“The White Lotus”: Should Aubrey Plaza and Meghann Fahy Kiss?
If there’s one thing The White Lotus writer/director Mike White and I have in common, it’s a belief that anyone can be a little gay.
I’ve learned this lesson from being a gender-nonconforming queer trans woman living in 2022. Mike White learned this lesson by being a bisexual Gen-Xer whose conservative dad used to write speeches for Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell before coming out as gay. (Yes, you read that right.)
The first season of The White Lotus wasn’t short on queer hijinks with its vaguely gay and overtly toxic teen besties, a surprise gay dad reveal, and some Emmy-winning ass eating from Murray Bartlett. But this season has wisely traded attempts at exploring race and colonialism for a total commitment to sexual politics. It’s what White did best in season one and it’s why, in my opinion, this current season is so much better.
The last episode ended with a now trademark White Lotus gay sex cliffhanger. We also got confirmation that Valentina is a lesbian — which, personally, I’ve assumed since the premiere. And Cameron and Ethan are still always on the verge of at least jacking each other off because straight bros are going to straight bro.
And yet, all this overt queerness, is not what I’m thinking about. Because this show also happens to star Aubrey Plaza and, well, I am just a basic homosexual. Like sometimes the celebrities our community drools over leave me feeling confused, but Aubrey??? Correct. You’re all correct. I’m correct. Anyone who watched Happiest Season was correct correct correct.
Plaza is always fun to watch even when she’s not playing gay. And that seemed to be the case with this season of The White Lotus. Her character, Harper, is married to recently successful tech entrepreneur, Ethan, and most of the speculation has been around whether she’s somehow going to end up in the arms of boring, rich asshole, Cameron.
But then in episode three, Harper has a ladies night with Cameron’s wife, Daphne, and I started to think: wait a second… are these two going to smooch??
Daphne is played by Meghann Fahy who emerged as my favorite character on The Bold Type, a testament more to Fahy’s performance than the character herself. She’s perfect on The White Lotus, as a wealthy woman who has found an inner peace by relying on desire, deceit, and selective ignorance of her world and ours.
This past episode — after much wine — Harper tells Daphne that she thinks their husbands cheated on them the night they were apart. Daphne smiles and says whatever happened wasn’t a big deal.
“And if anything ever did happen, you just do what you have to do to make yourself feel better about it.”
She tells Daphne that she has a trainer in the city with blonde hair and blue eyes. She says she sometimes spends more time with him than Cameron. She asks if Harper wants to see him and tosses her phone over.
Harper looks down to see a picture of Daphne’s kids, the oldest with blonde hair and blue eyes.
Reader, I screamed.
One woman confessing her infidelities — and children’s paternity — to another woman may not seem like flirting. But I’m telling you this scene had an energy!! Prolonged eye contact, chuckles, sips of wine.
Now it’s possible Aubrey Plaza just has sexual chemistry with everyone — especially every woman. But ultimately I do think Harper kissing Daphne would be far more interesting — and more enjoyable to watch — than if she gives in to Cameron’s advances.
The question is… should she?
Harper thinks Ethan cheated. And since that’s his fault for lying to her, maybe that justifies her cheating as well. But I’m not interested in the morality of marriage and infidelity. I’m interested in the morality of Cameron and Daphne.
It’s easy to call cheating unethical. It’s easy to criticize Valentina for abusing her position of power to crush on an employee. It’s easy to say that murder is wrong — whoever those bodies end up being. But none of these acts are as harmful as Cameron’s entire existence, and, therefore, Daphne’s.
The greatest evil enacted in our society is done by rich men who are never faced with the consequences of their actions. It’s a game to them. They ruin our world, ruin lives, and then fly off to a White Lotus. Harper is right in her disgust of Cameron and Daphne. The ways in which she’s being “difficult” are justified. People who cause this kind of harm do not deserve politeness because they are “nice.” The issue is not whether Cameron and Daphne vote — it’s who they’d vote for if they did.
And so, no, worker’s rights lawyer Harper should absolutely not fuck Cameron and shouldn’t even fuck Daphne. Because Daphne is complicit in her husband’s actions. Six years after the 2016 election, we really shouldn’t still be excusing rich white women just because they hate their husbands and have a nice smile.
But, hey, if Harper is looking to cheat, I know a horny manager of The White Lotus: Sicily who could use a more appropriate target for her affections. And if Aubrey Plaza and Meghann Fahy want to kiss on their own time, well, I support that too.
This Old WB Promo Brought Me Right Back to My Teenage Feels
In the late 90/early 00s, no TV network had a chokehold on me quite like the WB. It was the home of most of my favorite shows at the time, including Dawson’s Creek and Popular. We only had one TV, so we watched it together a lot as a family, even though my parents would tune out Dawson’s Creek. At 13/14, I was so desperate to be a cool teenager. Those shows made me feel like one.
When I came across this old WB promo from 2000, I was instantly transported back to those days.
The promo video is so jam packed that you couldn’t swing a stick without hitting one of the hottest network stars of the time. James Van Der Beek, Sarah Michelle Gellar (my birthday twin), Melissa Joan Hart, Jamie Foxx. It’s been 22 years (!!) since this promo aired, but somehow it still feels like yesterday?? I turned watching it into my own sort of memory game to see how many people I could not only recognize but correctly guess what show they were on. I’ll have it be known that my ability to name literally almost every face I saw, when I cannot remember what day of the week it currently is, proves that youth is wasted on the young. Why do I still remember Brendan Fehr, but it took me three trips to the grocery store to remember to buy my kid cereal? (And for the record, I didn’t even watch Roswell.)
I know that it wasn’t meant this way, but the dream-like quality of the video now creates a nostalgic haze. Back then it was supposed to be the party you wish you could attend because of how many cool people were there. Now, I wish I could attend that party to recapture some of the sheer joy of youth, but only if it was over by 10pm. There are so many pairs of bootcut leather pants, it’s amazing. I genuinely tried to forget those, even though I owned a faux pair myself! I can’t help but look at the clothes and think ”teenagers want to dress like this now?” I mean, I did back then, but I didn’t know better!
Aside from the ridiculous fashion, there are new things I realize. I can now identify my undying love for Katie Holmes as a serious crush. Back then she just felt like the girl that I wanted to be best friends with. But while I thought Dawson was cute, Joey Potter and her smile would turn me into a heart-eye emoji. Even now, I can feel that pang of seeing her shyly mess around with everyone else. I’ve also realized that I most certainly had a crush on Nikki Cox, who starred on the comedy Unhappily Ever After — the show wasn’t even that funny, but I watched it every week. A lot of these shows were airing during the time where I was really figuring out my bisexuality, except back in the year 2000, I didn’t have a word for it.
The most defining example of my teenage bisexual feels is tucked away in a few blink or you’ll miss it moments in this promo video. During the summer of 2000, there was a show called Young Americans. I was OBSESSED. It was a weak spinoff of Dawson’s Creek and its major corporate sponsor was Coca-Cola. (Seriously, the corporate sponsor thing was out of control.) It was the only original show on during the summer, and at 14, I spent most of that summer in the house talking to my friends on AIM and needed something new to watch. It was full of pretty, young unknown actors including Kate Bosworth and Ian Somerhalder.
One of the plotlines was a tale-as-old-as-time “girl who pretends to be a boy” stories. Jacqueline, desperate for her mom’s attention, enrolls at the prestigious all-boys prep school as Jake. Jake was played by Kate Moennig, and she finds herself falling for Hamilton, who was played by Ian Somerhalder. I didn’t know what a bisexual was, but I knew that I was jealous of both of them whenever they would find themselves alone together. It was the first example of what I like to call a bisexual nightmare and set off my decades long crush on Kate Moennig that still burns.
Nostalgia is such a fascinating thing, isn’t it? One little commercial from 20 years ago opened a Pandora’s box of feelings that transported me right back to being a horny 14-year-old, for only a few minutes at least.
It’s Lesbian Enemies to Lovers on Season 4 of “The Dragon Prince”
A deaf butch human warrior. A Black elf queen. Enemies to begrudging comrades. Comrades to tentative friends. Tentative friends to… future wives. That’s right! This year, while “grown-up” fantasy fans have been subjected to endless balks at queerness, and racist screeching that characters of color don’t belong in Star Wars, House of the Dragon, Lord of the Rings, and The Little Mermaid, Netflix’s animated series, The Dragon Prince, has continued to grow and develop a dozen fantasy POC characters, including Sunfire Elf Queen Janai, newly and queerly engaged to her former foe, disabled badass Amaya. Tolkien truly could never.
In season three of The Dragon Prince, General Amaya is captured by the Sunfire Elves. Janai sees her as nothing more than an enemy prisoner. But over the course of the season, Amaya find herself trusting and relating to Janai. Ultimately Amaya joins the Sunfire Elves in their battle against their enemies, and Amaya keeps Janai from riding to her death after her sister is killed. They smile at each other a little bit. They say thanks. They hold hands. And in the between-seasons time-jump, they fall for each other!
Season four, which landed this month, opens with the two of them getting engaged in an elaborate and romantic ceremony that nearly made me swoon right out of my skin! You might think it sounds like a cop-out, to miss out on their courtship, but actually it sets them up to have one of the most mature queer relationships on TV.
Until a few years ago, Amaya and Janai’s races were at war with each other. There’s a lot of bad blood between their people. Both Amaya and Janai have endured intense trauma, losing beloved siblings and being thrust into power positions they weren’t quite ready to take on. Neither of them fully understand the differences between their cultures. And everything they do, every decision they make, it’s not just about their own personal relationship with each other; it’s a very public example, for both of their peoples, about what things will be like between them. Their relationship is built on love, but they’re also political figureheads, so everything they say and do has ramifications far beyond them. Watching them navigate their conflicts, watching them open themselves up to new understandings of new worlds, watching them stand up for their own cultures while humbly accepting the differences in the other’s culture — it’s a wonder to behold. (You know who else could never? Bette and Tina.)
Also: Amaya and Janai really are in love. They make each other laugh, they make each other furious, they kiss right on the lips. Things aren’t going to be easy for them. Janai fights off a coup before season four ends — but I really believe these two gaybies are going to make it work. They’re setting an example for humans and Sunfire Elves, sure. And they’re also setting an example for what brilliant fantasy can be like when storytellers refuse to be confined to Shires they grew up inside.
25 Babes With Baseball Bats, Ranked by Lesbianism
The World Series came to a close last night (congrats, Astros fans!).To honor the occasion, our team spent an entire workday this week ranking baseball batted babes by lesbianism. Well, I mean, the World Series and also the fact that we still can’t stop thinking and talking about A League of Their Own.
This list was calculated using my usual form of gay math. I dropped a whole bunch of photos into Slack, provided a little context, and asked everyone on the team to vote for each batter on a scale of 1 to 5 (1 being least lesbian, 5 being most lesbian). I also asked them to offer some evidence for their ranking. And then everyone voted somewhere between a one and a FIFTY because the only thing queers love more than sharing their opinions is BEING CHAOTIC. Which is fine, of course; I am not exactly known for making people follow “rules.” I averaged the votes and sorted them and another entirely scientific Autostraddle list was born.
25 Babes With Baseball Bats, Ranked by Lesbianism
25. Max Mayfield, Stranger Things
Heather: Here Max is threatening a bully/prepping for eventual Demodog encounters.
Valerie Anne: I don’t believe that Max is straight but I also don’t believe she’s ever held a baseball bat before.
Shelli Nicole: We all know how I feel about the children of Stranger Things. They are my little cousins and I would do anything to save them. That being said, Max needs zero help and her wielding this may not be very gay but it is very badass.
Natalie: Had to lose some points for the spikes and the awkward grip. Definitely not adding her to my softball lineup.
24. Beyoncé, Lemonade
Heather: They don’t love you like I love you.
Shelli Nicole: THEY DON’T LOVE YOU LIKE I LOVE YOU!!!!
Christina: Changed me.
Drew: Okay but this is one of THE great works of heterosexual art and I don’t want to erase their culture.
Vanessa: WAS WAITING FOR THIS THE WHOLE TIME.
Vanessa: THIS IS MY TWILIGHT MOMENT, LANEIA.
23. Gail Peck, Rookie Blue
Heather: At the batting cages on a gay date! Hilariously runs away from a slow pitch!
Valerie Anne: Gail “Noodle Arms” Peck never backed down from a fight, could murder a man with just a look, had quips that would make your brain explode…but couldn’t hit a baseball to save her life. AND I LOVE HER FOR IT.
Natalie: Oh Gail…she was good at a lot of things. Baseball, however, was not one of them.
Natalie: The footwear is a dead giveaway.
22. Waverly Earp, Wynonna Earp
Heather: Prior to realizing she is a supernatural goddess, Waverly uses a baseball bat to protect herself. Her boyfriend at the time is a useless lump.
Valerie Anne: That bat beat away compulsory heterosexuality and set her free!!!
Meg: IT SURE DID.
Darcy: The only “you’ll be hitting the boys off so the a stick” we really need.
Natalie: This is giving, “I have to do everything myself.”
21. Cristina Yang, Grey’s Anatomy
Heather: Fondly remembered for its Calzona outfield canoodles, season seven’s “Put Me In, Coach” also showcases Owen turning on the pitching machine to pelt Cristina with softballs, so she scowls, squares her shoulders, and knocks it out of the… well, the infield. She’s been drinking from a flask in the outfield with Meredith all day.
Valerie Anne: She should have hit Owen in the head and put us all out of our misery.
Christina: One of the baseball scenes is where Cristina says “I am in love with Teddy” sooooo.
Anya: I have never seen Grey’s Anatomy so I am basically picturing Eve from Killing Eve batting up, and that is very gay.
Vanessa: Casey, same.
Natalie: If only, Valerie. If only.
20. Mrs. Barbara Howard (Woman of God), Abbott Elementary
Heather: Borrowed her work wife’s baseball bat (taped under her desk, ofc) to demolish the school’s one working toilet so the city would have to come fix all the bathrooms.
Valerie Anne: If this were ‘ranked by badassery’ I would have ranked this higher but I have a feeling if I told her I was a lesbian she’d be like, “My cousin’s neighbor’s daughter’s hairdresser’s dog walker is a lesbian, do you know her? I should set you up!”
Nico: It is true that heterosexual women can also be badasses.
Shelli Nicole: Mrs. Howard showed 26 minutes of The Rocky Horror Picture Show to her church on Halloween. A true Ally to the community.
Shelli Nicole: Plus she’s so hot and can do whatever she wants. Heyyyyyyy Mrs. Howard….
Christina: She is so hot it makes me ill.
Nico: I will third this.
Darcy: Yeah this ranks low in lesbianism but extremely high in my heart.
Natalie: She will not allow her desks to be desked yet again!
19. Carol Danvers, Captain Marvel
Heather: She gets knocked down over and over in a montage, including this one where a boy pitcher tries to knock off her head — but then she GETS THE FUCK BACK UP so she can get back home to her wife and daughter.
Drew: I am deeply sorry to the Captain Marvel gay subtext community but in the years that have passed Marvel’s lack of actual gay stuff has made me harsher on this.
Stef Rubino: I hear that. I feel like I should’ve been harsher but this is one of only two Marvel movies i’ve actually seen, and it felt pretty gay at the time.
Drew: Oh it feels sooo gay no argument from me there.
Carmen: If someone wants to read my ‘Carol Danvers is Monica Rambeau’s deadbeat dad’ fanfiction, you know where to find me.
18. The Cullens, Twilight
Heather: I was going to give y’all some context for this one too, but the fact that everyone started chanting TWILIGHT! TWILIGHT! TWILIGHT! as soon as I announced this list makes me think you don’t need it.
Laneia: Cinema.
Valerie Anne: All vampires are gay. These vampires are playing baseball. Therefore this baseball is gay. Simple math.
Nico: This is the most realistic depiction of how lesbians play baseball. Even if not everyone in this scene is a lesbian, they play baseball with the enthusiasm, gusto and prowess of lesbians.
Stef: Nico, that’s exactly correct.
Shelli Nicole: Film at it’s fucking finest.
Kayla: I came in here to say “this is cinema” before seeing Laneia’s comment.
Laneia: You know what, I might have to disagree with everyone here and say that vampires are specifically bi, but then between the Alice/Bella slashfic I’ve read and the fact that Edward is canonically a lesbian bisexual, this is a very lesbian baseball moment. Straight mortal beings could never.
Kayla: I love media analysis.
Christina: If you ask the average internet riddled homosexual what cinema is, a shockingly high number will say this scene
Vanessa: I want it noted I voted 5 for this solely because I love Laneia.
17. Ginny Baker, Pitch
Heather: Fox’s amazing baseball show about the first woman pitcher in the MLB that was cancelled after one season because they kept putting it up against Thursday Night Football.
Shelli Nicole: WAIT — who is this?!
Valerie Anne: I’ve never forgiven TV for cancelling this show, and I 100% blame Mark-Paul Gosselaar because if they had just let her be GAY and not forced her to KISS HIM it would have been a PERFECT SHOW.
Valerie Anne: (Or even if they hadn’t let her be gay but just not put them together I HAVE A LOT OF UNRESOLVED PITCH FEELINGS.
Christina: I MISS THIS SHOW.
Riese: I FUCKING LOVED THIS SHOW.
Kayla: I MISS THIS SHOW SO MUCH.
Carmen: THIS SHOW WAS PERFECT NOW I AM SO SAD.
Natalie: My crusade to bring back Pitch continues unabated…
Natalie: Also, there were no American-born Black MLB players in the World Series for the first time since 1950. We need this representation back on our screens!
16. Kristy Thomas, Baby-Sitter’s Club
Heather: Tomboy icon + BSC founder and president Kristy Thomas is at bat.
Stef Rubino: Kristy Thomas is gay as hell.
Riese: Why is there a zombie in the stands at this baseball game?
Stef Rubino: To watch baseball, Riese.
Riese: That’s true good point zombies deserve a nice evening at the little league game as much as the rest of us.
Stef Rubino: Yeah, he’s trying to harness the joys of his former life.
Darcy: I viscerally remember when I started getting these books through the book fair with the NEW, sophisticated cover redesign.
Darcy: With the crooked BSC logo.
Darcy: They felt SO MUCH fancier than the old ones.
Darcy: Kristy and the Trouble With Zombies.
Casey: Remember when she didn’t want to date Bart, her rival kids baseball team coach?
Casey: GAY.
Darcy: I cannot BELIEVE there are only two fives on this and one is mine.
Vanessa: DARCY I have joined you.
15. Camila Noceda, The Owl House
Heather: Camila is the mom of The Owl House’s bisexual main character, Luz. Camila has adopted all the kids on this show, basically; is a veterinarian; and is using a baseball bat to beat up demons to keep her gay babies safe.
Nico: I love that there are not one, but two instances of people using baseball bats to fight demons on this list?
Valerie Anne: THE PIN.
Kayla: Jack-o-lantern shirt under a flannel is somehow even gayer than the literal Pride pin.
Carmen: I was gonna vote her lower, but the pin really cinched it.
Natalie: I had to go 5 on this: the pin combined with the jack-o-lantern t-shirt (clearly a reference to gay Christmas) plus the way she’s holding the bat…this is EXTRA GAY.
14. Renee Montoya, Batwoman
Heather: Renee is walking into a party in a suit, flanked by other gay gals, ready to start/finish a fight.
Valerie Anne: THE SWAGGER.
NICO: THE SUIT.
Kayla: Color coordinating the bat to the suit is iconiccccc dyke behavior.
Carmen: Ok but no one has mentioned that it’s Harley Quinn’s bat? No disrespect to Renee Montoya, but that means all her points should also be Harley’s points.
Carmen: Harley should win the list. Her bat is so gay it made a new girlfriend.
13. Snorlax, Pokemon Sun and Moon
Heather: In this episode of Pokemon Sun and Moon, “Pulling Out the Pokémon Base Pepper!,” Snorlax uses Pulverizing Pancake to smash Wobbuffet and beat Team Rocket!
Shelli Nicole: I don’t know what this is but lol 5 stars.
Stef Rubino: This reminds me of me If I were to go up to bat, so I’m saying 5, as well.
Vanessa: Do we think Snorlax is a fat femme or fat butch or…
Stef Rubino: I’m claiming them for the butch but also genderless community.
Vanessa: This feels true and right, Stef.
12. Boris, Slo Pitch
Heather: Boris is a chaotic German lesbian who plays in the Canadian slow pitch beer league. Her team is the Brovaries.
Shelli Nicole: Although I hate the team name I dig this show.
Casey: This is giving strong Kate McKinnon licking her ghost busting equipment vibes.
11. Nancy Gillian, 9-1-1: Lone Star
Heather: Nancy is queer and played softball in high school because of the girls. Her nickname was The Big Whiff but she kept playing anyway, due to the: girls.
Shelli Nicole: I HATE that nickname but also – 5 stars.
Carmen: She’s so tall. That’s it. I’m gay. She’s so tall.
Carmen: The legs!?!? The height!?!?
10. Ruby and Sapphire, Steven Universe
Heather: Ruby and Sapphire are married and are usually fused together to form Garnet, but they unfuse due to competitiveness to play baseball. They flirt the whole time.
Valerie Anne: Flirt-fighting with your partner during sports sounds pretty gay to me.
Natalie: I like the follow through. Also I’m picturing Dottie yelling “dirt in the skirt!” from the dugout.
9. Harley Quinn, Bat-verse
Heather: Your favorite chaotic bisexual’s favorite weapon is a baseball bat.
Valerie Anne: She’s a Batman universe “villain” who carries a bat that would be recognized as hers even if she wasn’t holding it SHE WINS.
Shelli Nicole: Harley is a bisexual menace and I support her wielding items to cause chaos in any form.
Carmen: I literally voted for the highest number I could.
Natalie: The level of excitement with which she is wielding that bat is both scary and sexy.
8. Doris Murphy, A League of Their Own
Heather: The only context you need here is: This is Rosie. In a League of Their Own.
Nico: It’s ROSIE.
Stef Rubino: And still one of the gayest characters in cinema. To ME. Personally.
Riese: I mean.
Sai: My favorite is her impression of Penny Marshall telling her to play the scenes less gay.
Casey: I can hear her yelling, lesbian-ly, in my head when I look at this picture.
Carmen: I’m going to just casually lay down in the street so that she can run on over me.
7. Nicole, Fresh Off the Boat
Heather: When Nicole can’t figure out how to tell her dad she’s a lesbian, she joins The Denim Turtle — the town’s gay bar — softball team and then comes out in the middle of a game.
Shelli Nicole: I wish with all my heart that I had come out to my dad in the middle of one of my softball games — instead I chose an email about a decade later. This is very iconic dykey behavior.
Vanessa: Heather, I no longer feel the need to watch television, I feel like you can just tell me about the best scenes and I’ll be content.
