman. I was doing drag in high school. Also we had opposite sex day — wait, I’m going to show you a photo.
Drew: Please.
Murray: I’ll never forget my art teacher said, “You look much better as a man.”
Drew: (laughs)
Murray: Here it is.
Drew: Ah! That’s incredible.
Murray: This is the fucking 80s, Drew. Look at that! I’m embarrassed about the middle part but…
Drew: No, no, you’ve got to be with the trends.
Murray: Then I went to college in Boston which is also very conservative. Liberal pockets for sure, but conservative. I started taking pictures of drag queens in night clubs and I saw firsthand what I saw in those films. I witnessed these beautiful, loving, funny, positive, upbeat, not-discriminating spaces of drag and gay people and this, that, and the other thing. It was so beautiful and I started photographing them.
Long story short, I got to New York, and I was like okay where are the lesbians? Where are the trans guys? Where are the drag kings? What’s on the other side of this spectrum? So then I stopped taking photos of drag queens and I went to an early drag king pageant. Maybe 1993? It was more like butch women passing as guys. There wasn’t really that camp element. But then I became the subject matter! It went from always thinking I was a boy to seeing drag and trans people on-screen to dressing up as a guy in school to watching drag queens to photographing and documenting drag queens to documenting drag kings and then, finally, I became the subject matter.
Drew: You’ve been an icon for a long time, but I imagine being an icon in underground queer spaces isn’t the most lucrative kind of icon to be. So I would love to talk about your day-to-do in the 90s, the 00s, and the 10s. How much were you able to perform vs. day job stuff? What has the trajectory been throughout those decades?
Murray: I did have a day job. I was a visual artist and my day job was design and coding. I worked for this branding company and I had clients that were Fortune 500 companies like Kodak and fucking IBM and shit like that. I was the creative person making sure everything was on-brand. When the bubble burst the first time it was 2001. I’d been going out every night, doing shows, and then going to work. So when I was laid off, I was like, I’m not going back. That’s it.
I’m from the clubs. Not the comedy clubs. Nightlife. And I was in those clubs every night gigging, doing shows, doing the hustle. I wasn’t making tons of money, but I made enough to live. And the more gigs I did, the more exposure I got. I was really just pounding it. Pounding the boards is the old Vaudeville phrase. I always did shows in the queer community and in the mainstream. And one day Dita Von Teese’s manager saw me at this hole in the wall in Soho and was like “You’re funny! We want to try you out touring with Dita!” And I was skeptical. You know, LA people. “We’ll call you.” Sure, sure. But they did! And the trial went great and I ended up touring all over the world with Dita for ten years.
Drew: Wow!
Murray: And from that, some people with the Sydney Opera House saw me, and I did a couple of big seasons there. So I was in the underground in New York and then expanded out and out. And in the meantime, I’m trying to get on TV, and it’s like no, no, no. Gatekeepers. No, no, no.
I say this a lot, if you don’t see yourself represented, go out and represent yourself. I just created my own shows. I created my own events. I created my own one-man shows. I created songs. I did pageants for the community. The Miss Lez Pageant. The Transman Pageant. I was always making sure that I was represented. Because if I waited, I’d still be waiting. I would have had to go back to work… for the man!
Drew: (laughs) You mention wanting to be on TV and the gatekeepers. So going back to the 90s and the 00s, was being on TV the goal? Even though there wasn’t necessarily a model of someone like you on TV, that was still the ultimate goal? You could still see it happening? You had that vision?
Murray: For me, as far as show business goes, my whole mission statement, what drives me, is equal rights and that also means — and this is a touchy subject — equal rights within our own community. Because we know that’s not equal. So my whole thing was to raise visibility, be at the table, and to represent people like me. And in show business, you reach the most people if you’re on television. I can work in New York in the clubs for twenty years but if I’m on TV for two seconds a lot more people will see me. We didn’t have Instagram back then or any of that stuff so as far as reach went, TV was the goal.
Drew: Speaking of television, you’ve known Bridget Everett for a long time—
Murray: Oh hell yes!
Drew: (laughs) So I assume Somebody Somewhere wasn’t the average audition process. Can you walk us through the experience from first hearing about the show to finding out you got cast to filming?
Murray: Well, even if you’re an old-timer newcomer, most shows you have to audition. That’s just the way it is.
Drew: Of course.
Murray: But I didn’t have to audition for this! And I always say, thank God because everytime I do audition for a show, I don’t get it!
