10 Times Queer TV Taught Me Love Is a Lie
Is love a lie? Great question! We like to joke about it here, because nihilism is one (1) free and legal coping mechanism that’s available to us all at any given time of the day and night, but what do we really think? Today we’re attempting to find an answer, once and for all, for the record and for the good of the people.
I’ve never loved anything more than I love television. The problem is, love is a lie and TV doesn’t always love me back. Or sometimes it pretends to love me back but hurts me anyway. And so I am here with definitive proof that love is, in fact, a lie. This is just a short list of some examples that came to me off the top of my head, but I know there are more and want you to put them in the comments so we can make our case and let the defense rest once and for all, I’d be grateful.
Teenage Bounty Hunters
Also a lie: that you have to leave room for the holy ghost between you.
If love was real, Netflix wouldn’t have cancelled Teenage Bounty Hunters after one season. We left Sterling and April in a broken place that they totally could have come back from, but instead they will just be hurting and apart forever. I fell hard for this show and it’s silliness and heart and twist after twist. And its UNIQUENESS. It was different than any show at the time and despite ending with the door wide open for a second season…NADA. Ripped out from under me. Because LOVE IS A LIE.
Criminal Minds
This show serial killed my belief in love.
Somehow, despite there being FIFTEEN seasons for them to go this route, neither SSA Jennifer Jareau NOR Unit Chief Emily Prentiss came out as queer. They should have been TOGETHER but neither of them even hinted at being a little bisexual in canon? I’m rewatching this series right now and the amount of power suits, improper sitting, and loving glances tells a different story. We could have had it all, and yet, instead, we only have fanfiction. Love is a false confession.
The L Word: Generation Q
Maybe Tasha is better off not coming back BUT ARE WE BETTER OFF? The answer is no.
Have you ever heard Autostraddle’s own Carmen Phillips talk about how much she loves Tasha? And yet, despite so many of the original cast members returning, Tasha is nowhere to be seen in Gen Q? It hardly seems far. In fact, one could even say it’s rude and proof that no matter how much you love someone they could just disappear forever! Because love is the f word (and F is for FAKE.)
The Bold Type
LOVE IS A CAGE FROM WHICH THERE IS NO ESCAPE
If love was real, there’s no way on this green Earth that KAT EDISON, of all people, would fall in love with a REPUBLICAN. Kat who risked her job for social justice reasons, Kat who got into hot water for standing up to THIS SAME REPUBLICAN’S PIECE OF SHIT FATHER. It makes no sense! Love is a ruse.
Dracula
I think Lucy’s on my side of this argument, just saying.
Not only did NBC’s Dracula feature the illustrious Katie McGrath as Lucy Westenra who was hopelessly in love with her best friend Mina (playing by out queer actor Jessica De Gouw) and seduced by the intimidating Lady Jayne, but at the end of the first season she got turned into a VAMPIRE. If love was real, we would have had an entire season of television with lesbian vampire Katie McGrath. LESBIAN. VAMPIRE. KATIE. MCGRATH. The fact that the show was cancelled and that this is a thing we may never get to see is PROOF. LOVE IS FICTION.
Vida
Me when someone tries to talk to me about romantic love.
Now, Vida was a near-perfect television series, but I think any fan of the show and also Emma herself would agree that love is simply not worth the pain. Her mother tried the whole love thing, and ended up being with a horrible man who is the reason Emma got kicked out of the house at a young age. Emma herself spent many years WISELY building walls around her tender heart and when she FINALLY let some of them down to give love a try…she got her heart shattered almost immediately. Sure, by the time the series ended Emma was arguably happy and potentially getting back together with the person she was in love with BUT CAN WE EVEN TRUST IT? Who’s to say. Amor es una mentira.
Warehouse 13
If only I had a grappling hook to use every time someone tried to tell me love is not a lie.
If love was real, the fifth season of Warehouse 13 wouldn’t have happened. Love smells like rotten apples. Love is imaginary.
Pretty Little Liars
“What do you mean you thought I was DEAD?”
