Vote Now in the 2022 Autostraddle TV Awards!

Since 2018, Autostraddle’s TV Team has hosted what we previously called the Autostraddle Gay Emmys. The name, a cheeky queering of the Primetime Emmy Awards, reflected one of the core goals of the project, which was to recognize, celebrate, and evaluate television shows, episodes, writers, makers, and performers who might otherwise be overlooked by a mainstream institution like the Emmys. This year, we head into the project with the same goal but a fresh, new name that really solidifies the awards as ours. Welcome to the Autostraddle TV Awards.

These awards are meant to celebrate the best of television — through a lens of LGBTQ+ representation. To merely feature a gay character no longer feels like enough. We want complex, meaningful, varied queer storylines across genres, narratives, and themes. We approach voting for these awards from two vantage points: the overall quality of the show as well as the quality of the queer and/or trans stories told within. Some of the shows nominated by the Primetime Emmy Awards this year overlap with some of the shows below — many do not. For example, while the Emmys remain very enthusiastic for Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, several members of our TV Team have been disappointed by the way the show skirts around Susie’s sexuality. We put queer and trans characters and stories first with these awards, and within the extremely patriarchal and heteronormative machine of Hollywood, that matters.

How it Works: For the past couple weeks, the knowledgeable and passionate queer critics who make up our TV Team have collaborated on a lengthy process to determine the year’s nominees in each of our Autostraddle TV Awards categories. We have 21 whole categories, and while there is some overlap with the Emmys, we also feature our own original categories that celebrate LGBTQ+ achievements — including awards specifically for out performers — as well as awards for other parts of the television landscape that don’t often get love from mainstream awards systems, like genre television. We took a massive list of potential nominees and voted to narrow that down to just six nominees per category — with two exceptions. Due to the fact that after two rounds of voting there were still ties for Outstanding Comedy Series and Outstanding Lead Actor Playing an LGBTQ+ Character in a Drama Series, those categories feature a seventh bonus nominee. The team was genuinely split, so it felt the most accurately reflective of our opinions to go with this slight rule change!

Now, it’s your turn to help us pick the winners. Individual Autostraddle readers can vote once in each category. Your votes will be combined with the TV Team’s final votes to choose the winners.

There are also three fan-favorite categories that YOU get to decide completely yourselves! Those categories are Fan Favorite Couples, Fan Favorite Out Queer Actor, and Fan Favorite Character.

We follow the same rules as the Emmys as far as timeline, which means the shows must have aired between June 1, 2021 and May 31, 2022 in order to be eligible. (Yes, that means we have to wait until 2023 to nominate A League of Their Own!) While the show’s full season does not need to have aired during that range, most of its episodes must have aired.

Here is your official ballot!

Voting is now open and will close on Wednesday, August 31 at 5p.m. EST. The winners will be announced on September 7.

AND THE NOMINEES FOR THE 2022 AUTOSTRADDLE TV AWARDS ARE…

Outstanding Drama Series

Yellowjackets (Showtime)
Station Eleven (HBO Max)
The L Word: Generation Q (Showtime)
Euphoria (HBO Max)
Killing Eve (AMC)
Gentleman Jack (HBO Max)

Outstanding Comedy Series

Sort Of (HBO Max)
Hacks (HBO Max)
We Are Lady Parts (Peacock)
A Black Lady Sketch Show (HBO Max)
Sex Education (Netflix)
Dickinson (Apple TV)
Reservation Dogs (FX)

Outstanding Sci-Fi/Fantasy Series

The 4400 (CW)
Batwoman (CW)
Naomi (CW)
Astrid & Lilly Save the World (SYFY)
Supergirl (CW)
Riverdale (CW)

Outstanding Lead Actor Playing an LGBTQ+ Character in a Drama Series

Jasmin Savoy Brown as Taissa Turner, Yellowjackets
Tawny Cypress as Taissa Turner, Yellowjackets
Suranne Jones as Anne Lister, Gentleman Jack
Zendaya as Rue Bennett, Euphoria
Hunter Schafer as Jules Vaughn, Euphoria
Jodie Comer as Villanelle, Killing Eve
Sandra Oh as Eve Polastri, Killing Eve

Outstanding Supporting or Guest Actor Playing an LGBTQ+ Character in a Drama Series

Sepideh Moafi as Gigi Ghorbani, The L Word: Generation Q
Jordan Hull as Angelica Porter-Kennard, The L Word: Generation Q
Liv Hewson as Van Palmer, Yellowjackets
Sherry Cola as Alice Kwan, Good Trouble
Julianna Margulies as Laura Peterson, The Morning Show
Maya Hawke as Robin Buckley, Stranger Things

Outstanding Lead Actor Playing an LGBTQ+ Character in a Comedy Series

Mae Martin as Mae, Feel Good
Alia Shawkat as Dory Sief, Search Party
Jonica T. Gibbs as Hattie, Twenties
Bilal Baig as Sabi Mehboob, Sort Of
Hannah Marie Einbinder as Ava Daniels, Hacks
Hailee Steinfeld as Emily Dickinson, Dickinson

Outstanding Supporting or Guest Actor Playing an LGBTQ+ Character in a Comedy Series

Dua Saleh as Cal Bowman, Sex Education
Sophina Brown as Ida B., Twenties
Ashley Nicole Black as various, A Black Lady Sketch Show
Ashly Burch as Rachel, Mythic Quest
Ella Hunt as Sue Gilbert, Dickinson
Rebekah Murrell as Cam, In My Skin

Outstanding Lead Actor Playing an LGBTQ+ Character in a Sci-Fi Series

Javicia Leslie as Ryan Wilder, Batwoman
Danielle Brooks as Leota Adebayo, Peacemaker
Taylor Hickson as Raelle Collar, Motherland: Fort Salem
Jes Macallan as Ava Sharpe, Legends of Tomorrow
Kaci Walfall as Naomi McDuffie, Naomi
Chyler Leigh as Alex Danvers, Supergirl

Outstanding Supporting or Guest Actor Playing an LGBTQ+ Character in a Sci-Fi Series

Meagan Tandy as Sophie Moore, Batwoman
Victoria Cartagena as Renee Montoya, Batwoman
Tig Notaro as Commander Jett Reno, Star Trek: Discovery
Ireon Roach as Keisha Taylor, 4400
Kausar Mohammed as Soraya Khoury, 4400
Azie Tesfai as Kelly Olsen, Supergirl

Outstanding Performance by a Straight Actress in a Straight Role

Danielle Deadwyler as Miranda Carroll, Station Eleven
Jean Smart as Deborah Vance, Hacks
Quinta Brunson as Janine Teagues, Abbott Elementary
Melanie Lynskey as Shauna Sadecki, Yellowjackets
Sheryl Lee Ralph as Barbara Howard, Abbott Elementary
Natasha Lyonne as Nadia Vulvokov, Russian Doll

Outstanding Cis Male Character

Himesh Patel as Jeevan Chaudhary, Station Eleven
Tyler James Williams as Gregory Eddie, Abbott Elementary
Jason Sudeikis as Ted Lasso, Ted Lasso
Brett Goldstein as Roy Kent, Ted Lasso
Taika Waititi as Blackbeard, Our Flag Means Death
Steven Krueger as Ben Scott, Yellowjackets

Santana Lopez Legacy Award For Outstanding Queer Teen Character

Jordan Hull as Angelica Porter-Kennard, The L Word: Generation Q
Hailey Kilgore as Laverne “Jukebox” Ganner, Raising Kanan
Jasmin Savoy Brown as Taissa Turner, Yellowjackets
Liv Hewson as Van Palmer, Yellowjackets
Alycia Pascual-Peña as Aisha Garcia, Saved By the Bell
Kaci Walfall as Naomi McDuffie, Naomi

Best Episode with LGBTQ+ Themes

The 4400 Episode 104, “Harlem’s Renaissance”
Hacks Episode 204, “The Captain’s Wife”
Sex Education Episode 306, “Episode 6”
Sort Of Episode 105, “Sort of a Party”
Dickinson Episode 308, “This Was a Poet”
Batwoman Episode 311, “Broken Toys”

Outstanding Performance by an Out LGBTQ+ Actor in a Comedy

Megan Stalter as Kayla, Hacks
Devery Jacobs as Elora Danan, Reservation Dogs
Bilal Baig as Sabi Mehboob, Sort Of
Abby McEnany as Abby, Work in Progress
Ella Hunt as Sue Gilbert, Dickinson
Ashley Nicole Black as various, A Black Lady Sketch Show

Outstanding Performance by an LGBTQ+ Actor in a Drama

E.R Fightmaster as Dr. Kai Bartley, Grey’s Anatomy
Jasmin Savoy Brown as Taissa Turner, Yellowjackets
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

Outstanding LGBTQ+ Actor in a Sci-Fi/Fantasy Show

Javicia Leslie as Ryan Wilder, Batwoman
Chyler Leigh as Alex Danvers, Supergirl
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

Outstanding LGBTQ+ Director / Writer / Showrunner

Photo credits top, L to R: Phillip Faraone/Getty Images // Robin Roemer // Ben Gabbe/Getty Images for ReedPOP. Photo credits bottom, L to R: Rodin Eckenroth/WireImage // Amy Sussman/Getty Images // Sonia Recchia/Getty Images

Lena Waithe, Twenties
Mae Martin, Feel Good
B Nichols, Abbott Elementary
Abby McEnany, Work in Progress
Dana Terrace, The Owl House
Bilal Baig, Sort Of

Most Groundbreaking Representation

Heartstopper (Netflix)
Sort Of (HBO Max)
The 4400 (CW)
In My Skin (BBC)
Reservation Dogs (FX)
We Are Lady Parts (Peacock)

Outstanding Animated Series

The Owl House (Disney Channel)
Pinecone & Pony (Apple TV)
Masters of the Universe: Revelation (Netflix)
Blue’s Clues (Nickelodeon)
Rugrats (Nickelodeon)
Arcane (Netflix)

Outstanding Hairstyling for an LGBTQ+ Character

ER Fightmaster as Dr. Kai Bartley, Grey’s Anatomy
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
Vanessa Williams as Pippa Pascal, The L Word: Generation Q
Sara Ramirez as Che Diaz, And Just Like That…

Outstanding Costume Design for a Show With LGBTQ+ Characters

The L Word: Generation Q (Showtime)
Killing Eve (AMC)
And Just Like That… (HBO Max)
Yellowjackets (Showtime)
We Are Lady Parts (Peacock)
A Black Lady Sketch Show (HBO Max)

To vote in the above categories as well as the THREE SPECIAL FAN FAVORITE CATEGORIES*, go forth and:

VOTE IN THE AUTOSTRADDLE TV AWARDS 2022!!!

*When voting in the fan favorite categories, please keep the eligibility guidelines in mind and only nominate couples/characters/actors who appeared in shows that aired between June 1, 2021 and May 31, 2022. Otherwise your vote will be wasted!

P-Valley Has Changed the Rules of Black Queer Storytelling

Last Sunday was our last trip “down in the Valley” for a while, as the second season of P-Valley came to a close. Set in the fictional town of Chucalissa, Mississippi, the show chronicles the life of the framily at The Pynk and, for some, the season’s end brings happiness. Everyone else, though? Molly, you in danger, girl.

The club’s proprietor, the non-binary revelation that is Uncle Clifford, got her happy ending: her Grandmuva free from Covid, outright ownership of her club, the likely influx of new patrons from the town’s forthcoming casino and the man she’s coveted since the show’s start, loving her out loud. Mercedes, Clifford’s bottom bitch — the longest serving dancer at the Pynk — finally got what she wanted: her daughter, her gym, her money and a retirement performance worthy of her legacy.

But not everyone made it out of the season unscathed. Hailey leaves Chucalissa — and, presumably, the father of her future twins — with far less money than she thought she’d have when she took the Pynk off the auction block. Lil’ Murda might think he’s won, now that he’s been welcomed back into Uncle Clifford’s arms, but a rival gang is coming for him. Asserting control over a world that’s done nothing but take from her, Roulette steps fully into pimp mode, recruiting girls from the club for her stable. And just as Keyshawn (AKA Miss Mississippi) is about to escape her abusive husband, the rug gets pulled out from under her. And let’s not even talk about Diamond… poor, poor Diamond…

With so much going on, we had to take a trip to the Valley. Shelli, A. Tony, Carmen and Natalie got together to talk about P-Valley’s queerer second season and how the show is truly changing the game.

P-Valley

A lot of people, when they hear that P-Valley is a TV show about a strip club, they think about spots like The Landing Strip from Friday Night Lights, Bada Bing from The Sopranos, or Xavier’s from Hightown… but P-Valley really has changed the game on how strip clubs are depicted. How does The Pynk fit in with both your understanding of strip clubs, both in real life and how they’ve been depicted in pop culture? What do you think P-Valley’s doing that’s unique and/or interesting?

Shelli: I am not familar with any of those other shows’ strip clubs but what I do know is that The Pynk is inherently Black. Real life strip clubs that are white are so boring, they are lackluster and it is folks doing the bare minimum and it being celebrated as being the best. Their dancers hide behind fancy lighting, top shelf booze, songs that are on some top ten lists, and sometimes celebrity chefs. In pop culture though, they are shown as the sexiest places. Like, I’m supposed to be enticed by a barely there white girl swaying side to side to some slowed down version of a Panic At The Disco song?

I’m sorry but in so many parts of life I still get very upset when white folks are celebrated for doing the very, very least and when white women get like, all the praises for simply being white. And I’m also very sick of being labeled as a hater or bitter Black woman for feeling that way and announcing it — but that’s for another roundtable.

What P-Valley has done — what The Pynk has done — is shown us that Black women fucking do work. It’s shown so many variances of size, color, ability, sexuality, and more of strippers and shown that Black strip clubs are simply far superior. Whether it’s big and fancy like Magic City or local and small like The Pynk. I don’t know if what they are showing about strip clubs could be labeled as unique to many of their Black viewers who are already familiar with what Black strip clubs are like (a strip club is only as good as it’s wings), but, it is hella unique in the aspect of what is usually shown of strip clubs in pop culture.

A.Tony: Oh my gosh, this question unlocked a memory for me. I was like “I’ve never been to a strip… ohmygosh, how could I forget!” (it was very white :sad face:).

As Shelli said, I’m not familiar with those shows’ strip clubs, but P-Valley feels extremely special because this felt like a place that I already knew. When you love Black women and Black queer people and you are a Black queer person yourself, just about any place where they live, you’re just gonna feel at home there. There is no other strip club depicted in pop culture that I’d rather be at than the Pynk.

Shelli: It’s also shown us the history of some of these places and their evolution. From the jook joint to the shake shacks to the blind pigs and discos… that was cool as fuck. These spots are more than buildings and the booty that’s in them. For some, it’s their family history and, for a lot of Black folks of the millennial generation, specifically in or from the South, we don’t have a lot of family shit to hold on to.

Nicco Annan as Uncle Clifford Sayles and Elarica Johnson as Hailey Colton / Autumn Night

A. Tony: Yes! Seeing Grandmuva Ernestine and Uncle Clifford through the years, with the Pynk as their sun, was extremely important to me. There is consistent violence against Black people, not just in the very obvious ways, but in intricate, almost subtle ways. Most of us don’t have family shit to hold on to and many of us can only count as far back as our great grandparents (if we’re lucky). I love seeing something that Uncle Clifford loves, respects, and works to keep alive not just because it means something to her but because it means something (everything) to her family too.

Natalie: Having spent most of my life in the South, the Pynk echoes with familiarity. Not because I was a fixture in the clubs — though there was that period where my brother valeted for a local club and my visits became more frequent — but because its so embedded in the culture. But no one’s showcasing that on television, especially not with blackness and queerness and southernness at its center… no one but Katori Hall.

The thing about nearly every other show that features a strip club is that the women and the club itself are just scenery. The club is just a front for some shady business, most of the strippers — who are mostly white and almost always rail thin — go nameless and, in the moments where we get to see the women work, the focus is exclusively on whatever person is consuming the product. P-Valley really upends all of that.

The women are the center of the story — their work, their effort, their art — and P-Valley and its stable of all women directors, respect that like no one ever has on television.

There was a lot of time spent this season on establishing the club’s lineage, as Shelli pointed out, so the Pynk becomes more than just a building to its audience. Uncle Clifford works hard to shape the Pynk into a legitimate business, even if Hailey, Big L and Roulette’s machinations test her on that front. The strippers have names and different skin tones and body types… and they each have their own story of what brought them to the Pynk. Even as the floor of the Pynk floods with every-damn-body in Chucalissa, the focus is on the performers.

The central love story of P-Valley has been between Uncle Clifford, the nonbinary owner of the Pynk, and Lil’ Murda, the closeted up and coming rapper. What do you think about how the show — and, in particular, the season finale — handled that storyline?

Shelli: I LOVE IT. Like, to see two niggas on TV — dark, thick, tatted, southern, street niggas — in a situationship that evolves into something more? GIMME GIMME GIMME MORE. I think that we all know these relationships exist in the Black community, but I’ve never seen one in pop culture that was handled this way.

Carmen: I kept comparing it to my first loves, Noah and Wade in Patrik-Ian Polk’s Noah’s Arc in the 00s (Polk is also an executive producer on P-Valley), which is already awful because 20 years later… how is it still somehow only Noah and Wade that we have to reach back to? But Shelli, you’re absolutely right! Because Noah and Wade still weren’t this. Uncle Clifford and Lil’ Murda are simply unrivaled. The specificity of seeing such deep storytelling, hard fought and loving, set in the Black South? Nothing like it.

Shelli: When Uncle Clifford said that she was not about to be loved in the shadows, but still kept up with what Murda was doing, it felt the opposite of toxic. Clifford knew why Murda couldn’t come out and love her out loud. She knew he wasn’t capable of loving her in the ways that she needed and she didn’t do what a lot of Black women and femmes are taught to do in love, which is to hold fast to what someone is capable of doing and be hella cool with it even if it’s the crumbs of what you deserve.

Then seeing Murda pine over Clifford — the postcards, the texts, the fucking someone else even though you wish it was them — was this sorta odd sweetness. I was so hopeful that life would let go of the hold it had on Murda, and that Uncle Clifford would keep their boundaries but still let him back in slowly.

So when they got back together and then had that personal moment in the finale. That kiss and that look… where you can be in a room full of people but it feels like it’s just yall… it was beautiful. Then when they both looked at everyone like “I know y’all ain’t surprised but also what the fuck are you looking at?” I screamed with laughter but I also have that tinge of fear. Yes, they can be accepted by framily but also, they are two queer niggas in the deep south and there are lots of folks Black and non, who are ready and willing to hurt them in a million ways.

Some scenes just stick with you. Shoutout to @AllDayNicco and @JAlphonse_N for bringing this one to life. #PValley pic.twitter.com/coN4TeSjye

— P-Valley (@PValleySTARZ) August 16, 2022

A.Tony: Have Uncle Clifford and Lil’ Murda made me believe in love again? Low-key Ryan Wilder and Sophie Moore already did that, but they have definitely made me twerk in rejoice of the good news!

I am incredibly obsessed with this love story! Every damn Sunday night, my friends and I have been in the chat crying over how these two have invented love and I am STUCK on them. I cannot even fully articulate how much it’s meant to me to be full ass wrong about my initial thoughts around Lil’ Murda. Remember in the first season when he was cutting in line and everybody told him his music was slaw? (Y’all we were so young!). And now, I had to have tissues at the ready whenever he came on screen.

I knew I was gonna love Uncle Clifford as soon as I saw them holding Keyshawn’s baby in season one, but I was so not prepared for them to get a really good and true love. Like Shelli said, their love is definitely not without a shit ton of pain and hurt, and there’s no promise that that is not on the horizon for them both — God, I hope it’s not — but to see them in love inside all of the places that they love most has been really important to me. It may have been more articulate for me to just scream for five minutes straight with intermittent sobbing ’cause that’s all I do when I see them.

Nicco Annan as Uncle Clifford Sayles and J. Alphonse Nicholson as LaMarques / Lil’ Murda

Natalie: No, that was perfect, A. Tony. You and Shelli both really laid out the reasons I (and everybody who watches P-Valley) love Uncle Clifford and Murda together. I will say, though: for all my love of this pairing, I didn’t love the season finale for them.

Do I think there would come a day that one day Murda would be willing to walk away from the life he was building and love Clifford out loud? Yes. Would there come a day when Clifford would be willing to accept the love being offered to her, without fearing that the rug would be pulled out from under of her Louboutin clad feet? Absolutely. From the first time they connected in season one, there was never any doubt in my mind that Clifford and Murda were endgame. BUT, was I convinced that endgame should’ve come this soon into the show’s run… or that the both characters were at a place, mentally and emotionally, where they would step out on faith? Not at all… not even a little bit. I know that’s not something that matters to a lot of folks. People just want to fast-forward to the end and get their happy ending but the journey matters… and I think it matters for folks who see themselves in those two characters.

Here’s what I think happened: for some inexplicable reason, STARZ hasn’t renewed this show. Why this network persists in delaying the renewal of female-fronted properties while giving renewals to all their male-fronted properties (even the ones with lower ratings), is anyone’s guess. They can give us fifty-eleven Power spin-offs but they can’t give fans an early renewal of P-Valley? Dammit, STARZ, I just forgave you for canceling Vida… and now you’re playing with my emotions again?!

But I digress… it feels like the network’s indecision impacted the storytelling…l ike, maybe the show will be back, maybe it won’t… and in the event that it won’t, the show chose to give happy endings to its fan favorites: Clifford and Mercedes. There’s still plenty of story to tell with Cliff and Murda — chief among them, whether Murda will even survive to enjoy his happy ending — but to me, it felt like the show rushed to get to this place and it wasn’t as satisfying as it should’ve been.

In part because of the pandemic (but also because of her triflin’ mama), Mercedes had to go outside The Pynk to find a way to make money this season. She ultimately agrees to a sponsorship deal with one of her clients… and eventually the client’s wife wants her own piece of The Mercedes Experience. It’s the first depiction of a lesbian relationship on P-Valley. What’d you think about the storyline?

Shelli: DOPE, GREAT, SWEET, MEAN, SEXY, WILD, BEAUTIFUL. Like, I think it really hit for me when Mercedes and Farrah were at her art show. When Mercedes was like, that was business… but then said it was a little bit of pleasure. I don’t know if Mercedes is lesbian but I do think Farrah is queer because in her telling off of coach she said she loved pussy more than her husband — but he never knew ‘cos he was not paying attention to her.

I think I was more entangled in Farrah’s side of it, she was a woman who put her dreams and life aside to satiate her husband, something many Black women of a certain generation did and then taught a lot of their daughters to do as if it were the norm. Yes, seeing the two of them together was beautiful, but I always read it as more work than reality, Mercedes doing what she had to do and this part of it maybe wasn’t so hard but it was still work. I liked what came of it, that the two of them realized some things in their personal lives as a result of their tryst. Farrah stepping away from coach and going back to her own dreams, and Mercedes doing the same.