Natalie: Coming out after joining a softball team for a gay bar? This is PEAK gay.
Natalie: However, -1 point for the notsogay uniform. This was the 90s, this outfit should’ve been much, much gayer!
6. Kalinda Sharma, The Good Wife
Heather: Beat the literal hell out of an enemy’s car after stealing evidence from it, left a lipstick kiss on the rearview mirror.
Sally: I’m only voting once, and it’s to give this one 50, because it deserves it.
Kayla: Do you know how many times the gif of this moment showed up on my personal tumblr when I was still identifying AS STRAIGHT????????????????
Nico: A sign??
Sally: Literally the only reason anyone would be straight is so they could be turned gay by this scene.
Shelli Nicole: This is always something I wanted to do if I were a villain so…10/10.
Christina: Filed under: things I think about a lot.
Casey: HOT.
Natalie: 🎵 I bust the windows out your car/ You should feel lucky that that’s all I did. 🎵
5. JoJo Siwa, MLB Celebrity All-Star Game
Photo by by Daniel Shirey/MLB Photos via Getty Images
Heather: A home run! Watch this gazelle (affectionate) run!
Shelli Nicole: This is — unspeakably and off the charts dykey.
Stef: Even the expression on her face!
Casey: The hair!
Riese: It’s like her hair is taken aback by the velocity of the dyke energy here.
4. Jo DeLuca, A League of Their Own
Heather: DeLuca the Bazooka wins the World Series.
Meg: Christ almighty, this picture.
Stef Rubino: If she doesn’t get to go to a secret gay bar and schmooze with some other hot babe (instead of getting beaten up!!) next season, I’m gonna lose it.
Casey: Agreed! Give Jo a girlfriend!! Maybe with a pitcher from another team who is her enemy at first??
Natalie: I love that storyline idea, Casey.
Carmen: Hey wife.
Vanessa: Found Jo a girlfriend! 😇 ^
3. Ryan Wilder, Batwoman
Heather: She’s BATwoman.
Nico: 5 out of 5 bats!
Valerie Anne: The best bat!
Meg: HEATHER.
Carmen: (She better rank in the top three or everybody’s fired.)
Natalie: Our forever bat.
2. Max Chapman, A League of Their Own
Heather: Max never actually bats in ALOTO, but she sure does strike out a whole lotta men. (And only strikes out with one woman.)
Valerie Anne: NO NOTES.
Shelli Nicole: NO NOTES AT ALL.
Stef Rubino: NOT A SINGLE ONE.
Riese: YES.
Nico: ZERO NOTES.
Darcy: HELP.
Casey: THE LEAN I’M DEAD.
Carmen: LITERALLY NOT A NOTE.
Natalie: Torn between being utterly seduced by this picture and being stuck on there being no bats. I’m a sports gay, you can’t do this to me!
1. Jodie Foster, Rookie of the Year
Heather: An ABC Afterschool Special from 1973 about Jodie Foster joining an all-boys baseball team.
Shelli Nicole: We should make a post where it is just this photo and zero words — clicks off the charts.
Laneia:
![A young Jodie Foster licking her lips and cocking her eyebrow. Text reads: [gay silence]](https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/gay-silence.gif?w=290&resize=290%2C221)
Shelli Nicole: I see we are on the same page, Laneia.
Natalie: The outfit, the tentative grip on the bat, the concentration…it’s all very “baby gay.”
Slow Takes: “Pen15” and Embracing Alternate Girlhoods
When my sister was in sixth grade and I was in third, I walked into her room without knocking.
She was naked, jumping up and down — a goofy child fascinated by her new chest. She shrieked a death scream to match her stab of embarrassment. She told me she hated me. She complained to my mom. And I started knocking whenever I dared to enter her room.
As a kid, I latched onto my sister and her friends. I took whatever role I could get in their games of make believe, happily obliged any rules as long as I could play. The eagerness of a younger sibling and my hidden transness combined to create a child desperate for these older girls’ approval.
But middle school changes a person — especially a girl. My desire to be close with my sister was replaced with a desire for her and my mom to just stop screaming at each other. My yearning for approval was replaced with a confused dread as she vented about older boys.
I witnessed her middle school years with a mix of horror and envy. My birth announcement may have read: “Boy, oh boy! Liz and Keith Gregory are proud to announce the birth of their son.” But it wasn’t until my sister went through puberty that I truly realized I was a boy. There was a new distance between us — one I couldn’t expect to disappear.
When it was my turn to go to middle school, I wouldn’t understand her more. Supposedly, I would understand the boys she crushed on, complained about, ignored. My body would change in different ways.
Make believe was over.
***
Pen15 came out two years after me.
Co-created by Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle along with frequent director Sam Svibleman, the show stars Erskine and Konkle as versions of their middle school selves. This allows them to explore the often too adult experiences faced by young teens — specifically girls in the year 2000 — without exploiting actors of that age. It also further alienates the two leads since all the other middle schoolers are played by actual middle schoolers.
The show is brilliant in its specificities — of the era and of middle school in general. Sure, things like AIM and taking out your retainer before a first kiss, but also the ways certain girls would tie up their PE uniforms to look “sexy” or the cadence in a girl’s voice as she plays messenger to her best friend’s crush.
Watching the first season during what I considered my second puberty was miserable. I could acknowledge its effectiveness, but I felt alienated. I was reminded that middle school wasn’t just the beginning of boy-girl parties but the painful reality that those parties ended with the girls having one sleepover and the boys another. Never was I more grouped in with “boys” than middle school. The show didn’t feel relatable — it reminded me of all the beautiful suffering I’d missed.
I pitched an essay about this experience but gave up during my rewatch. It’s the only time I ever missed a deadline. And when the show came back for a two-part final season, I opted not to watch.
It’s been a year since the series finale, and I’ve been out for more than half a decade. The scars of middle school, of transitioning, of 2019, have all faded. And so, I finally watched those last 15 episodes.
They still made me cringe, they still made me ache. But the resentment, the distance, had died with the ease of a Tamagotchi.
***
The last eight episodes of Pen15 are a departure for the show. Not only do they begin with an animated vacation special and include a bottle episode about Maya’s mom, but their overall focus leaves behind the school setting for darker explorations of alcohol, death, and sexuality.
After the animated special, one episode acts as a bridge. “Bat Mitzvah” follows Anna questioning the existence of God after learning about the Holocaust — and, more importantly, still dealing with her parents’ divorce. Meanwhile, Maya is desperate to prove she isn’t poor by getting spoiled Bat Mitzvah girl Becca a gift Maya’s parents can’t afford — a butterfly necklace from Swarovski, of course.
This provides the half season with one of its only moments spent with Sam, the mostly sweet boy who has been crushing on Maya and was a major part of the first season and a half.
Maya walks up to Becca and her popular friends to give her the necklace. Becca points her to the gift table. When Maya convinces her to open it in front of her, the soundtrack fills with “Let Me Tell You” by Smooth Approach. The way a music cue on the show can indicate a crush is used in this moment of desired straight girl approval.
“Want to dance, Maya?”
It’s interrupted by Sam. First-kissed-obsessed Maya, obviously-crushing-on-Sam-too Maya laughs Sam off. She says, “No, because you don’t have good shoes,” repeating an insult she heard these girls use earlier.
He walks away, confused and defeated. Becca says she already has a couple of these necklaces and tosses the expensive gift to the side without a second thought.
Maya finds Anna, who has found high school boy Steve. He gives them alcohol and tells Maya he has a friend named Derrick who wants to meet her.
We don’t see it, but somewhere Sam is wondering why Maya doesn’t like him anymore, why Maya was mean to him to impress some girls who aren’t even her friends, why girls care so much about things like shoes.
Or, at least, that’s what I would’ve been thinking.
***
My own Bar Mitzvah marked a shift in the genders of those around me. I may not have become a man but I watched as my friends started to become their own little men and women.
Before then, I had cherished the friendships allowed by middle school social dynamics. My group of guy friends had a group of girl friends we would eat lunch with and who would attend and invite us to boy-girl parties. Sometimes we’d hang out with them at an outdoor shopping center called The Promenade that had a movie theatre and a Barnes & Noble. We went to the high school football games together, and some of us even dated. I could be around girls, even if I couldn’t always relate to their dramas.
Sometimes I even managed to transcend this divide. One year, I mentioned to my best girl friend and longest held crush, Ali, that it wasn’t fair that the girls decorated each other’s lockers for their birthdays and gave each other tiaras while the boys didn’t. I said it as a joke, but I’m sure my truth betrayed me. A couple months later, Ali and some other girls decorated my locker for my birthday. They even gave me a tiara. I wore it all day. As a joke.
That was sixth grade. By the time I was Bar Mitzvahed in the middle of seventh grade, everyone was trying to be more adult. My friend Tyler was the only exception. He wasn’t in my friend group, opting to hang with a less normie crowd. He danced and played guitar and that night he was the only boy with skills to impress the DJ’s hot employee. (Fun fact: the hot employee would go on to star in Step Up 2: The Streets.) That’s the last time I can remember the rest of my middle school friends admiring a quality outside a strict gender binary.
Since I’d already witnessed my sister go through puberty, I was familiar with the thoughts and experiences of cishet middle school girls. But that didn’t mean I understood it.
I’d watched my sister cry because my parents wouldn’t get her a Juicy jacket. I’d watched her daydream about her first name in front of the last name of some boy she’d had a crush on for a week. I’d watched her go through best friends and frenemies and nemeses, have rumors spread about her, and spread rumors about others. I decided most of this was because she was trying to be in the popular group. I wasn’t prepared when my own friends started acting the same way.
Middle school boys were a different kind of nightmare. Not being fully accepted by the girls could be painful, but moments alone with the guys were a different kind of challenge. As I grappled with my own burgeoning sexuality, I had to bear witness to some horrid attempts at manhood. Some of the guys I knew didn’t date or talk about crushes or talk about sex — this was very much not me. But the guys who were as interested in girls as me expressed that interest differently. They talked like stereotypical straight men, whereas I was a confused little lesbian.
I didn’t want to talk about which girls looked hottest in bathing suits — even if I’d noticed and immediately felt ashamed. I wanted to talk about love! I wanted a boy equivalent of seeing how my first name sounded with a girl’s last name. I wanted my first kiss, not my first handjob.
I slow danced for the first time at my Bar Mitzvah. Despite my Judaism, we left more than enough room for Jesus. This is how I continued to dance with girls, unaware when the rules suddenly changed. At the last school dance of middle school, I asked my crush to slow dance. My friend who had a crush on the same girl got all the other guys to shove us closer and laugh at me for standing so far apart. Afterward, he told me I’d wasted dancing with her since her boobs hadn’t even been pressed against me.
According to an endocrinologist, I was two and a half years behind developmentally. (They offered to put me on testosterone because that’s no big deal when it’s for cis kids.) This meant I was an adorable sixth grader. I had long hair and an easy confidence. By eighth grade, I’d been pressured into chopping off my hair and I got braces for the first time. My awkward phase started when my friends were trying harder than ever to be heterosexual men and women.
My guy friends began convincing younger girls to make out with them. My girl friends started dating high schoolers. There were no more tiaras on my birthday.
***
By the time Maya is meeting Derrick, at Anna’s grandma’s funeral, she’s already been declared UGIS (ugliest girl in school), been catfished by Sam (I said mostly sweet), and been dumped by her showmance Gabe who wouldn’t even kiss her (he’s gay). Meanwhile, Anna got her first kiss with a former boyfriend and is now always making out with new boyfriend Steve.
Maya is desperate for her first kiss — a relatable feeling as someone who once wrote in my journal, “I’M FOURTEEN AND STILL HAVEN’T KISSED A GIRL.” It’s understandable that her standards aren’t high even if Derrick is more interested in her ADD meds than getting to know her and at one point calls her Lucy Liu.
It also makes sense that Anna has sought out Steve in the first place. They had a fun rapport when working on the play together, and he understands the experience of parents divorcing. She’s isolated at home, angry at her parents, and here’s this older guy who seems to understand the world and her.
Not that seventh graders need excuses for poor choices.
The conclusions of these relationships are inevitable. The alcohol and drugs, the older boys, the youth and immaturity and desperation of Maya and Anna. I spent my childhood hearing about teenage boys from my sister. I spent my adolescence hearing about teenage boys from themselves.
It doesn’t make the scene where Derrick coerces Maya into giving him a blowjob any less painful. It doesn’t make him breaking up with her the next day — before she’s even had her first kiss! — any easier to watch. It doesn’t make it any more disappointing when Steve takes Derrick’s side.
***
Toward the end of eighth grade, all my friends went to Six Flags.
By this point, we were barely a friend group. But for this kind of thing, we were all there — boys and girls. Ali’s older brother and some of his friends came with us as well. My crush on Ali was over, but my desire to be close with her again was still strong.
Because of my sister, I knew my friends’ new lives weren’t ones to envy. And yet, I couldn’t help but feel jealous when they talked about older boys. They were looking toward high school, where they’d only grow further from me. It seemed like a choice to me, and they were making the wrong one.
At one point in the day, Ali and another friend of ours were talking about something private. Maybe it was a secret story about a boy, maybe it was as simple as asking to borrow a tampon. All I know is it was labeled “girl stuff” and I wasn’t allowed.
I got so upset. I begged her to tell me. I didn’t understand why she couldn’t trust me when we used to be so close. They walked away, and her brother told me I should let it go. He told me that I don’t want to hear about her girl stuff anyway.
But I did. I really, really did.
I hadn’t accepted that their girlhood would never be my girlhood, because I didn’t know I was experiencing a girlhood at all. I didn’t even know the word trans let alone that it described me. I’d heard a rumor that Ciara used to be a man and I’d seen a brief thing on Oprah and that’s it. All I knew to do was beg my friend not to keep “girl secrets” from me.
In a sense, I was still begging when I watched that first season of Pen15.
***
My first version of this essay from over three years ago ended with me naked, looking at myself in the mirror, jumping up and down. The idea, I suppose, was that my puberty may have been delayed — far more than that endocrinologist thought — but eventually I got to have the same moment of exploration as my cis sister.
In 2019, I was still really attached to the idea of second puberty. Even though I was 25, I allowed myself the grace of youth. I told myself I was making up for all those years that had been stolen from me.
I was wrong.
Not only did that excuse an immaturity in my adulthood, but it did a disservice to the girlhood I did have. It may have taken longer for my body to change in the correct ways, but as a kid I fought hard to have a life worth living. Yes, I found ways to be around girls, yes, for a day I got to wear a tiara, but my greatest triumph wasn’t with other girls. It was with my own Anna, my own Maya, my best friend, Tyler.
There are so many funny and painful moments in Pen15 where the girls grapple with their bodies, their hormones, the intricacies of puberty. But there’s a reason the show ends with the girls having a sleepover, watching home videos of their friendship.
Maya and Anna have just egged Derrick’s house — okay, thrown fish at it — and Maya has finally had her first kiss — with Sam! — and after all this excitement they’re alone, together.
“Do you think that there’s ever a time that we won’t be friends?” Anna asks. “Like what if after college you get a little bit depressed and I’m a little irresponsible and we’re both just so super dependent on each other and I can’t take it anymore and we don’t laugh like we used to.”
“Or the things that we didn’t think would bother us about each other. Or our parents. Or the way we see the world starts to eat at us, and we just get like really cynical. And really we just like wake up one day and we’re not friends,” Maya adds.
Their sadness gives way to a new fantasy: “Or we share a dorm!”
This is a show about how hard it is to be a middle school girl. It’s also a show about how having that one good friend can make it so much better.
While I was navigating the dynamics between the girls and the guys in my friend group, I had an escape every weekend with Tyler. Saturday mornings may have been reserved for soccer games, but Saturday nights I’d go with Tyler to his dad’s house. Tyler would introduce me to weird music — shoutout Nirvana — and I’d introduce him to weird movies — shoutout Escape from LA — and we’d stay up all night in the attic laughing, talking about art, talking about girls but not in a gross way.
Maybe Anna and Maya will share a dorm together. Or maybe this intense friendship, like so many intense friendships of youth, isn’t meant to last into adulthood. Either way, it’s special for them now.
I haven’t talked to Tyler in over a decade. Sometimes I look him up on Instagram and see that he’s still playing guitar. I don’t think he’s still dancing. Maybe one day I’ll reach out to him and we’ll catch up. But I’m just grateful he knew how to love me and I knew how to love him at a time when it’s so easy to feel unlovable.
I missed the point of Pen15 when I started it all those years ago. It’s a show about girlhood, it’s a show about middle school, it’s a show about the year 2000, but most of all it’s a show about friendship. Maya and Anna are at a time in life when the world is telling them all they have to be. And then they have each other — two beautiful weirdos who embrace the entirety of one another.
I should’ve had a different girlhood. That endocrinologist should’ve offered me estrogen instead of testosterone. But with each passing year, I become more comfortable with my own version of girlhood, my version that had Tyler. He was a beautiful weirdo who embraced the entirety of me.
Slow Takes is a series of “belated” reviews by Drew Gregory of queer art released last year that Autostraddle didn’t cover.
Why is Season 3 of “Love is Blind” So Heterosexual?
Season Three of Love is Blind is, somehow, remarkably heterosexual, despite its premise retaining deep roots in lesbian cultural practices: falling in love with someone you’ve never met, moving in together after a week, idealizing someone you barely know, socializing with all of your exes, your friends talking behind your back about how much they hate your girlfriend, sharing your trauma on Day Two, rampant alcohol use disorder, love triangles, and your parents fundamentally disapproving of the relationship before even meeting your partner. This was detailed extensively by me following Season One:
https://autostraddle-develop.go-vip.net/19-lesbian-cultural-practices-appropriated-by-love-is-blind/
For those unaware of the concept, in the hit Netflix reality show Love is Blind, marriage-ready singles are challenged to spend time speed-dating each other in “pods” where they can connect emotionally without viewing each other physically. During this time they often manage to “fall in love” and are only able to see each other after a marriage proposal has been accepted, at which point they run down a red carpet of love into each other’s arms and are shipped off on a romantic beach vacation, where they also meet the people they once dated. Then, they go back home to see how they’ll integrate into each other’s lives before their wedding. At the altar, they can say yes or no and most of the time, someone does say no!
After the sizzling lesbianism of Season One, Season Two continued to carry the homosexual torch. Nick made his own toothpaste and was marrying Danielle, a costume party enthusiast with emotional baggage sitting right a the very surface of her epidermis. Natalie was a girlboss trying to tame a bourbon-loving Golden Retriever named Shayne into a suitable husband. Salvador played Mallory a f*cking ukelele serenade!!!
Initially, I’d set out to rank Season Three’s contestants by lesbianism, assuming that there’d be plenty of material with which to do so, but quickly found myself thwarted by what can only be described as a season riddled with absolute heterosexual tomfoolery. Most notably, while the show has obviously always trafficked in the potential fallout from one partner meeting their fiancee for the first time and realizing they are not actually attracted to them — a situation less frequent in queer relationships because all gay people are hot and recognize each other as such — this season has taken that particular situation to an uneasy and honestly very rude extreme that leads you to ask “why did this man sign up for a show called Love is Blind????” Let’s begin with Cole and Zanab.
Cole and Zanab: 99% Heterosexual
Patrick Wymore/Netflix © 2022
Cole, who initially reminded me of my ex with his childlike enthusiasm for life, specific style of eyeglasses and penchant for jumping on the couch like a child bowled over by the possibility of presents, was set to be #1. After he confessed that he’d in fact, at the age of 25, already been married to someone he only knew for two months and then got divorced four months later, I thought “that right there is a lesbian!” HOW WRONG I WAS!
After Cole met his betrothed woman, Zanab, who is objectively one of the hottest women in the world, he somehow, to our collective bafflement, was unable to summon a “physical connection,” instead reminding her and the cameras and his cast mates, at every opportunity, that his “type” is someone else’s fiancee, Colleen, an alleged ballet dancer.
Here is telling Alexa about his first impressions of Zanab:
Here he is telling Zanab for the first but not the last time that she’s not his usual type:
HERE HE IS RELAYING A CONVO FROM THE NIGHT BEFORE IN WHICH HE GAVE ZANAB A NINE OUT OF TEN AND THEN GAVE COLLEEN A TEN OUT OF TEN AND THEN TOLD ZANAB SHE SHOULD BE FLATTERED BECAUSE HE GIVES 80% OF WOMEN LESS THAN A 7 OUT OF 10:
Here’s his voiceover regarding how he is emotionally in love with Zanab and trying to summon the physical, which is already present with Colleen:
Here is Zanab at a gathering of the cast in which this all came up again:
In the pods, Cole and Colleen had a connection, until Colleen told Cole that, in typical heterosexual fashion, that she wasn’t looking for a “deep” relationship but a “shallow” relationship. Cole expressed dismay at this revelation, and I subsequently expressed dismay when Colleen went back to the girls and cried that Cole had called her “shallow.” Justice for this lesbian man with deep feelings, I said! But now, after witnessing Cole’s overall personality and absolutely hogwild reaction to his smokeshow fiancee’s physical appearance, I curse the day I ever considered this man one of our own. In fact, I feel deep, pervasive shame around it, which is enhanced by my girlfriend reminding me that she hated him from the very beginning.
To get serious for a second, Cole is obviously racist! It’s clear he only sees white women as beautiful, and cannot recognize the objective beauty standing before him. He even tells Zanab that he “usually dates girls named Lily” and knew getting engaged to “Zanab” that she wouldn’t be his usual type.
Do not even get me started on this man’s apartment! Unacceptable! Clean before you go on a trip, you are the human equivalent of a broken printer.
Colleen and Matt: 90% Heterosexual
Patrick Wymore/Netflix © 2022
Similarly to Cole, Matt gets some lesbian points for the fact that at his relatively young age, he has already been married and divorced. Furthermore, his ex-wife cheated on him, and he now appears to possess intense, deep-seated trust issues that he may never get over, which is incredibly relatable to me, personally, a practicing lesbian. However, the way these trust issues play out is TOXIC AS FUCK. This man needs to calm the hell down.
Meanwhile, Colleen is giving me “front row of the viral TikTok dance for Alabama rush” vibes and as aforementioned, has explicitly stated her desire for a “shallow” relationship that doesn’t go too deep. A lesbian would never!!!
Raven and SK: 98% Heterosexual
Courtesy of Netflix © 2022
As soon as Raven started doing pilates while Bartise was confessing his childhood trauma, it was clear that Raven was going to be last on my (as aforementioned) thwarted list of cast members ranked by lesbianism. Eventually, Raven ended up getting engaged to SK and despite her cold body language when they first met, they’re shaping up to be one of the chillest and most respectful relationships on the program. But SK did indeed fall asleep during a “sound bath,” which is not gay.