I could have pulled 900 examples from this show that prove love is a lie, but in my opinion, the most egregious is that Maya, despite being VERY MUCH ALIVE, never officially returned to the show. Bianca Lawson can play any age, so she could have easily come back before or after the time jump, and she would have been a fun foil for literally any of Emily’s future girlfriends. Just imagine the drama of your ex coming back seemingly from the dead! But no. She remained gone despite the fact that everyone knows #MAYALIVES. Love is a mask of a mask.
One Day at a Time
Me at weddings battling between being happy for my friends and believing love is a lie.
If love was real, we would have had at least five more seasons of the Alvarez family filling up our hearts with joy. But instead, it got kicked around from network to network like an empty can of Café Bustelo and then finally torn from our desperate embrace. You want proof love is a lie?? Let me dramatically pull back the curtains and show you the broken shards of my heart on the floor!
Supergirl
VALENTINE’S DAY WEEKEND MOOD.
If love was real, then Supercorp would be canon. Lena has sacrificed entire people for Kara, stood full-bodied between Kara and danger on more than one occasion, filled Kara’s office with flowers and called Kara Danvers – not Supergirl, KARA – her hero. Kara has swept Lena off her feet and saved her life, flew literally around the world to get all of Lena’s favorite foods and told Lena her deepest, most dangerous secret. Kara and Lena, at one point or another, have done or said almost everything they tried to tell me meant someone is in love with you, and yet, they have not even ever kissed just to try it. Not once! And thus, it stands to reason, that love is a big fat lie that you should all stop trying to tell me.
Happy Love is a Lie Day!
Support Independent Queer Media
We’re raising funds to make it through the end of July. 99% of the people who read this site don’t support. Will you be one of the ones who do? Joining A+ is one of the best ways to support Autostraddle — plus you get access to bonus content while keeping the site 99% free for everyone. Will you join today?
What’s New and Queer and Streaming on Netflix, Hulu, Amazon and HBO Max in February 2021?
Well, it somehow is February, and you know what that means? New streaming television programs that JUST MIGHT have queer, lesbian, bisexual and trans characters!!!!!!!!!! So re-position yourself on that sofa because it’s time to settle in for our ongoing winter of despair and turn it up for psycho lesbians. What is gay and streaming in February 2021? There’s only one way to find out and that way is for me to watch 50 trailers and google “[x] + lesbian” / “[x] + queer” (etc etc etc) 55 times. Now let us all enjoy the fruits of my labor.
Netflix Content for Girls, Gays and Theys in February 2021
Love Daily: Season 1 (2018)
This anthology series from Awesomeness TV has been making the streaming rounds for a few years and now it is Netflix’s turn. (They actually snatched up a bunch of Awesomeness TV productions this month.) Containing 12 short films about 12 different love stories taking place through 12 months of the year, you bet your ass that one of those 12 little stories transpires between women. Brianne Tju, who played lesbian character Alex in Light as a Feather, plays Christine, and noted YouTuber Alexis G Zall plays Sam. Sam is a gay name.
Strip Down, Rise Up (Netflix Documentary) (2021) – February 5th
This doc follows a group of women in a pole dance class where they learn to dance but they also learn to empower themselves and their bodies and they cry and hug and stuff. There is a girl in the trailer who I am positive is queer but also if they did a documentary on this topic without any queer women in it then that is a crime that should be investigated.
Good Girls: Season 3 – February 16th
Speaking of crime — Beth, Annie and Ruby return for a third season of this dramedy about pals who decide to damn the man and launder the money. Isaiah Stannard plays Ben Marks, the trans son of single Mom Annie. “The show is tense, engaging and often fun,” writes Cate Young on Jezebel.
I Care A Lot (Netflix Original Film) – February 19
Rosamund Pike is Marla Grayson, a court-appointed guardian for many elderly humans whom she seizes and then milks for all their assets through unethical but legal means. She does all this with her very hot girlfriend Fran (Eiza González). But!!! The women have met their match in Jennifer Peterson (Dianne Wiest), a wealthy retired woman with no heirs but a very strong connection to a very dangerous gangster. So far reviews have been GLOWING.