I’d like to see a storyline between lesbian characters who are written as queer from the very start, but this was still very dope, incredibly beautiful, and written as lovely as could be.

Shamika Cotton as Farrah and Brandee Evans as Mercedes Woodbine

Natalie: That’s an interesting read on the story because I saw it so differently. I don’t think it was all about the money for Mercedes.. in fact, after their night together, I think she’s genuinely surprised to wake up and find those stacks on the night-table. The moment in the art gallery was really perplexing because, it seemed like the show wanted to both have this relationship be strictly transactional but also have it be this thing that fundamental changes both their lives. That seemed incongruent to me… both those things can’t be true.

To your point about Farrah, Shelli… based of what she says to Coach (“you don’t even know that I like pussy just as much as you. Hell, maybe even more!”), it’s not hard to imagine her having these quiet lesbian affairs throughout her marriage. But, for this — for the Mercedes Experience — she breaks free from a mask she’s been wearing for 19 years? She leaves her husband and the security of his money, to embrace happiness… over a transaction? Over a fuck? That strains credulity to me. I think she found in Mercedes someone who saw her and her talent and who showed her what strength looked like. I don’t think that evolves into a lifetime love affair or anything like that but it was meaningful and I was disappointed in the show for treating it like it wasn’t.

Carmen: I genuinely wanted to love Mercedes and Farrah, but I couldn’t. I think that Shelli brings up some very important points from Farrah’s point of view — about coming breaking away from Black compulsory heterosexuality late in life. And I agree with Natalie that it wasn’t all about the money for Mercedes. But this was my breaking point, and the show never repaired it: PAY SEX WORKERS FOR THEIR WORK!!

When the coach realizes that Farrah and Mercedes have had a tryst together — he refuses to pay Mercedes for their previously contracted time as a threesome. Mercedes signed an NDA and everything.  And because he got his feelings hurt, he literally took her 40 stacks, cash, off the table in front of her! And Farrah just… let him do it? And gave Mercedes “I’m sorry” eyes? Absolutely not. Mercedes should have sued. If you don’t pay sex workers for their work, that is an assault as far as I’m concerned. Do not pass go.

I do think the show tried to clear up their mess in the finale, when Farrah sells artwork she made based on Mercedes’ likeness and pays her for the rights. But confusingly, Farrah goes out of her way to say that it’s not the money she’s owed from coach?? Ok great, so then Mercedes is still out her original 40 grand? You said this woman changed your life? Then show respect. Pay! Her!

Brandee Evans as Mercedes Woodbine

A.Tony: Listen, damn near anything Mercedes wants to do, I am in full support of. Her leaning into some Sapphic situations? YES, MORE PLEASE. When they were holding hands and staring into each other’s eyes through Mercedes’ orgasm, after Farrah moved her husband out the way ’cause he wasn’t doing it right? I AM HERE FOR IT.

To be quite honest, I really didn’t think we’d get more than one queer character/storyline this entire series, so they were already exceeding my expectations. I’m really glad that there are multiple queer people in this show because it feels reflective of the Black South *I* know, and it is just really good.

Natalie: That’s such a good point, A. Tony. So often, shows only tells one type of queer story at a time — a gay or lesbian relationship, most often — and there’s no thought about community, but P-Valley builds that in season two. In addition to Clifford, Murda, Farrah and Mercedes, you’ve got Clifford’s queer friends — her Ace Boon Coons — who show up to celebrate Clifford’s birthday. It looks like one of her ABCs, Nineveh, is going to play a bigger role in future episodes… as she agrees to be part of Roulette’s stable at the end of the season.

Carmen: There’s a scene in the finale where Clifford, Murda, and Mercedes are all holding each other in the Pynk’s locker room and my heart leapt. This is my chosen queer family, I’m moving in.

There’s an episode of P-Valley this season (“Demethrius”) that features two queer sex scenes: the first, between Farrah and Mercedes, two feminine cis black women; the second between Lil’ Murda and Big Teak, two straight-passing cis black men. After that episode aired… whew, the homophobia jumped out… social media was just awash in it. How did you process that response, just as someone who has to exist in this world as a black queer person?

Shelli: The hold homophobia has on niggas is tight and probably not letting go anytime soon, lol.

I’m gonna guess that most cishet Black men who watch the show do so in the hopes of seeing the girlies strip and bounce and shake ass. Those of them who are watching it with their straight partners may be doing so out of obligation and didn’t think that the storylines would go where they have.

J. Alphonse Nicholson as Lil’ Murda and John Clarence Stewart as Thaddeus Wilks / Big Teak

They were probably weirded out by Uncle Clifford, but because she wasn’t doing anything “very gay” they tolerated it. And they had no issue with Mercedes and Farrah fucking because cishet Black men often think queer women are being sexual or romantic with each other for their pleasure and approval. BUT, when they saw men who probably looked like themselves or reminded them of their friends, fucking? That was too damn far and they had to take to the Twitter streets and meet up at the intersection of Loud and Wrong.

Same with a lot of cishet Black women who watch. They love to kiki with their gay male friends and love to be hit on by their dyke friends and called pretty by their femme friends. They love Uncle Clifford because they see her in the ways they see those same friends they have, as a spectacle. People who they don’t actually see as a real humans with real feelings and real lives. So I was also unsurprised when they hopped online to talk about how disgusting it was or how shows like this are adding to the erasure of “real Black men.”

EYE WAS NOT SURPRISED BY ANY OF THOSE THOTS AND OPINIONS, LOL.

A.Tony: I hadn’t caught up to P-Valley when this happened, so thankfully, most of the stuff kinda passed over my head as regular, shmegular homophobia within the black community. I got through it as usual: going to my group chat and being gayer in there than I was the day before in like some kind of lil resistance. I mean, it’s not little, it is often the difference between my survival and the absence of it, but yeah. Afterwards, when I’d caught up and remembered most of what had been said, it still didn’t really register ’cause like, that’s my family and what I grew up with so. I don’t know what to say beyond that.

Natalie: Unfortunately the hate hasn’t stopped. The rapper Plies dropped a video earlier this week about this — I guess he waited for the entire season to drop and then binged it — and, while it’s not surprising, the shit’s just so disheartening. While the bulk of the comments weren’t about the two women… there’s still a sense that if either of those women weren’t sufficiently femme, they’d be cast out as well… I’d be cast out.. and my friends would be cast out too.

It’s easy to convince yourself sometimes that we’re further along towards equality than we actually are — especially when you’re in community so often — but then something like this happens and snatches you right back to reality. Like, you can’t even revel in the value of this representation, without a reminder of the world’s bigotry. It’s just fuckin’ disheartening.

Shelli: I didn’t process it at all lol, because those people don’t matter to me and their opinions are not ones I care about. I am no longer in the game of helping homophobic, transphobic, and non-binaryphobic (is that a word?) straight, conservative (even though they won’t admit it) Black people change their ways. That is no longer my ministry. So while it saddens me sometimes, it’s not up to me as a Black queer dyke lesbian to teach them and use my platform as a writer to write think pieces that will inspire them to change. There are enough of those out in the world, there is enough information for them to teach themselves and instead what I will do is watch moments like this in pop culture — where two nigga ass niggas — kiss, softly touch, pleasure and escape into each other.

This season of P-Valley dealt with so many different issues: Covid, police brutality, Big Teak’s mental health, the abuse Keyshawn deals with (both from Rome and Derrick), Terricka’s pregnancy, the colorism that Roulette experiences, just to name a few. Which story resonated the most with you and why?

Natalie: When we close the books on this year in queer television, P-Valley will undoubtedly rank among my favorites. It’ll rank among the best of 2022 not because it told one affecting story… but because it told so many, in smart and compelling ways. The writing was brilliant and deserves so much recognition. And what’s doubly miraculous about it is that the show never seemed overstuffed or like it was doing too much… it was all just real shit people go through…

Carmen: That part.

Shelli: For me, the story that hit hardest was probably the colorism, because again, every time I bring it up there is a chance I get called a bitter or hatin’ ass Black woman. Colorism against dark skinned Black women exists but also some light-skinned people are cool. BOTH OF THESE THINGS CAN BE TRUE, LOL. I really don’t wanna dive into it anymore, but I will say that Roulette is my favorite character on the show, and Gail Bean has always been a phenomenal actress.

John Clarence Stewart as Big Teak and J. Alphonse Nicholson as Lil’ Murda

A. Tony: Big Teak and Keyshawn got me in my chest, man.

Big Teak’s face when he sees the postcard Murda prepared for Uncle Clifford and he says, “you ain’t never write me no postcards.” There’s a lot that can be said (and has been said by others more knowledgeable about it than me) about feeling left behind due to incarceration, due to mental illness (this one I get). Then to see that walk hand in hand with a love that cannot exist in the same way it did before — a love that just could not grow into something else because one of the lovers was just left behind — just really kind of messed me up.

I get Big Teak’s reasoning on a lot of things a lot more than I’m comfortable with acknowledging. And even though I want the people I love to live forever, I felt relief for Big Teak in that car. At least the last thing he saw and knew was that he was loved. There’s such an emphasis on “getting better,” especially within the Black community — if they acknowledge that you’re not doing well at all — that just isn’t the story for a lot of us. The world is cruel, especially to Black queer people, people who’re mentally ill, people who’ve been incarcerated and especially those who live at those intersections. But our collective suicide prevention practice is to not acknowledge that and push people forward in spite of it.

Our attempts at prevention are rooted in our own fear of mortality. We avoid looking too deep, fearing that we may see ourselves in that the suicidal person… after all, any person can run out of options at any time. It’s not always an inherent failure on being unable to keep people alive, there are systemic barriers that keep us from being able to show up in community the way we want to, the way our people need. To see Big Teak say, “no, this is too much” and just end it and Murda knows that there was nothing else he could do to help him, except just, be with him, I think says a lot not just about how we need community in both the difficult places in life, but as we get to our ends, and do whatever it is we do on the other side. I don’t know. I’ve struggled with passive ideation since I was a kid, and this doesn’t make me want to do anything, but it offers a kind of, “I see you” in a way I can’t explain. To have someone not shame you for giving into the things that have weighed you down, to have someone still sit in that car with you, anyways: it’s a story I’ve never seen for my people and it’s a story I need.

Natalie: As someone who’s dealt with ideation myself (and written about it) and who also understood Teak’s mindset in that car more than I’d care to admit… I really appreciate you being vulnerable and sharing that.

Shannon Thornton as Keyshawn Harris

A. Tony: Keyshawn messes me up because — Lord, have mercy! With her, everywhere she turns, it’s abuse: a step-mother at home who hated her and kids at school who hated her, knowing what her father probably did to her step-sister, domestic and sexual abuse not just from her husband but other men she trusted. The abuse is everywhere and it feels like she’s stuck… even more so after the bullshit Derrick pulled in the season finale.

It’s hard watching Keyshawn’s story because it’s true. Being stuck, for Black women, especially in abuse, is not a new thing. The people who love you, trying to get you out, but not knowing the extent in which your abuser will work to keep you, it is not a new thing. I don’t know a Black woman or Black queer person who hasn’t been abused and though some get community support, it’s so hard to be able to escape in a way that allow you and your loved ones to live.

I worry, though, that Keyshawn will turn into a meme or a joke like Tina in What’s Love Got To Do With It. I’m already seeing Black women saying they wouldn’t let someone beat their asses like that — an assertion that’s rooted in fear that they’d respond exactly like Keyshawn if they were in the same situation — and it’s dangerous for this cycle to go on.

Keyshawn’s story fucks me up because all it shows is that we do not protect Black girls and then people get mad at her for not knowing how to protect herself when she becomes a woman. I know Keyshawn grew up, but all I see is the high schooler who molded herself into whatever she needed to be to be loved by Derrick, to be loved by a lot of people who quite frankly do not deserve her, and after spending so long doing that, how do you learn to be anything else?

I’ve heard some people claim that too much of this is for shock value, but I can’t quite agree. So many of Black women’s stories are ignored and by the time people pay attention, it’s too late. I think, the constant tensing of your shoulders whenever Keyshawn comes on screen, the measured breaths when Derrick is in the room, the keeping your eyes on all exits at all times, is the entire point. Black women, Black queer people live in this way all the time and I think it is our responsibility not to look away (and I mean this solely for people who have the space to, not for anyone to re-traumatize themselves).

Gail Bean as Roulette and Psalms Salazar as Whisper

You’re heading to the Pynk with a couple stacks in your pocket: who are you inviting to the Paradise Room?

Shelli: ROU—FUCKIN—LETTE and she MUST chew gum the entire time.

Carmen: Absolutely Roulette. No question.

A.Tony: Whisper, I have no idea what she’s doing half the time and I am intrigued as fuck by her.

Natalie: I hope, in this imaginary scenario, I made it to the club before Mercedes hung up her floss… ’cause she would absolutely get all my money.

Favorite piece of wisdom from Uncle Clifford and her Rules?

Shelli: Rule #2 — “Always Know Where The Exit in This Bitch is, Cause You Never Know When You Gotsta Turn a Window Into a Door.” I always know where the exits are in every place I am in. I have a mother who is from Detroit and raised by her southern mother and when I first started going out partying every time I left the house she would say “Dance near the exits ‘cos niggas is crazy and you never know when you need to leave.”

A.Tony: I had to look them up, and I found this one — which was made up by the fans, the Pynk Posse, and is not officially from the show. But I loved it, so I wanted to share it! — Rule #94: “You Can’t Keep Getting Mad at Folks for Sucking the Life Outta You When You Keep Giving Them the Straw.”

Natalie: She said it in the season finale: Uncle Clifford Rule #88: “Don’t Ever Forget: Just ‘Cause a Bitch Good at Keepin’ the Peace Don’t Mean She Ain’t Good at Wagin’ War.” I like to stay quiet and keep to myself a lot, and people like to make all types of assumptions of what I can and can’t do.

Better Made for TV rapper/rappers: Lil’ Murda or KaMillion and Aida from Rap Shit?

Shelli: I’m sorry but KaMillion and Aida HAVE YOU HEARD SEDUCE AND SCHEME?!

A.Tony: I’m sorry I don’t pit bad bitches against each other, I cannot answer at this time.

Natalie: I’ve got to represent my home state — J. Alphonse Nicholson is from North Carolina (#EaglePride) — and say, “it’s Murda!” Besides, I’ve had “When I Get Out” and “Get It On The Floor” on constant rotation.

Megan Thee Stallion as Tina Snow (who is also Megan Thee Stallion)

This season gave us guest appearances from Big Freedia and Meg Thee Stallion. Who’s your must have guest for season 3 of P-Valley?

Shelli: Saucy Santana.

A.Tony: This fits nothing, please know I’m aware, but please imagine Beyoncé’s “Alien Superstar” playing while Janelle Monáe as Cyndi Mayweather just descends from the ceiling. Whisper would be really into that shit and I just want to know more.

Is Autumn Knight Lakeisha Hailey Colton the Jenny Schechter of P-Valley?

Shelli: Lol, HELP, but yes.

Carmen: THE SCREAM I JUST SCREAMED

Natalie: Abso-fuckin-lutely.

A.Tony: I don’t even know Jenny but I know this is true, except I guess that Hailey lives? Jenny doesn’t make it.. right?

What “Dyke TV” Can Teach Us About Independent LGBTQ Media

All images sourced from the Dyke TV records at Smith College Special Collections

Summer 1993 was the summer of “lesbian chic.” In May, New York Magazine declared the arrival of “lesbian chic” on its cover, featuring a photo of K.D. Lang staring seductively into the camera. One month later, Newsweek ’s June issue claimed that lesbians were “coming out strong” (at the same time as it offensively questioned: “what are the limits of tolerance?”). That August, Vanity Fair released its now-famous butch-femme barbershop fantasy photoshoot featuring Lang posed with supermodel Cindy Crawford.

This newfound media attention was met with a fair amount of skepticism from lesbian activists and academics. The lesbian chic news stories typically portrayed lesbians as white, wealthy, and femme, which many felt misrepresented the diversity of lesbian and queer communities. While lesbian activists were often frustrated by the lack of media attention given to their concerns, the “lesbian chic” articles were largely fetishizing and superficial, narrowly focused on style rather than substance.

Dyke TV was one response to these criticisms. Premiering that same summer in June 1993, Dyke TV was a half-hour public access cable TV program focused on lesbian and feminist activism, community issues, art and film, news, health, sports, and culture. Created by three lesbian artist-activists — Cuban playwright Ana Simo, theater director and producer Linda Chapman, and independent filmmaker Mary Patierno — Dyke TV was a TV show made by and for lesbian, bisexual, and queer women. Dyke TV aired on New York’s public access stations from 1993 to 2006, as well as on Free Speech TV, a national, independent news network, from 2000 onward. In 1994, Dyke TV expanded outside of Manhattan to 14 other cities, and at its widest distribution, the show aired in 78 cities around the country. For over a decade, Dyke TV brought the diversity of lesbian communities into living rooms across the U.S.

Co-hosts Laurie Weeks and Mary Edwards open the first episode of Dyke TV.

I interviewed ten people involved in the production of Dyke TV to learn more about the history and development of the show. Dyke TV was a part of the resurgence of radical queer activism in New York in the 1980s and early 1990s. In groups like ACT UP, Queer Nation, and the Lesbian Avengers, members used public demonstrations, civil disobedience, and art and video activism to bring media attention to the intersections of HIV/AIDS, homophobia, police brutality, racism, and sexism. Dyke TV both chronicled and helped shape this historical moment.

A flyer for a Dyke TV fundraising party.

Over a series of emails with me, Ana Simo shared that she pitched the idea of a lesbian public access show to Linda Chapman and Mary Patierno in the spring of 1993. Simo was a prominent Lesbian Avenger, and she hoped the show would become a “stealthy agitprop instrument” on television editorially independent from, but politically aligned with, the Lesbian Avengers. “The Avengers urgently needed to set up our own alternative media” in order to “report on our work and, crucially, to expand our reach beyond the initial dyke activist community,” Simo believed.

This activist impulse is palpable on the show. As each episode opens, the host of the show announces: “You’re watching Dyke TV: television to incite, subvert, provoke, and organize.”

After joining the team, Patierno and Chapman used their connections in the professional arts world to expand the purview of the show to include interviews and performances with lesbian artists. They both suggested using a magazine format on the show, which would allow it to cover a wide variety of issues, vary the content from episode to episode, and incorporate video made by and with volunteers from across the city and the country.

Working with a large network of volunteers was crucial to Dyke TV ’s success: Simo, Patierno, and Chapman largely volunteered their own time and energy to produce weekly half-hour episodes, an overwhelming amount of work for three people. Consequently, they relied on volunteer producers to help create the show’s content. In 1994, Manhattan Neighborhood Network offered the team a crucial grant: It provided funding for Dyke TV to hold free and low-cost workshops to teach women with little to no filmmaking experience how to produce video.

Dyke TV advertised digital media courses for up-and-coming producers.

The Dyke TV founders continually affirmed that including a diverse array of lesbian voices in production was central to the mission of the show. Patierno explained:

“It was a real activist time, so there [were] these other lesbian groups in town…we would’ve been completely remiss if we didn’t reach out…it just felt like a no brainer, to be honest. We lived in New York. It’s a very diverse city…It would have been just a big void and a big problem if we didn’t try to make the show reflect at least what our city looked like and what the women in our city were doing.”

The producers conducted ongoing outreach campaigns to other lesbian and LGBTQ groups to recruit a diverse group of volunteers. Women were quick to participate, associate producer Harriet Hirshorn suggested, because it gave them the opportunity to tell their own stories: “that notion of, you know, picking up a camera and telling your own story and telling the story of your community and telling the story of your community’s ancestors…all of that was just really kind of riveting for people.” Over the years, Dyke TV worked with groups like the Asian Lesbians of the East Coast, the African Ancestral Lesbians United for Social Change, the Bronx Lesbians United in Sisterhood, and Las Buenas Amigas, whose members each produced segments for the show on a wide range of topics.

The name of the show was purposefully provocative. “We felt like it really encapsulated the times, which was a little bit in your face,” Patierno said. While “dyke” is an historically pejorative term, Chapman shared that the Dyke TV founders wanted to “take back that title” and turn it into something “affirmative,” and reclaiming the word “dyke” helped the team “confront lesbian invisibility.”

A 1994 review of Dyke TV in the lesbian periodical DykeSpeak.

This provocative attitude is reflected in the show’s early logos. The phrase “Dyke TV” is styled to resemble the logo of a superhero. Like the irreverent and in your face demonstrations of the Lesbian Avengers (a group whose name conjures the image of vigilante caped crusaders fighting for lesbian justice), the Dyke TV team played with pop culture superhero imagery for its own provocative style.

The show’s original title sequence is playful as well: The letters spelling out “DYKE TV” fly into the frame one at a time. The letters, all-caps and in various bright colors, are shaped as if they have been cut out of a newspaper or magazine, reflecting the feminist zine and riot grrrl punk movements happening in the early 1990s.

A still from Dyke TV’s title sequence

Dyke TV ’s recurring segments explore lesbian culture, life, and activism. On Dyke TV ’s first “Lesbian Health” segment, for example, two women on screen show the audience how to perform a cervical self-exam in front of the camera using a mirror, a flashlight, and a speculum. The segment recalls the ethos of the women’s health movement of the 1970s, reminding viewers that, as argued by publications like Our Bodies, Ourselves, it is important to empower themselves in a world where women’s healthcare is marginalized. Other “Lesbian Health” topics included AIDS and HIV transmission, menstruation, menopause, breast cancer, and family planning. The fact that public access TV in New York was relatively unregulated at the time allowed the team to openly discuss sexual health on the show and to air segments that would otherwise be censored on commercial TV.

A still from Dyke TV’s “Lesbian Health” segment

Another staple was “I Was a Lesbian Child,” segments that featured a woman narrating the experience of looking through pictures of her childhood as she reflects on her sexual identity development and family life. The segment was inspired by a Lesbian Avengers action, at which the Avengers wore t-shirts bearing the titular phrase to a protest of a school district in Queens. The “I Was a Lesbian Child” segments use childhood snapshots to trouble conventional understandings of girlhood as non-sexual and/or innately heterosexual. In each segment, lesbian identity becomes an act of reconstruction: a queer reading of childhood snapshots in the service of creating lesbian histories of the self.

A still from Dyke TV’s “I Was a Lesbian Child”

Many episodes include an “Arts” segment, profiling lesbian, queer, and trans cultural producers. Over the years, the series showcased a “who’s who” of queer luminaries like Barbara Hammer, Cheryl Dunye, Carmelita Tropicana, Su Friedrich, Toshi Reagan, Nicole Eisenman, Barbara Smith, Leslie Feinberg, and Dorothy Allison, celebrating artists, writers, and musicians who were often ignored or under-appreciated in mainstream publications.