That said, Raven gets one small queer point for her impeccable reaction to Bartise’s inappropriate advances, telling the camera that physical complements are great and all, but she really wants to be loved for her mind, and telling him directly that she doesn’t think they’re compatible and that she feels secure that SK is more qualified to give her the love she wants to receive.
SK also gets one small gay point for thinking that going to grad school across the country shouldn’t impact the viability of their relationship.
Bartise and Nancy: 95% Heterosexual
Courtesy of Netflix © 2022
Cole and Bartise have the shared honor of being the people I hate most on this show, and I think both of them should be abandoned at sea. Nancy, who carries a heterosexual desire to birth 10+ children, gets some queer points for owning multiple properties with her ex. Bartise’s feelings about Nancy apparently shifted dramatically after Raven showed up to Meet the Exes night in a tight outfit:
Here Nancy is telling Andrew what Bartise told her:
Here he is after apparently not touching Nancy for two days:
Here he is, still talking about Raven to Nancy:
Meanwhile, Nancy is building a real estate empire and is a speech pathologist and is also incredibly hot and fun and delightful and loving. I am now, against all odds, shipping Nancy with Fake Tears Andrew, I think they should buy a spaceship and get the hell out of Dallas.
Alexa and Brennon: 75% Heterosexual
Patrick Wymore/Netflix © 2022
Apparently these two are having fantastic rough sex and Alexa is a queen who gives off light bisexual vibes. Also, Brennon’s family has a garden and chickens. Probably the gayest moment this season is when Alexa’s Israeli Dad unfurled a set of knives with which he was implying he would circumcise Brennon on the spot, because knives are gay. Alexa’s Dad also told Brennon that he expected him to be able to give Alexa the expensive lifestyle to which she is accustomed — treating Brennon like his economically underprivileged childhood was an inconvenience rather than a lived experience that could inform his present circumstances — which is a very straight attitude.
In conclusion, this show needs to get its shit together and make an all-lesbian season already! Logistically it would be impossible but I don’t care, men have been to the moon, women deserve a shot at the pods.
Talking to Tegan and Sara About Becoming Characters in Their Own TV Show
Feature image photo by Araya Doheny/Getty Images
I’ve never fastened my emotions to a memoir the way I did with Tegan and Sara’s High School, an open-hearted, open-handed first-person narrative of their teenage lives in the ’90s — before they became Tegan and Sara. It is so deeply, precisely personal; yet broadly relatable. I shouldn’t have been surprised. That’s kind of their whole thing. Now their book is a TV series, written and directed by Clea DuVall and Laura Kittrell, that lands tomorrow on Amazon Freevee. Just in time for the release of their new Crybaby album and tour, and the release of Sara’s actual human baby. Somehow, between the music and the show and the parenting/aunting, Tegan and Sara found time to chat with me about the challenges and joys of bringing their story to the screen.
https://www.instagram.com/p/Cf9KNLOAVqp/
Heather: Tegan and Sara, thank you so much for talking to Autostraddle today.
Tegan: Oh my God, we love Autostraddle! So nice to see you, Heather.
Heather: You too. I also want to thank you both personally. Your music, your writing, the work you’ve done with the Tegan and Sara Foundation, the way you have modeled queer community building — all of that has been so vital and aspirational to me in my life. This is a cool, full-circle moment.
Tegan: Ah, that’s amazing.
Sara: Thank you.
Heather: Whose idea was it to launch a tour, a new album, a TV show, and a literal baby at the same time?
Tegan: [Laughs] Not good planning on our part. Every time we do this we’re like, “We’re only going to do one project at a time” — and then what can we say? We just get inspired. The show was happening and we had time to write a record. I mean there’s amazing opportunities that come because of the show, to help shine a light on us as a band, because we continue to just muck about in this sort of indie, sort of mainstream world. We’re always sort of straddling those worlds, but it’s like hella stressful right now around our world.
Heather: I’m sure! Are you on the road already?
Sara: Not yet.
Tegan: Just some promo trips and stuff. But my mom’s coming, Sara’s bringing her partner and the baby. It’s going to be a full family affair here in about three weeks.
Heather: Amazing. And your dog also? Is it going to be—
Tegan: No, I’m not bringing the dog! Dog’s staying home!
Heather: [Laughs] Baby, yes. But not the dog! That’s one step too far!
Tegan: Gosh. Heather, don’t be crazy.
Heather: Let’s talk about this show! I love it. I loved your memoir. I listened to the audio book as well, which I thought was just wonderful. The show is such a heartfelt representation of your story and it’s also adding a real modern sensibility to these ’90s era experiences. Is there a different level of vulnerability that goes into allowing someone else to take your story and tell it, rather it than telling yourself?
Sara: Yes. The answer is yes. I think that’s the most complicated part about this process. Tegan and I spent a lot of the early part of our career knowing that if we were going to be successful in communicating directly to our audience, it meant that often we had to put in that extra work to build an online community when it was still very new, to spend time talking with our audience and community building in person at our shows. There was a lot of work that went into really being — quite literally — the face of our band; not relying on things like radio or press or TV. There’s a sort of strange irony in now telling our original origin story, but really having to let someone else do it, and not necessarily have a ton of control over how it turns out.
Heather: You chose who to turn it over to wisely, I gotta say.
Sara: Yes. For us, the biggest thing, in working with Clea, who is a friend, was just a sort of a request and an understanding that we would continue to be involved in the conversation. We read the scripts, we leave notes. Whether or not those notes are always adapted or implemented was less relevant than if we just got to have those conversations. Even just sort of texturally, to give that perspective to Clea and Laura as they were writing, just so those little details, at least for us, were captured in the show and make it feel really authentic.
Then obviously just from the completely brand perspective, the show is called High School, but the characters are Tegan and Sara. We are still an active IP. We are going on 23 years without a cancellation or a major scandal. When you hand over your name to other people — and not just the show but the people, the actors who play us — there’s a lot of opportunity for things to go sideways. It’s a big trust fall where you’re just flailing through the air, waiting and hoping that there’s a soft landing. It’s really scary. But I think art requires a kind of surrender and a risk. I think Tegan and Sara, we’re still trying to make art that surprises people and this feels scary, so I think that that probably means we’re on the right track.
Heather: What part of this TV creation process came the most naturally to you? You’ve been creating art together for so long, so collaboratively, and this has to be a different experience.
Tegan: I think actually we are very collaborative because everything we do, not only with each other, but you collaborate with co-producers and engineers and the record company and our creative director and the band. I think probably the hardest part was that we were all of a sudden having to collaborate with somebody who maybe doesn’t always collaborate, and it’s not quite as effortless. Clea is incredible and is our friend and is caring and empathetic and loving and knows all of our people, but we would often share our opinion and it would be like, “Well, just let me do what I’m doing.” Whereas, in our world it’s like, “No, you will hear me out! You will hear my ideas!”
I think we probably take for granted how much we collaborate and that there’s conflict that comes from collaborating and that’s normal and healthy and we just have to go through that. Clea and Laura are incredible and got through it with us — we all love each other and are friends and all hope we get a season two, so that’s a good sign. But yeah, collaborating comes naturally to us, but it’s not natural for everyone else and we push it on people like it is — and that’s intense.
Heather: My best friend is my sister; I understand a little bit about that dynamic. Were there things in your memoir that you felt comfortable putting on paper that you did not feel comfortable putting on television?
Tegan: Yeah. That’s a great question. I know we have such limited time, so I’ll just say, I think probably generally speaking, there were things that felt deeply personal, that felt like okay to share in the book — but then for the show, it was like, well, we’ll have to delve into the other characters. I think we were careful about how to portray those other characters. That’s probably where Laura and Clea fictionalized the most or did composites of people the most: the characters around us. Most of these people are still alive, they’re still in our life. My mom’s a therapist, so how do we portray her as a therapist on TV becomes really complicated because you don’t want anyone to watch the show and go, “Wait, that character must be me!”
Heather: Right.
Tegan: It’s like Sara said, it’s a lot of trust and complications. The book is its own entity. I really hope people who watch the show go and explore the book, if they haven’t read it, because it’s a different thing. But yeah, that’s definitely complicated.
Heather: Did you feel as much of protectiveness over these other peripheral “characters” in your life as you did over your own story? You’re nodding vigorously.
Tegan: More. Much more.
Sara: More. More. More. I think Tegan and I have been exposing ourselves and our lives for so long — I guess “exposed” almost feels like the wrong word. We’ve been really transparent and open about our lives and our relationships. But music is kind of abstract, it’s like poetry or something. Television is like fucking television. It’s exposing. I mean, every moment of being protective or diligent about details was about protecting our friends and family and hopefully getting out of this without lawsuits or people disowning us.
Heather: One thing I’ve asked everyone today, I especially want to ask you: If there’s a need for either of you to get into this ’90s head space, what’s your go-to album?
Sara: Anything by Smashing Pumpkins, for sure.
Heather: Hey, just like Book Sara.
Tegan: I would say Hole. When we started working on the show and we started sending back and forth songs, Clea sent a couple options for Hole songs and I went back and just went deep and was just like, “Oh God, yeah.” It transforms me to Grade 10 immediately.
Sara: Actually, not for Grade 10, but we just recently got to talk with Ani DiFranco for the first time and I spent some time with Living In Clip again, and man that album is like…
Tegan: So 12th grade.
Sara: So ’90s.
Heather: So gay.
Tegan and Sara’s High School lands tomorrow on Amazon Freevee.
Chatting With Clea DuVall, Cobie Smulders, and Laura Kittrell About Tegan and Sara’s “High School” TV Show
When Tegan and Sara finished their 2019 memoir, High School, and sent it to their longtime friend Clea DuVall, she called them up and told them: a) she loved it, and b) not to sell the rights to anyone else. She told them if they were ever going to make a TV series or a movie about their lives, they’d want creative control. Tegan and Sara listened — and three years later, they’re getting ready to launch their television show based on their book into the world, written and directed by Clea and queer writer Laura Kittrell.
The series, which lands on Amazon Freevee this Friday, stars newcomers Railey and Seazynn Gilliland, queer twins Tegan discovered on TikTok, as the world’s most famous gay duo. Their mom, Simone, who is heavily featured in their memoir and still a huge part of their lives, is played by Cobie Smulders. The show is jam-packed full of coming of age relatability, ’90s nostalgia, and so much delightful gay teen angst. (I can call it delightful because, like Tegan and Sara, I’m in my 40s now.) I had a chance to chat with Clea and Laura, and also with Cobie and Kyle Bornheimer, who plays stepdad Patrick, about the joys and challenges of making a series about very famous, very gay, very real pop stars.
Clea DuVall and Laura Kittrell
Heather Hogan: It seems like a daunting task to make a series about these beloved real life human beings, whom you know. Clea, you pitched the show to them, is that right?
Clea DuVall: Yeah, yeah! I read their book and fell in love with it and could just so clearly see it as a television show. Also Tegan and Sara being my friends, I just felt so protective of them and protective of their story and protective of the people in their lives, and didn’t want them to just sign it away to a stranger and have no say in it. I really wanted them to feel good about how their story was being portrayed, but it was daunting. We’ve been friends for 15 years and we could have gone through this experience and they could have been like, “Nope, no more. Sorry, you ruined it! You took our beautiful book and you totally screwed it up. Great job.” But luckily that was not their reaction, but probably a lot because I found Laura.
Heather Hogan: How did you become part of this series, Laura?
Laura Kittrell: I heard about the show when everybody else heard about it. So I was very excited just as a fan of everybody. And then I think maybe a year after that, Clea had already written the first two scripts and she’d outlined the third, and my agents had sent it to me and said that they were looking for somebody to work with Clea on the show. And so I read the scripts and I read the book and I was like, “This is a disaster. They need me. They need me. I got to save it. I got to get in there.” No, I’m obviously kidding. It was incredible. Everything that I already loved about the book and felt so seen by, with the book, Clea just enhanced even more in her scripts. And I just was like, “I’m just thrilled to watch this regardless.” And the fact that I am now working on it is a little surreal still.
Heather Hogan: That’s amazing. What are some things from the book that you knew you needed to bring to the screen? And were there any things that were like, “No, we can’t touch that.”
Clea DuVall: There were definitely certain things that were in the book that Tegan and Sara did not want in the show. And we wanted to always make sure that what we were portraying, they felt comfortable with. For me, I really wanted to capture how internal their experience is — especially in the ’90s, of coming of age and discovering your sexuality was so nuanced, it was so internal and it was quiet. It was a quieter experience. And just sort navigating all these feelings you’re having. Even as you’re doing things that are very clearly pointing you in a certain direction, how you’re still kind of like, “But what does it mean? What does it really mean?” When I read it in the book, I just felt very seen by it and thought that it would be such a great thing to explore and capture in a television show.
Heather Hogan: Right.
Laura Kittrell: I think the greatest compliment we’ve gotten — I heard it when we screened at the Toronto International Film Festival — was somebody in the audience was saying how happy they were to see a show that wasn’t cynical at all. And I’m happy that’s coming across. Is it, I don’t know if it is obnoxious to repeat your own compliments?
Heather Hogan: It’s absolutely not obnoxious, and I agree with this person.
Clea DuVall: This is just Laura all the time. She’s like, “Someone said my new shirt was nice. What do you think?”
Heather Hogan: Just reading and quoting those Rotten Tomatoes reviews to herself.
Clea DuVall: “The guy at Whole Foods loves my shirt!”
Heather Hogan: I think my favorite thing about the show, because I was a teenager in the ’90s too, is that you really found this fascinating balance between getting into the head space of being a queer teen in that time period, but also bringing a real 2022 representation sensibility to the series. It seems impossible, but it works so well. Can you talk about the merging of those two realities?
Clea DuVall: We really wanted the show to feel timeless. We never wanted it to be winking at the audience and being like “The ’90s? Remember Xena?” We wanted it to feel like a show that could be now, or it could be that 30 years ago. It was purity of story was always what our drive driving force was. I think that’s how that was created.
Heather Hogan: If you need to get into a nineties head space, right this second, what album would you go to?
Clea DuVall: I think Hole’s “Live Through This” or PJ Harvey’s “Dry.”
Heather Hogan: Very nice.
Laura Kittrell: Yeah, my driving around CD was always “Okay Computer” by Radiohead.
Heather Hogan: Oh wow you were so cool so young, Laura. What are you both hoping people connect with most about the series?
Laura Kittrell: I think it’s maybe different for different people. My connection to it was really from a queer lens. This felt like so much my own high school experience was with my friends and my romantic relationships. It made me very excited to put that out there. I grew up in the South as I think you did based on your accent.
Heather Hogan: Yes, this is Georgia you hear.
Laura Kittrell: I didn’t know any gay people in high school. TV was incredibly important to me because it was where I was meeting gay people for the first time. But then we’ve had friends who watched the show who are middle aged men who love the stepdad and that’s their entry point. I’m happy that we have different entry points for different people.
Heather Hogan: Can you talk a little bit about your casting process? It was a little unconventional.
Laura Kittrell: Well, Tegan’s algorithm provided her with a video of Railey, who plays Tegan. And so Tegan and Sara sent us some videos that Railey and Seazynn had done together and said, “What do you think?” We had been auditioning people who were great. I think most of them were probably not queer, because I don’t think that finding queer twins was quite as easy as we thought it would be somehow.
And so Railey and Seazynn had no acting experience and we were a little, “I don’t know how this is going to go.” They met with an acting coach for a week, came in, auditioned with us, just like blew us away. It was incredible. Basically went into boot camp, taking acting lessons, taking music lessons, working so hard. I mean, having to carry an entire show on their backs, basically. Coming from working at a pizza place in Fresno, this is not an easy job that we have given them. They’ve just surpassed our expectations and I’m so happy for people to get to see them on the show.
Heather Hogan: That’s amazing.
Clea DuVall: They’re Incredible. I am so proud of them and just love them so much.
Cobie Smulders and Kyle Bornheime
Heather Hogan: Cobie, It is really important for me to tell you, you’re a lesbian icon. I’ve had like 50 people tell me in the last three days that you didn’t know that.
Cobie Smulders: Maybe you can help me understand this. I found out about this at TIFF a couple weekends ago, and I don’t why. Maybe I just met my husband too early in the game, you know what I mean? And it could’ve been a very different path for me if I had the right woman. It’s very true.
Heather Hogan: And also, you could be married to a man and still be lesbian icon! My friends call Halloween Cobie Smulders Season because you can go as Maria Hill, you can go as Stumptown’s Dax Parios, as Robin Sparkles. Now we’re adding this Mommi gayness to it.
Cobie Smulders: Oh my gosh.
Kyle Bornheimer: Obi Wan.
Cobie Smulders: All you basically need for all of those characters is a pair jeans and a t-shirt.
Heather Hogan: Well, now we’re getting to an answer.
Cobie Smulders: Amazing.
Heather Hogan: I want to ask you both: How familiar were you with Tegan and Sara before you started working on the show?
Cobie Smulders: Well, I grew up in Canada, so I was very familiar with them, have loved their music for a very long time. And there is a rule in Canada, I’m going to get the percentage wrong, but it’s something like 60% of the music played on the radio has to be Canadian content. So there’s like certain people listening to Tegan and Sara on the radio, Alanis Morissette, all of these people, they’re the biggest musicians in the world. Their songs are literally playing on a loop and then you leave Canada and you’re like, “Oh, they’re still playing” — and people know them, but they’re not like as known as they are to me. I didn’t obviously know them personally, I didn’t know the amazing story that they wrote in their biography. So I discovered that when the show happened. But I find it pretty cool that I have their email addresses.
Heather Hogan: What about you, Kyle?
Kyle Bornheimer: I also find it very cool that I have their email addresses. When you’re an actor and you can find yourself associated with rock stars, you feel very cool. Because as cool as we think we are as actors, we don’t have anything on rock stars. So I feel cool just being in their presence. I was familiar with a lot of their bigger songs and because I have kids that were young when The Lego Movie came out. So Tegan and Sara were able to check a couple cool boxes for me when I took this job on.
And like Cobie said, I did not know their full story. I really read their book in one sitting because it was written in such a revealing way. And they really just opened themselves up. And I found that I was really taken with not only their story: how they didn’t paint themselves as saintly; they were just human beings, struggling like we all do. And sometimes being brats about it and sometimes being their best selves about it. In high school years, where it’s very hard to be your best self. We’re all just brats during that time. And they shared that with us.
Heather Hogan: Yeah, absolutely. One of the things I love about the show is how queer it is — but there are other places for people to get invested. And a lot of that has to do with your characters who have really fulfilling arcs, even outside of Tegan and Sara’s main storyline. Can each of you talk a bit about your characters?
Cobie Smulders: I’m playing Simone, who’s the mother of the twins, and I haven’t ever played a mother on a project — and I just jumped right into being a mother of teenagers. Sometimes I think when you come into that role, it’s very one dimensional. It’s very, you’re just nagging. You’re the one who’s like, “Do your laundry” or whatever. And there was certainly that in this as well. But it was wonderful to be given the gift of showing the intricacies of this relationship that Simone and Patrick have together. That Patrick was not the biological father of these girls, he’s a stepfather. So it’s a second relationship for her. Certainly a very stable one. And they’ve been together for a while. What would you say, Kyle? Over ten years, right?
Kyle Bornheimer: In real life it was 14 years, I think.
Cobie Smulders: He came in when they were little babies. So they’ve really created this life together and I think they created that life together out of necessity for Simone. As a 20-year-old woman who has twins, that’s a huge job to take on. So being able to count on a partner like Patrick, who was so caring and so present, was a need she had back then. Now we cut to 14 years later, now the girls are independent, they are doing their own thing. And she’s in this place where she’s looking at her life and going, “What do I want now that I am allowed to ask that question.” And so that’s being presented in this first season and she’s sort of reevaluating her relationship. She’s reevaluating her career and that’s sort of a tough, hard thing to do.
Kyle Bornheimer: I think one of the gifts that Tegan and Sara have that lends to this project is that their parents weren’t typical. There’s so many different stories about people coming out and finding their sexuality and having to communicate that with their parents. And we’ve seen lots of versions of that and they’re all valid. They had mother that was progressive, even for her time with that, but was still a mom. And whether you are queer or straight, whether you have the most progressive parents in the world, adolescence is hard. You’re still dealing with societal pressures and friend pressures and your own sense of self and the media and all that stuff.
Patrick is a little more of a typical dude of the time who wasn’t comfortable talking about that stuff, hadn’t really thought about it. And when he did think about it, he thought about it in of a default, gay panicky kind of way. He’d rather not talk about it, he’d rather it wasn’t a thing he had to deal with. They don’t have to hide it. I mean, they’re hiding it in terms of they still don’t know themselves and they’re not advertising it to anyone, but they can confront him about his own backwards views because they’re at the very least, even if they haven’t come out or they don’t know themselves, they’re at least in line with the 90s progressive ideals. We’re going to see these two evolve a little bit.
Heather Hogan: I just asked Clea and Laura this, so I’ll ask you too: If you needed to get yourself into a quick ’90s head space, what album would you put on?
Cobie Smulders: Anything by Nirvana. We were just talking about this. So there was Nirvana or Green Day. There was that thing that happened, and then Dave Mathews came into my life. Ben Harper, I was like, whoa. I was a new person. Halfway through the school year, new person. And I totally forgot, because Dave Matthews was late 97, 98, right? But I have such nostalgia for Kurt Cobain and Nirvana. But then also there’s Paul Abul is coming up for me. It was kind of a wild time for music, wasn’t it?
Kyle Bornheimer: Yeah. There was a lot of pop. I mean, the alternative stuff was sort of answering pop.
Cobie Smulders: Yeah. And ’90s hip hop. Tupac, Biggie, Puff Daddy, all of that. Busta Rhymes. I mean, it was a wild, it was very eclectic.
Heather Hogan: That is a very chaotic playlist, Cobie Smulders. Kyle, what are we going to do to increase your lesbian icon status before season two?
Kyle Bornheimer: I think this show’s going to help me a lot, that’s really why I did it. It was a very self-serving job in that respect. I needed to check off that box. So please help me all you can.
Heather Hogan: All right. I will.
Kyle Bornheimer: I really need this.
Heather Hogan: What’s your flannel situation?
Kyle Bornheimer: Well, I mean I was pretty flanneled up in the ’90s, but also what I did in the nineties is I dressed like I was in the seventies. We liked to look like we were dressed in 1972. A lot of faux leather jackets and butterfly collars.
Heather Hogan: Oh, that’s great. We can work with that.
Cobie Smulders: I feel like Patrick is wearing a lot of what we call up north, “the Canadian tuxedo.”
Heather Hogan: “Is it Canadian or is it gay?” is always fun game to play. And then there’s Tegan and Sara, who are both!