Ginny & Georgia: Season 1 (Netflix Original) – February 24th
Ginny is the biracial daughter of Georgia, a shrewd and freewheeling blonde lady who birthed Ginny when she was 15. Together with her son Austin they move to a lil town in New England to start a fantastic new life together but there are SECRETS lurking beneath the veneer of their already non-traditional life. According to Deadline, Sara Waisglass is playing Maxine, a friend of Ginny’s who is “cool, popular, smart, quirky and confident” and also “has a huge crush on Georgia.”
Hulu Streaming in Lesbian and Bisexual February 2021
Good Trouble: Season 3 Premiere (Freeform) – February 18
Rhea Butcher’s back and Constance Zimmer joins up for Season 3 of Good Trouble, in which Callie In a Suit and Malika fight the criminal injustice system and personal relationships experience various degrees of turmoil and triumph.
The United States vs Billie Holliday (Hulu Original) – February 26
Shelli’s post of this trailer blew up our website because we are so very excited for it — Andra Day stars as bisexual crooner Billie Holiday, who was in the crosshairs of the FBI starting in 1939, leading to a trial in 1947 referenced in the film’s title. Holliday struggled with drug and alcohol addiction all her life, and was targeted by the Federal Department of Narcotics with an undercover sting operation, led by a Black Federal agent with whom she had a tumultuous affair. Natasha Lyonne guests as bisexual actress Tallulah Bankhead, who was everybody’s lover including Billie Holiday’s.
February 2021 New Queer TV on Amazon Prime
Moulin Rogue! (2001) – February 1
This is not a lesbian film but I just wanted you to know.
Notes on a Scandal (2006) – February 1
This movie was very stressful for the community at a time when lesbian representation was pretty minimal! But anyhow, Judi Dench is a lonely spinster history teacher nearing retirement whose only comfort is her diary, aka she’s a lesbian. She gets really into this new art teacher Sheba (Cate Blanchett), who is married to an older woman and also is having an affair with a student. “It trades in stereotypes of the “vampire lesbian,” the frigid spinster, and the bitter, battle axe school teacher,” writes the Feminist Spectator, “but Dench’s acting mitigates these images to an extent that makes the film worth seeing.”
Billions: Seasons 1- 3 – February 1
This is a show about MONEY and the rich people who have it and do things with it. Asia Kate Dillon plays the first major non-binary character on American television, Taylor Mason.
Whitney: Can I Be Me (2017) – February 1
Showtime’s heart-rending documentary on the short life of the incredible Whitney Houston addresses rumors of her bisexuality and her relationship with Robyn Crawford.
February 2021 Streaming and Queer on HBO Max
Butter (2012) – February 1
This film is such a hidden gem! It’s an indie comedy starring a young Yara Shahidi as a master butter sculptor with ambitions of beating out the local favorite Bob Pickler (Ty Burrell) at the Iowa State Fair. Olivia Wilde plays Brooke, a bisexual sex worker who is a client of Bob’s (his wife is played by Jennifer Garner playing the part that Jennifer Garner always plays) but her storyline goes past this relationship! Carmen enjoyed it and perhaps so can you.
Sunshine Cleaning (2009) – February 1
This comedy-drama follows 30-something single Mom Rose (Amy Adams) and her queer underachieving sister Norah (Emily Blunt) as they embark upon the industry of crime scene cleanup. Norah experiences a little subplot of her own involving the daughter of a woman who died in one of the houses she cleaned.
There Is No “I” In Threesome (HBO Max Documentary) (2021) – February 11
A man/woman couple set out to make a documentary about their open relationship and present an alternative to monogamy BUT it seems as thought it ended up tearing them apart. Guess we’ll find out!
It’s a Sin: Season 1 (2020) – February 18
This five-episode series from the creator of Queer as Folk (UK) follows “those young, fleetingly liberated gay men who packed up their jeans and LPs and came to London at the dawn of the 1980s, a new decade filled with hope,” only to have their freedom interrupted by the HIV/AIDS crisis. I’m not sure if there are any lesbian characters — there’s a woman in the main cast but IDK if she is gay — but it’s about queer community, so I wanted to let you know.