Leslie Feinberg and Cheryl Dunye on Dyke TV

Meanwhile, Dyke TV ’s opening “News” and “Eyewitness” segments reported on LGBTQ current events around the country, and later, around the world, providing news coverage that would likely have otherwise gone unmentioned on TV. Into the 2000s, Dyke TV increasingly covered trans issues. Dyke TV covered the political funeral and memorial service for Amanda Milan, a trans woman murdered in New York, and aired a short documentary about trans women called I Am Your Sister featuring Sylvia Rivera. Dyke TV also profiled trans community groups like the Other Brothers in San Francisco, interviewed artists like Kate Bornstein, Silas Howard, and Harry Dodge, explored the drag king scene around the country, and covered trans legal resources available at the NYC LGBT Community Center. The Dyke TV team imagined an expansive understanding of the term “dyke,” and trans issues and activism belonged squarely within its mission and vision.

The San Francisco-based butch and trans performing arts group Other Brothers, profiled on Dyke TV

Other Dyke TV segments focused on love, sex, and relationships. “Dyke Dish” shared lesbian celebrity gossip, while “Lexa’s Lesbian Love Signs” provided tongue-in-cheek horoscopes for viewers invested in astrology. “Clubland” and “Oh What a Night!” were nightlife-themed segments that interviewed guests and staff at lesbian bars and parties throughout the city. “Blind Date,” a reality TV-esque segment ahead of its time, filmed lesbian couples before, during, and after their first dates. In the 2000s, the show created “What’s Your Problem?”, a call-in show within the show whose hosts gave viewers advice about their relationships.

“Lexa’s Lesbian Love Signs” on Dyke TV

Dyke TV also filmed and aired its own promotional commercials. One recurring commercial tells the story of two women who break up with their male partners to date each other. At the end of the commercial, the voiceover narration declares: “Lesbianism, what a beautiful choice! Keep it that way. Support Dyke TV!” The commercial playfully suggests that women can choose loving and fulfilling relationships with one another by rejecting compulsory heterosexuality.

A commercial on Dyke TV

Over the years, Dyke TV faced a number of financial, technological, and social challenges. Like a lot of independent LGBTQ media outlets, Dyke TV pieced together its funding from a variety of different sources. A bequest from Mary Patierno’s brother, David Miller, who died from complications due to AIDS in early 1993, provided the bulk of its early funding. Other sources included viewer donations, sponsorships from LGBTQ businesses, and grants from foundations. The executive producers incorporated the show as a nonprofit called DTV Productions, Ltd. and assembled a board of directors to help sustain production over the years.

Still, throughout the 90s and 2000s, the team had trouble raising funds to match its expenses (rent, office supplies, video equipment, and small salaries for its few staff members). Dyke TV episodes began airing biweekly and later monthly, decreasing the production output to lower costs and reduce the constant pressure on staff and volunteers to create and edit content for the show.

To create a new source of revenue for the show, Dyke TV also began to offer workshops focused on digital media rather than just video production, including introductory courses to using the Internet, designing a website, and digital video editing.

Through the 90s, Dyke TV moved offices to cheaper locations as rents rose across Manhattan and moved to a storefront in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn in the early 2000s.

Dyke TV ’s move to Brooklyn, where it operated until the last episode aired in 2006, signaled bigger shifts that led to the show’s end. In the early 2000s, the founding producers of the show were largely no longer involved in its operations, having moved on to focus on their own projects and careers. By 2003, the most senior staff member was Jules Rosskam, a 23-year-old trans filmmaker who served as the Executive Producer until 2005. While Rosskam, along with a number of volunteers, organized to produce Dyke TV segments and episodes, the lack of mentorship from more experienced filmmaking professionals impacted the consistency and format of the show, as well as staff morale. “Everyone involved just scrambled to get money to keep the organization afloat and pay our rent,” he told me. Constant financial insecurity plagued the small team, making it difficult to envision a sustainable future for the show.

Technological and representational changes impacted the show as well. Cheaper video technologies and digital video editing software became widely available in the 2000s. By 2005, new digital streaming websites, like YouTube, provided a free (if corporate-funded) platform for video distribution. A burgeoning LGBTQ and feminist blogosphere shifted interest away from public access towards new opportunities and platforms for writers online. Many queer filmmakers could use digital media to tell their stories and share their perspectives without relying on the resources at their local community media center.

As commercial media outlets grew interested in representing lesbian culture in the 2000s, Dyke TV ’s efforts to claim a space for lesbian visibility on TV became less urgent. It may not be a coincidence that Dyke TV closed its doors two years after the premiere of The L Word. While the 90s “lesbian chic” phenomenon was short-lived, it created a model for commercially successful lesbian content adopted by marketers, advertisers, and media executives throughout the 1990s and 2000s that appealed to straight viewers and consumers. The increase in lesbian representation sparked hope that commercial TV might finally provide opportunities for LGBTQ representation, seemingly lessening the need for independent LGBTQ TV.

In 2005, lawyer Cynthia Kern was hired by the board to serve as the Executive Director of Dyke TV. While hoping to revive the organization, she closed it by the end of 2006. “In the end, the money wasn’t there anymore,” Kern told me. Fewer volunteers, increasing rent prices in Brooklyn, and a lower demand for services meant that Dyke TV was quickly running out of money as well as content. Without the money to fund operations, Kern and the board had no choice but to close Dyke TV for good.

With the help of a volunteer, Kern packed up the storefront and drove the records up to Patierno’s house in Western Massachusetts. Some years later, Patierno donated the archives to the Smith College Library, where the video content and paper records are accessible for researchers. Smith has since digitized many episodes of the show, which are available to watch on its website.

While financial struggle, changes in TV representation, and the development of digital technologies eventually made it difficult to continue producing Dyke TV, the show has had a contemporary revival. Video journalist Ainara Tiefenthäler organized a series of Dyke TV screenings in Brooklyn between 2018-2020, before the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. The show resonated far more with her experiences of lesbian relationships and community than contemporary and commercial movies and TV. “Every lesbian I know is hungry for content,” Tiefenthäler told me over the phone.

A Dyke TV screening in 2018 introduced contemporary audiences to the show.

Dyke TV ’s scrappy, homegrown feel contrasts with slick, highly produced commercial media made about lesbian lives. Its expanisive, activist mission still feels novel in a media landscape where LGBTQ representations are typically designed to appeal to a straight, cis audience. At a time when independent LGBTQ and feminist media outlets have shuttered because of lack of funding, sharing the history of the show can demonstrate just how important these outlets are to creating and sustaining LGBTQ community. As Tiefenthäler told me, Dyke TV still feels necessary: “It doesn’t seem very dated to me…overall the way topics are treated, the kind of humor, what kind of issues are covered or discussed, still seems awfully relevant.”

How Realistic is “A League Of Their Own”? Let’s Do a Historical Deep Dive!

The Prime Video Series A League of Their Own, inspired by a 1992 film by the same name, tells the story of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, a real thing that existed in the Midwest between 1943 and 1954. Initially founded by famed chewing gum man Phillip Wrigley (owner of Wrigley Field, home to the Chicago Cubs), the league attempted to address a few interconnected issues. As emphasized in the film and TV show, Major League ballplayers were enlisting and thus thinning the ranks and starpower of their teams, and league owners were panicking about how to maintain love for America’s National Pastime during this slump. But there were other reasons, too. Minor League teams were so depleted by the war effort that many had to shut down entirely, a loss compounded by the fact that war-sanctioned travel restrictions were in place that made it tougher for fans outside of large cities to attend Major League games. Meanwhile, scores of war-related factory workers and their families in mid-size industrial cities like Rockford, Illinois, were in need of wholesome American evening entertainment to distract them from the woes of the era. And finally, women’s softball was actually already pretty f*cking popular, which we’ll talk about more in a minute. Thus the AAGPBL was born.

But how much of Prime Video’s League of Their Own is based on true stories, and which elements slightly revise the historical record? That is what we’ll be discussing today in this herstorical deep dive into the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, softball and baseball leagues for Black players, and lesbian culture in the 1940s.

The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League Actually Started Out as a Softball League

ROCKFORD, ILLINOIS – 1944. The Rockford Peaches of the All American Girls Baseball League pose for a team portrait at home in 1944. (Photo by Mark Rucker/Transcendental Graphics, Getty Images)

Although the show portrays the girls playing baseball from the jump, that wasn’t the case — they were mostly softball players recruited from local softball teams to play softball! Softball was an enormously popular American sport starting in the late 1880s, with hundreds of thousands of players joining teams in leagues all over the continent. By 1942, over 200,000 men’s and women’s softball teams existed in the country (including teams at all-women’s college), and local leagues attracted sizeable followings, including a beloved well-attended Chicago women’s softball league that inspired journalist Herb Graffis to note at the time that “it has been no secret to sports fans in the Midwest that girls’ softball in Chicago has been outdrawing the major league baseball clubs.”

Therefore, when the AAGPBL launched in 1943, it was originally called The All-American Girls Softball League. Some rules were shifted away from softball’s to increase the excitement of the game: the ball was slightly smaller, pitching distance was enlarged, base-stealing was permitted and the game lasted nine innings rather than softball’s seven — rule changes that inspired them to switch out “Softball” for “Baseball” in the league name mid-season, but not enough changes to prevent it from being changed from “Baseball” to “Ball” for its second season. Over the years, more rule changes and league name changes were made to keep the games exciting until it did become actual baseball and was named accordingly. This shift proved especially challenging for pitchers who’d honed their skills pitching underhand, and added a layer of difficulty to player recruitment.

The All-American Girls Baseball League Was a Midwestern Enterprise

Opa Locke, FL: Sophie Kurys of Flint, MI, member of the Grand Rapids, MI, Chiks, demonstrates her sliding ability during spring training here for teams of the All-American Girls Baseball League. She was the league’s base-stealing champ last year. Covering the plate is Ruth Lessing of San Antonio, TX, Chicks’ catcher.

As portrayed accurately in the show, the league drew its players from all over the U.S, Canada and Cuba; but its teams were all headquartered in Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana and Michigan, close enough to one another for away games to conform to wartime gas rationing restrictions. At times the league attempted to break into big cities, like Chicago and Minneapolis, but women’s baseball didn’t catch on there as it did in mid-size towns like Rockford, Kenosha, Racine, Muskegon and South Bend. Rockford was an industrial powerhouse, with many factories contributing to the war effort, and Rockford was also home to the military base of Camp Grant.

As addressed in the intro, these cities all had bustling populations of workers who were depressed about the war and death, and Wrigley was certain that women’s professional baseball was precisely the sort of wholesome family entertainment these workers should be enjoying in their off hours.

Did the Players All Live Together?

While the “entire team living in the same house” dynamic was necessary to create the human dramas portrayed in the show, in truth the girls usually boarded individually or in small groups with local families to “further enhance the clean-cut image” they were meant to portray. While playing away games, they’d sometimes room in boarding houses and sometimes at-home players would occupy a group home, but in general we did not get the delightful dormitory lifestyle the film and show portrayed.

Did Black Women Play in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League?

As portrayed in the show, the AAGPBL refused to allow Max, a Black woman, to try out for a spot in the league. But in 1947, Jackie Robinson broke the baseball color line and in the ensuing years, the Major League’s shift towards racial integration caused the question to come up again for AAGPBL owners. Unfortunately, they maintained their intolerance! Firstly, they argued it was already difficult enough to generate interest for women playing baseball, let alone Black women. Secondly, they claimed it’d definitely be difficult to find qualified baseball players as most Black women played softball — but this was also true of white women, so that was simply the same “we can’t find any” shit that employers say to this very day. Their third reason was, as hinted at in the show, they did not consider Black women to fit into the narrow “All-American” feminine standards they imposed on their players, rooted in the ideals of white-middle class respectability. According to Coming On Strong, in 1951 they decided against recruiting Black players “unless they would show promise of exceptional ability,” but made no efforts to attract or find any, and a Black female player who’d later join the Negro Leagues (more on that in a second) was told she was unwelcome when she showed up for AAGPBL tryouts in 1953.

Thwarted by her experience at AAGPBL tryouts, Max agrees to get a job at her local factory to potentially play for their team, as (accurately at the time) most local softball and baseball leagues were organized around workplaces. Max and Clance working at the factory is also realistic — Black “Rosie the Riveters” indeed joined the wartime factory ranks, many traveling great distances for jobs that offered unprecedented (but temporary) economic opportunities.

Were Black Women Allowed In the Negro Leagues?

INDIANAPOLIS, IN – CIRCA 1950: Teammates on the Indianapolis Clowns of the National Negro Leagues work out in a photograph around 1950 in Indianapolis, Indiana. (Photo Reproduction by Transcendental Graphics/Getty Images)

The first season of A League of Their Own eventually sees Max becoming the second female player on a Negro League baseball team. While it’s true that women did play in the Negro Leagues, they didn’t do so until the early 1950s, after the National Negro League had already folded, following an exodus of star players and fans into the Major Leagues after it began accepting Black players. Syd Pollack’s Indianapolis Clowns (“The Harlem Globetrotters of baseball,” likely the inspiration for Red White’s All-Stars in ALOTO), were one of the four remaining teams in the Negro American league, and in 1953, Pollack signed the league’s first female player, Toni Stone, who’d already played on three semipro teams. She switched teams in 1954 and he signed two women to replace her, certain the gimmick of female players would bring more fans to the league. One of them, pitcher Mamie “Peanut” Johnson, had gone to tryouts for the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League only to realize Black women weren’t allowed to play for the league. The other, Connie Morgan, had previously played five seasons with the North Philadelphia Honey Drippers, a semi-pro Black women’s baseball team, and had written Pollack directly to ask for a tryout after hearing about Toni Stone.

Did Latina Women Play in the AAGPL?

While Black women were excluded from the league, a grand total of eleven light-skinned Latina women were recruited to AAGPBL teams over the course of its existence. According to the ALOTO instagram, Lupe Garcia’s character was inspired by Mexican-American Californian AAGBPL catcher Marge Villa (who joined the league in 1946) and Esti Gonzalez by Cuban player Isabel “Lefty” Alvarez, who joined the league when she was 15 and is the subject of the documentary “Latin Nights: The Baseball Journey of Isabel Alvarez.” Like Esti, Isabel spoke limited English, and often felt lonely, isolated and homesick on her team. 

Baseball had been Cuba’s top national sport since the 1870s, and the AAGPBL held their 1947 spring training in Cuba, where they scouted Eulalia Gonzeles, the first woman from Cuba to join the league. Many Cuban players felt homesick and struggled with the language barrier, inspiring some to cut their AAGPL careers shorter than expected. Isabel’s mother had to convince her to return for the 1951 season, at which point, much to Isabel’s relief, Mirta Marrero, another Cuban player, joined the Fort Wayne Daisies.

The Mexican-American community in the U.S. also had a profound love of the game, with women’s teams attracting local fans in Latine neighborhoods, often sponsored by churches and small businesses.

When the AAGPBL toured in Latin America, Villa served as her team’s interpreter.

Were AAGPBL Players Forced To Wear Skirts and Go to Beauty School?

Wrigley was incredibly uncomfortable with the “mannish” women he saw on softball fields across the country and created his league “with the highest ideas of womanhood in mind… the natural appeal of women in every walk of life will be brought out in this venture. Girls will dress, act and carry themselves as befits the feminine sex.” He emphasized the intrigue and entertainment value inherent in feminine women playing a “mannish” game, the “amazing spectacle of beskirted girls throwing, catching, hitting and running like men.” They were forced to abide by strict codes of conduct, given chaperones, made to observe full makeup and beauty routines and forced to wear impractical, feminine uniforms. As in the show, a beauty mogul was brought in to whip the women into shape — Helena Rubenstein taught classes on fashion, makeup, posture and proper speech for the league’s first two years. Although players resented these restrictions and the uniforms, they also simply saw them as rules of employment and generally complied. Although the show and film frame these guidelines for femininity as essential to the league’s success, whether or not that’s true remains a matter of debate.

Were There Really That Many Lesbians in the All-American Girls Baseball League?

There sure were!

“The lesbian lifestyle has long been a bugbear in ball-playing circles,” writes Lois Browne in The Girls of Summer, before going on to note that “there were some lesbian players, and, chances are, chaperones. The fact of being lesbian was probably an added inducement to flee the stultifying atmosphere of their home towns and go on the ball-playing circuit.” Regardless of the sexuality composition of the sport overall, those willing and able to leave their home teams, move to a new city and travel unpredictably for several ensuing years would logically often be women without husbands or children, or women itching to get away from whatever family they did have.

According to The Hidden Queer History of “A League Of Their Own”, the league’s rigid standards of femininity were imposed in part to ensure the women were not perceived as lesbians. Rules against inter-team fraternizing were also partially rooted in a desire to stamp out romantic and sexual relationships. Managers who suspected a lesbian affair was afoot within a team would refuse to let the two continue to room together. In “Coming On Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth Century Sports,” Susan K. Cahn writes that “knowledge of gay women in sport ranged from hazy, unarticulated awareness to an informed familiarity or personal involvement. Often an athlete’s initial awareness of lesbianism developed from seeing women ‘pairing off’ or getting ‘very clannish’ with each other.”

The exact prevalence of lesbianism in the league is impossible to quantify, but the historical record is full of evidence that there was a significant percentage of queers in the league, including the two women at the center of Netflix’s documentary “A Secret Love.”

Maybelle Blair, who joined the Peoria Redwings in 1948, told the audience at a screening of A League Of Their Own, that “out of 650 [players], I bet you 400 was gay.” That’s over 60%, for the record, and ALOTO’s team is only 46% gay. Soooo take that, homophobes who think the percentage of lesbians on the Peaches is unrealistic!

“I’m very happy with what they’ve done. It’s things that Penny Marshall couldn’t say in 1992,” Blair told The Los Angeles Times. “People weren’t ready for any of this, but it needed to be told because it is the truth. These are the things that I really appreciated.”

Were There Lesbians Living Fully Lesbian Lives in the 1940s?

World War II was actually, relatively speaking, a pretty great time to be a lesbian, certainly better than the decades immediately before and afterwards. For a brief shimmer of time, women’s labor was necessary to the American military machine and therefore the idea that women, specifically white middle-class women, were best suited to making pies and children, went out the window. There were more jobs open to women than ever before, enabling greater economic stability without male support and the war brought women together in friendship but also “to learn to appreciate other females as serious, self-sufficient human beings,” working together in pursuits they considered important.

It also became easier for lesbians to blend in to the general population of women now that they weren’t the only ones making their own money or going to bars and restaurants with other women. There was less pressure to date. Many married queer women like Carson Shaw got a little break from their husbands. It was even okay to wear pants, since so many did so to work in factories, which enabled lesbians to more openly experiment with fashion that enabled them to spot and attract other women.

Furthermore, increased attention to “deviant” sexuality from psychologists and literature incidentally gave women the language to describe their experiences that they may have lacked in earlier decades.

All of this progress would be swiftly rolled back in the super-conservative 1950s!

Was Gay & Lesbian Nightlife in the 1940s A Thing?

1945, Male impersonators posing at Mona’s, via Wide Open Town History Project Records Courtesy of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society.

During World War II, “increased freedom for women to defy expectations of all kinds” led to many lesbian bars opening and in some cities, “bar hopping became a favorite weekend activity, especially for working-class lesbians.” Gay and lesbian nightlife did flourish during the war, not only in gay hotspots and ports like San Francisco and New York, but also in midsize cities near military bases and factories. In Buffalo, New York, historians have verified the existence of at least 26 gay & lesbian bars during the era. Although Buffalo’s population was about five times that of Rockford’s (the second-biggest city in Illinois at the time), it’s realistic that a city Rockford’s size would be host to at least one LGBTQ+ establishment.

Series co-creators Will Graham and Abbi Jacobson told yahoo that AAGPL players they spoke to while writing the series “told us stories of sneaking out to bars and barely escaping raids,” which was ‘a reality of life for all kinds of queer people at the time, and is still a reality for people in many parts of the world now.”

D’Arcy Carden told Vanity Fair about a story Maybelle Blair shared about her first time in a gay bar: “When we asked her questions about what it was like back then, we expected her to be like, ‘It was a struggle every day, and I feared for this or that.’ But Maybelle said, ‘It was a party. I walked into that bar and I saw those other women, and I was like—oh. This is what I’ve been missing all my life.”

The possibility of raids, imprisonment, and subsequent outings through the local newspaper held different degrees of risk for different queer people, depending on race, class, employment, family situation and financial resources. The risk of patronizing gay establishments is part of the reason why these bars were generally segregated by race and class (the other part of the reason is racism and classism).

Although Black queer bars existed across the country (including bars specifically for Black lesbians), often Black queer people preferred to congregate at private house parties. Like Uncle Bertie and Gracie in A League of Their Own, Black queer couple Ruth Ellis and Babe Franklin hosted regular parties for the Black queer community at their home in Detroit, eventually called “The Gay Spot.”

Bar raids became more common in the 1950s and 1960s, and owners could often avoid them by paying off local police or by having ties to the Mafia.

In Conclusion

You should watch the show, it’s pretty gay

Non-web sources for this piece included:

Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality In Twentieth-Century Women’s Sport, by Susan K Cahn, University of Illinois Press,1995

The Belles of Baseball: The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, by Nel Yomtov,  Adobo Publishing, 2017

Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, by Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis, Routledge 1993

Girls of Summer: In Their Own League, by Lois Brown, Self-Published 1992

Latinos and American Popular Culture, edited by Patricia M. Montilla, ABC-CLIO 2013

Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America, by Lillian Faderman, Columbia University 1991

When Women Played Hardball, by Susan E. Johnson, Seal Press 1994

Women at Play: The Story of Women in Baseball, by Barbara Gregorich, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1993

32 Excerpts From Really Special “League Of Their Own” Reviews Written By Homophobes Who’ve Had Quite Enough

The new Prime Video series “League of Their Own,” inspired by the original 1992 film “A League Of Their Own,” has been received with rapture by binge-watchers all over the world but has also been met with derision from a portion of humans who are upset about Ye Olde Lesbian Agenda. That’s right, “A League Of Their Own” actually intended to represent the league as it truly was: crawling with lesbians. As a member of the queer community and a big fan of queer history, I find this thrilling but, predictably enough, there are humans out there who feel differently and have taken their rage to the world’s top rage receptacle: internet review boards. The one-star reviews section for A League Of Their Own is a real cesspool of human intolerance: people complaining about there being Black characters at all, people complaining that racism is addressed in the story, people complaining about lesbians, the word “woke,” ladies doth protesting too much, people complaining about swear words, and people complaining about historical inaccuracies in a way that often disregards actual history and/or what was actually portrayed on the show. Also, a lot of really sharp Eagle Eyes who want to just let us know that Janis Joplin songs are from the 60s, not the 40s. Okay?