The Coming Out Scenes We’ll Never Forget
Coming out stories are a backbone of queer storytelling. The nerves, the sweaty palms, the fear of what comes next. It’s also some of the moments that have most connected us to our favorite television and film characters. The reason we stuck with them (or their TV shows!) for so long — maybe even longer than some of their shows deserved it. The quotes that we repeat to ourselves in our quietest moments. Places of recognition, passed around as clips online even if we haven’t seen the movie. Scenes that wear out our YouTube queues. Can anyone ever really forget Santana sitting down with her abuela?
So for this Coming Out Day, the Autostraddle TV Team came together to ask: What’s a coming out scene that you’ll never forget?
Kissing Jessica Stein
Drew Gregory
My favorite coming out scene isn’t a coming out at all. The queer character does not say, “I’m gay.” She doesn’t have to. She’s not able to and she doesn’t have to. Her mom just guesses. That terrible moment of suspense while you wait for the person’s response is spared. Her mom just gives her support.
I’m referring, of course, to the porch scene in Kissing Jessica Stein. Jessica (Jennifer Westfeldt) has ended her relationship with Helen (Heather Juergensen) because she’s too afraid to tell her family about her queerness. It just doesn’t fit in with her view of herself, in her plan. So far her mom (Tovah Feldshuh) has been portrayed as an annoying stereotypical Jewish mother. Jessica’s perfection is likely a product of her mother’s critique. But here her mother tells a story about how this perfectionism prevented Jessica from acting in a play as a child. She’s encouraging Jessica to let go of the self-critical nature she herself likely instilled. Finally, her mother says, “I think–” She stops to collect her emotions before continuing. “I think she’s a very nice girl.” Jessica turns to her mother in surprise — surprise at the knowledge, surprise at the embrace.
Tovah Feldsuh’s performance is unbelievable in these four minutes. She shows why she’s a legend. And she provides a queer audience with the ultimate fantasy: a world where we don’t have to come out — where we can just be seen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLu3e5avnMM&t=150s&ab_channel=JeremyIsaac
Skins
Heather Hogan
Of all the coming out scenes I have watched and written about over the years, nothing is threaded in my memory like Emily Fitch coming out on Skins — first to her friends — JJ and Thomas — and then to her parents and twin sister, Katie.
Emily Fitch is this adorable little button of a human being, the counterpoint to Katie’s brashness, boldness, and rule-breaking. But something inside her snaps when she finally starts pursuing a relationship with Naomi, the girl she’s been crushing on since she first started developing crushes. They’ve kissed in a club, in a bouncy castle at a birthday party, down by the lake before jumping in. Emily blurts it out kind of broadly to JJ: “I like girls. I like sex with girls. Hard nipples, soft thighs. I like tits and fanny, you know?” And of course he passes right out, his head hitting the ground before she even gets out the word “nipples.” To Thomas, she simply sobs, “I’m gay,” to which he replies, “That’s fine. Should we get a cab? I don’t think this bus is coming.” But with her family, it’s all about Naomi: “Her name’s Naomi, she’s rather beautiful — so, I was nailing her.” That’s why she looks like a mess, makeup all over the place, hair going everywhichway. No, she wasn’t fighting. She was shagging. A girl. That belligerence is a kind of power for someone who’s been stuck inside her sister’s shadow her entire life, bulldozed by her parents, and I’ll never forget Kat Prescott’s voice purring it out with a kind of content fury.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Valerie Anne
The first person who comes to mind for me and this prompt is Alex Danvers from Supergirl, but the truth is I’ve already written about her. Like, so much. So instead I’m going to go with not my all-time favorite coming out journey, but my first favorite coming out story: Willow on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Because even though I would go to hell and back for Buffy Summers, the truth is, she wasn’t always the best friend to Willow. She would often get sucked up in some supernatural scheme and overlook her number two. But she always showed up when it mattered; sometimes a little late, but she always showed up.
In this moment, the moment that Willow was finally so overwhelmed by her complicated mess of feelings for Tara and Oz, she has to tell her best friend about them. And at first Buffy stammers a bit about it — after all, it’s not often she comes across a problem she can’t punch her way out of — but when she realizes her weirdness isn’t coming across as “I don’t want to fuck this important moment up” and Willow asks her if she’s freaked out, she snaps out of it and looks her best friend right in the eyes and says she’s not freaked, and she’s glad Willow told her. To borrow from what Hanna Marin said to Emily Fields when SHE came out, whether she’s Willow dating Oz or Willow dating Tara doesn’t matter. Buffy loves WILLOW. Just the way she is.
The Haunting of Hill House
Valerie Anne
I love Theo Crain’s coming out moments in The Haunting of Hill House, maybe because the stories of the Crain siblings aren’t told chronologically, maybe because they were surprisingly light scenes in a dark, dark show. Maybe because Theo Crain is one of my all-time favorite characters. Theo doesn’t necessarily come out to the audience and her family at the same time, but sort of across time all at once. In the same episode, we see her flirting with a girl at a bar, getting a talk from her mother with some quiet understanding, and the wedding scene, aka the coming out scene that I love.
Theo is at her sister Nell’s wedding when she gets caught sleeping with a bridesmaid. Steve and Nell find her, and at first there’s tense eye contact, and there’s a little stumbling over words, but then when Theo finishes the sentence, “We didn’t know you were into…” with “Bridesmaids?” the three siblings laugh a relieved laugh. Nell blurts out, “I love you,” and throws her arms around her big sister. She finishes zipping Theo’s dress and hugs her one more time for good measure. A few episodes later, we see another flash of the wedding and Nell and Steve make a game of watching their sister Shirley to see how long it will take her to notice Theo dancing with a fellow bridesmaid in a way that makes it clear they are more than just gal pals. Theo’s coming out feels different to me than a lot of other comings-out; I like that it was shown but it wasn’t a big deal. Because sometimes it’s not. Sometimes families react with love and laughter. I think it’s good we have a wide range of different coming out stories on TV, and I’m glad this one had some weight to it but then immediately lifted that weight.
Stranger Things
Valerie Anne
My most recent favorite coming out scene was Robin on Stranger Things because her speech was perfect. It was rambling and awkward and sweet and it described exactly that feeling of watching your peers start to fawn over the cute boys in class as you enter teenhood but realizing you don’t want to date those boys, you want to BE those boys. Not in the literal sense, but in whatever way you have to so that girls would look at YOU that way.
I was in high school when the song “Sugar, We’re Goin Down: came out and the line, “Isn’t it messed up how I’m just dying to be him” still rattles around in my brain because of this very feeling. It’s tied to the line of Santana Lopez’s that will be forever etched on my soul because of how deeply I felt it: He’s just a stupid boy. It’s that lonely feeling of knowing you’re different, and that frustration that comes with seeing how easy it seems to be for everyone else. It’s watching your best friend’s boyfriend treat her like shit and knowing you’d be a better match but not being able to do anything about it. It’s perfectly written, and delivered expertly by Maya Hawke, and received surprisingly delightfully by Robin’s best bud Steve. Who promptly makes fun of her, because lovingly roasting people for their choice of crush is what friends are for.
Glee
Riese
When Santana Lopez came out in episode 215 of Glee, I didn’t see it coming, for all the same reasons I didn’t see it coming for myself, either. Because yes I made out with my hot blonde best friend in high school but my whole personality was an orbit of boys boys boys, of desperately seeking affirmation and reputation related to boys, of creating drama with girls about boys — and finding myself mostly confused that some girls couldn’t have emotionless, no-strings-attached heterosexual sex, which had always come easy to me. I also didn’t see it coming because I wasn’t prepared for Glee, an absurdist and completely unhinged delightfully-soundtracked and audaciously problemaitc high school variety show, to hit me in the heart like that.
I wrote this at the time but it seems like, where coming out stories are concerned, most girls saw a door. Maybe you’d gone in but kept it a secret, maybe you’d stood in front of it every afternoon debating entering. Maybe you kept opening and closing it, maybe your friends or family were blocking it. But some of us never even saw the door and nobody was blocking it but once it was open we fell straight in. A friend opened that door for me. I never, ever, ever in ten million years, would’ve opened it myself. When they’re all sitting in a “sacred sharing sexy circle” (I hate this show) led by Gweneth Paltrow playing Holly Holiday (of course) and she asks Brittany and Santana if they think they could be lesbians, she opens that door for Santana. Because she says it like it would be an okay thing to be, like it wouldn’t even be a big deal, like she could be gay and still be cool.
After Santana finished singing “Landslide” to Britany and we were all crying at a Glee episode and Brittany asked “Do you really feel that way?” and Santana nodded and they hugged — that was the first moment Glee felt real to me. And then Santana came out to Brittany, face to face, and said she wanted to be with her but she was afraid of the talks and the looks and what everyone would say behind their back. It’s hard to be proud and mean and sharp-tongued to admit that even if you know your friends will accept you, you still care what your enemies think about you, too. Because Santana was always afraid to feel anything real, with anyone, because wanting Brittany makes her more vulnerable than she’s ever been, and it’s terrifying.
I think a lot of fans related to Santana’s coming out story because she fell in love with her best friend, but that wasn’t the case for me. I think I related to it because of how your story can seem to be one way but ends up being something else altogether. Half her personality was being boy-crazy, you know?
I doubt that Santana was written from the jump with the intention to make her a lesbian, but sometimes that’s what a coming out journey feels like — like you’re in a show and the writers chose a new direction for your character mid-way through Season Two. You can still look back and find a way to make it all fit together, though. Stories and lives are fluid like that.
Glee
Carmen
Whenever I think of “coming out,” there will always be Santana Lopez. There will be her tear stained cheeks and the quiet in her voice, a voice that usually takes up the entire room. There will always be this: “I’ve tried so hard to push this feeling away and keep it locked inside but every day feels like a war. I walk around so mad at the world but I’m really just fighting with myself and I don’t want to fight anymore. I’m just too tired. I have to just be me.”
When I first saw the scene, it felt like someone had vacuumed air out of my lungs. In my apartment with the cheap Ikea furniture and walls I had badly painted myself, time stood still. I had been trying to figure out how to come out for… years? For what had felt like forever? But I never understood how to explain the ways I had tied myself into gut knots over my own secret. How I was so deep in my own closet, I didn’t see a way out. And no one was in there but me, right? No one was forcing me to make myself smaller, and yet here I was fighting every single day, tearing myself in two from the inside out, forcing up armor, trying so desperately to be perfect — as if being perfect would somehow mask my queerness. And I was exhausted.
I wept.
There’s a long road to my coming out, but there’s also a very direct and almost comically linear path. For years, I didn’t come out. For years, I choked on silence because I couldn’t say the words. Then Santana Lopez sat at her abuela’s kitchen table and said she was tired of fighting. That was eleven years ago, right before Thanksgiving. By Christmas break, I was out. Coming out changed everything. My friendships, my love, hell, this job that I now have. And it was as simple as that.
Master of None
Carmen
I talk a lot about my mom on this website, because when you’re the only daughter of a single mother… that’s a very specific kind of bond, I think. But there is a story I never tell — in part because I think if my mother knew I remembered it, knew how much it impacted me, she’d be ashamed. And in part because I don’t think she remembers it at all; it’s not reflective of all my other coming out stories, all the other times that she said or did the “right” thing. Maybe it’s unfair to bring back an off-handed comment from when I was 14 years old. It’s so small! It also never left.
One day, my freshman year in high school, we were driving some place that I do not remember to do a thing that does not matter. For reasons that I cannot explain, I felt a need to ask my mother “what would you do if I was gay?” It felt silly and light hearted — because first of all, I obviously wasn’t gay (I absolutely was) and second of all, because I knew my mother would accept me. She was very left and very sex positive, a feminist who wouldn’t ever use the word feminist but bought me a middle grade reader version of Our Bodies, Our Selves before I had my first period. Her best friend was a lesbian. This wasn’t a new concept. Plus, my mother’s whole deal has always been “I’d love you no matter what.”
Except this time, she didn’t say that. She said, “Well, I guess I’d be sad… It’s already so hard to be Black and be a woman. I don’t think any parent would want more hard things for their child.” And maybe that was true! It certainly makes sense. But then, I didn’t come out for another eleven years.
That’s a long story to get back to the “Thanksgiving” episode of Master of None‘s second season. But you see, almost verbatim, those are the exact words that Angela Bassett repeats when Lena Waithe’s Denise comes out to her. Also an only daughter of a single mother. “I just don’t want life to be hard for you. It is hard enough being a Black woman in this world. Now you want to add something else to that?”
I’ve never known what to do with that story. Just an ellipsis that haunts me, I suppose. I can imagine, as a parent, especially as a Black parent, wanting to protect your child. I also… yeah. Not all the coming out scenes that stay with us, stay with us for good reasons. Some just keep us up at night.
One Day at a Time
Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya
Like a lot of people here, I’ve already written a lot about specific coming out scenes in film and television — some for characters already shouted out in this roundtable, like Alex Danvers and Santana Lopez. But I think these days if I had to choose just one coming out scene to revisit over and over again, it would be Elena Alvarez’s from One Day at a Time.
Elena reminds me a lot of myself in high school. I was very nerdy, passionate about the things I was into, vocal about social justice issues, a little cringe, earnest, intense. When Elena comes out to her mom in “Sex Talk,” it gets me every time. Because I never got to have that moment. I was never even close to out in high school, and I get a little absurdly jealous of the people who were able to be. I try not to project myself onto fictional characters as much as I did in my youth, but watching Elena come out, it’s impossible to not imagine my teenage self doing the same and wonder what that might have looked like for me.
Like Elena, I was so confident and outspoken about so many things, but I was a closed and locked box when it came to this, and Elena quietly, cautiously is able to open the box. It’s a lovely scene in its silences, in its well timed comedic breaks (“No wonder you saw those Twilight movies so many times.”), in the way it centers Elena’s emotions but still makes some room for Penelope, too. Because, yes, it should of course be about Elena, but she isn’t coming out to a stuffed animal. She’s coming out to someone who knows her deeply and who loves her. There’s empathy and emotional complexity afforded to both characters in this moment, and it’s easily my favorite daughter-mother coming out moment ever. I didn’t really come out to my own mother. She called me one day and asked “when are you going to tell me about the girl you’re dating?” and I was like “I guess now?????” In a lot of ways, that approach worked for us. By then, I was already 23, and I don’t know how much longer it may have taken me to put things as plainly to her as Elena does with Penelope. But sometimes I do like to imagine this alternate universe where I did things differently, where I had the courage and self-knowledge possessed by Elena.
Brittani Nichols on Writing “Abbott Elementary,” Making Oprah a Shipper
Feature images by Brittani Nichols + Frazer Harrison/Getty Image
One of the best thing about watching Abbott Elementary take over the world and rack up a wheelbarrow full of prestigious TV awards is knowing Brittani Nichols is right in the middle of all of it. We’ve been knowing and loving Brittani’s work forever, from her Outfest- and Newfest-winning feature film, Suicide Kale; to her highly relatable stand-up comedy; to her writing and acting on shows like A Black Lady Sketch Show, Take My Wife, and Transparent. Now, as one of Abbott‘s head writers/producers, the whole world gets to experience her genius and hilarity on the regular. This week, Brittani’s first season two episode, “The Principal’s Office,” lands — and so she took some time to chat with me about the series’ success, which of her values she hopes are reflected in her sitcom writing, and what it’s like when your show’s biggest shipper is Oprah.
https://twitter.com/BisHilarious/status/1569733603936075779
Heather Hogan: Brittani, congratulations on your huge success. Nobody deserves it more than you truly. It’s so cool to now see the whole world invested in your writing. I’m like Buddy the Elf over here. I KNOW HER! I KNOW HER!
Brittani Nichols: Thank you! Now that I’m doing it again, I’m like, “Oh man, I really missed this.”
HH: Can you talk a little bit about the last year and a half? I mean, it’s been a whirlwind of success, just success upon success.
BN: The last year and a half has been busy, but it’s been fun. We’ve been in the writers’ room this season since the last week of April, and we’re going until probably around January, and we’re really in the middle of it now. And it is exhausting, but not miserable.
HH: That’s rare and amazing.
BN: I think this is the first time where I’ve really been able to make that distinction of “I’m really tired, but I’m not in a horrible mood all the time. I’m just doing a job that takes a lot out of me, but I enjoy doing it.” So it just feels different than a lot of the other jobs that I’ve had in this industry, which really run you ragged and make you crabby.
HH: Why do you think that is?
BN: It’s everything. It’s from the show that we get to make, to the people that I get to work with, to my own connection to the material. The showrunners, like Justin Halpern and Patrick Schumacker and Quinta Brunson, are all just nice people. And that’s part of why I took this job: because I trusted who they are as human beings. I trusted that they would run a room that treated everyone like a human. And that valued us as writers because — well, a lot of people don’t like writers very much. A lot of people are not very nice to us. And they just create an environment where we get respect and get treated with just basic humanity, which unfortunately is just not a foregone conclusion for work anywhere.
HH: Absolutely. Can you talk a little bit about your connection to the material and how you see that coming through? How it came through in the first season, how you’re seeing it develop in the second season?
BN: I hope that as people become more familiar with the episodes that I personally write, they’ll notice sort of this undercurrent of community care. And I think that’s something that is coming across in the series overall. The point at which we’re catching up, or learning about and living with some of these characters — specifically like Jacob, Janine and Gregory — is their mid-twenties when they are learning about the inherent trauma of labor and also figuring out who they are as people. And I think that combination can be very combustible, and it could create a lot of different extremes and personalities. It’s why now you see all these people that are all about hustle culture and you see people who are just like, “It’s very stupid that we as humanity decided we should all work. Why did we do that?”
Writing these characters and watching them figure out who they are within a system that they are, every day, learning has failed them in new and surprising ways is really interesting. And I think getting people to investigate that tension that they have in their own lives, in their own industries, I hope is something that people are walking away from these episodes with.
HH: I see a lot of that conversation on Twitter, especially with teachers. Teachers in Philly for sure, but also lots of other teachers around the country. Just talking about that tension that you’re mentioning, and talking about their love of the job, the love of the kids, the lack of institutional support, the way you reflect the challenges and the triumphs in such a real way. What sort of community care themes are we going to see in this upcoming episode you wrote?
BN: So this episode is about Gregory having a student that is paying attention, but isn’t necessarily paying attention to the things that Gregory wants him to be paying attention to. Now that Gregory has accepted that he is a teacher and wants to be a teacher, he has to figure out what kind of teacher he wants to be. We’ve seen this arc from Gregory where he is really reckoning with his own masculinity, and the ways that was instilled in him as a child, and how that is now informing the sort of educator that he is. And often the moments that really test who you think you are, are moments of adversity. And he’s early enough in his career that he’s coming across a lot of situations for the first time.
And it’s, “Am I going to be a disciplinarian?” or, “Am I going to have to manage my own emotions and figure out what it is that’s going on for this kid and what it is that’s going on for me? Because both of those things are interacting in this moment to produce the situation. It’s not just about the student, it’s not just about me, it’s about all of us. It’s about this environment and it’s about what have I learned from all these other teachers and the way that Abbott functions, how am I going to be additive to that equation?” Rather than veering off away from hopefully the lessons that he’s been learning from his coworkers.
HH: I’ve especially loved his relationship with Barbara as it’s developed more this season. I think they have such a good dynamic. Are we going to see any of that sort of mentorship coming up in your episode?
BN: Yes, we are. And I think we’ve seen so much of Janine sort of begging Barbara for mentorship. And it’s interesting to see the Gregory and Barbara dynamic because it isn’t this sort of neediness, it’s genuinely Barbara stepping in when she feels like she needs to and saying the things that need to be said. What Barbara says when she’s not being directly prompted, when she is just offering up knowledge from a place of graciousness and empathy.
HH: I’ve enjoyed all the different styles of your writing over the years, from your sketch comedy to your personal comedy, obviously a feature-length film. What’s it like writing these characters that are growing every week, every year? These characters who are evolving as people, and in their relationships with each other, and — as you said — with their careers?
BN: Writing for a sitcom and developing characters is a very unique challenge because you’ve built the foundation of a sitcom on the archetypes that you’ve created in the characters. You’ve said, “Hey, these are these people and this is why this is funny, because these people are going to sort of act in very predictable ways.” And so it’s maintaining enough of the core of the person while also figuring out the ways in which they can grow. The thing that doesn’t change is the system. I think in a lot of sitcoms what you have to depend on are characters remaining the same. And for us what remains the same are the challenges.
So we have a little bit more freedom of changing the way that people interact with those challenges and who they are as people, because it really doesn’t matter how many ways you attack this problem, it’s not going to change. It’s a problem that is entrenched and unfortunately not going anywhere anytime soon, it seems, from my assessment of our country. And so it’s fun to play with how they’ll grow and how they’ll retract and in what ways they’ll remain stagnant. I think that’s really human. It’s really close to how people actually are. That’s the undercurrent of everything that I do in comedy. I always want it to feel really real. I always want it to be a step too close to the reality that people are used to.
HH: Are there characters or relationships on Abbott that are easier for you to write, that you’re more drawn to?
BN: In season one, I really loved writing for Tariq. I think that people would be surprised to learn that, as he is perhaps my exact opposite. But it was really fun because it was reaching into part of my brain for things that I would never say and just pulling it out saying, “It’s your time to shine, little buddy!” And also Tariq is a rapper. And I not so secretly enjoy rap. I mean I wrote for a celebrity rap battle show and I came out with that EP when I got bored that one time.
HH: I loved that EP.
BN: Thank you! It was fun getting to just write a comedy rap song for someone who didn’t think it was comedy and thought he was doing a good job. It’s such a fine line to walk with Tariq’s lyrics, because I think if you look at the lyrics, I mean this might be just a compliment to myself, but I think he’s pretty clever. I think a lot of the wordplay in that song is pretty good. It’s just that it’s the wrong time for that song, Tariq. That song is not for children. So I loved writing for him first season, and we’re not fully done breaking this second season yet. He’s popped up a little bit and I’m hoping we get to see some more of Tariq in season two.
HH: I hope so too. He just kept surprising. I loved him driving away with the air mattress inflated on top of the car.
BN: That was added, we didn’t know that was going to happen, which is a thing that is so incredible and fun about working on the show. We’ll see stuff like that that wasn’t in the script, that someone added on the day, or Quinta went and told them during one of the pre-production meetings that only the writer of that episode will be on. So the rest of the writers will see the cut, we’re like, “Why does he have a fully blown up air mattress on the car?” [Laughs] And it’s nice to be surprised in the same way that I think the audience is surprised.
HH: That’s amazing. It’s so rare these days to be nicely surprised in any way. So do you have characters or relationships that you like to write jokes for the most? Or jokes about the most? It’s a tricky balance, right?