January 2021: What’s Gay and New on Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, HBOMax and Apple+?
Another month, another set of questions regarding the intentions of assorted television networks to deliver unto us, worthy subscribers, a bevy of new and original content that we will enjoy because it is gay and goddammit, so are we. What is gay and streaming in January 2021? Let’s discuss!
Netflix Content for Girls, Gays and Theys in January 2021
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011) – January 5
Hot sad bisexual hacker Lisbeth Salmander (Roony Mara) is enlisted by journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) to track down a Killer of Women who is responsible for the disappearance of a woman 40 years ago. This very intense remake of the excellent original Swedish film which was an adaptation of the book by Stieg Larsson also requires a very intense trigger warning for sexual assault.
History of Swear Words (Netflix Original Series) – January 5
One of the trailers for this six-part documentary series starring Nicholas Cage of all people features a montage of Bitch Magazines, which is enough to warrant its inclusion here. But also, the group of entertainers who make remarks in this film include Patti Harrison and a lot of feminist scholars and linguists so it should be a really good time.
L.A.’s Finest: Season One – January 5
This Bad Boys spinoff stars Gabrielle Union and Jessica Alba as …. cops! Neat. Union plays Syd Burnett, a bisexual with an “unapologetic lifestyle” and some skeletons in her closet who’s partnered up with Nancy McKenna, a working Mom who also has a very complicated past.
Pretend It’s a City (2021) – January 8
Legendary Lesbian Fashion Icon and New York Jew Fran Lebowitz is Martin Scorsese following Fran around the city as she delivers her myriad opinions on numerous topics.
Last Tango in Halifax: Season 4 – January 12
Due to the two-part Christmas Special that some refer to as Season 4 and some smash into Season 3, it was not immediately clear to me which season of Last Tango in Halifax we could expect to drop on Netflix this year, but rest assured I’ve settled the matter: it’s Season 4/5. There’s a new relationship for the widowed Caroline. Sally says that Season Five “has a lot to love (if you can forgive it for Season Three).”
The Magicians: Season 5 – January 15
Which activities will the students of the Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy get up to in Season 5? If you’ve already seen it, you already know, but if you haven’t, now’s the time! There’s a lot of sexual fluidity on this show including Margo, who LezWatchTV describes as “the baddest bitch you are ever going to meet.”
Call My Agent! (Dix pour cent): Season 4 – January 21
This French series follows the agents at top Paris talent firm ASK, including Andréa Martel, a lesbian who finds herself in charge of a now-precariously-established agency when season four gets jumping. The series has definitely made some missteps with Andrea’s character in past season. Update: read the comments of this post for the details on whether or not this is worth your time!
So My Grandma’s a Lesbian (2019) – January 22
I am going to go ahead and give this film a pre-emptive Pulitzer Prize for its title. This Spanish comedy follows a young Spanish lawyer whose plans to marry some rich Scottish dude from a conservative family are put into jeopardy when her 70-year-old grandmother, Sofia, comes out and announces her intention to marry her best friend. Good for them.
Hulu Streaming in Gay January 2021
Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist: Season 2 Premiere (NBC) – January 12
Zoey Clark is a smart tech kid who, after a very strange event, finds herself able to hear the innermost thoughts, wants and desires of everybody around her, but as songs! Her neighbor and close pal Mo, played by Alex Newell, is gender fluid.
9-1-1: Season 4 Premiere (Fox) – January 19
We have been told to expect the following: Athena works to put her physical and emotional injuries behind her to get back into the job, Maddie and Chimney prepare to have a baby, and an exploration into Buck’s childhood. What will happen to our beloved Hen (Aisha Hinds)?? We will find out.
9-1-1: Lone Star – Season 2 Premiere (Fox) – January 19
Liv Tyler won’t be returning for Season 2 (she did not want to travel to the U.S. to film during a pandemic) and Gina Torres will be joining the cast. Brain Michael Smith will return as trans firefightere Paul Strickland.