Below please witness excerpts from homophobic reviews left on the Amazon Prime Video page for of “A League Of Their Own,” ripped mercilessly out of context but mostly presented in their entirety. I have edited some of these comments for clarity, grammar and spelling, but also sometimes left errors intact for artistic reasons.

1. “Wanted baseball, got gay. Not for me.”

2. “A league of inspirational women breaking barriers or a league of sexually confused/ lesbian women?”

3. “As a woman who played baseball throughout my life I find the impression that all women who play baseball are lesbians is highly offensive.”

4. “We stomached 2 episodes. Lesbians were the theme. The left ruins everything.”

5. “Seems like it was written by nasty old men who are more interested in seeing women make out with each other rather than women in empowerment like the original movie.”

6. “The main character is a feminist who immorally sends a letter to her husband. Garbage scene, Hollywood always has to have the modern woman who “doesn’t need a man.”

7. “Knew this would not be like the old movie, BUT did not expect this to be about homosexuality and cheating on spouses.”

8. “Women in the 1940s were conservative and respectful. This series tried to make them into whores and lesbians!”

9. “There are millions of women athletes and those into all kinds of sports who are not gay. Just as all professional male dancers (i.e. ballet, contemporary…) are not gay.”

10. “I’m so damned tired of Hollywood shoving homosexuality down our throats as if 75% of all relationships are homosexual ones. Although Homosexuality is less than 1% of the world’s population, Hollywood makes everyone think that 7 out of every 10 people are either already homosexual or have the propensity to be.”

11. “…[they make the] women who were, in actual life, really fine, dedicated ballplayers look like a bunch of sex addicted sluts.”

12. “When you push identity politics into a series this is what you get.
Then add the LGBQXYZ1234#$% and you get this mess.”

13. “Girls can have deep friendships that don’t become sexual. A show about that would be far more refreshing.“

14. “I wish women could be represented and sports movies like men. Those movies are always about the love of the game, not their sexuality.”

15. “This is basically just the porno version with a whole lot of white male hate going on in it.”

16. “Families stay away! Lesbian kiss scene first episode, F BOMBS throughout not necessary.”

17. “Everyone is queer. It’s nothing like the movie which is EPIC. Is Janet the mean girl? The best friend? Mean lesbian? Mean straight girl I? can’t figure it out. ”

18. “The original was about women getting the opportunity to play a sport. The series is all about sexuality and blah blah blah.”

19. “If you want to be gay or whatever you want to call yourself, that’s fine. There is NO need to push it into people faces.”

20. “… it was like orange is the new black rockford peaches edition without the entertaining drama or romcom.”

21. “Way to go, Amazon, with furthering the stereotype that straight women can’t be good athletes, or that they’re all sleeping with each other!!”

22. “SORRY NOT SORRY MY 7 YEAR OLD DOESNT NEED TO WATCH LGBTQ HAVING SEX OR THE LEADING INTO IT.. THIS IS MORE OF SOFTCORE GAY PORN THAN A FAMILY SHOW! WHAT IN THE HELL DOES LGBTQ HAVE TO DO WITH THE HISTORY OF THIS ERA?”

23. “I cannot believe they took an amazing story about brave, bold women of the 1940’s and turned it into a complete homosexual extravaganza.”

24. “That satanist Madonna replacement character: gay and dragging another woman down with her. That personality hemorrhoid Rosie O’Donell character: gay.”

25. “I loved the league of their own movie and was hoping for a light funny show. This show is less baseball, less humor and a lot more lesbian sex scenes. It should be called “Bush League” At least then you would know what you are getting.”

26. “Nothing against the LGBTQ but its awful.”

27. “There was a pandemic, the economy is in the tank, inflation is up, .. nobody is in the mood for continued lectures from the woke class about their misogyny, their white privilege, etc.”

28. “women’s baseball… gay? im sorry i can care less who you do… but do not shove your crap at me, especally a womans baseball movie… i love women and i love baseball…”

29. “More like 2022 than 1943. The story is typical in a 2022 environment. POC, Friends of Dorothy, smoking, swearing, clothing, etc. Almost nothing happened IRL back in 1943 and that’s the issue.”

30. “The baseball stuff was good. I don’t know how it ended cause I canceled my membership cause of this.”

31. “They didn’t even show any loving heterosexual relationships with the female players. This was a great opportunity for a great movie and they blew it. I had to force myself to Finnish watching.”

32. “Should have just called it ‘The L Word Season of A League of Their Own.'”

Every “A League of Their Own” Reference in Prime Video’s “A League of Their Own”: An Obsessive Guide

When news of the A League of Their Own television series broke, I simply had to know: How many A League of Their Own movie references would there be to feast on? And would I actually be nerdy enough to study those A League of Their Own Easter eggs frame-by-frame?

You see, I love very little things in the collective history of cinema like I love A League of Their Own. That’s not hyperbole! When the original film came out in 1992, I was six years old. I did not see it in theaters (because I was six) but I requested that my mother rent it, every single week, from Blockbuster for our weekly family movie nights for FIVE MONTHS on end!! Everyone please pour one out for my sweet mom and her patient soul because I’m sure she still has shudder worthy flashbacks when anyone says “batter up.”

Well my friends! The answers to those questions were “yes” and “even more yes.” I have watched the entire series, all eight hours, front-to-back, twice before it even dropped on Prime Video in a brave effort to catch all the A League of Their Own movie references and Easter eggs — every possible whiff of sweet, sweet nostalgia — present them to you here.

All of this, because I love you.

But first, some ground rules: I spent a lot of time thinking about this, and not everything in a piece based in real actual history, like A League of Their Own, counts as “movie references” or “Easter eggs.” Some things are just plain facts of the time period, and I am not going to count them here! This would include, but is not limited to, “baseball fans are being sexist” or “both teams played night games” (duh) — just to give an example. We will have a deep dive into the history of the 1940s coming next week from Autostraddle co-founder and CEO Riese Bernard. But for today we are talking movie specifics only!! I’m also not including “this actor kind of looks like that person” or “look they are both wearing sideswept pin curls” — because again, that comes with the time period! They all have 1940s pin curls or are tall/short/red haired! Humans walking around happen! (There’s two notable exceptions to this rule, and when you see them I feel confident that you’ll agree).

Thus far my obsessive research has discovered a grand total of 35 A League of Their Own movie references and Easter eggs in A League of Their Own! They are listed in episode-by-episode order, so you can follow along while you watch at home (but don’t scroll ahead unless you like spoilers! Or if you do scroll ahead, at least please do not yell at me about spoilers. This whole post is spoilers. That’s what you have agreed to by reading it, there’s no crying in baseball).

I’m starting my third rewatch today! If I find any more A League of Their Own Easter eggs, you can bet I’ll include them here — if you find any before me, let me know in the comments! You can also follow all of our A League Of Their Own coverage, including daily recaps, because trust me, we are just getting started.

All of the A League of Their Own Movie References and Easter Eggs in Prime Video’s A League of Their Own

Episode 1: “Batter Up”

1. The Train!! Running!! Scene!!

2. Walter Harvey, the Candy Bar King, owns the Rockford Peaches and is a founder of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL), his nephew is the manager of the ball club. (In the television series, it’s “Baker’s Chocolate Candy Bars”, not Harvey Bars, but c’mon… we know what we’re doing here.)

3. Carson’s husband Charlie, like Dottie’s husband Bob, is away fighting the war.

4. Jo’s entire vibe can only be described as “The New Rosie” ⚾️

5. Speaking of which, Jo and Greta are both loud and brassy besties from New York with big dreams, and ring-a-ding-ding — that makes them the new Rosie and Madonna.

6. Tryouts happen in Chicago.

(1992)

(2022)

7. Carson’s grey overall uniform with a blue baseball cap is a direct reference to Dottie and Kit’s dairy farm baseball uniform.

8. The use of “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie” by The Manhattan Transfer over baseball montages (we love a good music cue, and can I just say finding this specific version of the song on Beyoncé’s internet from the 1992 A League of Their Own soundtrack took infinitely longer than expected!)

9. The unnamed Black woman from the 1992 film throws a ball so hard it impresses everyone around her, a direct nod to the fact of who exactly was left out of the AAGPBL due to segregation. This opens the door for Max who is kicked out of try outs even though she clearly has the best arm on the field — she still doesn’t make the team (racism), but she becomes the co-lead of the series.

10. A homage to Dottie catching a ball while doing a split.

(1992)

(2022)

11. A homage part deux to Rosie (excuse me, Doris) catching a ball by diving into the bleachers.

(1992)

(2022)

Episode 2: “Find the Gap”

12. Both versions of Peaches are coached by formerly famous men baseball players who had short careers and don’t want to be here. Jimmy Duggan, meet Casey “Dove” Porter.

13. Carson and Dottie are both catchers.

14. The beauty make over/ charm school scene, in its entirety. But damn do I love what the television series does with it and the commentary it makes about “queerness” and “passing.”

15. Everyone calls Carson “farm girl” — despite her not actually being from a farm (I’m counting this as an reference to Dottie and Kit both famously being from an Oregon dairy farm in the original).

Carson’s actually called a farm girl right from episode one, and during the entire series, but the moment in episode two’s “makeover scene” where they reference her “farm hands, farm face” was too good for screenshooting purposes to pass up.

Episode 3: “The Cut Off”

16. Carson and Dottie both lead the Peaches when the guy coach inevitably sucks at his job.

Episode 4: “Switch Hitter”

17. The use of the black and white 1940s newsreel as a narration device, so much worry about the “masculinization of women.” 🥺

18. This comes from Autostraddle A+ member Caitlin, who caught it when I missed it! “Dove offers Carson some dip the way Jimmy offers Dottie some. Carson thinks it’s gross but Dottie takes to it.”

19. While the Peaches travel to an away game with the Racine Belles, we learn from Carson’s notes that “Johnson, #23, always goes for the ‘high ones'” — of course Kit, who ended her career as a Racine Belle, never laid off the high ones. (Dottie: “Mule!” / Kit: “Nag!”)

20. The dueling battle of the hand call signs.

21. The team fights on the field.

(1992)

(2022)

22. Both Jimmy Duggan and Dove Porter get offered jobs in the men’s league (the difference being that Dove takes it, and Jimmy stays).

Episode 5: “Back Footed”

23. THERE’S NO CRYING IN BASEBALL!!!

Episode 6: “Stealing Home”

24. In A League of Their Own (the movie^TM), Alice thinks it’s bad luck to change socks. In episode six A League of Their Own (the television series^TM), Jess says “Lady Luck is on our side, so from this point on we change nothing! Not our shoes, not our clothes, not what we eat for breakfast. nothing!” And then later in the same episode, another player on the Peaches says they haven’t changed their socks “in weeks” in response to someone asking “what is that smell?” in the locker room.

25. A Racine Belle runs directly into Carson over the plate, and everyone hold your breath… Carson does NOT drop the ball. She! Does NOT! Drop! The Ball!

26. The Rosie cameo.

And if you listen closely, that sound you hear is me passing out —

Episode 7: “Full Count”

27. Kit and Jo both get traded. (And no, I’m not emotionally prepared to talk about Jo getting traded. If you made it this far, you know why.)

28. Dottie’s husband and Carson’s husband both come back from the war, just in time for the World Series.

29. Maybelle, a short curvy blonde, is found out to be a mother on the team (much like Evelyn, the short curvy blonde of the original, is the mother of Stillwell Angel — notorious brat and unofficial Peaches mascot of “You’re gonna lose!!” fame).

30. The Raw Hand Ball Catch!! You know the one. And you know what it does to me. 🔥🥵

Episode 8: “Perfect Game”

31. THE SONG!!! DID YOU HEAR ME WHEN I SAID THE SONG!!!

Did I cry? I cried. Did you cry? You cried. We all cried. It’s why we are here.

32. Kit and Jo both play against their former team in the World Series.

33. The bloody bruise.

(Little known fact! The bloody bruise that Alice gets in the original movie is a real injury that actress Renée Coleman sustained during filming, and director Penny Marshall worked it in. Ouch!)

34. In remembrance of Dottie catching a ball behind her back.

(1992)

(2022)

And Finally…

35. The Peaches lose the World Series — but they win in our hearts.

A League of Their Own’s Roberta Colindrez & Priscilla Delgado on Queer Maintext and Just Playing Ball

Feature image photos: Killilea/Getty Images for SCAD aTVfest 2020  // Michael Buckner/Variety via Getty Images // Prime Video

When Prime Video first released casting news for the A League of Their Own sequel, our TV Team lost our collective minds over the description of Roberta Colindrez as a talented, surly pitcher with something to prove. Colindrez has been an Autostraddle fan fave for a very long time, starring in the triply beloved Fun Home, I Love Dick, and Vida. Then the news that the series had added another Latina starter to the Rockford Peaches line-up: 20-year-old Priscilla Delgado, an up-and-coming superstar from San Juan, Puerto Rico who’s been on your TV since she was a child in Los Hombres de Paco. In the series, Colindrez plays Lupe, one of league’s aces, who has time for nothing but the sport. Delgado plays Esti, a first generation immigrant with wide-eyed passion for everything about the league. I chatted with the pair about finally seeing Latina representation in the beloved series, their characters’ complicated relationship, and the queer subtext of the original film.

Killilea/Getty Images for SCAD aTVfest 2020  // Michael Buckner/Variety via Getty Images // Prime Video

Heather Hogan: Let’s talk about your characters, Lupe and Esti. You have a really special relationship. It’s affectionate. It’s antagonistic. It’s really cool to see Latina characters finally making their way into this universe. Can you talk about your characters and your relationship with each other?

Priscilla Delgado: Well, I play Esti, the youngest girl in the league. She’s a Cuban girl coming directly from the island and she finds that Lupe is the only Latina girl apart from her in the league. So she really starts to be very, very, very excited about it. She really thinks she found a girl that can help her and guide her. And then she notices that Lupe, for some reason, doesn’t want to help her or doesn’t want to have any relationship. So that’s going to be very harmful for my character, for Esti. It’s going to be very sad, very heartbreaking, and we’ll figure out how this goes as the series progresses.

Roberta Colindrez: Yeah, and I think for, for Lupe, she has a very complicated past, and there’s a lot of stuff, particularly around family, that she had to sacrifice in order to be playing for this league. Something that’s really important to note is that the fact that there were so many Latina players in the league and it was never really addressed because they were white-passing. I mean, the whole reason they got to play was because they were white-passing. And so it created, I think, especially in this time, when you had so much to prove as a woman, as a Latin person — you had to really decide what you wanted to fight for, what identities you wanted to fight for. Not much has changed as far as what it means to be a representative of your ethnic group.

Heather: And Lupe comes in just wanting to play baseball.

Roberta: Right, for Lupe, she wants to be identified as a ball player as the best pitcher in the league. So for Esti to come around and say, “You are like me. We must be together. We’re a family, in our identity,” I think for Lupe, it’s really challenging and scary, and it feels like a step back or something, you know?

Heather: I think one of the really remarkable things about both your characters is that, as you say, the only reason they are in the league is they’re white-passing — but they’re both still dealing with a lot of racism, big moments, and also everyday microaggressions that other players aren’t even noticing. 

Priscilla: That’s why I think Lupe has this weird relationship with Esti because she just wants to stay in her place, be the best pitcher possible — and my character is very loud. She doesn’t care if she’s speaking Spanish very loudly. For Lupe, she’s thinking, “Okay, that could be dangerous also for both of us.” I think Lupe has lived a lot before. She has lived the meaning of being a Latina woman during all her life in the States. I think that’s also like a protection, sentimiento, right? A protection feeling she has for Esti.

Roberta: Yes.

Heather: Can you talk about your relationship to the original film or to growing up with sports? 

Priscilla: Well, my relationship to sport, it’s always been very strong. I grew up with soccer in my country. Baseball is also very popular in Puerto Rico. So I really didn’t know a lot about the movie because it was released when I wasn’t even born. So when I got the role, I really did my research. I saw the movie. I loved it — and then I had the best baseball training I could have ever have imagined.

Roberta: Yeah, we were doing some press with Kelly McCormack from the cast yesterday and she was just like, “Yeah, it’s one of those movies. It’s in the cannon of nineties films that just, of course everyone has seen it, you know?” So, I never thought about how huge of a thing A League of Their Own was for me, but I remember watching it as a kid and — well, there’s something about me and Lori Petty. Also, Madonna, Rosie, what’s going on? Marla Hooch? Come on. I love baseball, of course. But I love the movie for so many reasons I didn’t understand until I was much, much older.

A League of Their Own’s Melanie Field on Platonic Queer Love and Being the New Rosie

Feature image photo of Melanie Field by Vivien Killilea/Getty Images + Prime Video 

You know Melanie Field, even if you don’t know you know Melanie Field. The 34-year-old queer actress has been popping up on queer shows for years: Shrill, Heathers, Hashtag You on Lifetime. She also played fan favorite aspiring detective Bitsy Sussman in The Alienist sequel, Angel of Darkness. But you can forget all that. When Prime Video’s A League of Their Own series lands this Friday, Melanie Field is going to become Jo De Luca to you, and it’s going to take you less than ten minutes to fall in love with her. To oversimplify it, Jo De Luca is the Rosie to D’arcy Carden’s Madonna — if Rosie and Madonna had been overtly, canonically gay best friends in the beloved 1992 film. But Jo is so much more than a fast-talking, ride or die sidekick with a heart of gold and a cannon for an arm. Melanie Field hopped on the phone with me recently to chat about what it means to see a body like hers on the baseball field, the power of platonic queer friendships, and what it felt like for Rosie to tell her “you’re the me!”

Heather: I’ve watched the first six episodes of A League of The Own so far, and may I just say — Jo De Luca, what a heartthrob! I can’t imagine what it would’ve been like to see this character when I was like a teenager. It would’ve just changed my whole life.

Melanie: Oh my God. That makes me feel so good. You have no idea.

Heather: She’s got to be one of my favorite queer TV characters of the last — like, ever, maybe. I love her.

Melanie: Isn’t she just the best? I’m partial obviously, but I’m in love with Jo. I have been from the moment I read her on the page. I was like, wow, this character is so perfect.

Heather: Tell me why you think she’s perfect.

Melanie: God, she breaks my heart in all the best ways. She’s so earnest. She’s just so genuine. She’s funny even when she’s not trying to be funny, but people are laughing with her, not at her — because she’s just so in intensely lovable, right? She’s a great friend. She’s fiercely loyal and protective. She’s a lot smarter than she comes off in the beginning. She is a freaking great baseball player. She’s a star. She’s an athlete, like an undeniably incredible athlete. I mean, I can go on. I just think that she had so much to offer me as an actor, but I think she has so much to offer audiences too.

Heather: She’s one of the only characters who’s really living her truth when we meet her, and yet there’s still so much growth for her over the course of the series. 

Melanie: Yes. She and Greta (D’arcy Carden) have their thing that works. They are thick as thieves. There is an intense, platonic love there: family, sisters, like they are each other’s everything. And I think that Jo has fallen into a routine with Greta as kind of the sidekick, kind of like, “I’ll clean up your mess, like I’ll carry your bags, I’ll make sure everything happens.” And Greta is a dreamer and a romantic and a showman. And what’s amazing about this journey for Jo is that she gets to be exposed to all different kinds of people. And she gets to see how they bring out different aspects of her personality. And she gets to step into her own identity.

Heather: Right, Greta’s a huge part of her story — but that’s not her whole story. 

Melanie: Yes, and even though that’s scary, because change is scary, and it’s sometimes heartbreaking, it’s so exciting for her. I think that being seen for what she’s good at is so empowering. I mean, I have chills talking about it.

Heather: We don’t get to see a lot of great queer friendships on TV because we often don’t see more than one queer character on a TV show. What I really love about Jo is that she is ride or die, but when it’s time to drop the hard truth, she’s willing to do that. I have a small handful of friends like that too. Does that resonate with you in terms of your own queer friendships? 

Melanie: For sure, especially as I get older. I think that my ability to communicate with my friends has gotten better the more mature I become. And I’m this way with all of my friends now because I have purposefully curated a small group of people that I can be dead ass honest with and they can be with me. So yes, I think it’s incredibly important. And most of my friends are queer. I mean, I grew up in New York City. I came out when I was young, like 19. I was basically raised by gay people. That’s how I say it. I left my small town, went to New York and was like, “What? Who are all these people?”

Heather: Me too, but it took me 30 years! Platonic queer love is one of the most precious and valuable things in my life.

Melanie: Me too. We have really, really intensely bonded friendships and relationships, in some ways bonded by our similar struggles and our fears and our anxieties. But there’s a lot of queer joy in my life too. I would say primarily, there’s queer joy. I cherish my queer friendships so much. And yeah, just being able to tell it like it is and be like, “You’re acting a certain way,” or, “That’s not smart,” or “Get it together. This isn’t a good look on you.”  I’m really lucky, very similar to Greta, that I have friends like Jo.

Heather: Do you have any kind of relationship to the original film or to sports growing up? Did you ever imagine yourself on a baseball card?

Melanie: No way! I never imagined myself on a baseball card! I played sports. Well before I got into acting or performing, sports was kind of the cool thing to do, especially in grade school, elementary school. That’s when I started playing softball. I played volleyball. I was on the track team. I threw the shot put.

Heather: Oh, you were destined to be queer.

Melanie: I was destined to be queer.  I was like, “No, I don’t need to run the track, but I will throw this metal ball as far as it can possibly go.” But even with softball, I wasn’t very good at it. I was fine, acceptable, but sports definitely were a part of my life growing up. And also as I started to pursue theater, particularly musical theater, I got very into dance, which is a sport, it’s an incredibly athletic activity.

Heather: Did you bring all those dance lessons to the field? 

Melanie: I approached the baseball of the show somewhat from my history of playing baseball and sports, but, yes, really from a dance perspective. Even some of the baseball coaches that we had, some of the women that were helping us, I would do something and it would be really graceful, and they’re like, “Wow, you learned that so fast.” I’m like, “I’m just looking at your feet and basically treating like choreography.” I channeled that a lot on the field, just studying what they were doing and memorizing the moves, basically.

Heather: What was the training like? Was it really intense? 

Melanie: It was. It was intense. I mean, we had a great time because it was an amazing group of people and we were just messing around on the field all day. But we trained a lot — it started with just 7:00 AM, little sessions with just the cast and then expanded into two-week long intensives where we were all there. We almost had enough for one-on-one coaching. They were able to put so many women together to help us. We did that for the pilot and we did it again for the series.

Heather: That sounds like a dream. 

Melanie: We were in the thick of it for sure and definitely getting better, definitely unlearning a lot of the things we’d learned when we were like ten years old from these professional people. They were so patient with us, so generous with their time and really rooting for us. We all agreed and shared the goal that the baseball had to look great because these women were professional ball players. They were really good and they needed to look that way. So I’m really proud of how that turned out. It was a lot of work.