BN: I like finding new areas of jokes. Because I think, from the first season, we like to make short jokes about Janine. We know that Gregory is going to serve as the straight man for that world, and oftentimes has the perspective of the audience. I think so many people think Gregory is really weird and when you really look at it, you’re like, “Gregory might be the most normal person in the school and everyone else is just so strange that he sticks out,” which is a fun reversal.
I like writing the scenes between Gregory and Janine. I think all the writers do, honestly, because we know that everyone’s going to love them. So it’s just like, “Oh yeah, this will be an easy way for me to feel great about myself, is writing some sweet interaction between them and finding those down beats.” Because a lot of the moments between them, it’s not the thrust of the scene, it’s just finding little flirty moments for them to have. In my episode there is what I describe as a “sexy fight” between the two of them.
HH: Ooh!
BN: We got a little bit of pushback as we moved through from outline stage to script stage of this episode, with people being slightly concerned, “Is this too much tension between them? Are they being sort of snippy?”
And I just was like, “Listen, Quinta and Tyler [James Williams] are going to make this work. They are going to find a level in this scene that none of us imagined was possible.” And they did. We talked so much about it, because I also was like, “Well as a writer I need to listen to what people are saying. And so I want to make sure that we also just have a version that isn’t tense and that is just funny. But also, let’s see what happens.”
I was sitting at Video Village with Patrick Schumacker, one of Abbott’s showrunners, and he just looks at me, he goes like, “Was that a little sexy?” And I was like, “It was. That’s a little sexy fight. They found the level of a sexy little fight.”
HH: I always think maybe one of the hardest things about being a TV writer is shippers — and you’ve got Oprah on you!
BN: Yeah, Oprah’s a big shipper. Who knew? Oprah’s somewhere writing fanfic right now.
https://twitter.com/BisHilarious/status/1574925071629488128
HH: Is writing TV’s it couple a lot of pressure?
BN: It’s not so much a pressure as it is a challenge. And Quinta has a very precise vision for them.
This writers’ room has the most amount of people that love television of any room that I’ve been in. We just, between all of us, can recall pretty much any episode of comedy in the last 15 years. And even going further back for some stuff like King of Queens, like Family Matters. We just know our stuff and it’s because we know our stuff that hopefully we’re going to be able to chart something that feels familiar but is also unique. And that’s really the only thing that we’re focused on is being able to say, “Yeah, Janine and Gregory are connected to the history of these beloved ‘Will they? Won’t they?’ duos that exist.” We like finding new waters with our little ship.
HH: I love that. Speaking of a room that’s just so familiar with TV, I felt like the cold open with Barbara thinking that these famous Black actors are white actors, that mix up, was so funny. You can tell from that kind of stuff that the room is just full of people who have all of this deep, deep industry knowledge.
BN: That cold open was from Brian Rubenstein’s episode — and he and I, and I believe Quinta, all just brainstormed a bunch of those names that could work. So we just have this master list somewhere of a bunch of Black actors’ names and white actors’ names that seem sort of similar. And that came from something that Sheryl Lee Ralph does in real life. She sometimes will say — there was one specific one. What is his name? Orlando Bloom?
HH: Ha!
BN: Yeah, I want to say, Orlando Bloom is who she initially thought was Black. And Quinta heard her do it and was like, “We got to make something out of this.” And it’s really fun, honestly, to have that sort of relationship with our actors because that’s not a foregone conclusion on shows, that the talent cares about the writers, or has a relationship, or says hello to us. And we’ve been able to spend time with them and sort find some of the quirkiness and specifics of them as people that we’re able to weave into the characters. And we have this really cool thing that happens where their performance of the characters and the way that we write the characters is meeting in the middle and creating what people are seeing. We try to be receptive and listen to the things that they want to be pulled out of the characters and the things that they care about and weaving them in with what we know.
Because they’re not in the room with us. So there’s so many things that we as writers talk about for the backstories of the characters and where they’re going in the future that the actors don’t always get to know. And they’re also writing this backstory and doing all this digging on the characters internally. And finding the places where we’re missing each other a little bit and finding the places where we overlap and using that to create the depth that we hope is coming across.
HH: I could listen to you talk about TV and the craft of writing all day. Alas, you have an Emmy Award-winning show to make! I’m so proud for you and so happy for you, B, and I hope your success just continues to *makes skyrocketing motion with hand*
BN: Thank you always, Heather. I really appreciate it. I love talking to Autostraddle. It was such a huge part of my history and how I got here and it’s fun to still be able to check in.
Style Thief: How To Dress Like League of Their Own’s Butch Icons Lupe and Jess
A League of Their Own has gay looks for everyone — from the high femme stylings of Greta to the fly butch flair of Jo and in between with Carson and Max’s versatile presentations. Today, we’re going back into butch territory with beloved hermanos Jess and Lupe.
Jess and Lupe have distinct but complementary go-to butch styles. Jess has never met a sleeve she didn’t roll, preferring short-sleeved buttondowns that she leaves unbuttoned over white, undershirt-style tees. Lupe plays a little more with patterns and stripes, also enjoying a short-sleeved buttondown but usually wearing it buttoned. They both look very good in hats, which is a well known butch superpower. Below, find some slightly more modern takes on their looks so you can emulate their easy tomboyish swagger.
Always Be Rolling
1. Denim Shirt ($90)
2. White T-Shirt Multipack ($18)
3. Trousers ($90)
4. Ball Cap ($12)
Again, Jess has never met a sleeve she didn’t roll. The gal simply loves to roll her sleeves! Listen, if I had baseball arms, I too would never ever cover my arms. I do often attempt a rolled sleeve, but they can be finicky/not stay put. Jess has this figured out though, usually opting for short-sleeve buttondowns made of sturdier material like a denim or a chambray so the roll stays in place. As for a shirt to go underneath, this is where multipacks come in handy! Why buy just one comfy white tee when you can buy three? Like this look? Then you’ll probably want to revisit the Jo style guide, because it’s all about the art of butch layering.
A Look To Lean In
1. Boxy Striped Tee ($20)
2. Burgundy Pants ($28)
3. Belt ($14)
4. Two-Tone Vintage Ball Cap ($24)
Ah, yes, the butch art of leaning casually against a wall. Of course Lupe is fucking good at it. By the looks of this photo, she invented it. Truth be told, you can lean in any outfit if you’re confident enough. But something about a slouchy/boxy tee really is the ideal leaning look.
Just a Really Good Shirt
1. Checked Camp Shirt ($72)
2. Embroidered Bird Shirt ($35)
3. Freshly Picked Shirt ($59)
4. Brown Floral Shirt ($63)
As I said up top, Lupe gets a little more playful with patterned shirts than Jess does. This is a great chance to get into some butch florals! Here are four different styles of buttondowns in prints and patterns to choose from. Throw one over a pair of high-waisted jeans ($98) with or without a belt, and you’re good to go out for a night of dancing or just for an intimate dinner.
All Aboard
1. Resort Shirt ($23)
2. High-Waisted Brown Trousers ($40)
3. Leather Belt ($38)
4. Corduroy Hat ($32)
Okay, so it’s kind of giving train conductor, but I like it? I will absolutely board this train if you know what I mean. Obviously, I took some liberties with the hat here, but I tried to modern up the look. Jess wears pants so fine they’re worth being fined for, so invest in some sturdy high-waisted pants to rock with various rolled-sleeve buttondowns.
Butch Night Out
1. Paisley Shirt ($40)
2. Herringbone Blazer ($40)
3. Faux Leather Pleated Pants ($98)
4. Leather Boots ($195)
Let’s hear it for paisley! You simply cannot go wrong with paisley for a gay night out on the town. Pair it with an oversized blazer, and you’re unstoppable. Faux leather and silky, paisley tops are two things that have a sort of femme-ier reputation, but they can absolutely be butched up, especially with the right accessories and shoes. When in doubt, just wield a beer like an accessory the way Lupe is here.
That should just about wrap up the queer style guides for A League of Their Own. If you have any other queer fictional characters, celebrities, etc. who you want to learn to dress like via Style Thief, drop a comment below! I’m thinking of tackling some of Eleanor’s looks from Do Revenge next.
Style Thief: How To Harness the Fly Butch Style of League of Their Own’s Jo
Here I am to once again tell you how to dress like your favorite characters from A League of Their Own! Previously in this series, I’ve broken down the go-to looks for Max and for Carson — who both exist somewhere between femme and butch — and for Greta, who’s a little more squarely on the femme side of the fashion spectrum. Now, we’re going into butch territory with everyone’s favorite slugger Jo DeLuca.
Jo loves to rock a very particular butch classic: an unbuttoned short-sleeved buttondown over a t-shirt or tank. It’s a butch look that has stood the test of time across decades. Butch layering is a time-honored tradition, and Jo does it very well. And now you can, too!
Butch Layering: The Classic
1. Striped Pants ($55)
2. White Tank Multipack ($18)
3. Chambray Buttondown ($122)
4. Wool Ball Cap ($30)
This is butch layering at its most fundamental. You’ve got your white tank and your rolled-sleeve open buttondown. It’s classic, it’s versatile, it’s effortlessly hot. I like that Jo injects a little fun here via the pants. The pinstripes are sporty but also sleek. It’s a good look, and Jo of course tops it off with a hat. Butch accessorizing is important! Also, a key to butch layering is multipacks! Instead of washing your fav tank over and over, have multiple on hand. Also, I know this buttondown seems pricey, but it’s something you can wear all the time, and the chambray material means it’s sturdy enough to maintain a perfectly rolled sleeve to show off those slugger arms.
Butch Layering: Power Clash
1. Pistachio Striped Shirt ($58)
2. Striped Camp Shirt ($30)
3. Cuffed Pants ($178)
4. Wool Ball Cap ($32)
Butch layering doesn’t have to just be about solids/basics. You can also do it with patterned shirts and play around with bold colors. Here, Jo mixes plaid and stripes to great effect. Who says you can’t wear a vertical stripe over a horizontal stripe? Do it! Add a little chaos to your butch layering. Personally, I think if you’re going to only buy one thing from this post that it should be this hat. And here’s a bonus striped polo ($40) I can totally see Jo rocking.
An Every Day Shirt
1. White Courier Shirt ($65)
2. Vintage Wide-Leg Jean ($138)
3. Plaid Hat ($32)
4. Belt ($48)
You need that one short-sleeved buttondown that you can just throw on any day of the week, any occasion. Something that can be dressed up or down, something that’s comfy and classic and easy. Material matters! If you live in a cooler climate, maybe a wool shirt is the move. Or, if you’re somewhere warmer, try out linen or a linen blend. This white shirt from Madewell is a cotton twill, which’ll work anywhere. This plus a really good jean, and you’ll be unstoppably fly. Once again: Don’t skip the accessories!
Going Out and Getting the Girl
1. White Courier Shirt ($65)
2. Sweater Blazer ($168)
3. High-Waisted Cropped Pants ($40)
4. Watch ($44)
Yep, I’m linking the same shirt twice, because that white Madewell shirt really is the perfect shirt! Here’s an example of how you can dress it up a little more than the previous outfit. This is what you wear to score at the dyke bar. Here’s a bonus pair of plaid pants ($42) if you want to spice it up a bit.
I hope you enjoyed another inning of A League of Their Own Style Thief! We’ll keep the butch ball rolling with a guide for how to dress like Lupe and Jess next!
“Harley Quinn” and “Star Trek: Lower Decks” Give Chaotic Bisexuals a Good Name
The season three finale of HBO Max’s Harley Quinn opens with Poison Ivy kneeling on the ground yelling “—uuuuuuuuuuck,” the payoff of the previous episode’s closing, where she fell to her knees shouting “fuuuuuuuuuu—”. She’s holding a limp Harley in her arms, and not because she’s dead. The opposite, actually. Harley let herself get infected with the zombie goop her girlfriend was using to live out her wildest fantasies, transforming Gotham City into an all-green Eden. Harley zombiefied herself so Ivy would stop. Meanwhile — in a galaxy far, far away — in a different fantasy wold, Ensign Beckett Mariner of the USS Cerritos has hijacked an amusement park spaceship, and taken it into deep space — so she can steal a Federation Starship to gather evidence to free her Captain from a sham Starfleet trial.
What do these three have in common, you’re wondering? Well, they’re all three women starring in their own animated series from beloved, multi-gazillion dollar franchises. And they also happen to be the most well-developed chaotic bisexuals I’ve ever seen on TV in my entire life.
I’ve long held the opinion that no shows are doing queer representation like cartoons; Harley Quinn and Star Trek: Lower Decks just prove my point. Maybe animated series in deeply established universes have more creative freedom because they’re viewed by studios as less important than their live-action counterparts. Maybe legacy properties have just accepted that the role of animated spin-offs is to lovingly skewer their real-people predecessors. Maybe it’s simply the fact that less viewers watch these animated offshoots, that they get exported to fewer countries, so it’s less about making bank and more about keeping that branding fresh. Who really knows how the minds of big corporations work? Whatever the reason, DC Comics and Paramount, respectively, have stayed out of the way and allowed Harley Quinn and Lower Decks to thrive under the creator’s narrative visions.
For Harley Quinn, that has meant two seasons of Harley and Ivy being in love. Not winking at being in love. Not hinting at something more than friends. Not subtext. I’m talking wedding-busting, face-smooshing, U-Hauling, “thanks, we’ve been doing a lot of banging” in love.
In season two, they finally admit their feelings for each other and decide they owe it to themselves to at least give their relationship a shot. In season three, which aired its finale yesterday, the couple grapples with their individual identities (How does Ivy get back to her roots, literally and metaphorically? What does Harley actually want to do with her life, now that she’s not in an abusive relationship with the Crown Prince of Crime?) and with being a couple (If one of them joins The Legion of Doom, do they both have to join The Legion of Doom? If one of them wants to bash in Joker’s head with a bat, do both of them have to bash in Joker’s head with a bat?). Being selfless doesn’t come easy to either of these super-(villainous?) women — but they try so hard for each other.
They love being Harlivy, but they also love being their own selves with their own shifting aspirations. They call each other “honey” while saving each other’s lives, repeatedly. They call each other “babe” while blowing stuff up. They know what kind of toilet paper the other one likes and their go-to order at Mama Macaroni’s. They even have their own individual relationships and hang-ups with the Batfam. I’ve never seen anything like it!
On Lower Decks, Beckett Mariner’s personal growth is less tied to romance, but her evolution is no less satisfying. She came out as pansexual early in the series, telling one of her best friends, “I’m always dating bad boys, bad girls, bad gender non-binary babes, ruthless alien masterminds, bad Bynars” — and, this season, we really get to see that pay off as she’s got a real enemies-to-lovers situation going with Jennifer “Jen” Sh’reyan, a female Andorian Starfleet officer. In fact, in last week’s “Mining the Mind’s Mines,” she gets her hands on some glowing psychic ore that makes her start hallucinating her deepest desires and insecurities. Surprise, they involve Jennifer! First, Jen wears a bikini and tries to seduce her. She wants to have fun, go swimming, makeout, just generally have a good and carefree time with Beckett. Then, a whole other Jen shows up and starts demanding labels and morphing into a commitment-greedy lesbian werewolf. They battle it out in the arena of Beckett’s mind and she ultimately decides she still wants to smooch and canoodle with her girl, and also she needs to go back to therapy.
Beckett Mariner is Chaotic Good come to life. She wants to help people. She wants to make the world a better place. She wants to be a good friend and daughter and colleague and Starfleet officer. But she also chafes at just the whiff of a whisper of the echo of the idea of being boxed in by rules. She absolutely refuses to do what she’s told the way she’s told to do it. She hates bureaucracy. She is, in fact, never not getting into trouble. But she’s almost always doing it for the right reason.
It is shockingly rare to see the complex internal lives of women get explored like this on television, to dig through their motivations with them, to see their crunchy exteriors and gooey caramel centers — and to ride the waves of their messy decisions alongside them, without ever losing sight of their humanity. The fact that all three of these woman are bisexual? And in relationships with other bisexuals? One of the most misunderstood, misrepresented, maligned group of characters on this or any planet? It’s a joy to behold. And it’s only in cartoons.
Style Thief: How To Catch Hearts by Dressing Like League of Their Own’s Carson
Hello and welcome back to another inning of A League of Their Own Style Thiefs! I’ve already told you how to dress like femme jock goddess Greta and the dreamiest pitcher on the planet, Max Chapman, who is a champion of what I call the “casual-hot” look. Next up to bat is Carson Shaw, so has come oh so very far from this:
I said this in my Max Style Thief, too, but Max and Carson’s wardrobes throughout the first season are so fun because they really evolve. Their styles have an arc. Carson doesn’t shirk dresses entirely, but she does break out of the sort of demure housewife trappings of her previous wardrobe, instead turning to plaid shirtdresses and mixing in some pants as well. There’s a lot of plaid going on in her looks these days, and an abundance of plaid is also how I started coming out of the closet. You know what they say: Once you start putting plaid in the closet, you’re about to come out of the closet. (No one says this; I just made this up.)
Here we go!
Baseball Is Life
1. Belted Utility Jumpsuit ($150)
2. Blue Ball Cap ($20)
3. Repurposed Baseball Mitt Wallet ($54)
4. Baseball Keds ($60)
What is a catcher without her mitt, you know? But instead of carrying around a literal baseball mitt as an accessory, you can carry around a wallet made from repurposed vintage leather mitts. This whole look really does scream BASEBALL, so I only recommend rocking it if you are indeed a baseball fan and not a fake baseball fan like myself. Admittedly, even a fake baseball fan like myself is tempted to get those Keds…they’re cute!!!
Have a Catch
1. Plaid Shirt ($50)
2. Gray High-Waisted Pants ($40)
3. Nike Belt ($15)
4. Retro Adidas ($110)
Are we brand-mixing with Nike AND Adidas in this look? Yes, yes we are. I don’t think Carson would really care about such things. Carson is a little chaotic, and I feel like this outfit captures some of that spirit while still at the end of the day being a cohesive look. Wear it to “have” “a” “catch” with someone cute, if you know what I mean (I don’t know what I mean).
SHIRTDRESS O’CLOCK
1. Loft Plaid Shirtdress ($90)
2. Retro Shirtdress ($68+)
3. Floral Shirtdress ($56)
4. LL Bean Plaid Shirtdress ($90)
This really is the staple Carson Shaw look when she isn’t in something more casual like pants and a tee. What can I say, my girl loves a sensible shirtdress. The best thing about shirtdresses — especially ones that are patterned like hers — is that they’re super easy to style! Most of them have built-in belts/waist ties, and you can keep the jewelry minimalist. I found four different shirtdresses for you to choose from, so go wild!
Urge To Merge
1. Land’s End Buttonfront Dress ($48)
2. Forever 21 Floral Dress ($21)
3. City Chic Faux Wrap Dress ($109)
4. ASOS Wrap Front Skater Dress ($39)
Okay, my favorite thing about this dress is that if you dialed up the reddish brown color of it to more of a deep red then it would look…exactly like something GRETA would wear. Whomst amongst us has not gradually absorbed elements of our partner’s wardrobe? Tis a queer tradition. But at the end of the day, Carson does wear much more muted and cool-toned colors than Greta. I’ve picked four dresses that feel distinctly Carson-esque but also modern. Dresses that may be floral or patterned and yet still have a tomboy-femmeness about them. Carson straddles a lot of lines, and I like that about her. I feel like the Carson of the modern era would wear a lot of skater dresses.
Thanks for joining me on another Style Thief journey! Next up, we’ll tackle Jo!
Style Thief: How To Dress Like League of Their Own’s Heartthrob Pitcher Max
Max Chapman and Carson Shaw have my favorite fashion arcs in A League Of Their Own‘s first season. We watch them go from wearing what they think they’re supposed to wear to wearing what they actually want to wear. There’s some experimentation and play, their confidence in their looks increasing alongside their confidence in their baseball skills. For Max, that means trying out more and more pants looks and playful pieces like vests. I also like that Max has very specific colors she knows she looks good in and largely sticks to them. Dark red and dark blue are her go-tos and they do indeed look great on her. Sometimes, she mixes in some olive. Basically, Max is an autumnal icon.
Previously in this series: a guide on how to harness the high femme floral looks of A League of Their Own’s Greta.
Casual Hot
1. Faux Leather Hat ($35)
2. Utility Shirt ($18)
3. White Tank ($30)
4. The Utility Barrel Pant ($98)
Like!!!! This is the simplest outfit ever, and yet, she is making it seem like a work of art. It’s the perfect look to wear while leaning against something, as she’s demonstrating. Who can resist a casual-hot lean? I have not been able to pull off a newsboy cap like the one Max is sporting here — though I have attempted it at many junctures of my very gay life, especially when I was experimenting with a more tomboy femme/soft butch aesthetic several years ago. But a newsboy cap on other people? ABSOLUTELY YES. LOVE IT. The tank + high-waisted trouser + unbuttoned buttondown is a v versatile casual-hot look you can rock just about any season, any occasion. If you’re a Max in your heart, make this combo part of your capsule wardrobe.
Loose Buttondowns
1. Olive Utility Shirt ($26)
2. Blue Resort Shirt ($123)
3. Plum Button-Front Shirt ($25)
4. High-Waisted Skinny Jeans ($118)
Speaking of capsule wardrobe, Max’s closet had gotta be just brimming with red, blue, and olive buttondowns in long and short sleeves with loose/boxy fits. Tuck any of these shirt options into some high-waisted jeans or slacks, and you’re good to go. Don’t love any of the three shirt options I linked? Just Google “short sleeve resort shirt” and you’ll find plenty of other options. I recommend going with a linen or linen blend version. This is truly Max’s go-to look, and she wears the hell out of it. As for styling, you can do this outfit with a pair of sneakers or ankle boots. And of course, if you’re wearing a literal Max costume, you gotta get a red-brimmed blue ball cap.
Party Vest
1. Yellow Silk Blouse ($23)
2. Black Cropped Vest ($84)
3. Black Pants ($88)
4. Lapel Pin ($16)
Party! Vest! I found a slightly more modern take on the suiting vest here, but you can definitely find a more vintage look, like this version which is on sale for $50. While I’m a big fan of the buttercream blouse, the vest really is the star of this look, and once you have a vest, you can become the Vest Dyke of your dreams. This style of vest will instantly dress up any shirt. Or, go bold and go shirtless underneath (though that feels less Max, more Shane, of course). And have fun with lapel pins on your vest! It’s a great way to add a pop of personality.
Coverall Chic
1. Everlane Coveralls ($89)
2. Dickies Coveralls ($68)
3. Madewell Jumpsuit ($95)
4. Navy Blue Bandana ($15)
Here are just three different versions of navy coveralls, because why not! For truly the best coveralls, I recommend actually thrifting Dickies or a similar work brand and then having them tailored. Also, Max + Clance would be a v good best friend x best friend costume idea this Halloween just saying.