Drew: (laughs)
Murray: So thank fucking God I didn’t have to audition! The show is loosely based on Bridget’s life so the writers knew about me and Fred is loosely based on me. I got a free pass. Bridget called me and I was like, what? You’ve got a show on HBO? I’m going to be on it? I don’t have to audition?? Shit! And, you know, six months later we’re doing table reads and then we shot the pilot. And then after we shot the pilot, they greenlit it. It was a very long process.
Drew: I feel like people who aren’t in showbiz don’t realize how much is just waiting to be told by someone who you would never encounter in the real world whether or not you get to do the thing you love or not.
Murray: It’s pretty nuts.
Drew: So now that you’re on an HBO show and have that mainstream validation, what are your dreams for the future? What’s the dream project?
Murray: Well, Drew, since I was a kid I was very inspired by Johnny Carson. I would sneak down late at night and watch him. I’ve always wanted to have my own talk show and with every project, I’m getting a little closer.
Drew: I see it! I see it so clearly!
Murray: Last Monday, I shot Family Feud with the Drag Me to Dinner cast. And being there with Steve Harvey, on a game show, I felt so close! It’s very exciting. But it’s very subversive to have somebody like me in that kind of space. I was there with six drag queens. It was pretty nuts. It’s going to come out sometime in June to coincide with Drag Me to Dinner.
Drew: I want to shift slightly to talk about the current legislative and cultural backslide against trans people, against us. Witnessing this do you feel like well things used to be so much worse and this is just how it goes or do you feel more like shit we finally got there and now it’s getting bad again. Where are you at emotionally?
Murray: Because I am older, it hasn’t always been rosy. And it does feel like we’re going back to a time when gay and trans people were protesting in the streets. But I struggle on a daily basis to try not to buy into the ruse of it all. I honestly believe that it is a minority of people that feel hatred and want to harm us and want to erase us and take away our rights and healthcare. I do feel it’s a minority. That said, looking at the news today the reality is that things are being passed. It’s real. Laws are getting changed. That’s the scary part. And on a daily basis I have to remind myself to turn anger into action. What can my action be? How can I as a person in the community, as an elder person in the community, be of service? And I really think that my whole thing is — and this kind of goes back to me in elementary school — I want to show people one-on-one or in a group or through Fred or by being a host on a TV show that I’m just a human being. We breathe the same air, we eat the same bad foods, I don’t like to exercise, I’m a human being first.
Cardi B tweeted something like I don’t know what everyone’s problem is, everyone has a gay best friend, everyone has a gay cousin, and if you’re homophobic you’re ugly. Most of the people who are spewing this hate don’t even know any trans people. I want to be the guy that they meet or who they see on TV and they go oh hey this is just a human being, a person with a heart. The same problems, the same issues. I want to build a bridge with my anger. I want to turn it into a handshake.
Drew: Does that ever get exhausting? I know sometimes when I go out into the world, especially in certain places, I can feel this pressure to be super friendly because if I’m the first trans person someone is meeting or the only one they’re going to talk to this month I need to make a good impression. And that can be exhausting. How do you deal with the burden of that?
Murray: I find other things more exhausting. The misgendering. Even when I’m in full drag, in a completely queer space, I’m sometimes still called a girl, people use she and her. I could go on and on. It blows my mind. And that’s in our own community. Then out in the world, forget it. That’s a whole other story. And I’m not necessarily the type of person who is a corrector. I usually have a three strike policy and then I’m like okay time to get the schoolbook out.
But in response to what you’re saying about having to be friendly, this is how I feel: I need to be myself and I actually am a very upbeat, friendly, warm person. My first instinct is actually to dull that. Because enemy! enemy! danger! homophobe! transphobe! So I have to dig deep to remain who I am even in the face of a threat.
Drew: I love that.
Murray: And then most of the time, we can reach some sort of human understanding.
Drew: The last thing I want to ask you is a very broad question.
Murray: Well, I love broads!
Drew: (laughs)
Murray: (laughs)
Drew: What does showbiz mean to you?
Murray: It has many meanings! One example is you’re on tour, you’re doing great, the show starts at 7 o’clock, and then the bus doesn’t show up. And you look at your friend and you’re like, “Showbiz.” Right? Or you’re watching Judy Garland and she’s doing her thing and you’re like, “Showbiz! Now that is showbiz!”