Heather: It’s so legit and I am very critical of fictional sports on TV. I didn’t even yell at you one time to get your elbow up, or lead with your hips! Are there any moments that stand out for you from your training? 

Melanie: I just loved every day on set so much. Darcy and I have been doing these interviews all day and we share this love for each other and this love for acting with each other. Part of it is that we were gifted this incredible relationship on paper, but we just have had instant chemistry when we met. It didn’t take any work whatsoever. We’re not faking an ounce of it. Like we loved each other. We gelled. And so some of those scenes I got with her one on one, particularly at the one where we’re sitting at the table smoking and talking to her her how her choices are freaking Jo out, and there’s a scene coming up in the episodes you’re going to watch, which was an intensely emotional scene for me and really for the whole team. Just what it took to get there emotionally as an actor, but also the love and the support and the collective energy that we all felt on that day was something I will not forget.

Heather: Ah, that’s amazing. What do you think Jo would’ve meant to you growing up? It sounds like you already had a great support network growing up and queer people in your life.

Melanie: God, she would’ve meant everything. Not only being queer but also just my body being on camera. Growing up, I never saw anybody who looked like me on television. I had absolutely no reason to believe that I would ever be on TV. The evidence just wasn’t there. One of the reasons why I love Rosie so much is because she was one of the first people I ever saw on television who I was like, “Oh, okay, I’m seeing myself reflected a bit.” But for the most part, I just felt like my existence as a fat person was completely ignored by the media.

Heather: Especially in sports TV and film. And now you are the change you wanted to see! 

Melanie: Being in this body, being able to play a fat, queer athlete is — it’s mind blowing to me and my personal experience. It’s a responsibility that I take very seriously. I hope and I dream that people like me feel seen and people like me feel like they’re being reflected. I think it’s just very powerful. It’s necessary, and I think that we need to feel like our society acknowledges our existence and thinks that our stories are worth telling and that we’re worth being seen. I hope Jo does that for anybody who looks like me or who doesn’t feel like they’ve seen their body types or any body diversity on screen. I was so proud to be in this body, playing an athlete. It was amazing.

Heather: Well, now I’ve got chills. There’s both power and grace in the way that you play Jo, athletically and emotionally. It’s beautiful. You mentioned Rosie. The first episode, when I met your character, I was like, “Oh, Jo’s the Rosie.” But you make that character your own. There’s certainly shades of what Rosie brought to her role, but Jo is her own person. Did you feel any pressure around that? 

Melanie: A little bit. I mean, the connection is kind of undeniable. I’ve been told my whole life like, “Oh, you remind me of Rosie O’Donnell.” When I met her for the first time, she even said — she looked at me and she’s like, “Oh, you’re the me.” No one’s pretending that we’re not going to be making a connection to this thing. But if anything, I just drew inspiration from her and from her character. But I was lucky. They only had two hours to kind of flesh out those roles in the film. We had eight hours of television and I was really lucky the writers gave Jo a lot on the page. So I feel like I had a lot to work with and I was able to kind of allow Rosie’s spirit and the spirit of the original film to be in me, but also I felt completely free to do my own version and my own thing.

A League of Their own lands Friday on Prime Video.

An Autistic Reading of Stranger Things’ Robin Buckley

Mild spoilers for season four of Stranger Things ahead.

Stranger Things is Netflix’s nostalgia-packed golden child. I remember having mixed feelings about its third season, feelings which can be summed up in two words: Billy Hargrove. But while the abusive, yet redeemed-in-death racist was very much a low point, we also got its highlight in Robin Buckley. Ah, Robin Buckley — what a pleasant surprise she was. A highlight that would grow and further catch my attention in season four, where throughout she spoke to both my lesbian and neurodivergent identities.

Robin was a delight to watch in her season three debut. She was funny, had great chemistry with fan favourite Steve Harrington, and her unique skillset as a polyglot who was familiar with Starcourt Mall proved invaluable. Not only that, but her coming out scene was handled with a lot of care and respect: she wasn’t outed, she wasn’t coerced, she did it of her own volition — and she was accepted. Steve even went out of his way to make her laugh after the fact! It was especially welcome because I remember worrying the two would get hastily paired up. After all, Steve had lost in the love triangle between himself, Jonathan, and Nancy. Years of forced heterosexual romances in TV had me worried, was Robin just going to be his consolation prize? Instead, she trusted him with her identity, Steve accepted her wholeheartedly and their friendship bloomed. It blew me away and honestly left me overjoyed.

Stranger Things isn’t — and honestly shouldn’t be — lauded for its progressive approach to queer rep. Will Byers has been in a “will they or won’t they” (haha) with coming out since the first season, and even Robin herself isn’t groundbreaking. She’s a skinny, white, conventionally attractive lesbian. That said, something about her felt different from other queer characters I’ve seen. I found myself not only relating to her struggles as a closeted lesbian, but to what felt like those of a neurodivergent young woman without the words to truly express or grasp it. As an autistic person, as much as I do look for LGBTQ representation in pop culture, I look for neurodivergent stories a bit more. It makes me feel less lonely, and more understood — and season four Robin pinged that radar.

She started as I remembered, a snarky, stylish-in-a-tacky-lesbian way band nerd, now with a new job at the local video store, and a new crush Vickie, a fellow band kid. I kept watching and in episode two, she confides the following: “I have this problem, where it’s like, I should stop talking. Then I guess I get nervous, and the words keep spilling out.” That’s the first thing where I was like, “Okay, been there.” But I didn’t think anything of it. Don’t we all get nervous around cute girls? And then, in a later episode, she’s paired up with Nancy Wheeler, and her character’s given a chance to shine in contrast to Nancy’s straightlaced nature. They share this exchange in episode three, which gave me genuine pause:

Robin: Did I come off as mean, or condescending or something?
Nancy: No.
Robin: Alright. . . . You don’t know me very well. I don’t really have a filter or a strong grasp of social cues. So if I say something that upsets you, just know that I know it’s a flaw.

Still, I didn’t really think anything of it until one scene locked it in, the one at Pennhurst Mental Hospital, where Robin borrows Nancy’s clothes. She complains about how tight Nancy’s blouse is, how itchy she is, and all her sensory discomforts. When it comes time to convince the hospital warden to let them in, she cuts loose, giving an impassioned speech, simultaneously complaining about her sensory issues, and overall throwing social cues to the wind. And it works — the warden’s convinced. Plus, later on, when they bolt, Robin confides that she has “terrible coordination,” and that she didn’t learn to walk until six months after most kids.

It was around then that my allistic, neurotypical sister asked: “Is Robin autistic?” I had to stop myself from punching the air in sheer celebration. If others see it, I’m not reaching. Finally, finally, an autistic lesbian on TV! Someone I saw so much of myself in! Her bluntness, her inability to read the room, her clumsiness, all things I saw in myself, all things I’d been told were symptoms to hide. She dealt with them too, and nobody saw her as any lesser for it. Hell, in the case of the warden, they actually came in handy.

I was so thrilled, I even went back to season three, to see if there’d been earlier hints. Sure enough, while Robin wasn’t as open about all of her struggles, she’s a self-proclaimed “loser” who spent her time in high school observing, not doing. As an autistic lesbian, it’s like looking in a mirror — high school was a minefield of heterosexual and neurotypical norms, and I acted much the same. I kept to myself, watching other kids flirt and kiss and go to parties, because I didn’t feel like I could act on my own desires and urges.

Now, let’s assume Robin’s neurodivergent behaviour is intentionally written as such — that she is autistic. That would be huge. To have someone so much like me be portrayed as likable and capable, in one of Netflix’s biggest shows ever, is thrilling. Doubly so, as her autistic traits have been some of her strengths. We’re so rarely given that kind of positive portrayal, rarely anything beyond a one-off, a background character, or a painful stereotype. Besides that, I can genuinely count all the queer autistic characters I’ve seen on TV on one hand, none of whom have been in anything as major as Stranger Things. If this was intentional, it’d be a game changer.

Unfortunately, I don’t have my hopes up. Stranger Things takes place in the 1980s, and our understanding of autism has changed in the past forty years. To us, Robin may seem neurodivergent, but back then, she was just quirky. I genuinely can’t imagine anyone else recognizing her as neurodivergent, herself included. Even in my own adolescence, in the 2010s, after my parents had sat me down and told me I was autistic, some part of me still denied the possibility that my brain was different, that my brain was disabled. I was a teenager literal decades after Robin would’ve been, and I still had this idea of autism as exclusively being nonverbal, being obsessed with trains, or being something you grew out of.

Besides, her not being a cis man means her odds of being assessed for autism would be low. Even in the 1990s, it was still assumed that autism was eight times more common in boys, a ratio now lowered to three in one, due to progress in recognizing autism in girls & AFAB folks. I would know, my own diagnosis journey has been long and complicated, and I still get the ever-classic refrain of “you don’t look autistic” on the regular, something cis autistic men in my life have never dealt with.

So, can I praise the Duffer Brothers for a great autistic character? I don’t know. It’s very possible that they weren’t even going for an autistic character, or a character with ADHD, or any other kind of neurodivergence. Sure, she’s clumsy, and not the best with social cues, but for all I know, the Duffer Brothers just gave her those traits as quirks. They’re both, to my knowledge, neurotypical, and neither’s given any indication that Robin was intentionally written this way. If representation isn’t confirmed, wasn’t intentional, and was written by people outside the marginalized group they’re representing, should it still be celebrated? Or is that below the bare minimum? I’m not sure there’s a simple yes or no answer for any of that.

However, I know this much — Robin Buckley in season four of Stranger Things made me happy. I loved seeing a character go through what I do on a daily basis, yet never fail to be funny, charming, and competent. I loved seeing someone who struggles with social cues befriend the most popular boy in school and go on all kinds of adventures. I loved that she was queer, and allowed to have crushes on girls. Whether purposeful or not, the fact of the matter is that it felt special and downright affirming. BUT if the Duffer Brothers ever do confirm she’s one of us — I’m never shutting up about it.

There Will Never Be Another Wishbone

I can’t stop thinking about Wishbone.

Y’all know Wishbone, right? The short-lived PBS series from the mid-90s that featured a darling Jack Russell terrier playing the titular role of Wishbone, a dog with an imagination so active he was able to recreate literary classics with just the power of his mind. That Wishbone.

Since last December, Wishbone and Wishbone’s literary adventures have been on my mind. Call it nostalgia for a less depressing and more joyous time in my life or a potential reexamination of the impact this little show had on my development, but I cannot stop bringing it up in conversation. At this point, every single one of my friends has heard me start a conversation with, “You remember that show Wishbone?” or “Wow, that reminds me so much of Wishbone.” I’ve had to defend Wishbone’s merits to my partner, who didn’t grow up in the U.S. and doesn’t quite get why I still have such a fondness for the show, and to a few other people who didn’t grow up watching it or didn’t have access to it where they’re from. What I’ve realized is that the people who get it, really get it, and the people who don’t will remind you constantly that Wishbone is “just a dog.”

For those who are uninitiated or don’t understand Wishbone’s whole thing or are too young to have experienced the true glory of the show, let me explain in a little more detail. You see, as I said, Wishbone is a dog. He lives in the fictional town of Oakdale with his owner Joe and Joe’s widowed mother, Ellen. Joe has two best friends, Samantha (“Sam”) and David, who are also in most of the episodes. There’s a few other characters who are around often — like Joe’s neighbor, Wanda; David’s dad, Mr. Barnes; the kids’ English teacher, Mr. Pruitt; David’s little sister, Emily; and the kids’ archnemesis, Damont. But the series really centers around Joe’s life and what he and his friends get up to. Every episode of Wishbone is set up the same: In the contemporary world, Joe and/or the people around him are experiencing some kind of conflict or are trying to solve a problem and then Wishbone uses his imagination to recreate the canonical classics of World Literature that most closely correspond with or relate to whatever it is the characters in the contemporary world are facing. Usually, Wishbone plays the lead role in his fantasies, but in the cases where he “can’t” (because of his sex or because it would be too technically difficult), he plays the sidekick.

Maybe that’s not enough of an explanation. Here, let me illustrate this for you using one of the episodes I loved the most as a kid…

The episode focused on Mark Twain’s Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc opens with Joe and David discussing their upcoming soccer tournament and how they’ll never win against a rival team because their star player sprained his ankle. Sam, a star soccer player herself (on the GIRLS’ team, of course), steps in to say basically, hey, I rule at soccer, too. I’m down to play for y’all. Joe and David are a little reluctant, but then enthusiastically decide to ask their soccer coach, Mr. Barnes, if Sam can play. Meanwhile, Wishbone imagines himself as Twain’s version of Louis De Contes, Joan of Arc’s page, and narrates the story of her rise to prominence from a farmgirl to the General-in-Chief of the French armies and her capture and untimely death at the hands of the English. In 28 minutes, we see both of these stories play out simultaneously, and the episode concludes as Wishbone’s voiceover narration leaves us with some bits of wisdom for us to take on our own journeys.

If you’re wondering, no, Wishbone’s mouth doesn’t move when he talks. And no, the characters in the contemporary world cannot hear Wishbone’s thoughts. And once again, no, Joe and the people around him have no idea what’s going on inside of Wishbone’s head. Only the characters in the stories Wishbone’s imagining interact with him as if he’s a real person, and to his credit, Wishbone (well, really, the dog actor named Soccer who plays him) does his best to seem like he’s a real person. I mean, when characters are speaking to him, he looks like he’s listening intently. When he’s involved in high stakes brawls or has to do something to get away from another character, he does the appropriate flips and backflips to get out of the situation. In the episode focused on the African American folktale of Anansi the Spider, he climbs a tree with a gourd on his back, and in his version of the legend of Robin Hood, he shoots a bow and arrow. He does it all himself while wearing period appropriate clothes in the process, and at the end of every episode, Wishbone’s voiceover narrates just how the stunts are done. Wishbone — ok, Soccer — was truly the Tom Cruise and Keira Knightley of children’s television.

The series played on PBS from 1995 to 1997 with 50 episodes in total that focused on everything from Homer’s The Odyssey to the plays of William Shakespeare to the novels of Jane Austen, Alexandre Dumas, and Charles Dickens to Sherlock Holmes’s mysteries to the biblical story of King David and Goliath and Juan Diego’s vision of the Virgin Mary as Our Lady of Guadalupe to Wu Cheng’en’s Journey to the West. All of the episodes are about 30-minutes long, and all of them tell two stories at the same time. Thinking about it — and writing about it — makes it feel like pretty standard stuff for kids’ shows in the 90s and, at the same time, it doesn’t feel like anything else at all.

What’s the deal with Wishbone? Why can’t I stop thinking about it? Better yet…what is the story, Wishbone?

In some ways, it feels like I was bound to be a literary kid. According to my parents, I started talking just before I turned nine months old, and I started reading early, too. My dad was a big reader and always had his trade paperback copies of the police procedurals and detective novels he loved to read laying around the house and in his car. My mom wasn’t a big reader but, in my very early childhood, she was insistent about ensuring my younger brother and I were engaging with art of all forms. I latched onto literature and visual art quickly and passionately, so much so that I begged her to take me out of dance in order to make more time for going to art classes and reading. I was seven when Wishbone first came on PBS, and even though I can’t remember the first time I sat down to watch it, I remember watching Wishbone a lot, both when the series was running and when it went into syndication.

Because of the animal element, I think it’s easy to see why kids were attracted to Wishbone, but I don’t remember ever fawning over the fact that Wishbone was a dog back then. Mostly, I felt like I was being let in on some kind of big secret, like I had access to stories that adults cared about. I’m not sure where it came from, but something felt especially furtive about Wishbone. Obviously, it was perfectly orchestrated to appeal to kids my age, but they weren’t telling kids’ stories or editing the stories to make them safer for kids either. (In the “Bone of Arc” episode I mentioned earlier, they show Joan of Arc just as she is about to be burned alive.) Wishbone made hard things — in both Wishbone’s literary dreamscape and in the world where Joe and his friends lived — accessible to kids without writing down to us.

The best episodes of Wishbone impressed on me the importance of storytelling and listening to other people’s stories. I can’t and won’t credit the show for instilling a love of stories in me, but I can certainly credit it with encouraging me to tend closely and thoughtfully to that part of myself that was beginning to blossom at the time. As I got older and graduated to the other sections of the library right before middle school started, I began reading some of the “adult books” that were featured on Wishbone first before any others. When my 8th grade English teacher gave us the daunting task of reading Romeo & Juliet the way Shakespeare intended it to be read, it felt less difficult because I could easily recall Wishbone’s own brush with star-crossed love. In college, one of my professors insisted we read all of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and the first thing I thought of when she said it was Wishbone’s short run as King Midas.

Wishbone taught me, very explicitly, that the stories we hear and read and tell each other are directly connected to our lives in the real world. It showed me how we can take stories — even ones that are from outside of our own cultures and experiences — and use them to broaden our perspectives on and change our perceptions of the situations we face and the worlds around us. It was an example of what it meant to seek guidance in places other than who and what was right in front of you. Before this past year, I didn’t think too much about how Wishbone was an essential block helping me fill in the foundation to this literary life I’ve been building since I was seven-years-old. When I think about it this way, it’s obvious how instrumental the show was to my maturation. Mostly, though, it has just kind of existed there in the background of my mind like so many of the most impactful moments of our lives do. But I know it was brought back to the front of my mind for a reason.

Revisiting Wishbone and rewatching these episodes I considered favorites is kind of maddening in the same way revisiting a lot of 90s shows can be. The cast was certainly not the most diverse of the era, and most of the literature featured in Wishbone came from white authors, but the approaches to the stories that were recreated for the show would probably get some pushback in elementary and middle schools and on Fox News now. In the episode about African American folktales, slave owners are referred to as “evil,” they don’t shy away from depicting some of the violence enslaved people faced on plantations, and West African people are depicted as courageous and resistant in the face of that oppression. Robin Hood’s episode plays out how you expect it would, but then it also features Joe organizing a protest at his school and Wishbone reminding us that we should always do what is right even if convention and authority tell us it’s wrong. The creators of the show were dedicated to telling the stories as closely as they could to how they were originally written, which meant that they also couldn’t shy away from showing some of the harshest truths about the society we live(d) in.

It feels strange to think about moments like these from the show in context with everything that’s happening in children’s education at the moment. I’m not arguing that the 90s was necessarily some freer, more enlightened time but looking at Wishbone as a small case study definitely reveals a very big difference between the loud pseudo-intellectualism of today and the prevailing commitments to truth in story- and history-telling in that part of the mid-90s. Twenty-five years ago, it wasn’t really up for debate whether or not slave owners were malevolent and violent, they just were. It was important for kids to know that, oftentimes, authority needs to be challenged, and they showed them how. It can often be hard to empathize with people who do “bad” things but people knew “bad” actions didn’t just come from out of nowhere, so they made things that explained this reality to young people and taught kids how to question the world around them. The truth of our history and how we live our lives — the actual truth, the one that’s often painful to reconcile with — wasn’t some bogeyman that was coming to destroy children and tear our communities apart. It was just what it is: the facts of our lives and the lessons we needed to learn from in order to create greater lives for all of us.

Surely, I don’t want to thrust all of this meaning onto Wishbone alone, but as I said, it makes sense that it came rushing back to me so incessantly this year. It’s not because I’m a nudge or because I like to torture my loved ones with obscure media of a bygone era. It’s more than that. It’s a reminder of something I think we’re losing sight of, even when we think we’re not. Wishbone was, of course, just a supremely talented dog, but Wishbone feels like part of a bigger project, the one where we fully recognize the power and potential of stories and allow them to help us change and shape our lives, our futures, and our unlived and unwritten stories for the better.

Slow Takes: “12 Dates of Christmas” and When Transphobia Makes You a Chaos Demon

Even though I’m trans and queer and my sister is cis and straight, she’s the one my parents threatened to disown.

She was in her early twenties, stuck between her dreams and reality, and she was offered an opportunity for fame, an opportunity for love. She was offered a spot on The Bachelor.

My parents were outraged. Like most Americans, they were far more willing to watch other people’s daughters get plowed with alcohol and thrust into the spotlight than their own. They told my sister if she appeared on the show, she’d get kicked out of their house. And so, she declined the producers’ rose.

At the time, I was a high school boy far more concerned with the platitudes of the show than the show itself. I wanted to find my soulmate — in lieu of confronting my gender feelings. I was an unlikely candidate to ever appear on a reality dating show considering I wouldn’t even play spin the bottle with my friends. (I thought kissing should be saved for romance.)

And yet, I think I missed my calling. More than my sister, I think I was the one who was destined to go on a reality dating show. After I transitioned, my Venus in Sagittarius started to poke at my long-held beliefs and behaviors. After I broke up with my partner, I was eager to embrace the chaos I’d always ignored.

With the perfect mix of horniness, instability, strategy, and desperation, I was ready. If androgynous queer trans women were appearing on The Bachelorette in 2019, I would’ve been a star. But when you’re 25 and newly out and newly single, you don’t need a contract. Queer community is a reality dating show.

“My name is Amanda Grace. I’m 33, I’m originally from Denver, Colorado, and I’m here to meet some ladies.”

So begins the second season of HBO Max’s niche reality dating series, 12 Dates of Christmas. While The Bachelor ends in a proposal, the goal of this show is for the three leads to choose someone to take home for Christmas. The stakes are low — and even lower when you find out they film in March.

Season one had two straight leads and one gay man, but season two is queer queer queer. There’s still one straight man — of course — but he’s joined by a gay man and the aforementioned Amanda. Unlike The Bachelor, where, traditionally, all the love interests are there from the start, 12 Dates of Christmas has an ever-evolving cast of potential holiday loves. Just when our leads are starting to get comfortable, someone new arrives, dressed as an elf, ready to steal them away.

Amanda has a soft stud aesthetic, and she insists she’s open to a variety of presentations in her partners. “I have had an attraction to anyone from, like, really feminine to very masculine women,” she says. “Women are beautiful.”

The producers don’t bring Amanda any dates with a more masculine presentation than her, but they do bring her Hina — 24, Leo, music executive, TikTok star, nonbinary. Hina’s introduction will be the last time the word nonbinary is said on the show — and there will be no direct discussion other than their pronouns.

As Amanda falls in love with Hina, she will treat Hina the same as everyone else she deems more feminine than her. But because of their transness, because they’re a Leo, Hina refuses to be treated like everyone else.

“My wish for Christmas,” Amanda says, “is to meet a beautiful woman inside and out.” Not all wishes are meant to come true.

Before I tell my story, I have to tell another. Before I make my confession, I must bore you with excuses.

I transitioned in a relationship. We stayed together for another two years, and then I broke up with her and moved to LA — or, rather, moved to LA and broke up with her. I had never dated as a queer person or a woman, and now I was in a new city learning that being trans is harder alone.