Now go forth a build a capsule wardrobe full of dark solid buttondowns and high-waisted trousers and denim. You’re ready to live your best casual-hot life. Stay tuned for a guide on how to dress like Carson Shaw next week in an all-new Style Thief!
Presenting the Winners of the 2022 Autostraddle TV Awards!
Autostraddle’s annual celebration of the best of LGBTQ+ television had a major makeover this year as we rebranded from “the Gay Emmys” to the Autostraddle TV Awards. It might seem like a small, surface-level shift, but it’s significant to us. It signals an overall push for our annual awards to be taken seriously. We might not come with a fancy in-person ceremony or physical trophies, but as mainstream awards continue to overlook groundbreaking LGBTQ+ series, we vitally fill a gap in the television awards pomp and circumstance. We celebrate the shows and performers most important to queer, lesbian, bisexual, and trans viewers.
And perhaps the greatest difference between our approach and the Television Academy’s is not just that we specifically highlight LGBTQ+ achievements but that we involve you, the viewers and our readers, in the voting process. After the Autostraddle TV Team narrowed down each of our categories to six nominees, we opened up the floor to you to weigh in. For the 21 main categories, the TV Team’s votes weigh more than the fan votes — though there were multiple instances where fan choices swayed the vote. For the three special fan favorite categories, the winner was determined 100% by readers with no input from the TV Team.
Now, here are the winners of the 2022 Autostraddle TV Awards, accompanied by words from our seriously talented, smart, knowledgable, passionate TV Team.
Outstanding Drama Series
Yellowjackets (Showtime)
Runner-Up: Gentleman Jack (HBO Max)
Other Nominees: Station Eleven (HBO Max) // The L Word: Generation Q (Showtime) // Euphoria (HBO Max) // Killing Eve (AMC)
The last two decades have shown us that television holds endless possibilities. A 10-episode all-at-once binge! An 18-episode movie(?) sequel of an old show! A limited series that’s so popular it gets a second season! Personally, I love it all. And yet there’s something special — retro? 90s? — about a show with a killer pilot, self-contained episodes, a full-season arc, and questions left unanswered for years to come. There’s a reason Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson’s Yellowjackets has become an obsession for countless queers — in the purest sense, it’s just fucking great television.
Kind of like Lost meets Sarah DeLappe’s The Wolves meets lesbian night at the dive bar, Yellowjackets is as delicious to discuss as it is to watch. It’s a mystery show, a horror show, a trauma show, a teen drama. Each half — a high school soccer team stranded in the woods, their older selves reckoning with that past — holds its own puzzles, its own delights. The present storyline has career-best work from 90s faves Melanie Lynskey, Christina Ricci, and Juliette Lewis — along with equally stunning work from Tawny Cypress — and the 90s storyline has an exceptional, largely queer, young cast that holds their own alongside the legends. With these performers, a directing team that includes Karyn Kusama, Daisy von Sherler Mayer, and Deepa Mehta(!), and sharp, layered writing, this is a TV show that moves through its twists with total confidence.
The year is 2022. We’re still living through a pandemic. Our favorite queer show has as much horror as humor, as much trauma as nostalgia, as much pain as delight. And this first season is just the beginning. Here’s to Yellowjackets, a show that feels both classic and fresh. May it consume us completely for many years to come. Stingers up! — Drew
Outstanding Comedy Series
Hacks (HBO Max)
Runner-Up: Dickinson (Apple TV)
Other Nominees: Sort Of (HBO Max) // We Are Lady Parts (Peacock) // A Black Lady Sketch Show (HBO Max) // Sex Education (Netflix) // Reservation Dogs (FX)
You know how they say “laughter is the best medicine”? Well, I am an American so even though unfortunately I don’t always have access to it, medicine is the best medicine — but laughter is a close second. The winner for best comedy this year is the incredibly funny and honest intergenerational comedy, Hacks. I’ve been in love with this show since it’s debut, screaming about it in Slack and waxing poetic about it with friends. Now, I’m no Christina Tucker, but I can still say that I love Jean Smart who plays Deborah Vance. She is a fucking comedic genius who has been part of some of my favorite now-forgotten series: The Oblongs, Samantha Who?, and of course cult queer classic series Designing Women. Then we have the irl bi-babe and high-key hilarious Hannah Einbinder playing Ava Daniels, and she kills it in her evolution from entitled millennial creative, to still-a-bit-entitled-but-more-aware and incredibly dope millennial creative.
Hacks does that thing that queers are always saying they want but never actually try for, and that’s have an intergenerational friendship — of sorts. Like, yes, it’s obviously boss and worker, but there is obvious friendship present — AND IT’S NOT ALL WHINY, SAPPY, AND AFTER SCHOOL SPECIAL! It’s mean, it’s raucous, it’s got real moments that cut pretty deep, and it’s FUCKING FUNNY. The writing is layered and witty, but the actors’ comedic timing and portrayals of these sometimes shitty people are what bring it home. So congrats to the show, the cast, and the writers and let’s all celebrate by going on a dykey day cruise! — Shelli Nicole
Outstanding Sci-Fi/Fantasy Series
Batwoman (CW)
Runner-Up: The 4400 (CW)
Other Nominees: Naomi (CW) // Astrid & Lilly Save the World (SYFY) // Supergirl (CW) // Riverdale (CW)
Let me just count the ways Batwoman deserves this Autostraddle TV Award. Number one, just the sheer number of LGBTQ+ characters on-screen. There were at least six during this 2022 Autostraddle TV Awards time-frame, including heroes, villains, bisexuals in dresses, lesbians in suits, and whatever Dr. Pamela Lillian Isley was wearing. A green leotard? Number two, Black lesbian Batwoman — the most famous LGBTQ+ superhero of all-time — played by bisexual star Javicia Leslie during one of the most sustained uprisings for Black lives in United States history. Number three, an epic slow-burn enemies-to-friends-to-lovers romance between two queer Black characters, which almost never happens on-screen. The swooniest queer romance I’ve seen on TV in many moons. Number four, the engaging storytelling which featured some of the most original, heartfelt, emotionally fraught, action-packed, successfully paid-off comic book stories in TV history. And, finally, number five, the image at the top of this blurb, which pretty much says it all. — Heather
Outstanding Lead Actor Playing an LGBTQ+ Character in a Drama Series
Jasmin Savoy Brown as Taissa Turner, Yellowjackets
Runner-Up: Zendaya as Rue Bennett, Euphoria
Other Nominees: Tawny Cypress as Taissa Turner, Yellowjackets // Suranne Jones as Anne Lister, Gentleman Jack // Hunter Schafer as Jules Vaughn, Euphoria // Jodie Comer as Villanelle, Killing Eve // Sandra Oh as Eve Polastri, Killing Eve
Taissa Turner is the kind of girl I would have had a life-ruining crush on in high school. Jasmin Savoy Brown brings an effortless charm to her, while still showing flickerings of the teen anxieties under the confident facade as she’s pressure-tested, first during an intense soccer game, then while stranded in the wilderness. A character that easily could have been a basic jock archetype instead has nuance and layers in Jasmin’s hands.
I’m not surprised Yellowjackets — and specifically Jasmin/Taissa — won a few Autostraddle TV awards this year. There was something really authentic about the show, despite being a hyperreality of murder mysteries and cannibalism. It captured the “real people in unreal situations” vibe that a lot of shows aim for, but not all achieve. And I think a not-small part of that is because you can tell that ‘own stories’ were being told. Queer people were involved in the creation of the queer characters, and Jasmin Savoy Brown has talked about how she had a part in Taissa’s iconic hair cutting scene and making sure it was clear that Taissa still took care of and wrapped her hair up until that turning point. It all just adds to the fact that Taissa isn’t a broad-strokes character, and her queerness and her Blackness aren’t just boxes the show is checking off, they’re authentic and inextricable parts of her character. And clearly that resonated with viewers, especially queer viewers. — Valerie
Outstanding Supporting or Guest Actor Playing an LGBTQ+ Character in a Drama Series
Sepideh Moafi as Gigi Ghorbani, The L Word: Generation Q
Runners-Up, Tied: Jordan Hull as Angelica Porter-Kennard, The L Word: Generation Q // Maya Hawke as Robin Buckley, Stranger Things
Other Nominees: Liv Hewson as Van Palmer, Yellowjackets // Sherry Cola as Alice Kwan, Good Trouble // Julianna Margulies as Laura Peterson, The Morning Show
Part of being a star is making it look easy. A natural charm, a natural beauty. But in reality the industry is filled with charming, beautiful actors. Having it is different. Having it is a skill. Sepideh Moafi has it.
Moafi’s Gigi Ghorbani was one of the standouts of Gen Q’s first season. She had us all wondering how anyone could decide to downgrade from throuple to couple when she was the casualty. But unlike Alice and Nat, the Gen Q writers staff didn’t let Gigi go. And with the wise decision to bump Moafi up to series regular, she and Gigi were able to steal the show and our hearts and our, um — well let’s keep this PG — even more.
Of all the actors in the Gen Q ensemble, Moafi achieves the tone best. She can do the melodrama, she can do the comedy, she can do the sexy. She’s such a magnetic presence that she had the fanbase rooting against Bette Porter. Now THAT is an achievement in gay television. — Drew
Outstanding Lead Actor Playing an LGBTQ+ Character in a Comedy Series
Hailee Steinfeld as Emily Dickinson, Dickinson
Runner-Up: Bilal Baig as Sabi Mehboob, Sort Of
Other Nominees: Mae Martin as Mae, Feel Good // Alia Shawkat as Dory Sief, Search Party // Jonica T. Gibbs as Hattie, Twenties // Hannah Marie Einbinder as Ava Daniels, Hacks
I will never be able to sum up how much Hailee Steinfeld’s Emily Dickinson means to me. It never would have occurred to me to think of Emily Dickinson as such a chaotic, energetic character, but I’m so glad that’s how Hailee played her. Hailee always brings a casual, relatable vibe to characters she plays, while still making each one unique. Like there are similarities between Emily Dickinson and Kate Bishop that never would have existed on paper because of the quippy and curious nature of Hailee Steinfeld’s acting style. But it works, especially in the case of Emily Dickinson; of course someone whose writing was so passionate and prolific would be larger than life. Especially in her youth, as she’s just experiencing love for the first time. And even if it’s nothing like the real Emily Dickinson’s life, it was a fun exploration of what it could have been. Seeing the world through Emily’s eyes, and through her imagination, including but not limited to her undying love, her all-consuming passion, her overwhelming desire for Sue. Hailee Steinfeld brought such humanity and fun to this character, and it was a joy to watch her, whether she was writing furiously about the love of her life, imagining meeting Sylvia Plath, or just being her brave, messy self. The show may be over, but I have a feeling we’ll be talking about Hailee’s performance for a while. Perhaps even forevermore. — Valerie
Outstanding Supporting or Guest Actor Playing an LGBTQ+ Character in a Comedy Series
Dua Saleh as Cal Bowman, Sex Education
Runners-Up, Tied: Ashley Nicole Black as various, A Black Lady Sketch Show //
Ashly Burch as Rachel, Mythic Quest
Other Nominees: Sophina Brown as Ida B., Twenties // Ella Hunt as Sue Gilbert, Dickinson // Rebekah Murrell as Cam, In My Skin
Trans actors rarely get to just be actors. Even on the best cis-run sets — aka almost all sets — trans actors end up as consultants, teachers, even writers, while still being expected to do the emotional and intellectual work of any other actor. It’s a tough challenge for a seasoned pro, even tougher for a newcomer. That’s why musician Dua Saleh’s turn as Cal on Sex Education is so special. They managed to join an ensemble cast as a trans actor and not only fit in — but stand out.
Cal is not an outwardly emotional character. And Sex Education doesn’t traumatize them like weaker shows often do to trans characters. The conflicts Cal faces are severe but understated. Cal approaches them with a confident shrug and a hit from a joint. And yet Saleh manages to capture the feelings underneath. We feel Cal’s pain, the unfairness of their circumstances, even as Cal themself hides this vulnerability. It’s a nuanced, subtle performance from Saleh. Their charisma and sense of humor may be obvious, but they deserve just as much praise for adding the emotional layers that helped create one of the most three-dimensional trans characters on TV. — Drew
Outstanding Lead Actor Playing an LGBTQ+ Character in a Sci-Fi Series
Javicia Leslie as Ryan Wilder, Batwoman
Runners-Up, Tied: Kaci Walfall as Naomi McDuffie, Naomi // Chyler Leigh as Alex Danvers, Supergirl
Other Nominees: Danielle Brooks as Leota Adebayo, Peacemaker // Taylor Hickson as Raelle Collar, Motherland: Fort Salem // Jes Macallan as Ava Sharpe, Legends of Tomorrow
Much of Batwoman‘s second season was about a transition: the transfer of the cowl from Kate Kane to Ryan Wilder. A new addition to DC Comics lore, Ryan Wilder needed time to settle in, to build her backstory, to connect her to the existing canvas, to take the baton from the show’s legacy hero. But Batwoman‘s third season? It belonged to Ryan Wilder. It belonged to Javicia Leslie and it thrived because of her.
Batwoman‘s third season asked more of its star. Need a fight scene, in ankle deep water, against Poison Ivy? Javicia delivered. Need an emotional reaction to finding out the biological mom you thought was dead actually wasn’t? Javicia’s got that too. Need the honesty of a black woman, challenged to carry the weight of the world on her shoulders, to just admit that she’s tired? Javicia offered it with level of candor that resonates in the deepest part of your soul. And when she’s asked to shed the armor of the batsuit and just be vulnerable with the woman she’s slowly (and unexpectedly) come to love? Javicia conveys every heartfelt moment, turning us all into WildMoore shippers. The show asked for so much more and Javicia Leslie gave…and gave…and gave.
I am not sure we were ever deserving of any of it — she was the manifestation of a dream we had not dared to have — but I am so grateful that we got it. — Natalie
Outstanding Supporting or Guest Actor Playing an LGBTQ+ Character in a Sci-Fi Series
Meagan Tandy as Sophie Moore, Batwoman
Runners-Up, Tied: Kausar Mohammed as Soraya Khoury, 4400 // Azie Tesfai as Kelly Olsen, Supergirl
Other Nominees: Victoria Cartagena as Renee Montoya, Batwoman // Tig Notaro as Commander Jett Reno, Star Trek: Discovery // Ireon Roach as Keisha Taylor, 4400
Comic books are littered with the girlfriends of superheroes, most of whom are damsels in distress who constantly need saving. The superhero rushes to their rescue and we fall in love with them even more for their heroics. And, for a while, it felt like Sophie Moore would be that for Batwoman: in season one, Kate returns to town because Sophie’s been taken. But slowly but surely, Sophie comes into her own power….as a hero and as a black woman and as a queer woman. By the end of Batwoman‘s run, it’s clear: Sophie Moore is no one’s damsel in distress. It’s Sophie’s evolution that, as Carmen once noted, is the true bedrock of the show…and it’s to Meagan Tandy’s credit that the audience feels every bit of that messy evolution.
I’ve watched Tandy in two shows before this — UnREAL and Survivor’s Remorse — and in both, she was a recurring love interest and the quintessential “girl next door.” It felt like Hollywood had decided what kind of box they wanted to put her in. But then came Batwoman and Tandy broke out of that box and demanded that the world see her as more. It wasn’t just Sophie Moore’s evolution that we were watching, it was Meagan Tandy’s. — Natalie
Outstanding Performance by a Straight Actress in a Straight Role
Sheryl Lee Ralph as Barbara Howard, Abbott Elementary
Runner-Up: Melanie Lynskey as Shauna Sadecki,Yellowjackets
Other Nominees: Danielle Deadwyler as Miranda Carroll, Station Eleven // Jean Smart as Deborah Vance, Hacks // Quinta Brunson as Janine Teagues, Abbott Elementary // Natasha Lyonne as Nadia Vulvokov, Russian Doll
There are these rare unifying moments in pop culture where — no matter who we are or where we’re from — that we’re all consuming the same thing. The same sporting event, the same movie, the same show. For this brief period, we’re sharing the same moment, experiencing this beautiful synchronicity and, suddenly, we don’t feel all that different from one another. But those moments are rare. What’s more common is the reminder that’s come with Sheryl Lee Ralph’s star turn as Barbara on Abbott Elementary: Most of the time, we live in very different pop culture ecosystems and, rarely, do we try and venture out.
You see, Sheryl Lee Ralph’s been an icon in my house for as long as I can remember. Denna Jones in the original Dreamgirls? Linda in To Sleep with Anger? Eddie Murphy’s sidekick in The Distinguished Gentleman? Moesha’s stepmama? Lauryn Hill’s disapproving mama in Sister Act 2? My dad even made me watch her first movie role, opposite Sidney Poitier. She was a fixture in my life and in the pop culture that I consumed…and you couldn’t tell me she wasn’t legendary. But we live in very different pop culture ecosystems and a 45-year career wasn’t enough to earn her the plaudits she deserved.
That is, until Abbott Elementary, when pop culture ecosystems aligned. Barbara Howard is a hardworking Philadelphia school teacher, grizzled by the years of a bureaucracy that continues to fail her and her kids. She’s serious about her work — and Ralph plays it so straight — that some of Abbott‘s most hilarious moments come when she leans into the funny. It’s been months and her delivery of “Sweet baby Jesus, and the grown one, too! My desks have been desked!” still makes me laugh so hard, I start crying.
I’m thrilled to see Autostraddle join the ranks of those finally giving Sheryl Lee Ralph her flowers. — Natalie
Outstanding Cis Male Character
Brett Goldstein as Roy Kent, Ted Lasso
Runners-Up, Tied: Himesh Patel as Jeevan Chaudhary, Station Eleven // Taika Waititi as Blackbeard, Our Flag Means Death
Other Nominees: Tyler James Williams as Gregory Eddie, Abbott Elementary // Jason Sudeikis as Ted Lasso, Ted Lasso // Steven Krueger as Ben Scott, Yellowjackets
In the opening episode of Ted Lasso‘s second season, Keeley and Roy find themselves on a double date, opposite Rebecca and some unassuming bloke. Rebecca liked him enough — they’d been out a few times — but after her divorce, she doesn’t fully trust her instincts anymore, so she invites her friends to join them and give their two cents. Keeley soft peddles her reaction, focusing on everything that’s appropriate about him, but Roy can’t hold back.
“He’s fine. That’s it,” Roy offers, in a way that let’s you know “fine” is definitely not a compliment. “…Why the fuck [do] you think he deserves you? You deserve someone who makes you feel like you’ve been struck by fuckin’ lightning. Don’t you dare settle for fine.”
It is, at once, something you’d never expect to hear from someone like Roy Kent — with his omnipresent scowl, intimidating appearance and foul mouth — and yet it’s everything we’ve come to expect from the character. He treats the women in his life like prizes: from his girlfriend to his boss, to his niece, Phoebe, to the group of older women with whom he does yoga. It is a beautiful thing to behold.
“He’s here! He’s there! He’s every-fuckin-where! Roy Kent! Roy Kent!”…and I can’t help but think that if there were Roy Kents, every-fuckin’-where, the world would be a much, much better place. — Natalie
Santana Lopez Legacy Award For Outstanding Queer Teen Character
Jasmin Savoy Brown as Taissa Turner, Yellowjackets
Runner-Up: Jordan Hull as Angelica Porter-Kennard, The L Word: Generation Q
Other Nominees: Hailey Kilgore as Laverne “Jukebox” Ganner, Raising Kanan // Liv Hewson as Van Palmer, Yellowjackets // Alycia Pascual-Peña as Aisha Garcia, Saved By the Bell // Kaci Walfall as Naomi McDuffie, Naomi
As a Capricorn lesbian of teen soccer playing experience, I immediately fell for Taissa Turner. Even before our lovable band of possible cannibals crash in the woods, Taissa is brutally slide tackling her own teammate and breaking her leg. She’s determined, she’s confident, she thinks she’s always right, and, even better, she basically is always right.
Queer teens on TV have mostly fit into two categories: vicious caricatures and wholesome models. The namesake of this award, Santana Lopez, was one of the few on a long-running show to defy this binary. Santana was vicious and a model. She sometimes had a mean-spirited wit, but she still fit into Ryan Murphy’s vision of wholesome queerness. Taissa takes it a step further. As played by Jasmin Savoy Brown, she’s able to be vicious and caring, a complicated and grounded queer teen with just as much charm as she has bite. Sure, she was a little fucked up before the crash and she’s absolutely fucked up after. We know she’ll continue to be fucked up as an adult! And yet when she’s not blacking out and eating dirt in the middle of the night, she’s having a cute romance. When she’s not breaking the leg of her own teammate, she’s the only one another teammate can turn to about her pregnancy. And that’s not all! She leads the team to water. She leads them to the cabin that provides them shelter. She’s the reason they have a gun! As an adult she runs for state senate, but as a teen she was president of the woods. I know she’d have my vote. — Drew
Best Episode with LGBTQ+ Themes
Hacks Episode 204, “The Captain’s Wife”
Runners-Up, Tied: Dickinson Episode 308, “This Was a Poet” // Batwoman Episode 311, “Broken Toys”
Other Nominees: The 4400 Episode 104, “Harlem’s Renaissance” // Sex Education Episode 306, “Episode 6” // Sort Of Episode 105, “Sort of a Party”
Hacks has this way of being equal parts hilarious, deep, and uncomfortable at any given moment and “The Captain’s Wife” is no exception. Deborah Vance thinks she’s going to perform on a gay men’s cruise and is thrilled because “the gays” love her. But then much to her horror and Ava’s delight, Margaret Cho informs them that it’s a lesbian cruise. And turns out those aren’t “the gays” Deborah was talking about. This episode has everything; the good, the bad, the ugly. More specifically, deep conversations about the nuance of sexuality and hot hookups, biphobic lesbians, and a truly tragic stand-up set. It has everything that makes Hacks great, from over-the-top goofs to serious topics, and it’s beautifully acted by Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder. It also perfectly demonstrates how standup isn’t well-received by the communities you’re punching down on, no matter how many positive one-on-one interactions you have with people in that community. (People like to be included in jokes, not the butt of them! Go figure.)