Grown-ish: Season 3B Premiere – January 22
In the back half of Season 3, we will see “the Cal U gang as they navigate the second half of junior year and begin to step out as adults into the real world. After dropping out to focus on her fashion career, Zoey wonders if life outside of Cal U is all it’s cracked up to be or if she still has some growing left to do.” And uh, Nomi has her baby so that’ll be interesting.
Streaming in Queer on Amazon Prime January 2021
Flack: Season 1 – January 22
Anna Pacquin is Robyn, a bisexual and unflappable PR person/fixer with a messy personal life. You know; an antihero! The show was abruptly cancelled by PopTV earlier this year but picked up by Amazon for its first and second seasons. Variety described the show as “often too blunt to be as interesting as it palpably wants to be, burying any shred of nuance by underlining its themes in red marker to make sure you can’t miss them.
Chick Fight (2020) – January 29
This certified hot mess of a film written and directed by men about women punching each other in the face centers on Anna (Malin Akerman), a girl going nowhere with a lesbian police officer best friend, Charleen (Dulce Sloan), who convinces her to join an all-female fight club headed up by Bear (Fortune Feimster). Bisexual actress Bella Thorne stars as Olivia, the fight club’s usual champion. There are also some men who insert themselves into this already muddled narrative full of stereotypes and tired humor.
January 2021 Streaming and Queer on HBO Max
Gossip Girl: Seasons 1 – 6 – January 6
You probably won’t watch this show strictly for the eventual very brief kiss between Hilary Duff and Jessic Szohr (also, Penn Padgley is there, so) but, just so you know, that does happen. It’s there waiting for you. In 2017, the co-creators of the soapy teen drama about rich kids in Manhattan said their only regret about the show was that they didn’t have enough gay or POC representation. So we are all on the same page there.
The Color Purple (1985) – January 1
Alice Walker’s epistolary novel was de-gayed for this wildly successful Steven Spielberg adaptation starring Danny Glover, Oprah Winfrey, Rae Dawn Chong and Whoopi Goldberg. Goldberg plays Celie, a teenager in rural Georgia with an abusive family who falls for showgirl Shug Avery, her husband’s mistress who Celie nurses back into health.
Mullholland Drive (2001) – January 1
Drew called this twisty surrealist neo-noir thriller “a cinematic masterpiece and one of David Lynch’s finest works.” Naomi Watts plays Betty, an actress new to Los Angeles who is immediately drawn to and falls for an amnesiac woman recovering from a car crash.
Ready Player One (2018) – January 1
Based on Ernest Cline’s sci-fi novel, Ready Player One is set in a dystopian 2045 where humans escape the real world through the virtual world of OASIS, where they can adopt characters of their choice and compete for elusive escape from their bleak reality. Lena Waithe plays lead character Wade’s best friend, lesbian gamer Aech/Helen Harris, who Heather describes as “[weaving] a magic spell around that audience, ping-ponging them between flashes of awe and fits of giggles.”
V for Vendetta (2005) – January 1
WHAT IS HAPPENING WITH THIS MOVIE? Literally every month it is leaving or arriving at a new streaming network. I actually stopped erasing old streaming guides from wordpress after I released a new one specifically because I didn’t want to have to keep writing new blurbs for V for Vendetta. It came to HBO Max in September, must have left at some point (perhaps for its November engagement with Netflix? Who can say), and now it’s back. As aforementioned, V for Vendetta is a dystopian political action film from the Wachowskis starring Natalie Portman. A*terE*len’s Sarah Warn called, in 2006, “One of the most pro-gay films ever.”
Lost and Delirious (2001) – January 12
This objectively terrible film that for some reason remains beloved amongst huge swaths of the lesbian and bisexual population, including by our noted film critic Drew Gregory, will be entering your homes via HBO Max if you desire boarding school lesbians, Mischa Barton, ravens, and mixed metaphors.
Person of Interest: Seasons 1-5 – January 23
This sci-fi crime drama follows a group of detectives and assorted nerds who seek to stop various violent crimes using a computer program that predicts terrorist acts. Computer hacker Root (Amy Acker) joins the crew in Season Two after guesting in Season One and eventually one of the show’s only romantic storylines erupts between her and psychopathic assassin Shaw (Sarah Shahi)
Euphoria: Part 2: Jules: “F*ck Anyone Who’s Not a Sea Blob,” Special Episode Premiere – January 24
Hunter Schafer co-wrote and co-executive produced part two of Euphoria’s two part special episodes. The first part focused on Rue and her attempts at sobriety, and the second part will be focused squarely on Jules, following her over the Christmas holiday as she “reflects on the year.”