To me, showbiz means the spotlight is on you. And not only is the spotlight on you, but you’re feeling the light. You’re feeling the light and then you’re giving the light. And when you’re feeling the light and giving the light, hey, maybe you share a couple of things that might help somebody else out. But then when things go wrong and you can’t fucking believe it even though showbiz is a pain in the ass most of the time, well, that’s showbiz too.
Revisiting Iconic Pride Scenes From Film and Television
Pride month is nearing, and I thought it might be fun to look at on-screen depictions of Pride through the years. It turns out…there aren’t that many? I thought perhaps there was just a gap in my knowledge, but even when I tapped other queer film/tv critics to assist with this list, it didn’t get much longer! I thought surely there’d be DOZENS? Where is the 200 Cigarettes-esque multistory, sprawling cast Pride comedy we deserve?! Actually, don’t take that idea. I might wanna do that idea.
Also, I’m hoping the Billy Porter-directed teen comedy set at Pride being made by Gabrielle Union’s production company is still in the works, but I feel like I haven’t heard any new information about it in a couple years.
I do think part of the reason it’s rare to find Pride scenes is because of budget reasons! It’d be expensive and difficult to film a Pride parade or major event in a way that feels realistic. It makes sense to me that Sense8 is on this list twice given the sheer size of that show’s large-scale production budget! Also, it makes sense to me that a lot of Pride scenes film at actual Pride events rather than staging them. Some shows have referenced Gay Pride even if they don’t explicitly show Pride events, like Pose and Generation Q.
Here are some of the (rare!) moments from film and television that explicitly depict Pride celebrations. I’m sure I missed some though, so be sure to shout them out in the comments!
Pride docuseries
Okay, this is an obvious one to include, but the 2021 FX docuseries Pride documents LGBTQ+ resistance and activism from the 1950s to the 2000s. It’s worth a watch! I’m skipping over some documentaries on this list, because I’m going to do a separate Pride piece that centers docs, but this series feels right to include on this list as a starting point.
Pride (2014)
This movie really captures the political and activism aspects of Gay Pride, focusing on the group Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, which advocated for a Welsh mining community. Collective action! Protesting! Being loud and proud and fighting the system! This is what Pride’s all about.
The Truth About Jane (2000)
Ah, yes, the time Stockard Channing plays mother to a teen lesbian coming out the closet and does not take it well but then eventually goes to a Pride parade as she learns to accept her gay daughter! I wish this very 2000 movie hadn’t made me cry when I watched it the first time, but ALAS!!!!!! We get to see the parade from young Jane’s POV, and it got me. She’s taking it all in — the signs, the shirts, the smiling and cheering queers living out and proud. The movie is free to stream online.
BPM (2017)
Set in 1990s France, the French movie BPM follows ACT UP Paris activists. There’s a lot to love about this movie, and I in particular am drawn to the tension within the group about how to best show up for Pride. Some members want to take a more serious approach to mourn lives lost, but some of our central characters want to take a more joyful and cheerful approach to celebrating queer lives. I think this tension and plurality ties very well into the theme of Autostraddle’s Pride package this year, which will be revealed soon 👀
South of Nowhere, “Gay Pride”
The third season of South of Nowhere indeed featured an episode literally called “Gay Pride,” which saw the return of the show’s popular ship “Spashley.” Just typing “Spashley” awakened something dormant in me.
Queer as Folk, “Pride”
The Pride episode of Queer as Folk aired in 2002 and is centered on the characters attending Pittsburgh’s Gay Pride parade. It has it all! Pride ex drama! Baby gay first Pride fears! Dykes on bikes!
The L Word, “Loud & Proud“
Given the subject matter and scope, it’s a little surprising we don’t have like…75 episodes of The L Word to choose from when it comes to on-screen depictions of Pride. Instead, we pretty much just have season two, episode 11, “Loud & Proud.” We head to West Hollywood Pride in the episode, and I’d say that the most Pride thing about this episode are the outfits that make you experience a full spectrum of reactions. Alice at one point is in a red terrycloth romper and a rainbow boa, and it all makes you go “huh” but also “could be cute?” What is Pride if not perplexing fashion-wise!
Harlem, “Pride”
In Harlem‘s second season, Tye takes Quinn to her first Pride after coming out — she comes dressed wig-to-toe in a homemade outfit! — and the comedy of errors of one of the longest days on the queer calendar is not quite what Quinn expected. Meanwhile, Tye ends up on a journey of self-discovery, confronts her past, and grapples with what her legacy means as a queer small business owner in service of her community. It’s joy-filled but also nuanced look at the range of feelings queer people have about Pride, and is also one of the only depictions of Black community celebrations of Pride on television.