Of course I couldn’t help but be reminded of The L Word‘s lesbian cruise episode, and honestly it made me think “lesbian cruise episode” should start being a standard trope TV shows lean on, like bottle episodes, road trip episodes, etc. — Valerie
Outstanding Performance by an Out LGBTQ+ Actor in a Comedy
Ashley Nicole Black as various, A Black Lady Sketch Show
Runners-Up, Tied: Megan Stalter as Kayla, Hacks // Devery Jacobs as Elora Danan, Reservation Dogs // Ella Hunt as Sue Gilbert, Dickinson
Other Nominees: Bilal Baig as Sabi Mehboob, Sort Of // Abby McEnany as Abby, Work in Progress
At this point, it feels like it’s less a question of will Ashley Nicole Black win a Gay Emmy and more a question of: for which of Ashley Nicole Black’s fifty-eleven jobs will she win a Gay Emmy? Writer/Producer on Ted Lasso? Actor/Writer/Producer on the forthcoming Apple TV+ show, Bad Monkey? Or whatever she yields from her development deal for Warner Bros. Television? Whatever role we’re celebrating Black for next, you can guarantee it’ll be thoughtful…and probably hilarious.
This season on A Black Lady Sketch Show, Black expands the repertoire of characters she plays: Chef Lourdes, one of the country’s best and brightest bullshitters; Harlan, one half of lesbian couple that’s just adopted a grown-ass woman three year old; Jamilah Clark, the girl who will make a deal with the devil to escape ridicule for her ashy feet; Fatima, the Door Dash awaiting security guard turned bomb tech; and Autumn, the college student whose coming out gets thwarted by some uninvited guests. It’s all another step in Black’s quest to bring the stories of the unseen to our screens.
“One of the characters I play on A Black Lady Sketch Show is The Invisible Spy,” Black told TVLine back in February. “My thing is just taking all of those people who have been invisible — the sassy best friend character or whatever — and turning the camera onto them, putting them at the center of the story.”
If those portrayals are even a fraction as funny as Black was during ABLSS‘s third season, we’re all in for a real treat. — Natalie
Outstanding Performance by an LGBTQ+ Actor in a Drama
E.R. Fightmaster as Dr. Kai Bartley, Grey’s Anatomy
Runner-Up: Jasmin Savoy Brown as Taissa Turner, Yellowjackets
Other Nominees: Hunter Schafer as Jules Vaughn, Euphoria // Rosanny Zayas as Sophie Suarez, The L Word: Generation Q // Sherry Cola as Alice Kwan, Good Trouble // Juani Feliz as Isabela Benitez-Santiago, Harlem
There is a lot to be said about a romantic lead. The ability to create a fire with just the flick of an eye towards your costar, the surgical precision with which to deploy the dimple tucked into your cheek, a well placed chuckle that riptides like an ocean. To pull it off well, it has to appear effortless, but it’s a study of skill as old as, well, filming people on screen.
In the realm of recent television, few romances have had the permanence of Grey’s Anatomy, and after 18 seasons in walked E.R. Fightmaster’s Dr. Kai Bartley, the first nonbinary doctor in the show’s history, cut directly out of the finest of Shondaland’s heartthrob cloth. Yes, as Dr. Bartley, Fightmaster has the perfect McDreamy hair and a smile so symmetrical you could graph it on a calculator (if you’ve ever watched the show, you know exactly what I mean) — but what makes the role stand out are the small queer details that only Fightmaster could put into it, the quiet sexiness of how they carry Kai’s mannerisms. They’ve taken the large stage of a primetime network romance, known best for its high stakes drama and twists, and instead turned it into a performance where its subtly makes it riveting.
In other hands, watching as Dr. Bartley and Amelia Shepherd figure out Bartley’s comfortability with Amelia’s motherhood and how a child would fit into their life would be a bore, but instead watching them navigate the heartbreak of adult expectations was appointment television. Kai swooping down to kiss Amelia in the rain was a moment instantly recognizable, every bit as swoon worthy as all the Grey’s greats — which given the pedigree, is no small feat. And it’s made all the better, because it’s ours. — Carmen
Outstanding LGBTQ+ Actor in a Sci-Fi/Fantasy Show
Javicia Leslie as Ryan Wilder, Batwoman
Runner-Up: Chyler Leigh as Alex Danvers, Supergirl
Other Nominees: Lili Reinhart as Betty Cooper, Riverdale // Nicole Maines as Nia Nal, Supergirl // Ireon Roach as Keisha Taylor, The 4400 // Kausar Mohammed as Soraya Khoury, The 4400
It’s a bittersweet feeling, seeing Batwoman win so many Autostraddle TV Awards this year. Because on one hand: fuck yes! They deserve it! But on the other, it’s a slap-in-the-face reminder that the show was taken from us too soon. It obviously resonated with queer viewers, but the powers that be don’t seem to think our queer eyeballs or dollars count. But I digress. We’re not here to complain about corporate bullshit, we’re here to celebrate Batwoman.
Javicia Leslie was a breath of fresh air in smog-filled Gotham; to us as an audience, but also to everyone else in Gotham, on and off screen. Ryan Wilder was a funny, sarcastic smartass, breaking the always-grumbling stereotype of most people who had worn a bat cowl before her. Her smile is contagious, and even if it took their characters a little longer to warm up to her, it was instantly clear the cast loved having her around; the vibe of the live-tweets was joyful. This most recent season of Batwoman was its best, with Ryan feeling comfortable in the cowl and behind the wheel of the Batmobile, literally and figuratively. The sexual tension between Ryan and Sophie was palpable and electric and a damn joy to watch. I’ll be forever bitter they took this show away from us, but grateful we can still celebrate Javicia’s amazing work here.
(And special shoutout to runner-up Chyler Leigh as Alex Danvers, just because it’s the last time I’ll be able to do that. *wipes tear*) — Valerie
Outstanding LGBTQ+ Director / Writer / Showrunner
Mae Martin, Feel Good
Photo by Phillip Faraone/Getty Images
Runner-Up: B Nichols, Abbott Elementary
Other Nominees: Lena Waithe, Twenties // Abby McEnany, Work in Progress // Dana Terrace, The Owl House // Bilal Baig, Sort Of
The second season of Feel Good was a tremendous accomplishment across the board. Well written, well acted, and well directed, it just simply stuck the landing in so many arenas, yielding one of the best depictions of trauma and its reverberations I’ve ever seen on television. Mae Martin is a singular voice in television right now, and while season one of the series was already impressive, I just think season two is a near-perfect masterpiece. A little stranger, a little more ambitious, it takes what works in the first season and dials it up, evolving and shifting in the ways I wish more comedies did. The queer sex scenes on the show remain some of my favorite, and the writing of complicated relationships allows so much room for nuance and depth. Mae’s double duties as creator and star here are impressive, and Feel Good has such a distinct comedic and dramatic voice of its own, helmed skillfully.
I can’t wait to see what Mae does next. — KKU
Most Groundbreaking Representation (Show)
Sort Of (HBO Max)
Runners-Up, Tied: Reservation Dogs (FX) // We Are Lady Parts (Peacock)
Other Nominees: Heartstopper (Netflix) // The 4400 (CW) // In My Skin (BBC)
In her interview with Vogue announcing her retirement from the game of tennis, Serena Williams bumps against the word “transition.” She’s sensitive about using that word, recognizing that the word “means something very specific and important to a community of people,” and instead settles on “evolution” to describe the moment she’s in. Perhaps, if Williams had asked Bilal Baig, the nonbinary creator, writer and star of Sort Of, about her word choice, they would’ve advised Williams to embrace the word transition for herself. It was, after all, the word that convinced her to collaborate with Fab Filippo on the show.
“There was such a power in a cis person using the word transition, without any sort of taboo, stigma,” Baig told Complex last November. “There was also an understanding that, of course, our transitions are different…There was a real power in acknowledging that it’s a human experience to evolve. And we, the more we all embrace it, the better we all are.”
Yes, Sort Of is groundbreaking because Baig is the first queer South Asian Muslim actor to lead a Canadian primetime TV series, but if we reduce it to just that, we’re missing the point. Sort Of understands that we’re all “sort of” striving to be the person we’re meant to be. We’re all “sort of” transitioning and if we can accept that — even if your transition looks more like Paul’s than Sabi’s — perhaps we can build more empathy for trans and nonbinary folks. — Natalie
Outstanding Animated Series
The Owl House (Disney Channel)
Runner-Up: Arcane (Netflix)
Other Nominees: Pinecone & Pony (Apple TV) // Masters of the Universe: Revelation (Netflix) // Blue’s Clues (Nickelodeon) // Rugrats (Nickelodeon)
If my TikTok FYP is right, I spend a lot of time trying to heal my inner child. And The Owl House is one of my favorite ways to do it. It’s the kind of show I would have eaten up as a kid (Magic! Girl with purple hair! Adorable demon dog!) and it would have changed my entire life to see a young girl have a full-on girlfriend and having her found family and friends support her. It’s not even a thing, really. Just a cute side plot. And by the time we got to that point with Luz and Amity in the most recent season, it felt so earned. There was angst, there was growth, there was character development, and longing, and then there was girlfriends. And that’s not even the only queer thing about this show! Gender and sexuality seem like a non-issue in general in the Demon Realm, and everyone uses they/them pronouns for Eda’s ex Raine without any fuss or fanfare.
On top of being the cutest queer witch, Luz is also so fun to watch. She’s ambitious and curious and clever but not flawless; in fact, quite often she stumbles in her attempts to help and makes things worse. And has to face those consequences! Including but not limiting to not listening to her girlfriend and learning about boundaries and communication. Things aren’t just magically perfect all the time, and it’s just another added layer of greatness to this adorable show. — Valerie
Outstanding Hairstyling for an LGBTQ+ Character
E.R Fightmaster as Dr. Kai Bartley, Grey’s Anatomy
Runner-Up: Vanessa Williams as Pippa Pascal, The L Word: Generation Q
Other Nominees: Sandra Oh as Eve Polastri, Killing Eve // Rosanny Zayas as Sophie Suarez, The L Word: Generation Q // Sepideh Moafi as Gigi Ghorbani, The L Word: Generation Q // Sara Ramirez as Che Diaz, And Just Like That…
It was an ordinary Tuesday when Heather slacked me to ask, “E.R. Fightmaster is Alex Vega’s doppleganger, right?” I was initially unclear on how Autostraddle co-founder Alex Vega could bear a resemblance to the short-haired actor I remembered (crushing on) from Shrill, but then I journeyed into E.R.’s Instagram and discovered myriad similarities between the two, such as “playing the drums” and “overall aura.” But mostly — it was the hair. And this paragraph is about the hair on the head of the character of Kai (E.R. Fightmaster) on Grey’s Anatomy, not Alex Vega, I do know that, but the reason I’m dwelling so extensively on Alex is because back when she worked at Autostraddle full-time we got a lot of questions about Alex’s hair. It was often suggested to us that we write an entire article on how, exactly, Alex did her hair, from how she pitched her cut to the hairdresser to how she styled it and with which products. This plea often came from self-identified “long-haired butches” (aka LHBs) seeking something new for themselves.
The look hit a sweet spot, you know? And now Kai on Grey’s Anatomy is really blowing up that sweet spot with their volume and style and shine. When they first entered the program, there was chatter regarding Link’s old haircut and its resemblance to Kai’s current haircut, but that was incorrect. Link could never. He didn’t have the volume. But it’s true that at least Amelia still has something to grab onto.
Kai masters (LOL) an elusive look, a way of styling and surrounding (often-longer-than) shoulder-length hair that, despite popular associations with that cut and length, is somehow “masc” or “androgynous.” Is it the flip? The far-side part that can create the illusion of a swooshed-over bang? Kai’s Alternative Lifestyle Haircut is somehow nonbinary all on its own, is an automatic entry to the Pantheon of Queer Hairstyles, so often dominated by super-short dos. Kai elevates the layered bob. I mean the cut is basically a Rachel, and yet it looks nothing like a Rachel at all. It looks like a short haircut, except somehow long. And when Kai and Amelia are in bed together, it’s so choppy and tousled and it glimmers almost honey-blonde beneath occasional wedges of light.
E.R. Fightmaster is my current style icon, and every time I look at my own hair in the mirror I am thinking about their hair, and how to make mine look like that. I haven’t figured it out yet but in the meantime, I’m happy just to watch. — Riese
Outstanding Costume Design for a Show With LGBTQ+ Characters
Killing Eve (AMC)
Runner-Up: Yellowjackets (Showtime)
Other Nominees: The L Word: Generation Q (Showtime) // And Just Like That… (HBO Max) // We Are Lady Parts (Peacock) // A Black Lady Sketch Show (HBO Max)
The series finale of Killing Eve was controversial to say the least. The sudden — spoiler alert — death of Villanelle caused an uproar online with people decrying what they saw as another case of “Bury Your Gays.” (More than one post insisted that Villanelle was the first person some queer women were able to see themselves in!) At first this confused me, because there has been such a wide array of queer stories since that trope was first named and because Villanelle is literally a sociopathic assassin. But as I trudged through the online mayhem, I realized this response was a mark of the show’s success. Villanelle had seduced all of us just like she seduced Eve.
I’m here to discuss costumes, and the fact is Villanelle would not be Villanelle without her clothes. Killing Eve would not have succeeded so well in its seduction without its fashion. From Villanelle’s iconic pink dress in season one to her practical tank in her last moments, Villanelle was an ever-shifting delight of disguises and queer fashions. Season three and four costume designer, Sam Perry, built on the work of previous designers Phoebe De Gaye and Charlotte Mitchell, continuing to develop these characters through what they wore. Killing Eve was a spy show and while that genre may be known for its intrigue, gadgets, and, yes, fashion, the best work uses all that flash to serve a story that grapples with the darkness in government. For better or worse, that was the reminder of Killing Eve’s final moments — when the clothes come off, death is soon to follow. — Drew
Fan Favorite Categories
Fan Favorite Out LGBTQ+ Actor: E.R. Fightmaster as Dr. Kai, Grey’s Anatomy
Runner-Up: Chyler Leigh as Alex Danvers, Supergirl
Fan Favorite LGBTQ+ Character: Maya Bishop, Station 19
Runner-Up: Carina DeLuca, Station 19
Fan Favorite Couple: Maya Bishop and Carina DeLuca, Station 19
Runner-Up: Raelle Collar and Scylla Ramshorn, Motherland: Fort Salem
Jinkx Monsoon on Queer Adolescence, Being a Lifelong MILF, and Working Out Demons Through Drag
Jinkx Monsoon photographed by Alec White
For me, Jinkx Monsoon has always been the queen of all queens. Years before I watched a single episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race, Jinkx’s show The Ginger Snapped was the first drag performance I ever saw. Life-changing is often more an expression than a truth, but this performance truly changed my life. It provided me a love of a drag — and a love of self — at a time when I needed them most.
Jinkx’s unique sense of humor and killer voice have long made her a favorite in mainstream drag, on the cabaret circuit, and in her local Pacific Northwest. But in the decade since winning Drag Race’s fifth season, Jinkx’s humor, voice, and MILF hotness have been joined by a newfound confidence and even more beauty. No wonder she returned to Drag Race this year for the All Stars All Winners season and won the whole damn thing.
I was lucky enough to chat with the Queen of All Queens about growing up as a queer kid, working out demons through drag, and her new show, Sketchy Queens.
Drew: You’re in San Francisco doing Drag Becomes Her?
Jinkx: Yeah!
Drew: Great. Well I have a question about Death Becomes Her, so let’s start there. I want to talk about camp or what I might call accidental camp. Movies that were made by straight men that were maybe intended to be misogynistic and instead the actresses stole the movie and they ended up becoming iconic. I think a lot about how good queer people are at finding ourselves in work not necessarily intended for us.
Jinkx: It’s funny because accidental camp sounds like it applies to Death Becomes Her, until you think about the fact that Robert Zemeckis also directed Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
Drew: That’s true!
Jinkx: And that movie gave us the gay icon of Jessica Rabbit. So there’s this part of me that wonders is Robert Zemeckis an outwardly straight man who has queer tendencies that he expresses through his films? Or is he just a straight man whittling women down to archetypes and then the actresses realize that they can make it something more through subtext or satire? I don’t know. But I do know there are a lot of films that were made for straight communities that are really kept alive today by their queer, cult following. And a lot of them are horror-tinged. I wouldn’t call Death Becomes Her horror, but it has horror elements. I think when you work in horror or comedy, the stakes get so much larger than life, that camp is just a natural landing point, you know?
Drew: I like this “Robert Zemeckis is queer” truthing.
Jinkx: (laughs) Maybe! I don’t know.
Drew: You never know. It’s interesting because I feel like some of his work has such a conservative streak and then some of it is very fun and campy.
Jinkx: I mean, just the scoring in Death Becomes Her. The hook that they use any time that something supernatural is happening — DUNNA DUNNA DUN DUN DUNNA DUNNA DUN DUN DUN DUN — there’s just something about that. There are drag queens working behind the scenes on that movie. It’s just obvious. There were probably queer stylists on-set, there were probably queer choreographers. You can tell that there’s queer sensibility all throughout that movie, even if it’s not spoken. And that’s Hollywood in general. Queer people are running Hollywood and not getting the credit for it. That’s how it’s always been.
Drew: That’s a really good point. I mean, I think about that with a lot of classic Hollywood films. Where it’s like, well those actresses were hooking up with each other and a lot of the filmmakers behind them were either out gay men or closeted gay men. The queerness was always there.
Jinkx: And even someone like Bette Davis had lots of queer friends. She was such a dominant force on-set and she was probably bringing things she learned from drag queens and queer men into her work. Straight men can’t recognize that stuff so they’re not realizing that Bette Davis is bringing in queer sensibility. (laughs)
Drew: I love that.
I want to go back and start from the beginning. I know that you grew up in Portland. What was it like growing up there? And, more specifically, what was your relationship to your queerness and gender as a kid?
Jinkx: Growing up in Portland I was given a lot of privileges that you don’t necessarily have everywhere in the country or the world. Portland is this liberal bubble. I was taught by my aunt what it meant to be queer. I think I came out to my friends at 13 and by the end of middle school everybody knew. I experienced some taunting and teasing, but not really. I went to a really small arts magnet middle school. Most of the families that the kids came from were very bougie and pretentious and with that bougieness and pretension also usually comes a more open mind toward sexuality. (laughs)
My family was very good about it. Like my mom had her moments that weren’t the best, but my grandma and my aunt always knew I was queer and when I came out they didn’t bat an eyelash. So I had the support of my family. In high school, I got some taunting and bullying as a freshman and the teachers decided to move me fully into honors classes. I kind of became a straight-A honors student just so I wouldn’t have to deal with bullies in high school. I had no intention of taking honors classes or becoming a studious academic. It was just what happened as a result of not wanting to be called faggot all through class. (laughs)
Drew: I like that the honors kids were like, “We’re too nerdy to get away with calling the faggots faggot.”
Jinkx: They were preoccupied with their studies!
Drew: (laughs)
Jinkx: But in Portland, what made the hugest difference for me is I spent all my time at a place called SMYRC — The Sexual Minority Youth Resource Center — a drop-in center for queer youth. I think it was 23 and under but most people stopped going there when they were 21. It was essentially a hangout center, a resource center for jobs and housing, food, there were all these resources for queer homeless youth. But it was also a place where we just hung out.
We had steering committee meetings where we were talking about what resources we wanted to provide at the center. We had open mic nights. Amateur drag shows. Summer parking lot barbecues. It was an amazing place. And at 14 years old I met other queer and trans people who were my own age. And I always say because I lived in a city where it was safe to come out in my teenage years and because of resources like SMYRC, I got to go through puberty and adolescence as a queer person. Whereas when I meet people who didn’t get to come out until later, it’s like they went through puberty and adolescence pretending to be straight and then come out and go through a second puberty. It’s like they’re teenagers again, only now they’re queer. I’ve known so many people in their twenties going through a second adolescence.
Drew: Having experienced that, I can confirm.
Jinkx: (laughs)
Drew: It’s interesting that not only were you around other queer people, but you were talking about political issues, and you were around queer people who didn’t all have the same economic background. I feel like you’re pretty political and outspoken. Is that where it formed?
Jinkx: Yeah because different people got different things out of the center. Some people were just there to hang out with friends. Some people were there to affect change. Some people were there starting their own grassroots things that they carried on into adulthood. It wasn’t until Trump was running for president that I started getting concerned with politics at large, but from an early age I was involved in queer politics and queer issues. And yeah I think a big part of that is I met people who were 16 and transitioning. And this was 20 years ago. That was the normal for me since I came out. It’s pretty typical for trademark gay men to have never met a trans person until adulthood. There aren’t a lot of places, especially 20 years ago in America, where it was safe to transition in your teens. So I’ve just always been having conversations about gender and trans issues and trans rights and human rights. And I feel very privileged for that. I’ve had a leg up on certain conversations that we’re now having at large because I’ve been having them since I was 15.
Drew: You also mentioned learning about queerness from your aunt. Can you talk more about that relationship?
Jinkx: I always say I was raised by three moms. I have my mother who gave birth to me, my aunt who was my spiritual mother, and then my grandma who was my guardian and protector. My aunt always felt like I was her child. It’s this weird family legend essentially. But my mom was pretty young, I was unexpected. My aunt told her, “Well, you’re not ready for a baby but I am.” My aunt was like 13 at the time. (laughs) My aunt also has a bunch of health issues and found out at the same time that my mom was pregnant that she wasn’t going to have kids. And she felt like this was a sign that her mom was having a kid for her. (laughs)
My aunt is very witchy woo woo and since I was born was filling me with knowledge that she had acquired. She was like the Lisa Simpson of our family. She was always up on human rights issues. She went to college for anthropology. She just taught me about everything outside of Portland essentially. And she also knew I was queer from like speaking age. She was the first person in the family to really see it within me and to remind me multiple times throughout my life that I could talk to her about anything — always hinting at the same thing. And by 13, I came out to her. And she was like, “I know! I’m so glad you finally figured it out!” (laughs)
Drew: (laughs) So you came out at 13. When did you see your first drag performance? Do you remember the first time you were like oh THIS is what I want do?
Jinkx: I came out at 13 because I met other queer people at my middle school and I felt safe to have the conversation. Then I found SMYRC and that’s where I saw my first drag show. And the first drag show I saw wasn’t that remarkable. It was an open mic night at a queer youth center. But they had invited some of the drag queens from the local bars and clubs to pad out the evening and there was this one queen named Abby performing… I think… a Tina Turner song? There was a moment in the number where she pointed directly at me in the audience and the lyric was like, “YOUUUUU.” And there was something about her making eye contact with me and pointing directly at me. It was like she went, “YOUUUUUR A DRAG QUEEN.”
Drew: (laughs)
Jinkx: And it wasn’t long after that because I did drag for the first time at 14 or 15. I started doing female roles in some of the ballets and plays that I was in at the time. Like I filled in for someone on a day that she missed rehearsal for this ballet I was in. And then she missed two more rehearsals and had to leave the project, so I filled her role and that was technically my first drag role.