Babylon 5: Seasons 1-5 – January 26
This ’90s series set on a space station had one poorly handled implied relationship between bisexual Space Jew Susan Ivanova and bisexual corporate telepath Talia Winters, but you probably liked it despite that not because of it.
Gay and Streaming on Apple+ TV in January 2021
Dickinson: Season 2 (Apple+ Original) – January 8th
Season Two will continue to explore why Dickinson’s poems were only published posthumously — this time, it’s not just the patriarchy to blame, but Emily’s own “ambivalent relationship to fame.” “Season Two is really all about fame and the attention economy, which was a central concern in Emily Dikcinson’s poems,” said showrunner Alena Smith. You can watch a featurette right here.
The Best 2020 TV Shows With LGBTQ Women and Non-Binary Characters
It was a strange year for the television industry — prematurely truncated seasons, retroactive cancellations and long production delays for network and cable programming while streaming networks erratically churned out new content and many humans found themselves spending more time than ever watching television. We did comfort re-watches and ambitious multi-season first-watches. We did remote watch parties to fill a “watching television with my friends” sized hole in our hearts. We googled “what’s new on Netflix” 45 times.
What ultimately emerged onto our screens this year was not necessarily a careful balance of content consciously arranged by network executives, but rather a haphazard release of whatever anybody had already finished producing, as soon as they had space to debut it. Many of the queer-inclusive seasons we were anticipating new seasons from this year were pushed off to next year — Pose, A Black Lady Sketch Show, The Handmaid’s Tale, Russian Doll, Euphoria, Dickinson, Gentleman Jack, The L Word: Generation Q, Work in Progress.
Still, LGBTQ+ inclusion had a solid 2020, with more shows centering our experiences or taking up a lot of ensemble space, including lots of queer characters of color and more non-binary characters than ever before. We had stylized horror like Ratched and The Haunting of Bly Manor; historical reckonings from Mrs. America, Little Fires Everywhere, Hollywood, Self-Made and Hunters; witty first-person aspirants in Feel Good, Gentefied, Vida and Twenties; confused teens of I Am Not Okay With This, Trinkets, Utopia Falls, The Wilds and Never Have I Ever; and shows that got gayer this year than ever before, including The Chi, Umbrella Academy, Homecoming and Dead To Me. Unfortunately, many of the new shows we fell for in 2020 were swiftly cancelled: Dare Me, I Am Not Okay With This, Stumptown, Teenage Bounty Hunters, High Fidelity and Party of Five all landed on the chopping block. Most devastating of all, though, was saying goodbye to Vida.
The shows on this list were compiled from the votes of Autostraddle TV Team members, and each TV team writer was also invited to make their own Top 5-15.
Technical notes: The L Word: Generation Q and Work in Progress also snagged spots on last year’s list and put us in a slight bind for this one: the general rule is that the show must have aired more episodes in 2020 than in 2019, but TLWGQ released 4 in both years. They did much better this year though so good for them.
The number in parentheses next to a show title is the number of other publication’s Best Of lists on which the specific show appeared. The lists counted are: Rolling Stone, The New York Times, Vulture, Vanity Fair, Entertainment Weekly, The New Yorker, The AV Club, LA Times, NPR, Esquire, Guardian, Daily Beast, Indiewire, Slant, Variety, The Ringer and Paste.
An interesting comparison between last year’s list and this one — in 2019, only six of the top 25 shows didn’t appear on any other mainstream critics’ Best-Of Lists. This year, a whopping 12 of them were absent from mainstream Best-Of lists.
You can read about our top shows below and each individual critic’s picks are discussed shortly thereafter.