The first people I met in LA knew very few — if any — trans women , and it was felt in every interaction. I remember one party that turned into a Q&A, a room of cis people asking invasive questions, me offering personal answers to please. This was the same party where a lesbian told me she hated penises and a straight girl told me The Silence of the Lambs was her favorite movie. I responded by chugging Moscow mules without lime juice or ginger beer — so just vodka in a fun cup.

This became a pattern. I experienced transphobia, and I responded by partying. As my blood alcohol content rose and my inhabitations plummeted, I became a sort of court jester. Step right up and ask the tranny a question! She’ll respond by making a joke at your expense or by flirting with your boyfriend. No one saw me as a person so I let my humanity go — I let the humanity of everyone else go too. They couldn’t hurt me, I couldn’t hurt them. Except, of course, neither was true.

By the time I met a better group of queers, I’d been deep in these patterns for months. There was a difference between these new friends and the people I’d been spending time with. But being a trans woman in our world is being a trans woman in our world, and if you want to feel like a victim, you can. If you want to pretend to be invincible, you can. If you want to believe your actions don’t have consequences, you can.

It was in this moment I fell. And then fell again. Not in love, but in crush — the greedy, desperate kind. Two new friends, two older women, two seasoned lesbians too powerful to worry about. I didn’t realize they were people with their own lives and their own feelings. I didn’t realize they were already in a relationship — with each other.

From the moment Hina arrives at the 12 Dates of Christmas cabin, they call out the charade. Dressed as Little Red Riding Hood, they hand Amanda a basket of cookies and joke that they were up all night making them.

Hina is a 24-year-old queer on a reality dating show centered around Christmas that films in March. It’s not that they don’t seem eager to make an actual connection — or, rather, connections — but there’s a limit to how seriously they’re going to take it. It’s a game and they want to win. But it’s still only a game.

The first episode ends with Hina making out with Krissi, another love interest. We see footage of Hina sneaking into her bedroom late at night. Throughout the rest of the season Hina will say Krissi kissed them, and it’s unclear if the footage we’re shown is just the producers crafting a narrative or if Hina is trying to soften their actions with lies. Either way, who cares? As Hina says, “Even though Amanda is the lead, we all came here for the purpose of finding love.”

And why shouldn’t Hina explore other connections, especially when the lead is struggling? Amanda spends the season overwhelmed by the attention she signed up to receive. Her hesitance to flirt and desire for something serious make her a better candidate for lesbian OkCupid than an off-brand Bachelorette. She seems totally lost on the show and totally lost with Hina.

“Have you ever taken someone home for the holidays?” Hina asks. “I have but I’ve never taken a woman home for the holidays,” Amanda replies, oblivious. “Oh I see,” is all Hina says before the producers cut away. Maybe Hina addressed this in real life, or maybe they let it go like trans people so regularly have to let things go.

It’s true that Hina is sometimes enraptured with Amanda, sometimes apathetic. It’s true that Hina plays the game using other love interests as her pawns. It’s true that Hina starts to pull away whenever Amanda finally opens up. It’s also true that Hina is a 24-year-old nonbinary person and Amanda is a 33-year-old cis woman. It’s also true that they’re on a reality show being manipulated by substances and producers.

I struggle to judge Hina’s own potential manipulations when they’ve been brought onto a show that slapped pronouns under everyone’s name and called it a day. Queer representation is rare enough on dating shows, let alone trans representation, but that small victory doesn’t mean it’s fun for the person doing the representing. At one point, Amanda asks Hina if they would carry a child without any consideration of Hina’s transness. A lot of people on the transmasculine spectrum want to carry children, but that’s still a very loaded question to ask someone unless you view them simply as a woman with different pronouns. (One could argue it’s a loaded question to ask a cis woman too.) “I don’t know,” Hina says. “Part of me feels like no, just because I’m already so uncomfortable with the way that I perceive my own body in a lot of ways.”

Maybe off-screen, our Christmas daters discussed gender and race and other important aspects of their identities. Maybe it’s just that these topics are more important for dating than they are for a dating show — especially one on which people pet reindeers. But on-screen, there is none of it. On-screen, it’s unaddressed that Hina is the only one of Amanda’s dates that also wears a suit instead of a dress.

And so, when Hina creates chaos and encourages chaos in others, I couldn’t help but cheer.

That cabin wasn’t made for you — burn it down.

My crushes didn’t date for much longer, and I soon found myself in the middle of their breakup.

Only one of them lived in LA, and we became close. Let’s call her my friend and the other one my friend’s ex. My friend and I had so much in common, I felt like a younger version of her. Sometimes I took this as proof we were destined to be together. Other times, I decided this meant we were better as friends. There are so many different kinds of gay crushes, and my crush on my friend was never quite sexual. I was attracted to her. I wanted to kiss her. But I couldn’t imagine kissing her. I had her on such a pedestal that I could only imagine us together in a distant future.

My friend’s ex was a totally different kind of crush. Her pedestal was paired with real feelings. I saw us together even though people warned me she was just a flirt. I didn’t care. I’m a flirt too. Flirts still fall in love. The more we got to know each other, the better our banter became. I had never been so attracted to someone, and I daydreamed about her like an obsessive teen. Due to her breakup, I wasn’t in a hurry, but I could clearly see us together. For now, I was happy to become her friend. Even if that’s all we were ever going to be, I was happy to be her friend. I told myself that at the time, and I hope I wasn’t lying.

I only saw my friend’s ex once that summer, so that fantasy was allowed to metastasize via text while my relationship with my friend grew. They both talked to me about their breakup — the ex even talking through me when she assumed I was with my friend. I knew it was messy. I liked that it was messy. I felt like I’d wandered into my own episode of The L Word. I didn’t think my new friend might be upset I’d fallen for her ex. I didn’t think my new friend might be upset I’d fallen for her. All I knew is neither of these lesbians had ever been with a trans woman. All I knew is the few other trans women around us warned me not to try. I felt too inconsequential to cause harm. I felt too powerless to worry about anyone — including myself.

But as the summer waned, my invincibility went too. My friend’s ex was sometimes effusive and sometimes cold. I started to wonder if the warnings had been right. I started to wonder if she was even my friend or just, well, my friend’s ex. Instead of realizing both of these crushes were misguided, I decided to pivot my focus exclusively to my friend.

Drunk at the finale party of another queer reality dating show, I crossed the line I’d been circling around all summer. I didn’t try to kiss her — thank God — but I said an aggressive flirt. I was too drunk at the time to remember it now, but what I do remember is the way her face dropped. What I do remember is asking, “Do you want me to stop flirting with you?” What I do remember is her saying, “Yes.”

I sobbed from embarrassment the entire Uber home.

While the gays are processing feelings and providing reality TV gold, the 12 Dates straights carry on as usual.

Danny, the straight male lead, seems even more lost than Amanda. He says he’s looking for a wife because that’s what he’s supposed to say, but I’m not sure this man has ever even known what he wants for dinner.

Early on, he’s taken with Nicci, a fitness coach, as traditional and overbearing as his mom and sister she’ll soon meet. Nicci is 28-years-old and ready to get married. She’s everything Danny is supposed to be looking for, and he seems relieved to have his decision made for him.

Unfortunately for Danny and Nicci, their date is interrupted by a cute little brunette carrying a chainsaw. This is Brooke, 26, a script supervisor too genuine for reality. Brooke is so pretty it’s almost boring, but she’s fun enough to make it alluring again. She’s the TV version of the girl next door, meaning most of the girls we grew up next door to looked nothing like her.

She’s one of Danny’s last love interests, and the final few episodes will find him in shambles as he’s torn between the person who makes the most sense for him and the person he actually has chemistry with.

It’s unclear why Danny is so reluctant to pick Brooke, it’s unclear why Hina seems to be on Team Nicci, it’s unclear who Hina is talking about in the finale when they tell Amanda they’re interested in pursuing different connections from the show. At least, this was all unclear until after the show aired.

Three weeks after the season dropped, Brooke came out and revealed that after their time at the cabin, she and Hina briefly dated. Unfortunately, this was not shared on her own terms, but in response to another cast member threatening to out her. While Brooke shouldn’t have had to come out, this reveal does recontextualize the whole season.

Whether consciously or unconsciously, Hina’s focus on Amanda waned when Brooke entered the house. Whether consciously or unconsciously, Danny was choosing between a straight girl eager to get married and a bi girl just figuring herself out.

Hina’s chaos didn’t just affect other lives — it affected other storylines.

During the fall, my connection with my friend solidified, and my connection with her ex nearly vanished.

But on the eve of winter, my friend’s ex visited LA and the feelings came rushing back. At first, I thought we could just be friends. Then she hugged me, holding on more than a beat too long, and her pheromones made other plans. When she told me — in front of my friend — that she knew I had a crush on her and asked why we hadn’t kissed yet, I lost any attempt at a new boundary.

I wasn’t stupid. Whether on purpose or not, I knew my friend’s ex was trying to make my friend jealous. I’d talked to both of them about their relationship enough to know things weren’t quite settled. I called my friend’s ex out on this, and she said she just wanted to kiss me. And so, I kissed her. My friend, her ex, could have come out of the bathroom and seen us at any moment.

I spent the whole week stealing kisses with my friend’s ex, pretending like the silences weren’t filled with her lingering feelings for my friend and my friend’s lingering feelings for her. At one point, I tried to explain to my friend’s ex the intense, complicated feelings I had for my friend. It felt good to watch my friend’s ex process that she wasn’t the only one. It was chaos, but when I became overwhelmed, I told myself it was better to be chaotic than like those other trans girls who hadn’t tried.

One night when my friend’s ex and I were expected at my friend’s house, we snuck away and had what I’d call trans sex and what she would call our most intense make out. By the time it was over, both of our phones were filled with texts and missed calls from my friend.

When we finally got to her house, I made up an excuse. My friend looked me right in the eyes, her own glassy with drunk. I felt the sadness in her voice as she softly spoke one word.

“Liar.”

By the time I shared all this with my friend and my friend’s ex, the drama had continued without me. I realized I was a singular chaos agent in a story that started before me and would continue long after. It still felt important to be honest, apologize, and receive apologies, as needed. I admitted that for a lot of the previous year, I hadn’t really been friends with either of these people — at least not a good friend — but I wanted to be one now.

I don’t know the timeline of events for Hina and Brooke, and I’m hesitant to speculate on a situation already more public than desired. But what I can say is that Hina experienced a fantasy that every queer I know who watches The Bachelor has proposed. What if I got on the show and then fucked one of the straight girls? It’s fun to imagine sticking it to heteronormativity in such a straight space. But straight people have feelings. That newly bi girl has feelings. My friend had feelings. Amanda had feelings. My friend’s ex had feelings.

The people in our stories have stories of their own. The people in our fantasies are still people.

I absolutely don’t think Hina is responsible for all their chaos wrought — nor am I. Dating is messy, and I understand why I wanted to lean into that mess according to my own rules. But within that chaos, I realized I was still playing other people’s games. We hurt people, because we feel hurt. We hurt people, and we feel more hurt ourselves.

If you’re trans, there will be plenty of people who are equipped to date you — from within our community and outside of it. If you want to live in a reality show, go ahead and sow chaos, but if you’d rather have a romcom, you have to let go. Let go of the need to control the narrative, let go of the need to be the main character, let go of the risks that aren’t risky at all.

When you find real love, you won’t have to play the games. The chaos will vanish, the answer will be clear. You’ll know exactly who you want to bring home for Christmas.

Slow Takes is a series of “belated” reviews by Drew Gregory of queer art released last year that Autostraddle didn’t cover.

“The Owl House” Is a Place For All Us Queer Weirdos to Stick Together

The Owl House has already made history in terms of queer representation with the love story that has blossomed over the course of two seasons between protagonist Luz Noceda and her magical classmate Amity Blight. Then, it made history again by introducing Disney’s first non-binary character, Raine Whispers. Who also happens to be deuteragonist Eda Clawthorne’s old flame.

Eda herself has long been a fan-favorite, having been part of the series from the very first episode. We first meet her when teenage protagonist Luz steps through Eda’s magic door into the strange and often terrifying world of the Boiling Isles, home to witches and demons alike. Eda is one such witch, the most powerful one, in fact, if her boasting is to be believed. She is also a wanted criminal on the run from the law, mostly for something she didn’t do: join a coven. This makes her a “wild witch,” whom government propaganda declares to be a danger to society. After taking Luz on an adventure, she agrees to teach her magic and let her stay in her home, the eponymous Owl House; and over the course of the series, the two bond over their social outcast status and weirdness.

In fact, it is right in episode one that Eda coins what could be considered the show’s catch phrase: “Us weirdos gotta stick together, you know?”

She is beloved among fans not just for her weird and kooky ways, but also for the narrative involving the incurable curse that has been put upon her in her teens, which causes her to turn into an owl-like beast that reads as a pretty obvious metaphor for disability, neurodivergence, and illness and/or mental illness. People with many of these conditions see themselves in the way she has to take daily elixirs to manage her curse and the way it touches every area of her life, while she also tries to make the best of it and keep a positive attitude.

An episode I, as a chronically ill and neurodivergent person myself, particularly appreciated was Season two’s “Keeping Up A-Fear-Ances,” in which Eda’s mother is introduced as a figure who keeps looking for a cure for Eda’s curse against her wishes and ends up harming her in the process. Ultimately, she sees the error of her ways and swears to henceforth accept and respect Eda, and the way she decides to handle her curse, in full. Not being listened to when it comes to the management of one’s disability or illness feels sadly familiar, and I am very grateful that The Owl House took the time to address this issue in their show.

Fans have also speculated about Eda’s sexuality, aided by the little bi flag seen on her cheat box in a shot of an episode in the first season. Because why would a character who shucks all norms be heterosexual, after all?

This, however, remained in the realm of hypothesis until the season two episode “Eda’s Requiem” introduced Raine Whispers, who was advertised as “a witch from Eda’s past” and confirmed as nonbinary on social media. The show goes the route of their gender being accepted as perfectly normal, with they/them pronouns being used for them without comment. Raine’s character is anchored firmly in the story from the get-go, as they are introduced when they are appointed head of the Bard Coven, one of the most high-ranking positions in Boiling Isles society. At the same time, this introduction establishes their personality by requiring them to make an acceptance speech in which they stumble over their words and ultimately run off stage in a panic. Soon, however, we learn that they have a hidden agenda: all these years, they have been working toward building a resistance to the Emperor’s restrictive and punishing reign, and they credit Eda with inspiring them to do so when the two meet again. We see this via flashbacks.

One shows a younger Raine and Eda on a hill, and Eda is playing Raine’s Rhapsody, an instrumental piece she appears to have composed for them, and gives them a speech about facing their fears. “Just give ‘em a whack right in the face”, she says, and she’s talking about the performance they skipped out on to hang out with her instead, but they seem to have taken it to heart and remembered it when they discovered how corrupt the coven system is, ultimately causing them to plot their rebellion. Due to the show’s tragically shortened run, there isn’t much time to develop a character introduced this late, but the show’s crew uses every opportunity to flesh Raine’s character out as much as possible.

Eda and Raine’s love story parallels Luz and Amity’s in the way it slowly develops in sometimes beautifully understated ways. No big declarations of love are made, but the way they blush around each other and declare their worry and care for the other speaks volumes. In Knock Knock Knockin’ on Hooty’s Door, Eda is fed sleep-inducing cookies by a well-meaning Hooty, leading to a series of flashback-dreams in which she grapples with her past and the Owl Beast. The first part shows a teenage and likely recently cursed Eda accidentally attacking and permanently injuring her father when he sets off a party popper that triggers her curse. In the next part, she and Raine are confirmed to have dated in their youth, only for Raine to break up with Eda for lying to them about their curse and pushing them away emotionally in the process. It’s hardly far-fetched to say that Eda’s previous experiences with the curse caused her to always keep Raine at arm’s length because she was afraid of hurting them.

As someone who has pushed people away due to mental illness before, I certainly felt for Eda in that moment, even as Raine’s perspective was also perfectly understandable. When they reunite in the present day, they bond over their distrust of the restrictive coven system and desire for change, kicking off the rebellion against Emperor Belos in earnest. Because as Eda once inspired Raine, she is in turn inspired by them: to see the bigger picture, think beyond herself, and begin to believe that systemic change is possible. And this is really what makes this a great love story for me, one where through each other, the characters gain a deeper understanding of themselves and the world around them.

In a time when non-binary people seem to be mostly thought of as a new phenomenon that mainly appears among young people, it is quite momentous for a cartoon to introduce a non-binary character that is middle-aged. It also reflects reality, as even celebrities in their thirties and forties have come out as non-binary in recent years; such as Queer Eye star and voice actor Jonathan van Ness, actor Sara Ramirez, or Japanese pop star Hikaru Utada.

And for The Owl House to have both a queer ship between teenagers and one between older characters is equally important. Luz and Amity tell queer kids they have a present; Eda and Raine tell them they have a future.

What Are Lesbian Eyebrows? A Housewives Investigation

Hello, Bravo Dykes! It has been a minute since I last delved into the queer happenings of the Bravo universe, so let’s delve in, shall we? Today, we’re talking lesbian eyebrows.

Yes, welcome to my TED Talk, LESBIAN EYEBROWS EXPLAINED. First, some context.

The Real Housewives Ultimate Girls Trip recently returned for its second season, subtitled The Real Housewives Ultimate Girls Trip: Ex-Wives Club, as it exclusively features Housewives who have been fired from their respective franchises. Or, according to Dorinda Medley, merely “put on pause.” She can indeed make anything nice.

Dorinda (New York) hosts the ex-wives — Phaedra Parks and Eva Marcille of Atlanta, Taylor Armstrong and Brandi Glanville of Beverly Hills, Vicki Gulvalson and Tamra Judge of Orange County, and Jill Zarin of New York  — at her Great Barrington estate Bluestone Manor, home to iconic Housewives memories like the time Sonja Morgan made it very clear that you don’t touch the Morgan letters and the time Bethenny Frankel for some reason told Luann de Lesseps neé D’Agostino neé de Lesseps she fucks everyone…as if that was a bad thing! Mention it all, baby!

Now three episodes in, The Real Housewives Ultimate Girls Trip: Ex-Wives Club can be summed up by the following: Three Scorpios, two Sagittarians, an Aries, a Gemini, and a Virgo are trapped in a house together for eight days.

A lot of these women do not really know each other beyond being Bravo sister wives and watching each other’s shows. The ones who do know each other mostly have baggage with each other (except for Jill and Dorinda, it seems, but I think that’s because they were never actually in the cast together, and it tends to be the shows themselves that ruin friendships). So much of the first episode is spent on rehashing old drama and also introductions. Brandi wastes no time asking the important questions: Have you ever been with a woman? she asks the table.

this would also be my first question if I were at a table full of Real Housewives

No one really answers, which is not surprising, because most of these women tend to just talk at each other rather than to each other, so group questions like this are more like words whispered into the wind and then floating away. But Brandi presses on, telling the other women that yes, of course, she has been with both men and women, and while she thinks she prefers men, she is just attracted to any sexual energy. I don’t think I need to tell you she is one of the three (3!) Scorpios. None of this is new information btw. Brandi said last season on Beverly Hills that she’s bisexual.

Some of the women are surprised by the fact that Brandi has been with women, and by some, I mostly mean just Vicki, who is seemingly the only woman at the table who doesn’t watch the shows she isn’t on. Because as Tamra points out in a testimonial, Brandi was at the center of dyke drama last season on Beverly Hills, which I attempted to write about at the time even though it’s VERY MESSY.

who can forget??????

Brandi is far from the first Housewife to talk about having sexual or romantic relations with women. Across the franchises, Housewives in every city often refer to this as “taking a dip in the lady pond” and, like, is that a phrase actually used anywhere else other than Bravo?! Where did they get this from?! Why does it make dyke activity sound like synchronized swimming???? Bravo bizarrely touted Miami’s Julia Lemigova as “the first LGBTQIA+ Housewife” ahead of Miami’s reboot, but that wasn’t really true unless you added a bunch of qualifiers to it and also have a very narrow definition of queer but I DIGRESS. We’re here to talk about lesbian eyebrows, and I promise it’s coming. But it does feel like a good time to also bring attention to this clip of Luann saying she wants to take a dip in Kyle Richards’ lady pond:

chic c’est la vie @CountessLuann ✨ pic.twitter.com/o3psm7RQLp

— 𝖆𝖓𝖓𝖆 (@___adorn) June 25, 2022

In episode two of The Real Housewives Ultimate Girls Trip, Dorinda — who is representation for those of us who like to create a physical itinerary for vacations — brings the girls to a supposedly haunted mansion where there’s believed to be a heavily perfumed ghost. They are going to do readings with a medium (DON’T WORRY IT’S NOT ALLISON DUBOIS…iykyk) and eat a chef-prepared dinner.

Upon arriving at the haunted mansion, Brandi takes one look at the chef for the evening and says to the other women, casually, “she’s a lesbian” and, mysteriously, “I can tell.”

Perhaps the moment would have just breezed on by, but Vicki Gulvanson decided to announce at the dinner table to the husband of the chef that Brandi thought his wife was a lesbian. Everyone is a little confused and also…you know that thing that sometimes happens where sometimes perfectly normal words when said by a certain kind of straight person in a certain kind of tone suddenly sounds like a FULL-ON SLUR? Something about the way “lesbian” sits in some of these women’s mouths makes me want to forbid them from ever saying “lesbian” again.

Phaedra decides to broach the topic when Brandi returns to the table. “What made you think the lady was a lesbian?” she asks.

“Her eyebrows,” Brandi replies, completely deadpan and also as if this were the most obvious thing in the world.

Now, I knew this moment was coming. It’s featured in the trailer for the season, which I immediately watched five times in a row when it first dropped specifically because of this line. LESBIAN EYEBROWS? It is something I simply never could have predicted coming out of Brandi’s mouth in this moment, and I appreciate Real Housewives’ ability to always keep me on my toes. Phaedra’s full-body cackle at Brandi’s answer is Me.

I thought perhaps that this would be the last we heard of lesbian eyebrows. The trailer made it seem like a throwaway line. But no. Lesbian eyebrows do not go away. Brandi doubles the fuck down on lesbian eyebrows. Eva tries to chime in and say that clearly, Brandi was merely making a joke and “there’s no such thing as lesbian eyebrows.” To which Brandi says, again in the most deadpan of tones: “There is, actually.”

We cut to a testimonial, where Brandi says: “Generally, I can tell if someone’s a lesbian by her eyebrows.”

A producer asks the question on all of our minds: “What do lesbian eyebrows look like?”

Brandi replies: “I will tell you when I see them. It’s different for everybody.”

Perhaps it is her Scorpio confidence, but you know what? I believe her. I believe Brandi Glanville can take one look at a person’s eyebrows and say lesbian. In fact, I think that should be a game show. I want a shirt that says Lesbian Eyebrows. As a concept, it sounds perfectly scientific. And sure, I still don’t really know what it means, but who cares!!!! Lesbian eyebrows explained? Baby, there’s no real explanation. You either know or you don’t.