The first time I was doing drag like what we know drag to be, I was 15 and did it for fun one night. The response was so energetic and I felt so electric that from that point on it was like every weekend. A year after doing drag for the first time I ran for an under 21 title, Rosebud of Portland, which is the longest running under 21 drag pageant in the country. And I won. So it was like I started drag, a year later I won a pageant, and from that point on I was working every single weekend. Drag was my after school job. Straight-A honors student during the day day, drag queen pretending to be older than I was so I could perform in gay bars and nightclubs during the night. That was my high school experience.
Drew: Were you pretending to be older to the extent of being a MILF? Did it start then?
Jinkx: Some bars I was pretending to be 18, some bars I was pretending to be 21, but I just always looked older in drag. I put on drag and I look ten years older than what I am no matter where I’m at in life. So I think that’s where the MILF thing started, but it’s always because my drag persona was born out of me doing an impression of my mom. And my mom and I have the same curse. She’s always talking about this. She’s like, “I don’t go for younger men! Younger men go for me! I can’t help it!”
Drew: (laughs)
Jinkx: And I’ve heard myself say this in my adult life. People tease me. They’re like, “Oh you like twinks.” And I’m like, “I don’t even like twinks! They’re just who is interested in me!”
Drew: (laughs)
Jinkx: My mom was always a cougar, but begrudgingly. I guess I found that interesting enough to make a whole drag persona out of it. (laughs)
Drew: It’s interesting knowing that you were around trans people from such a young age. But it seems there’s a difference — watching season five and watching All Stars — in your relationship to your gender. How has your relationship to drag changed as you’ve become more self-assured in your gender out of drag? Or maybe self-assured isn’t the right word…
Jinkx: No, I think that’s an accurate read. Because, as I was saying, I was having the conversation around nonbinary gender identities at like 14 years old. But we had different words for it. Twenty years ago. the words weren’t nonbinary or nonconforming, at least around me. It was agender or non-gendered. I remember when I heard nonbinary for the first time, it resonated with me. I was like, “Oh that’s what I am.” And I always knew people who were nonbinary, but there’s this like fear that it didn’t apply to me.
I can boil it down to this. For a long time in my life I felt like I wasn’t trans enough to come out. I felt like, “Oh I’m just an effeminate gay man and I have to find peace with that.” When the nonbinary conversation started happening, it became very clear that there is a classification for the kind of trans that I am.
I’ve always said that I feel like a woman in a man’s body who doesn’t feel trapped there. And that’s when I started identifying as transfem nonbinary. I present femme. I’m a feminine person. I want you to perceive me as feminine. And also I don’t feel the need to modify my body or my outward appearance to achieve the feminine person that I am. And that’s just my own personal journey with my gender. It’s a conversation that started in my mid-20s and now I’m in my mid-30s and I’m still finding the best way to communicate that to people.
But yeah I feel very self-assured now. And I think that translates in my drag. Like Jinkx is still hyperfeminine. The joke is that Jinkx is a cis woman posing as a drag queen because that’s the work she can get. This was born from people mistaking me for a cis woman doing drag when I was younger, before Drag Race. People would either be excited to see a cis woman doing drag or be like what’s this cis woman doing here. (laughs) There were lots of different reactions, but it was pretty consistent that people thought I was a cis woman. So that became a part of Jinkx’s story. Like a Connie and Carla thing. She couldn’t get work as an actor, so she’s working as a drag queen.
I think what’s changed the most in my drag since coming out and living my truth is that I’m not fulfilling a part of my gender through drag anymore. Drag has very much become my passion, my art form, and my career. But I don’t get personal gratification from drag in terms of my gender expression. I do that now in my day-to-day life. Which means I’m not putting the same… like drag can be just me playing Jinkx now… rather than me having to… me finding certain validation and gratification through drag.
What I’m mainly speaking about is I used to hook up in drag and now I don’t anymore.
Drew: (laughs)
Jinkx: (laughs) There was a part of me that needed that validation, that needed my femininity validated.
Drew: Sure.
Jinkx: So there are certain bars I used to go to. I’d do a show. I’d stay in drag. I’d pick up a chaser. And that validated my gender identity. Now I don’t need that. Drag is not getting blurred with my personal life anymore. It’s very much my art, my medium, my career.
Drew: How does sobriety factor into that?
Jinkx: (laughs)
Drew: Because alcohol has been such a part of Jinkx and I wondered if it was an added challenge to get sober when that’s so tied to your character. Was it easier because of the separation that started to form?
Jinkx: So I didn’t drink until I was 22. But I started drag at 15, and Jinkx has always been an alcoholic. That’s always been a part of Jinkx’s story. And I think a part of that is growing up around alcoholism. There was a part of me that needed to work through it. I always say that I get my demons out through Jinkx on-stage so that I don’t carry them with me through my day-to-day life. My lucky audiences get to work through my demons with me. I grew up around alcohol, I grew up around alcoholics, I grew up around alcoholism. So not only did I have a lot of character study, but I had things to say. Even though they’re light-hearted, satirical things, I’m still getting my demons out.
I’m like three years and some change sober from alcohol. And when I quit drinking, it felt very important to me that Jinkx needed to remain an alcoholic, because I still had things I was working through and had things I needed to get out through Jinkx. Around the same time that I quit drinking, I was writing a show about Jinkx coming to terms with her own mental illness and mental health issues and deciding to go to therapy on-stage. That show was called The Ginger Snapped and featured music from the album of the same name.
That’s one of my favorite shows because it was very candid and honest but it was the tongue-in-cheek camp version of what actually happened to me. Friends saying, “Maybe you need to talk to a therapist.” My anxieties and fears around seeing a therapist. Unpacking the conditioning and stigma around mental illness. But I did it all on stage with prop gags and a lot of satire. It helped with the fact that I realized I needed therapy and intervention in my mental health. I was able to joke about that on-stage rather than carrying around the shame I’d been conditioned to have.
Only just recently have I started to think, well now that I’m sober I have things to say about being sober. And where am I going to say them if not through Jinkx? Does that mean Jinkx needs to get sober too? So that I can discuss these things through Jinkx?
And, you know, for so long Jinkx the character and Jinkx the human being got to be different, but Drag Race fuses those two because you see us in and out of drag so frequently and we’re constantly having to bounce back and forth between mindsets. I’ve done standup comedy in full drag talking about my sobriety but that’s not part of the Jinkx character, that’s part of the Jinkx artist’s story. It makes sense when I’m doing standup I’d be candid about that, but when I’m doing scripted cabaret, Jinkx is still an alcoholic and it all gets complicated. But where I’m at right now is maybe I have enough to say about being sober that Jinkx might have to be sober. Or Jinkx might have to go on some kind of a sober journey. So we’ll see! You’re the first reporter I’ve talked to about that. (laughs)
Drew: That’s exciting! Can I tell you something wild?
Jinkx: Yeah.
Drew: The Ginger Snapped was actually the first drag performance that I ever saw in my entire life.
Jinkx: Oh you saw that one!
Drew: I was like nine months into transitioning and I got offered free tickets to Joe’s Pub. And I didn’t want to see a drag show! I knew nothing about drag, nothing about drag history. I felt like I was going to be so on the spot as this gender nonconforming person in a cabaret audience. But I loved The Public Theater and I didn’t want to turn down free tickets. And not to fangirl but—
Jinkx: (laughs)
Drew: It was just one of those like — I think those first nine months of transitioning I was trying to be like a Trans Woman. In a box. Now I’m a woman. This is what a woman is like. And seeing your show, I realized I could be so much more expansive than that. I could be weird and queer, and sure I could be a trans woman, but I could be that in my own way. Like not only did it give me a love of drag, it also just gave me… I don’t know. And it’s such a great show and such a great album!
Jinkx: I’m so happy to hear that. You know, with drag having the influence it has these days, I get asked a lot, “How do you feel being a role model?” And I’m always like, well that’s not why I started doing drag. I started doing drag because I wanted to dress up like a woman, sing songs, and play the roles I wasn’t allowed to play because I had a penis. Drag was for me. I love entertaining. I didn’t get into any of this, because I was like I want to be a role model.
Drew: (laughs)
Jinkx: But just through doing the work that I’m interested in doing, I get to do that kind of stuff without actively having to do it. Just by having a loud voice and a lot of opinions, I’ve been able to connect with people. I call it paying it forward. Because that’s what drag queens did for me at a young age. That’s what drag queens have done for me all throughout my life. Inspired me. Given me permission to talk about certain things. Given me permission to even think about certain things. And the fact that I now get to be one of those drag queens doing that for other people feels like a really great added bonus. It’s not why I started doing the work, but it’s definitely why I keep doing the work.
Drew: I want to talk about your new sketch show, Sketchy Queens, because I got to see the first episode and it’s as weird and wonderful as I would expect. When it comes to sketch comedy specifically, who do you look to? What sketch comedy inspires you?
Jinkx: I love non sequitur, I love random, I love when something starts out as one thing and then becomes something completely different. It’s funny because ten years ago when I won Drag Race the first time, I pitched a sketch comedy show. And I was told sketch comedy doesn’t really have a place these days. And now it’s ten years later and there has been a resurgence of sketch comedy. What’s different now is it’s very much independent comedians doing the work on their own and then getting picked up by someone. They know what’s funny and they know what their audience wants to see and then producers are like, “Hey this kid has got something. Let’s get in on this.” I feel like the best comedy is coming out of people doing it themselves and then getting the chance to share it on a bigger platform. The comedians that inspire me the most are the ones who are creating their own work and being adamant about it being theirs.
Tim Robinson’s I Think You Should Leave is one of my favorites. I also just watched the first episode of Aunty Donna’s Big Ol’ House of Fun and that’s right up my alley. I like comedy because there are no structural rules. The only rule is to make people laugh and you get to do that however you want.
My writing partner for Sketchy Queens, Liam Krug, went to the same middle school as me, same high school as me, grew up in the same town as me, but he’s ten years younger. So we’re of two different generations but we’re equally as queer and weird and have all the same reference points and all the same influences because we had all the same teachers in all the same schools. It’s funny because it’s me, a millennial, and him, a Gen Z person, who somehow have this overlapping sense of humor just because of where we’re from and who we are. He became my videographer during the pandemic and we started creating sketches just for ourselves and for me to be able to put stuff out. I was like let’s see if World of Wonder is interested in this. And they picked up the show.
They helped us conceive Sketchy Queens, and then they really let us be in charge. Liam does the bulk of the writing, creates the sketch for me to play around within. The script always becomes optional for me, a guideline for my improv. I like to make decisions while we’re filming and direct from the actor’s seat. And then in the end we have these really weird sketches. Episode one is amazing but, of course, with any show from episode one on we go in every freaking direction and there are recurring sketches and character development and I can’t wait for the whole thing to be out so everyone can watch it as a package. We worked really hard on making this fun, little show.
Drew: I’m so excited to see the rest of it and I’m excited for music of yours to come out. Also, I know it’s a dream of yours to get to be on Broadway in an original role or as The Witch or Mrs. Lovett. I think Annaleigh Ashford was just announced as Mrs. Lovett and I was like… what about Jinkx?
Jinkx: How much louder do I need to be saying this??
Drew: It’s what we all deserve and it’s what you deserve.
Jinkx: (laughs) Thank you. I’m also really excited about our new music. I have to say I get so critical of my own work that sometimes I stop listening to it as soon as it’s done. With my music, with video work. I get so critical of my own stuff that once it’s complete and out there I don’t typically revisit it. There are a few exceptions. The holiday movie I put out with BenDeLa Creme. I never get sick of watching that. Like when I see a clip posted on Instagram I stop and watch it because I’m so proud. And I am really proud of The Inevitable Album and The Ginger Snapped, my previous albums with Major Scales, but I also get really critical. When you’re creating albums, you learn as you go. Unless you were born into a musical dynasty. (laughs)
Drew: (laughs)
Jinkx: This new EP — Well, first of all it’s an EP, because I didn’t want to rush this thing we’ve been working on for three years. I was like, let’s just put out five songs right now and give everyone a taste of what we’re working on, so they’re excited for the album when it comes out. I’m so glad I went that route. Because the five songs we just put out, I listen to them just because I like listening to them. I’m so proud of this music that I’m actually able to remove the fact that it’s my music. I can listen to it just as a listener and not be like, “Oh we should’ve done this differently.” We took the time with these songs to let them get perfect. (laughs)
Drew: Everything you just said was the most Virgo thing ever, so it makes sense that it’s called The Virgo Odyssey.
Jinkx: (laughs) Well, it started with this dream to tell an epic, futuristic space rock opera and then through that I was like, well it’s Jinkx in outer space and if she had a space ship it would be the SS Virgo Starship or something. So we called it The Virgo Odyssey because the full album is going to be a queer sendup of The Odyssey, the Greek epic The Odyssey.
Drew: I love astrology, I love references to things that are very old, I love drag. So this is checking a lot of boxes for me.
Jinkx: Oo then you’ll love this Easter egg. The album artwork for the EP is me floating amongst the stars and the constellations behind me is my star chart. Virgo/Cancer/Leo.
Drew: Oh wow. I do love that Easter egg. And our readers will too. Autostraddle is a queer website, but it definitely has a lesbian bent and, you know, astrology is an important part of lesbian culture.
Jinkx: Lesbians like astrology?? (laughs)
Drew: (laughs) A little bit. Just a little. I’m still waiting for like a truly hot lesbian moment on Drag Race. We peaked at the Raja/Carmen lip sync and haven’t had one since.
Jinkx: It’s because Willam started shouting from every rooftop, “Sister dick will make you sick!” So now everyone is scared to hook up with each other. (laughs)
Drew: (laughs) Well, thank you, Willam.
Sketchy Queens premieres September 15th on WOW Presents Plus.
Style Thief: How To Dress Like League Of Their Own’s Resident Femme Jock Greta
I wish I was still in my tumblr era, because I know I’d be reblogging every gifset of A League Of Their Own‘s Greta Gill I could get my lil lesbian fingers on. The Rockford Peaches’ first baseman — played with irresistible charm by D’Arcy Carden — is exactly the kind of woman I would have let ruin my life when I was in the queer awakening stage Carson Shaw finds herself in at the top of this series. We love a mean femme top who can flirt as good as she can play ball.
(Is anyone else’s mind playing the way Greta shouts bring me home, Carson on the field in the final episode on a loop?????)
The show’s costume designer Tracye Field tells Hollywood Reporter she put the high femme characters into “fun, sexier colors” like reds, purples, and oranges. Indeed, some of the most striking visual details about Greta aren’t necessarily her floral flowy dresses but rather her red hair and lipstick.
So, first thing’s first! Before we can even get into the clothes, we’ve gotta talk lips. To really channel Greta, you’ve gotta wear something bold and red but also something that’s going to have lasting stay so as to be seen from the bleachers on the field (and also so as to not disappear after some secret smooching). My personal fave is the Stila All Day Liquid Lipstick ($22) in the shade beso. But you could also go the lip stain route with the Cream Lip Stain Liquid Lipstick from Sephora ($15) in cherry moon. I also love the matte look of the Nars Powermatte Long-Lasting Lipstick ($34) in dragon girl.
Okay, your lips are set. Now let’s get into what to wear to channel A League Of Their Own‘s saucy, sexy Greta Gil.
Show Out for Try Outs
1. Abercrombie & Fitch short sleeve half zip polo in tan ($75)
2. Calla pleated trousers in ruby red ($98)
3. Weekday “Gentle” embroidered varsity jacket in bright red ($104)
4. Reclaimed Vintage inspired unisex PU cap in stone ($22)
I find it hilarious — and deeply relatable — that this is pretty much Greta’s most “casual” look other than her Peaches uniform. This is what she sports for tryouts, and in true high femme fashion, she’s doing the most, tucking those curls under a cap and rocking high-waisted, belted burgundy track pants with a matching varsity bomber and a cropped half-zip polo with the zipper zipped all the wayyyyy down. An inspired sporty-femme look that has Sporty Spice shaking.
Floral Femme Fest
1. Knot Front Pleated Skirt Dress ($32)
2. Wrap Maxi Dress ($50)
3. Ginger Floral Maxi Dress ($60)
4. Esmee Waist-Tie Chiffon Maxi Shirtdress ($435)
My girl Greta has never met a v-neck floral dress she doesn’t like! And you know what? Same. I recently started wearing long v-neck dresses in shades of red to emulate Carla Gugino’s vibe in The Haunting Of Hill House, and Greta brings a slightly less haunted, slightly more playful edge to the look. I think to really harness this vibe, you should probably go the actual vintage route. But I’ve included some modern takes above. If you do want to go on a vintage search, basically ask yourself “would this pattern make a very fancy wallpaper in a low lit parlor where beautiful women are swirling martinis in crystal glasses?” and if the answer is yes, then buy it.
As for styling, I clocked that despite her high femme status, Greta wears very little jewelry. That makes the ring she wears from her first love Dana all the more significant. Maybe you also wear a ring to remember a long lost love, but in case you don’t, consider a simple statement piece like this adjustable moonstone cuff ring ($49).
How To Make a Goddamn Exit
1. Wool Skirt Suit ($162+)
2. Peak Lapel Double Breasted Blazer ($168)
3. Long Belted Blazer ($150)
4. Ellie Midi Wool Wrap Dress ($158)
Greta’s season finale farewell outfit is one of my favorite costume pieces of the entire first season. That deep red! The structure! The fact that Carson’s dress has accents on it in the same color, signaling that even if Carson isn’t leaving with Greta, she’s carrying a piece with her into whatever her future holds.
Once again, your best bet for a close match is shopping vintage or secondhand designer. I did find a lot of comps on The Real Real. The first option above is a vintage wool suit set from Etsy that comes pretty close to the look. But for modern and slightly more affordable options, I picked out some dark red pieces that capture a similar vibe if not the exact 1940s babe look. For the true Greta Gil Suiting Experience™, wear one of these whilst kissing a woman significantly shorter than you.
And there you have it! Tbh, the timing is kind of perfect for a Greta-inspired wardrobe overhaul, because dialing up the drama with some dark reds is a great fall/winter move. Next up to bat, I’ll be telling you how to dress like the one and only Max Chapman. You can expect that Style Thief next week!
Which Gay League Of Their Own Character Should Be Your Girlfriend?
Two weeks ago we all took a minute to find out which League of Their Own character we were, and it was a very intense and important process for us as a community. Now we have come upon the logical next step in this journey of League of Their Own discovery: learning who amongst the gay League of Their Own characters are our intended Gal Pal: Max Chapman, Jess McCready, Lupe Garcia, Carson Shaw, Jo Deluca or Greta Gil?
Which Gay League of Their Own Character Is Your Girlfriend?
The "League of Their Own" TV series on Prime Video is the gayest show ever and you probably have a crush on someone, but are they your soulmate?
Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin Betrays Viewers in the Series Finale
The following article contains spoilers and mentions of sexual assault.
Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin recently aired its season one finale and there is a lot to unpack. There are murder attempts, reveals of secret identities, broken trust, and nonstop thrill. Imogen, one of the new Liars in the reboot, gives birth to her baby after spending the entire season pregnant. A few episodes back, she ultimately decided to give her baby up for adoption after realizing she’s not ready for motherhood. In one of the final scenes of the finale, we find out who ends up adopting the baby.
And it’s fucking Aria and Ezra from the original Pretty Little Liars.
For those of you who may not know, Aria and Ezra are one of the main couples on the original show. Aria, a young teenager, meets Ezra, a fully grown adult, in a bar where Aria pretends to be of legal age. They flirt, make out in a bathroom, and go about their nights expecting to never see each other again. The next day, Aria goes to her high school English class and finds Ezra, who happens to be her new English teacher. Despite this, they continue their relationship. It’s a sick story of grooming, statutory rape, and an unhealthy student-teacher dynamic that’s glorified. Aria is portrayed as the cool teenager who gets to have a scandalous, yet exciting, relationship with an adult rather than a victim who lacked sexual agency. The writers frame their relationship as a forbidden love story where the characters have to fight all obstacles to be together. I. Marlene King, the executive producer and showrunner of the original Pretty Little Liars, even once called them “soulmates”.
TV has a long tradition of showing romantic depictions of student-teacher affairs. It is a problem because it is normalizing the sexual and emotional exploitation of vulnerable young people and makes it difficult for survivors of these situations to be taken seriously. However, it seems like TV shows are finally stepping away from these harmful narratives and showing student-teacher relationships for what they really are: dangerous and abusive. Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin shows this through Tabby, another girl who’s a part of the new generation of Liars. She works at a movie theatre called The Orpheum, and it is her dream to study film at NYU and become a filmmaker. Her boss at The Orpheum, Wes, knows that it’s her dream and has connections to NYU professors since he studied there. Wes serves as a mentor to Tabby not because he genuinely wants to help her pursue her passion, but because he is sexually interested in her. Wes is written as a predatory creep and when he tries to make advancements toward Tabby, she is portrayed as an uncomfortable young girl who wants to get away from him. It is a complete contrast to the romantic overtones of Aria’s and Ezra’s relationship.
Sexual violence overall is a major theme in the Pretty Little Liars reboot. Imogen and Tabby are sexual assault survivors. Angela Waters, a mysterious figure who is connected to the search for “A”, is also a sexual assault survivor. However, none of what the girls experienced is used merely for the sake of the horror genre of the show. While horror has a huge problem in portraying sexual assault, Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin manages to subvert the trope of the female victim by not letting any of the characters be defined by their sexual assault. They’re not just survivors. While Angela commits suicide prior to the show’s current setting, Imogen and Tabby live full-fledged lives and have agency. Tabby particularly establishes her agency through filmmaking — the stories she creates are of women taking back their power. The girls’ trauma is also taken seriously and is portrayed with layers of complexity and grace.
So it feels like a slap in the face when Imogen and Tabby talk about how thrilled they are to drive to Rosewood and meet the highly-esteemed Aria and Ezra, the parents-to-be of Imogen’s baby. It feels like the show betrayed and undermined everything it stood for by continuing to affirm the relationship between Aria and Ezra. It is disrespectful to viewers who experienced sexual violence.
Ironically enough, Imogen would despise Ezra and would have never given her baby to him and Aria if she knew the origins of their relationship. To have Imogen, a survivor of sexual assault whose pregnancy happened because of rape and someone who passionately stands against all forms of sexual violence, allow this couple to adopt her baby is disgusting and, frankly, a poor writing choice. If the writers wanted to make a connection to the original series, they could have had any of the other original liars or other characters from the show be the ones to adopt Imogen’s baby.
There’s been instances where creators go back to a show they worked on and change details or correct any errors they found post-production. If those who worked on the Pretty Little Liars reboot truly cared about how sexual violence is portrayed in the show, they would edit the mentions of Aria and Ezra out of the show. A public apology on Twitter or Instagram is not enough. It may seem like such a small detail that bears no significance to the story, but it disempowers the show’s overall message on sexual violence.