Boomerang, “Family”
Like Harlem, Lena Waithe’s Boomerang stands out by focusing its depiction of Pride on voice and celebrations that are often otherwise left at the margins — this time on Atlanta’s annual Black Pride festival. This is what Carmen had to say when the episode first aired in 2019:
“Most striking is that we not only see Tia and Ari comfortable in their own Black queer skin, but that the director chooses to highlight – via portrait style close ups – a variety of festival goers. Black trans women and men, Black studs and butches, Black femmes of all genders, Black drag performers, Black masc gay men – the whole family is accounted for. And we’re happy, we’re smiling, we’re…. Proud. There is not a single second in the episodes 22 minute run time where Black queer folks are asked to check any part of ourselves at the door. It’s unforgettable and, quite frankly, revolutionary.”
Vanderpump Rules, “Your Pride’s Showing”
While I won’t include every single Bravo Pride moment (because a lot of them center straight women!), this Vanderpump Rules episode from season eight is important, because it was the first Pride episode of VPR that main cast member Ariana Madix was out as bisexual for. In fact, I wrote about it when it first aired. Newer (and short-lived) cast member Dayna (pictured above) also came out as bisexual at Pride that year. Now is when I must confess that my fiancé Kristen and I have a deranged annual Pride tradition — that we do on the morning of Orlando Pride, which doesn’t happen until October — of watching all the Pride episodes of Vanderpump Rules. Yes, Pride episodes are an annual tradition for this show (though they’ve sadly stopped doing them recently), and yes they often focus way more on the straight cast members’ drama than the actual queer ones, but they still just really capture the vibe of Pride.
Real Housewives of Atlanta, “The Float Goes On”
My favorite thing about this episode is that it airs one episode after Cynthia Bailey’s daughter Noelle opens up about being sexually fluid to her mom in a really sweet scene. Then just one episode later, we get to see them going to New York for World Pride together! There are some classic Housewives shenanigans that go down on the float unfortunately, but I like that it’s also a touching mother daughter moment between Cynthia and Noelle!
Southern Hospitality, “Pride and Peanut Butter”
This is one of my favorite Pride episodes on Bravo, because it’s the one that manages to center LGBTQ+ cast members the most. There are still some straight shenanigans (I won’t even explain what the “peanut butter” in the title means, but you can Google it”), but for the most part, this episode really is about Mikel and TJ, the show’s queer main cast members — who also are kind of frenemies but still come together in this episode to throw a killer Pride party. Mikel’s coming out journey is documented across the season as he reckons with his religious upbringing and familial relationships. TJ opens up in the episode about how he never really formally came out to his parents. It’s a really moving depiction of a range of queer experiences in the South, and the whole time I was watching it, I was mumbling “Vanderpump Rules could never.”
Sense8, “Isolated Above, Connected Below”
The sixth episode of Sense8‘s second season features the previously closeted Lito making the boldest public declaration of his own queerness by participating in São Paulo’s Pride parade. The scene was filmed at São Paolo’s actual Pride celebrations!!!!! It has all the hallmarks of a big, spectacular Sense8 set piece while also being…real! It’s such a celebratory and fun scene that it would easily be one of my favorite on-screen Pride moments of all time if it weren’t for the fact that Sense8 had already topped it a season before, which brings us to…
Sense8, “Limbic Resonance”
I have saved the best for last. This is easily my favorite Pride scene of all time as well as the moment I first fell in love with Sense8. It happens in the first few minutes of the show’s pilot. Amanita fucks Nomi with a rainbow strap-on, takes it off, and wishes her gorgeous girlfriend a happy Pride. It’s a lovely, hot, wet scene of intimate and joyful queer and trans sex. Happy Pride indeed!!!!
Later, we see Nomi and Amanita out and about celebrating Pride, and they reflect on their first Pride together. It’s really sweet and sweetly real! This is why I’m surprised Pride doesn’t crop up in film and television more often! Sure, there are plenty of individuals and couples who don’t make a point to attend designated Pride events on the regular, but it’s a big part of a lot of queer people’s lives! Even just complaining about [corporate] Pride is a big part of being queer! Nomi and Amanita always felt like a strikingly realistic lesbian couple to me, and the fact that we meet them on Pride and they reflect on their first Pride together actually heightens that!