But while I thank Brandi Glanville for introducing “lesbian eyebrows” to my life, it’s the other women’s reactions that are, while not surprising, frustrating, especially given that I know they’ll never really be taken to task for them. Ultimate Girls Trip doesn’t do real reunions (just Watch What Happens Live wrap-ups), but even if they did, I doubt “lesbian eyebrows” would come up as anything other than a called back joke. And hey, it’s funny! I’m here making jokes about it right now! But it’s disappointing to know pretty confidently that Andy Cohen wouldn’t go anywhere near some of the casual lesbophobia and biphobia the other women throw around during the lesbian eyebrows moment: They all trip over themselves to assure the chef she’s attractive as if lesbian is synonymous with ugly; Phaedra multiple times insinuates that “lesbian eyebrows” must mean unkempt eyebrows; Taylor like maybe has a point about it being kind of rude to just go up to a man and speculate about his wife’s sexuality, but the way she makes that point really does make it sound like being a “lesbian” is something horrible! And Taylor also calls Brandi a “part-time lesbian,” which is obviously biphobic, but also once again her tone makes it even worse, like this is meant to be an insult or a gotchya moment. It’s gross all around! And Brandi isn’t perfect by any means either. She is an agent of chaos, and I’ve had many issues with her through the years and even at times on this new season of Ultimate Girls Trip. And I really had a problem with the ways she may have outed Denise on Beverly Hills last season, even though she also didn’t deserve to be treated the way she was by other cast members and Denise. Again…messy.

But in terms of that last point, the thing I had the biggest problem with when it came to the fallout of Brandi/Denise on Beverly Hills was how the issue of outing someone wasn’t even part of the conversation at the reunion. While Andy Cohen has called out homophobia in the past during reunions, it’s usually about gay men, like when he told the Wives of Beverly Hills to stop referring to the gay men in their lives as “my gays” as if they were accessories and not, you know, people. I truly struggle to think of a single time Andy Cohen called out biphobia or homophobia against queer women or transphobia in the same way.

And homophobia happens often on these shows! And goes completely unacknowledged at reunions as anything real! On the most recent season of Summer House, Lindsey Hubbard shared that she has had past sexual experiences with women, which led Kyle Cooke to say he had the biggest boner of his life. Andy not only didn’t even hint at Kyle being kinda gross or how this feeds into the patriarchal idea that women hooking up with each other is for the benefit of men but actually joined in on the joke, thinking it was hilarious and asking Kyle’s now-wife Amanda Batula if it made her feel bad that she apparently can’t do it for him the way his fantasies about Lindsey hooking up with girls do.

Now, this is all small potatoes, I know. And I don’t mean to make this sound like a hit piece on Bravo Daddy Andy Cohen, who is my father. Bravo Daddy letting homophobia toward lesbians slide at reunions is actually very low in the rankings of Bravo’s most egregious and upsetting choices these days, including but far from limited to the decision to give Vicki Gunvalson a platform again even though she is openly an anti-vaxer and even SAYS SO on Ultimate Girls Trip!!!! I just get frustrated by how much queerness there really is in the Real Housewives universe but how it’s so often framed as scandal or salacity — not just by Housewives but by the producers, too.

Like, if I’m being honest, “lesbian eyebrows” is one of the funniest gay jokes I’ve heard in a long time, ESPECIALLY BECAUSE BRANDI DOESN’T CONSIDER IT A JOKE AND IS 100% SERIOUS. And she simply won’t explain it further, and I love that. I think she’s onto something. AND IN FACT, this is not even the first time “lesbian eyebrows” has appeared on this website. Former art and marketing director Sarah Sarwar wrote about having “lesbian eyebrows” in 2016. And the more I write the words “lesbian eyebrows,” the more I’m like, yeah, I get it. I can only hope that Brandi Glanville would take one look at the photo below and say lesbian.

I shall leave you with this image of Dorinda hand-feeding lobster to Phaedra:

Idk about Lesbian Eyebrows, but this looks like Lesbian Seafoodplay to meeeeeee.

This Episode of “Real Housewives of New York” Was Performative Pride Allyship at Its Finest

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Allies are the real backbone of queer culture.

[cue laugh track]

Just kidding. I hope you weren’t ready to flip a table at that statement, because today we are taking a journey into what allyship looks like on screen. What is an ally, really? Your options are: A) a Lady Gaga billboard, B) someone who tweets out “love is love” or “trans rights are human rights” for clout, C) a politician who “supports us” but then casually allows anti-queer policies to pass, D) the nice lady who yells “HIS PRONOUNS ARE THEY/THEM”.

The answer is actually E) all of the above, but allies are so much more than just that. Allies are everywhere on television, and we as queer people should be incredibly thankful for that, but my personal favorite place that celebrates allyship is none other than the Real Housewives franchise. No other series has done quite as much for representation on the small screen as Andy Cohen and his wide collection of American Girl dolls come to life, many of them dragging their gay accessories along with them to gossip with about their frenemies.

Since beginning my deep dive into the world of RH, I’ve been particularly taken by Real Housewives of New York. One episode especially has never left my mind when it comes to the housewives and how they interact with queer people. Hell, a scene from it was even tweeted out this year with the playful “happy pride month” phrase attached. That’s right folks, in this ongoing celebration of Pride, we’re going to talk about season four, episode two of RHONY, “March Madness.”

Let’s jump back over a decade to the top of RHONY’s fourth season, arguably one of the weakest of the series overall but not without its treasures (from stolen hangers to bumpy camel rides). All of the drama from past seasons continues to boil as this one begins, people try to sweep their mistakes under the rug to start fresh, and the women all come together and vaguely pretend to like each other at the first event of the season. While tensions are still low, Alex McCord announces she and her husband Simon are on the committee for the Marriage Equality March, which will proceed from Manhattan to Brooklyn to support those who want to get married and cannot, and that all of the women are invited to march along with them in their wedding dresses (or a white outfit that is adjacent in some capacity).

It’s a simple invitation that, without the context to come, is actually rather endearing. After all, this was 2010, and the Marriage Equality Act had still not been passed (though the season aired in 2011 just months prior to its signing). Seeing a bunch of straight women — Sonja included despite her attraction to women being alluded to many times later in the series, though she never identifies as “bisexual” herself — band together and set aside their issues for the sake of supporting queer people in their journey toward marriage (which was the issue du jour at the time) was a net positive. Do Ramona and one of her friends insert their own conservatism by toasting and suggesting marching for a small government? Sure. Does Jill take the moment and make it all about her as usual? Also yes. But, y’know, as queer people, we are forced to settle for crumbs.

It doesn’t take long for this to sour though, as everything about this event quickly becomes about none other than the women themselves instead of the people they claim to be doing this for. In the same episode, Jill makes excuses for not being able to attend the march while still being on some sort of honorary committee, and Alex guilt trips her about not attending. But the true magic doesn’t begin until “March Madness” itself.

Sonja Morgan begins the episode by noting she was invited to be the grand marshall and one of several speakers at the event, explaining that MENY (Marriage Equality New York) described her as the ideal opener: light, funny, and “such a gay icon.” Now, to be fair, Sonja Morgan is a gay icon (she’s “raised millions for the LGBT”), and I will admit to having had many a session with my therapist explaining how deeply and painfully I relate to her at times, but I digress. As soon as Alex enters the room, she reminds everyone that she is on the host committee, and the episode becomes a question of whose event it really is. As Kelly aptly puts it: “So is it Sonja’s day or is it Alex’s day? I’m not sure, but I was marching for marriage equality.”

Alex, bless her heart, tries to explain the significance of wearing bridal gowns to this event and is instantly cut off by Kelly, who clarifies they’re really just doing it because it’s fun and campy, while Sonja emphasizes this isn’t a public broadcast, and Luann calls her an annoying infomercial. What follows is a series of inane conversations about dressing up and various women challenging each other about the fact that it isn’t their day, but actually a day to support marriage equality. “She was trying to take ownership of a day that was supposed to be about a cause, not about a person,” Alex notes about Sonja.

This is further proven by the fact that, upon arriving at the event itself, Alex discovers that Sonja has blocked any of the other housewives (and their husbands) from speaking at the event. Simon, who had a speech prepared, has essentially been cockblocked because, as Sonja notes, “it’s about me.” The thing is, as right as Alex and Simon are in their frustration about the whole thing, they do, inevitably, participate in the same game as Sonja does. Everything becomes about them.

For half the damn episode, the women (and Simon) do nothing but argue with each other about who exactly is the problem and who exactly is doing the most for marriage equality and gay rights. Sonja’s speech (if you didn’t click the link above, I implore you to do so now) was something of a disaster, and Simon’s speech, which he recited in private to his friends at home, isn’t much better despite coming from a seemingly more sincere place. Every minute of this fight for marriage equality became something else: a showcase of who, exactly, should be allowed to pat themselves on the back the most.

These are people who have proposed themselves as bastions of selflessness, sacrificing their time and energy and voices for the sake of queer people, but are incredibly selfish in the way they approach it. There is no talk of why any of this matters beyond shallow comparisons to straight life, as it is simply a given that it matters because these women say it does.

To revisit and write about this episode, in some ways, feels like analyzing an ancient relic, something that is so bafflingly dated that it’s hard to imagine we were ever there. Even beyond the absurdity of the reality series itself, there’s something ridiculous about looking back at just a decade ago and realizing that marriage was the sole priority of queer people in charge. It’s easy to laugh at Jill when she jokes that gay people should suffer as much as straight people in marriage, but when you think about it — isn’t it laughable that that’s exactly what people were happy to settle for instead of fighting for safety beyond that?

“March Madness”, as completely unhinged and dated as it is, also reveals something far more depressing and contemporary: Nothing has really changed. Is watching faux-celebrities bicker over who is the best ally not essentially what we do every day now between Twitter and the news? I’ve long maintained that reality television, for all its inanity, is something of a microcosm of American culture. What is Survivor if not just showcasing how willing people are to backstab each other in the name of a prize? What did our last presidential elections teach us if not how much of an impact on the culture someone’s self-aggrandizing behavior can have?

Looking back at the last decade of television, including but not limited to “March Madness”, can actually show us exactly how things still are. To call the episode a perfect encapsulation of liberal bullshit isn’t a stretch, as it is just scene after scene of people in power praising themselves and each other for caring without actually doing a single thing. Think of how that plays into everything in politics designed to be for those who most need it. While conservatives do their damnedest to ensure people will be stripped of their rights, liberal politicians are showing up on Drag Race and doing nothing but telling people to vote.

This isn’t a new observation by any means, but the realm of politics is one in the same with reality television. Everything is about empty promises for the sake of self-promotion, to the point where streaming services are producing just as many shallow hagiographic documentaries about campaign trails as they are reality television. Anyone who even considers criticizing the actions of someone in power becomes the target of criticism themselves. Just like Alex and Sonja accuse each other of being narcissistic about the event, so does every politician who tells us we should shut up, take what we can get, and go back to the polls.

For all the pronouns in bio and tweets that say “trans rights are human rights,” is anyone actually doing anything? Or is it all one big performance? As depressing as it is, this is what ally culture is, and has always been, about. It is people who don’t understand our struggles thinking they have the experience to speak in our place. It is people with power cherry-picking which issues they care about and putting them on a national platform without acknowledging the mountain of other issues, sometimes far more life-threatening, that exist. With all the anti-queer rhetoric, propaganda, and legislature that continues to threaten us, wouldn’t it be nice if everyone stopped fighting over who gets to represent us best and instead actually fought to save us?

Kristen Kish on “Iron Chef,” Power Suits, and the Freedom to Be Her Queer Self

This Kristen Kish interview contains very minor spoilers for Iron Chef: Search for an Iron Legend

In my home, when Kristen Kish appears on TV, it’s like Christmas morning. We never know when it’s going to happen. Maybe she’ll show up and judge an episode of Top Chef, which she famously won in 2012. Maybe she’ll be on the Travel Channel, exploring foods from around the world. Maybe she’ll pop up on the Food Network, competing again. One time I caught a glimpse of her while I was clicking through channels, and stopped in my tracks to watch TruTV’s Fast Foodies, which I’d never even heard of before. Kish is a world-renowned chef, and she’s also a ubiquitous presence on food TV. She’s charming as heck, she’s endlessly generous, she’s got a quick wit, and best of all, she is just so enthusiastic about food. And that energy is contagious.

Kish, who came out nearly a decade ago after winning Top Chef, is currently the co-host of Netflix’s new incarnation of the three-decade-old classic, Iron Chef. She joins longtime host Alton Brown in their QUEST FOR AN IRON LEGEND, which has already rocketed to a top ten spot on the streamer chart in only a week. She recently took some time out of her incredibly busy schedule to chat with me about her new co-hosting gig, the welcome shift in conversation around fine dining, and yes, her impeccable Iron Chef fashion.

Heather: Let’s just jump in and talk about the best part of Iron Chef: Quest For an Iron Legend, which is your suits. You are a queer fashion icon. My wife and I are as excited to find out what you’re going to be wearing every episode as we are about the Iron Chef secret ingredient.

Kristen: You know, honestly, I was really excited about this. During the preparation for the show, they’re like, “You’re going to have a stylist. Can you send us some of your clothing options to see what we’re working with?” I was sending stuff and I guess I didn’t fully understand it either. I couldn’t see the full picture that it was going to be me in these suits. I thought I was just going to wear my bomber jacket and a t-shirt. I’ve always wanted to weather a power suit, but I just never have.

Heather: Right, you already have so many other supremely gay looks in your pocket.

Kristen: Exactly — but when I started trying on these suits, my heart was so happy. It was everything I wanted it to be. Being on a show like this gets you to step out of your comfort zone with your choices. I was like, sure, let’s wear a pink blazer with stripes! I don’t know if I would ever have picked that out on my own, but Bre Fleming, who is our stylist, did a phenomenal job.

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Heather: You do look powerful. You look like you. Isn’t it so cool to wear a suit and just feel like yourself? 

Kristen: Yes! Just looking at yourself, feeling so good. Out of all the suits, there was only one jacket that I owned, that was out of my own closet. They were like, “This is great!” One jacket out of my entire closet! I was like, “Thank you… I guess?” I did wear my own pants because getting pants to fit the way you want is very difficult. And I wore my own shoes. But Bre just crushed the rest. And now I’m wondering, if there’s a second season, could I even up my suit game?

Heather: I can’t wait to find out if that’s even possible. At this point, you’ve done it all. You’ve won Top Chef, you’ve been on Iron Chef as a contestant, you’ve judged so many cooking shows, including the Top Chef finale in the most recent season — how does hosting something like Iron Chef feel different than all that? 

Kristen: It was a full-on learning curve, for sure. I’m confident — well, “confident,” even though my anxiety is crazy high when I competitively cook — but, you know, cooking is what I do. I can talk about food in a way that feels judgey, but being able to host is hard! And it was new, learning how to do that, especially on a platform like Iron Chef, next to a guy that’s been doing it for 15 years by himself. The beauty of it is that I basically get to observe. I get to be excited about it. I don’t even have to feel nervous. All I have to do is convey what I’m feeling and seeing. And I don’t have to judge, which — god, that is so nice to be able to just sit at that table. To sit there and eat beautiful food and not have an opinion on it? It’s a dream.

Heather: You and Alton Brown seemed to have such an easy, natural chemistry. 

Kristen: We have to give credit where credit is due. Tom Keller, who is kind of the driving force who paired Alton and I up, he saw something in us. Alton and I had met one time when I was a contestant on Iron Chef. And of course I watched him growing up. He’s very gracious. When I met him, he was like, “Oh I remember you too!” And I was like, “Sure okay, probably not” — but I’ll take it.

I don’t know how they knew it would work, but as soon as we started that first episode, we started developing the chemistry, and I was like, “Wait a second!” It was like the feeling of working with an old friend, and by the second one, we just started to click. As the episodes go on, we get more and more playful. We talked a lot about how we were learning to do the dance, together. After the first rehearsal, we asked: What can we do for each other? What can we do to make each other’s jobs easier?

Heather: I loved how, as the season progressed, you seemed to get more comfortable coming out from behind that desk and just charging down into Kitchen Stadium.

Kristen: From the beginning, there was kind of an expectation that I would go down there. For the first few episodes, I was nervous. I was talking to the producers in my mic like, “Can I go? Can I go? Can I go now? Now can I go?” But then I did just start sort of charging in there. And they were like, “Kristen, wait! We’ve got to get a camera on you!” But I couldn’t wait. I was so excited. I just wanted to be down there and get in it because it’s so much fun.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CdJFSPeua4u/

Heather: Do you find it hard not to coach when you’re in that position? Not just as a chef, but as someone who’s had so much success cooking competitively? 

Kristen: Oh no, it’s very easy. I go in there fully knowing those chefs are so dialed in. I feel comfortable cooking, especially in my own space, but when you’re around that caliber of chefs, you’re like, “I’m not messing with any of this!” I’m just curious about what’s going on, I’m learning with the audience, these techniques and the way these flavors are developed. There were so many things I saw while hosting that I’d think, “I cannot wait to try this!” I’m there to be excited to watch my friends — because a lot of the chefs are my friends — do what they do best. And that is to just cook.

Heather: That’s such an awesome way to think about your role. I want to talk a little bit about this thing we’re seeing on Iron Chef this season, something we’ve been seeing on Top Chef the last few seasons, and that’s a real push to bring these shows into conversation with what’s happening in the broader culinary dialogue. We’re seeing more POC chefs on these elite shows, and we’re also seeing more freedom from POC chefs to explore all the facets of their identity when it comes to creating food. We hear it all the time now from POC contestants, that the food from their different cultures has always kind of been dismissed from the “fine dining” conversation, has always been looked down on because it’s not classic French cuisine, and now the door has been thrown wide open to really reimagine what we think of as “fine dining” food.

Kristen: God, it’s such a relief. It’s beautiful. Food, at its core, is storytelling. It’s storytelling on the part of the chef who’s cooking it, and a story all the way through to the person who’s eating it. Now we’re understanding that it’s acceptable to play with all kinds of genres of food, to think about where we’re from and where our families are from, and express ourselves more fully. We’ve all wanted this for a very long time. It’s kind of like coming out, right? You want to do it, but you’re afraid, and you think maybe you’ll just do it later — but when you finally really do it, you can just be your authentic self. There’s so much freedom there. Freedom to fully be exactly who you are. The storytelling of food is getting, literally and figuratively, more colorful.

Heather: Yes, and we saw that play out in so many moving ways on Iron Chef this season.

Kristen: Right, like Marcus Samuelsson cooking a Swedish and Ethiopian mash-up, and elevating it without losing any of its heart and soul. These foods from around the world, they’re delicious, they’re nuanced, they’re stunning. Also we have to rethink “fine dining.”

Heather: Talk about that more. 

Kristen: Quite frankly, fine dining is, to me, food that is simply done really well. Period. I don’t care if it’s a bowl of curry. I don’t care if it’s Jollof rice. I don’t care if it’s Dominique Crenn’s Michelin-starred cooking. It can all be beautiful. Take care of the food, do it well, and that is fine dining.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CezXgyrP2MO/

Heather: Have you found more freedom, personally, as these conversations have shifted? 

Kristen: Absolutely. I think maybe it’s a combination of my surroundings, my maturity, my age. Or, well, maybe also because I try not to give as many effs what people think anymore. But I do feel like I have more permission to be who I am, to experiment with who I am and what different foods mean to me. What feels right to me now might be different in a week. That’s what life is. It’s constant growth. It’s ebb and flow. We’re allowed to change. I’m going to cook what I cook and then tomorrow I might experiment with something completely different.

I took Midwestern comfort food and elevated it to a place where I can serve it in my restaurant. I’m currently in Korea. I imagine I’m going to come back and start playing around with those flavors, and I’m allowed to do that. I’m not scared of that anymore because we’re finally understanding that’s what people want. They want to experience your story through your food, whatever that story is, even — maybe especially — if they’ve never heard it before.

Heather: You were one of the first celebrity chefs to come out. You did it on Instagram back in 2014. Have you seen attitudes shift around queer people in kitchens since then? 

Kristen: Definitely. 100%. I mean, here’s the thing: We were probably watching a lot of gay people cook before we knew they were gay, right? Before we even knew it, they were here.

Heather: For sure. That’s true in all areas of history. 

Kristen: Right — so, like with everything, at first there’s a kind of panic or people getting triggered by gay chefs — but then it becomes the norm, like it is now. Gay chefs are everywhere and we’re not in some other category. It takes just a few people coming out, and then more and more chefs feel comfortable, and then we get to where we are today. Queer chefs are the norm.

Heather: Do you have any advice for aspiring chefs — or even artists, any kind of storytellers really — who exist at the intersection of marginalized identities? People who may not have been given the same opportunities, or who are worried about the kind of oppressions or struggles they might face if they pursue their dreams? 

Kristen: The culinary community is very broad, we have a lot of different avenues. When you’re trying to find that in, you have to find like-minded people. Sometimes it does take a little bit of research to figure out where you’re going to place yourself. When I announced that I was hiring for my restaurant, I very naturally attracted a lot of queer people and people of color. It just happened. You have to find your crew. You have to find your people. When you do that, there’s a level of empowerment, a level of safety to try new things. Find someone you admire who’s already doing what they do — and that’s always a good place to start.

Iron Chef: Quest For an Iron Legend is streaming on Netflix right this very second. 

Quiz: Which Fictional TV High School Should You Have Gone To?

High school: a ripe setting within which many of our most beloved LGBTQ+ narratives take place, inspiring us to say things like, “I could never wear that to my school” or “how does Will Schuster still have a job?” Now it’s time to find out which one of these fictional high schools owes you an education:

Which Fictional High School Do You Belong At?

"*" indicates required fields

1. Which of these mediums would be best for telling your high school story?*

Controversially edgy indie film

Teen drama

Musical

Romantic comedy

Adorable graphic novel

Erotic thriller

Critically acclaimed arthouse film with a cult folloiwing

Sitcom

Prestige premium cable dramedy

Supernatural adventure drama series with an unraveling multi-season mystery and light dystopian elements

2. Pick a place to grow up:*

3. Pick a musical:*

Fun Home

Hairspray

You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown

Spring Awakening

Fame

Hamilton

Jagged Little Pill

Chicago

Come From Away

The Prom

4. Pick a default after-school and weekend hangout spot:*

A burger joint with a jukebox and a '90s vibe

A posh country club

A beloved local bookstore / coffee shop hybrid

A gritty dinner with '70s Hollywood charm and killer hangover food

A park with a vegan taco truck and the best smoothies in the city

A small cafe and sandwich shop with a club upstairs

An adorable milkshake stand with trendy flavor combinations and lots of kitschy outdoor seating

A coffee shop where the baristas know your name and you never know who you might run into

We don't really have a go-to spot, we just cruise and go to each other's houses and break into motel pools and stuff

The woods

6. Pick a teen movie*

Cruel Intentions

Kids

The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Can't Hardly Wait

Blockers

High School Musical

But I'm a Cheerleader

Bring it On

Booksmart

The Hunger Games

7. Pick an outfit for your first day of school:*

8. It's time for the big school play! What's your role in the production?*

Playing the lead role, of course

It's actually a very expensive high-concept play I wrote about myself (and my sister. and my friends. and some people i only kinda know)

Playing a main role in which my long-hidden talents are revealed to the school and everybody will see me in a new light

I'll be in the audience high on edibles, I love the theater

I'll be designing the sets because I'm good at art and need an extracurricular on my college application

It's actually an erotic sci-fi musical that I wrote myself

I'm in the band!

I'm the director because the drama teacher thinks I have a lot of potential!

Designing the costumes

You know at this rate I don't think I'm gonna make it

9. Pick a plan for your 16th birthday:*

Going to see a midnight showing of Rocky Horror in costume with my gay BFF

Just a little bowling and pizza with my pals and my crush!

Throwing a high-key rave full of hot people and fantastic drugs

Mom's gonna buy alcohol for my friends so we can get wasted and dance and sit in the hot tub and maybe if we're lucky there'll be some drama

I'm going to vehemently declare my desire to NOT have a party and then my friends are going to throw me a surprise party anyways

My parents are taking me and my BFF to the closest major city to see a Broadway musical and have a very lovely dinner!!

My best friend is putting together an epic personalized scavenger hunt full of my favorite things and people

We're doing a huge pool party with a semi-famous DJ and killer catering

Renting a party bus for the night (ironically) for me and my friends, having an amazing dinner and then finishing the night on the beach

No

10. Pick a song to play at your graduation ceremony:*

"Move on Up" by Curtis Mayfield

“Live Your Life,” by T.I. ft. Rihanna

"Graduation (Friends Forever)," by Vitamin C

"We Are Young," by Fun. ft. Janelle Monáe

"Glory Days," by Bruce Springstein

"Time After Time," by Cyndi Lauper

"(Don't You) Forget About Me," by the Simple MInds

"Meet Me At Our Spot" by The Anxiety, Willow and Tyler Cole

"These Are Days," by 10,000 Maniacs

"Home," by Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros

11. Pick an After-School Special:*

12. What is your favorite self-defense mechanism?*

Centering all of my self-worth on the exceptionalism of my artistic talent

General cynicism and being ironic about everything

I keep my expectations exceptionally low but also often find out when those low expectations are met that I'd actually been hoping for better all along, so

Unshakeable confidence in my own greatness

I don't need one because I know that whatever it takes, I'm gonna make it through

Pushing people away when I have real feelings that make me feel vulnerable while engaging in self-destructive behavior that enables me to feel like I have some control over my life

Relying on drugs and alcohol to create a wall between my brain and reality

Constantly strategizing my next move and analyzing my friends and partners as if my life was a high-stakes role-playing game

Burying my true feelings and instead letting them come out in jokes or passive-aggressive statements!

Eating food, drinking water and sleeping

13. Pick a Core Value:*

Greatness

Conviction

Freedom

Creativity

Friendship

Potential

Discovery

Acceptance

Community

Survival

14. Pick a crush:*

Your pretty, bubbly and talented best friend who is allegedly straight but keeps flirting with you

The cheerleader with a sharp tongue, killer pipes and dance moves and an undying loyalty to the people she loves

The secretly smart and very troubled badass in a leather jacket and a nose ring who has never spoken to you

The beautiful free-spirited weirdo with the coolest outfits and a barely obscured emotional vulnerability

The brooding hottie who hides behind a tough facade but obviously could be saved by you, specifically

The quiet artsy girl with a perfectly imperfect smile and sharp insights

The out-and-proud lesbian with jet black hair and endless charm who keeps you laughing

The sweet rugby player with a heartstopping smile who realizes they're bisexual because of their feelings for you

The fancy, well-traveled party girl who lives in a mansion with a pool and always keeps you guessing

The tough, self-assured jock who softens up a lot when you get to know them

15. Pick a backpack*

16. Tell me about the craziest party that ever happened at your high school:*

The one where a classmate's "small gathering of friends" turned into literally everybody in the school coming over, the host drinking way too much and a whole bunch of drama! But also there was some dancing and everybody got home okay in the end

The one where the richest kid in school rented out a massive venue and invited 200 people to enjoy dancing and soda pop and two girls we thought were best friends came out as girlfriends by kissing on the dance floor!

The one where everybody put their phones on airplane mode and "left their sexuality at the door" which led to everybody doing crazy drugs and hooking up with everybody of any gender

The one where two girls kissed in a game of truth or dare and a sophomore drank alcohol

The one where two kids did heroin in the laundry room while a drug dealer beat the shit out of Nate in front of everybody and the lighting was really cool

The one where a kid's parents were out of town so everybody got wicked drunk in the basement, played spin the bottle and did karaoke

The one where a kid's parents were out of town and someone brought a keg and then people were doing body shots and playing beer pong and girls were dancing on tables and, eventually, two girls who'd been in a fight all night ended up making out in the swimming pool!

The one where your buddy's birthday party turned into an impromptu '90s dance competition (with costumes!)

The one on Valentine's Day that was super chaotic and sort of stressful but also really beautiful at times and a girl got on the mike and basically admitted to giving birth in a mall bathroom

The one with the bonfire (I lit the fire)

17. Which of these fictional high school's students do you THINK you'd fit in best with? (This question is optional and won't override your other answers, but it could be a tie-breaker.)

Las Encinas High School in Madrid, Spain

East Highland High School in East Highland, California

Hester High School in Austin, Texas

McKinley High School in Lima, Ohio

Orange County High School in Orange County, CA

Bayside High School in the Pacific Palisades, California

Moordale High in a "quiet village" in England

Truham Grammar or Higgs Girls School in Kent, United Kingdom

Degrassi Community School in Toronto, Ontario, Canada

None of the Above?

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At “Dinner at Shibden Hall,” We Sure Did Dine!

On the evening of April the 25th, a flock of exceptionally hot and important queers assembled at the austere House of the Redeemer on the Upper East Side of New York City to celebrate the premiere of Season Two of HBO’s Gentleman Jack, hosted by Human By Orientation. Believe it or not, we were there and in fact had an exceptionally good time, as I’m sure Anne Lister would’ve wanted for us all.

Autostraddle’s Event Crew: back row – actress Elise Bauman, Riese Bernard, Christina Tucker, Drew Gregory. Front row: novelist Kristen Arnett, Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya (Not in the photobooth but also in our crew on Monday night: Anya Richkind, Jourdain Searles and Cora Harrington)

HBO, with light assistance from Autostraddle and our extended network of queer humans doing cool shit in New York City, created an event that celebrated queer community, queer love and queer art.

The festivities began when we started getting ready that afternoon but they officially began when we arrived at the House of the Redeemer at 6pm, at which point I took 45 photographs of Autostraddle writer Drew Gregory and her girlfriend, Lesbian Lifetime Christmas Movie legend Elise Bauman, in front of a Volvo that they did not own. This was followed by another photoshoot of the whole gang in front of a noted courtyard.

Group Photo, L to R: Drew Gregory, Kristen Arnett, Riese Bernard, Christina Tucker, Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya and Anya Richkind. Jourdain Searles in the front! /// Other photo: Drew, Elise & a Volvo

Once inside, we enjoyed small appetizers on golden trays and festive beverages also delivered on golden trays while entertained by a gay string quartet!

It was clear from the jump that everybody at this party was very cool.

We immediately beelined for the Photobooth, where a plethora of related costume pieces were available for our direct engagement.

We then traversed a winding stairway, lit with tiny tea lights that none of us knocked over as we ascended into the upper levels of this very cool house!

In the upper chambers we found additional mingling, small-plates-consuming and imbibing, and also we waited to have our chance at doing yet more photography in a place my companions assured me had “great light.” They were not wrong!

Christina Tucker, Drew Gregory, Riese Bernard, Anya Richkind, Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya

The photoshoot was consequently interrupted by an announcement that the main event — the screening of Gentleman Jack Season Two Episode One — was about to commence, and we filed into a library that I wish was my own personal library in my own personal mansion!

Once seated we got a rousing introduction to Season 2 with our very special screening of the season’s first episode. We celebrated, together, a delightful romp into mid-19th century lesbian courtship and mental health care, conflicts relating to the distribution and alleged theft of coal from land that belonged to Anne Lister, Anne Lister eating a plum while standing on a scenic vista and remembering hot sex with Ann Walker the night prior, the intricacies of purchasing a spry pony and the ethics of solidifying a subversive lesbian “marriage” by including one another’s lands in their will. This has never come up for me personally, but I am happy for them — we all were!

We laughed and clapped and admired Anne Lister’s exceptional fast walking skills and ended the screening in hot anticipation of two things: Season 2 Episode 2 and dinner.

Earlier in the day we’d been playing “who will be at the event tonight” and Christina had wondered aloud, but certainly not in a serious way, “what if Melissa King is making the dinner.” In the past, Christina has shared a number of feelings about Melissa King in her weekly No Filter column on this website, including “I still have a crush on Melissa King!” (September 2020) and “Weird, My Last Name Translates to ‘Wife of Chef Melissa King!'” (October 2021) and “Two Melissa Kings Is a Dream I Once Had and Well – Never Mind!” (November 2021) so imagine all of our surprises, but especially Christina’s surprise, to hear that indeed MELISSA KING WAS MAKING US DINNER.

As King later explained in her intro to the meal, after marathoning Season One, she’d prepared a multi-course meal inspired by the program — its love of pea soup, its iconic top hat, its short ribs.

We were READY TO EAT.

If I could take a moment for this soup??? It was perhaps the best soup I have ever consumed in my life?

Everybody chatted and laughed and smiled and ate and was gay!

Throughout the meal, in addition to delightful conversation with each other, people we’d just met, and also Cora Harrington (who was in our party but hadn’t arrived yet when we took the group pics, which is too bad because she came in fancy pajamas), we were treated to some delightful gay ballet in period costume:

… as well as the ongoing regalement from the quartet, who inspired singalongs when they broke into orchestral arrangements of hits including Britney Spears’ “Toxic” and “Mamma Mia” and Sia’s “Chandelier” and Lil Nas X’s “Montero.” Although I lament not recording these singalongs for posterity, here are more pictures of us at the event!

The finale of the meal, a Georgian chocolate cake shaped like a top hat, was the best cake I have ever eaten in my life, and also had the unexpected side effect of turning all of our tongues and teeth blue. We had just discovered this when Melissa King came over to talk to us but I think we all did great considering!

In conclusion, a truly incredible and unforgettable night was had by all, and it was so lovely to be in community with so many cool queer people. I mean, even the florist was queer!

Thank you to Human By Orientation for having us! Everybody really ought to tune in to HBO’s Season 2 of Gentleman Jack, now streaming on HBO Max!

Autostraddle March Madness: Better Halves Champion – Carina DeLuca!

Thanks to the hard work of our A+ Selection Committee, we started this contest out with 32 couples, eight couples each from four regions. We had thousands of people weigh in through six rounds of voting and, finally, we have our champion: congratulations to Carina DeLuca of Station 19, the overwhelmingly determined to be the Better Best Half.

When I kick-off Autostraddle’s March Madness each year, I always have a theme in mind. This year, I wanted to see how people determined which half of their favorite ships they liked the most. I wondered how people made the choice: is their overall favorite the character that they see themselves in the most? Or is their overall favorite the one that they’re most attracted to? Is your favorite the character that excites you more or who gets more screentime? What makes one character the better half? Of course, this is the Internet so soon after the voting starts whatever theme I picked usually gets forgotten and all my attempts to suss out fans’ motivations becomes futile. Ultimately, the contest becomes a challenge to marshal the enthusiasm of the fandoms…that’s jut the nature of the game.

But, in an interesting twist — beginning last year with WayHaught’s win in last year’s challenge and now again this year with Carina’s victory — Autostraddle readers have managed to select a winner who fits the theme perfectly.

When Maya Bishop first meets Carina DeLuca in a bar, the audience — who, presumably, also watch Grey’s Anatomy — has known her for a while. We know she is a force of nature…a beautiful and talented OB/GYN who studies the female orgasm in her spare time. She is charming and magnetic. She draws people — Arizona, Owen and a bi-curious Amelia — to her almost effortlessly. And there’s the accent? My goodness…how can you not swoon?

But, in that moment where Carina meets Maya, instead of cheering the possibility of this new bisexual super-couple, all I can think is, “Maya doesn’t deserve her!” Because in the months before that meeting, Maya had been the absolute worst: dating her best friend’s ex-boyfriend, snagging the promotion that should’ve rightfully gone to her best friend and then dumping the aforementioned boyfriend when she realizes their connection might get in the way of her career ambitions. I didn’t think Maya deserved good things…and certainly not someone as good as Carina.

As I wrote back in 2020:

“I don’t need a girlfriend,” [Maya] tells Carina. They were a hook-up, nothing more. But beneath Maya’s bravado are the scars of her father’s abuse…abuse that’s conditioned her to put coming in first — in racing, in the firehouse — above all things, including friendship and love.

“I’m not in the habit of fixing broken people,” Carina answers, but that’s exactly what she does. By loving Maya when she can’t fully return it, by not leaving even when Maya pushes her away, by (gently) pushing and supporting Maya as she comes to grips with her father’s abuse, Carina fixes what’s broken in Maya. By season’s end, Maya’s able to make some groundbreaking admissions: most notably, that she really loves someone for the first time in her life.

In Maya’s darkest moments, Carina is there…and even in the moments when Carina’s scared — after losing her brother and when her immigration status is threatened — she minimizes her fear to bring Maya comfort. She truly is the better half.

I had my doubts that Carina would make it through this contest, quite honestly. The frustration within the ship’s fandom about the couple’s current on-screen story is real…and I thought we’d see that reflected in the vote. But it truly says something about the fandom — about how genuinely they care for these characters and the actresses that portray them — that, in the middle of all that frustration, they returned to this contest, round after round, to vote for them. There’s hope to be found in that, I think.

Another cause for hope? Carina’s victory is the first time, since we began Autostraddle March Madness back in 2019, that we have a winner from a show that will return next season. So whatever problems exist on-screen right now, there’s still time for the writers to address it and restore the chemistry that we first witnessed that night at Joe’s.

For the second year in a row, we incorporated a bracket challenge into this year’s March Madness. It’s one of my favorite aspects of the NCAA tournament — especially that moment when you start cheering for upsets and against your bracket predictions — and I’ve been thrilled to see so many folks embrace that as part of our tournament. This is the first year that I haven’t managed to tank my own bracket: I finished 7th overall this year, after finishing 180th in last year’s competition. Maybe by next year, I’ll be able to break into the top three!

But the real kudos goes to the owner of the bracket, “Switches over stitches,” who correctly picked the final two competitors and this year’s March Madness winner. They were one of only four users to correctly predict that Carina would take home the championship. What an impressive feat!

Let’s say we do this again next year, eh?

Autostraddle March Madness: Better Halves — Final Competition

Did you watch last night’s WNBA Draft? It’s amazing to me to think that just a little over a week ago, we watched South Carolina and UCONN face-off for the national championship game and now, some of the stars from that game — Christyn Williams, Destanni Henderson, Olivia Nelson-Ododa and Evina Westbrook — have the destinations set for the next step of their playing careers.

For me, the WNBA Draft is always a mixed bag: there’s the joy, of course. I cheered so loud when I heard Elissa Cunane — the (apparently) underappreciated center from my alma mater — get her name called by the WNBA Commissioner, you’d think I was the one who got drafted to play along Sue Bird on an automatic title contender. Then when another NC State alum, Kayla Jones, got picked 22nd by Minnesota, I couldn’t wipe the grin off my face for the rest of the night. I was so happy for them both.

But soon after all the names are called and you’ve enjoyed fawning over everyone’s Draft Day fits, the reality sets in: there are just too many talented players and not enough roster spots for them. Far too many of the players who heard their names called last night won’t make it onto a WNBA roster. According to On Her Turf’s Alex Azzi, last year “16 of 36 draftees were waived before the season began, and an additional six were waived or released shortly after the season started.” Because of the dearth of roster slots, according to the NCAA, only 0.8% of draft eligible women’s basketball players will make the jump to the professional ranks. The rosters need to expand — the MNBA has 15 players on their roster, the WNBA only allows for 12 — and the league needs to expand.

We need a WNBA team in the Bay.

We need a WNBA team in the Six.

We need a WNBA team in Music City.

We need to bring back the Charlotte Sting with its former point guard as the new head coach/GM.

For now, though…this is what we’ve got.

The first few picks of the draft went as expected: Rhyne Howard to Atlanta, NaLyssa Smith to Indiana, Shakira Austin to Washington and Emily Engstler to Indiana. Heather got her wish and got her own Sabally to cheer for as Nyara Sabally — the younger sister of Dallas Wings standout, Satou Sabally — got drafted to the New York Liberty.

Then things started to get weird. I thought the changing of the guard in Indiana meant that we’d see more stable Draft Day from the Fever, but nope…Lin Dunn set fire to every mock draft I’d seen and picked Lexie Hull and Queen Egbo — both expected to be late second rounders — in the first round.

That’s what y’all have been doing throughout Autostraddle’s March Madness competition: setting fire to every bit of conventional wisdom and all our bracket predictions. Remember how y’all decided three races by less than 10 votes? Remember how you tossed all conventional wisdom out the window and eliminated Gigi in the Elite 8? Just Lin Dunn-ing all over the place.

At this stage, it’s hard to think of any loss or defeat in the Final Four as an upset — these competitors have made it through so much — but I’ll admit, I’m a little surprised by the results from the Final Four.

I wasn’t surprised that Waverly Earp took down Emily Dickinson in their semifinal match-up — she’s the better half of the defending champions, after all — but I was surprised by the final spread. After Emily took out Maya Bishop of Station 19 and Casey Gardner from Atypical, I thought she’d be a more formidable foe for Waverly but the Earpers were not going to let their better half go down.

But before you go penciling Waverly in as the champion of March Madness, consider this: she got fewer overall votes than both competitors in the second semifinal.

This was one of those contests where I feel bad that one of the competitors had to lose: on the one hand, you had a fandom trumpeting Sophie Moore — the longest running queer character on Batwoman — and this contest became one way fans could show support for the #RenewBatwoman campaign. On the other hand, you had #Marina fans, who despite the understandable frustration they feel about the couple’s current storyline, still came out to support their favorite Station 19 character. Both the #WildMoore and #Marina fandoms came play on behalf of their favorite ships.

Votes would come in like waves — the first pushing Carina into the lead, the second giving Sophie the lead — and they just kept coming. I imagine, if the vote had gone on for a few more hours, another wave of votes would’ve come in, changing the outcome but in the end, it’s Carina DeLuca who advances to the championship round.

So that’s it, our final is set. Waverly Earp vs. Carina DeLuca.

It’s kind of crazy — when you think about the progression of queer storytelling on television — that at the end of this competition, we’ve ended up with the better halves of two marriage couples. It was so improbable just a decade ago and now, we have these two wives competing for our championship. And maybe that’s why Waverly and Carina are here…because a wedding means that we’ve seen those relationships (and these characters) grow across multiple episodes and multiple seasons. We’ve seen them rebound from heartbreak and piece themselves and their future wives back together.

So, just in case you need some help deciding who to vote for, take a moment to relive the #WayHaught and #Marina weddings. As usual, the voting will go on for 48 hours and then we’ll be back here on Thursday to crown our BETTER HALVES Champion!

Waverly Earp, Wynonna Earp vs. Carina DeLuca, Station 19

Autostraddle March Madness: Better Halves – Final Four

Back in 2000, ESPN dropped The Last Dance, a 10-part miniseries that documented the career of basketball’s greatest player, Michael Jordan, with a particular focus on his final run with the Chicago Bulls (1997-1998). The docuseries debuted at the height of the pandemic and filled a tremendous void among sports fans, in the absence of actual live sports. It offered a fuller picture of things basketball fans knew or had long speculated about — Jordan’s longstanding disdain for the Pistons, Jordan’s unlikely deal with Nike, the party culture of NBA teams — and revealed a lot of things to which fans had never been privy, such as the acrimony between Jordan and Bulls front office or Rodman’s 48 hour midseason Vegas vacation. But, perhaps, the most indelible portion of Last Dance…the thing that sticks with even non-sports fans today: the memes.

Jordan’s no strange to Internet meme culture: in 2009, the tears he shed at his Hall of Fame induction became an instant meme. The “Crying Jordan” face became the go-to meme for anyone who’d lost something or disappointed their fans. But Last Dance took Jordan’s memeifaction to a whole ‘nother level. This one remains a favorite:

Michael Jordan was (is?) a master self-motivator. Every slight — real or imagined — he used to make himself better. Someone else wins the MVP trophy? Jordan took that personally. A handful of Chicago sportswriters picked Cleveland to oust the Bulls in the playoffs. Jordan took that personally. LaBradford Smith says “nice game Mike” after scoring 37 points against him? Jordan took that personally…and went back to Washington and torched Smith for 36 points in the first half. That’s just how Jordan rolled.

And, apparently, that’s how y’all roll too because in the Elite 8, I touted how unstoppable Gigi Ghorbani looked through the opening rounds of this contest…and y’all took that personally. I speculated that Gigi’s popularity would carry her on-screen girlfriend, Dani, on to the Finals and, again, y’all took that personally. I touted how formidable Casey and Izzie looked, y’all took that personally. Voters seemed intent on challenging every bit of conventional wisdom and tossing it out the window.

After three amazingly tight contests in the Sweet 16, the Elite 8 gave us four unexpected blow-outs: Waverly Earp blew past Dani, Emily trounced Casey, Carina crushed Izzie and, in perhaps the biggest upset of the tournament thus far, Sophie Moore overwhelmed Gigi. Those eliminations mean that no couple will meet in the Finals. I’d wager a prediction about what’s going to happen next but y’all continue to surprise me and I think I’ll just wait and see what havoc is wreaked in this Final Four.

I am a little comforted by the fact that no one really saw this Final Four coming. A cursory glance at the Leaderboard suggests that no one predicted this Final Four slate. I feel fortunate to have had a good run through the Sweet 16 but after your Elite 8 picks, my bracket — which included just two of the final four — is on its way to being busted. How’s your bracket doing? Are you one of the handful of folks who correctly predicted three of the final four participants? Is your prediction for the eventual champion still alive?

You’ve got 48 hours to continue to confound all expectations!

Waverly Earp, Wynonna Earp vs. Emily, Dickinson

Sophie Moore, Batwoman vs. Carina DeLuca, Station 19