Top 25 TV Shows With LGBTQ Women and/or Trans Characters of 2020
These are the top 25 according to our internal ballots and scoring system. For each critic’s individual picks: Carmen Phillips // Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya // Riese Bernard // Drew Gregory // Natalie Duggins // Valerie Anne // Heather Hogan
25. The Haunting of Bly Manor (Netflix), Season 1 (3)
The Haunting of Bly Manor is one of those rare shows that caught the attention of basically every gay person on earth, including all of our TV Team, and all kinds of mainstream critics. There was high queer interest in 2018’s The Haunting of Hill House, the first entry in the The Haunting anthology series with a major lesbian character, but Dani and Jamie’s story was right there at the the absolute center of Bly, and something about it cast a spooky shadow across our isolated Octobers. Maybe it was Jamie’s butchy gardener swagger. Maybe it was the romance across space and time. Maybe we loved the idea of being haunted by love and trauma and the seemingly endless battle to see which one’s going to win out. Maybe it was the rumination on being a lonely ghost in your own home. WHO KNOWS. Maybe lesbians just like to be spooked and see women smooching! Whatever the particular draw, Bly Manor was gay, gay, gay right down to its toes, including the fact that T’Nia Miller is gay in real life. It resonated as deeply as any series in 2020.
24. The Circle (Netflix), Season 1
“The Circle” (Netflix)
I argued at the time that The Circle was “about working in a remote office,” forming relationships and pulling together narratives about people you’ve never met, drawing on clues that seem solid but might not be, typing that you feel one way while resolutely feeling another. I didn’t realize how quickly this would become all of our lives. The conceit of being unable to leave your home or communicate with other people no longer feels quite so dramatic. But the show was, and is — it delivered “bisexual chaos” and casual queerness and a sociologically fascinating look into how relationships are formed online, and just in time, too.
23. Better Things (FX), Season 4 (6)
Last Year: Didn’t rank
BETTER THINGS “Monsters in the Moonlight”” Episode 4 (Airs Thursday, March 21 10:00 pm/ep) — Pictured: (i-r) Hannah Alligood as Frankie, Olivia Edward as Duke, Pamela Adlon as Sam Fox. CR: Suzanne Tenner/FX
Motherhood seems manageable when Sam’s doing it — manageable insofar as it begins with admitting defeat and then proceeds from there with a kind of hopeful, biting swag. Better Things has been unique and smart and caustic and warm-hearted every season, but this year won even more of our respect for its careful, informed approach to Frankie’s confusion around her gender non-conformity and sexuality.
22. D.C’s Legends of Tomorrow (The CW), Season 5 (0)
Last Year: Didn’t Rank
You will never convince me that these ladies never had a threesome. Sorry, not sorry.
Legends of Tomorrow competes hardcore with Batwoman for the title of “gayest show in CW’s Arrowverse.” While it didn’t clock quite as many lesbian and bisexual characters at Batwoman, total, in season five, it did give significant screentime and storylines to Waverider captain and badass bisexual Sara Lance, and her partner Ava, who had plenty to do on her own outside of her relationship with Sara, a real rarity for queer supporting characters! They are one of the longest running queer couples of TV full-stop. Sadly, season five bid adieu to Charlie, a genderfluid pansexual character played by queer actress Maisie Richardson-Sellers. The door seems open for her return in the future, and here’s hoping!
21. Killing Eve (BBC), Season 3 (0)
Last Year: #4
Killing Eve has yet to match the revelation of its first, sexual-tension-soaked cat-and-mouse guessing game of a season, and it’s possible we’re all still tuned in for the outfits and Villanelle’s general deal but at this point have no fucking clue what’s happening with whatever international spy situation is at play? But there was still those outfits, that kiss, that dance.
20. Star Trek Discovery (CBS All Access), Season 3 (0)
Last Year: Didn’t rank
930 years into the future, our beloved crew faces a new set of mysteries and subsequent reckonings with the influence of institutional power on friendship and chosen family, the ethics of leadership and general mayhem regarding hot women in space. Plus Tig Notaro says a line every now and then! Although her pansexuality was basically ignored this season, Philippa Georgiou’s ascendence to a central role gave us Evil Mommi in spades, even if it ended with a farewell into Spin-Off Land.
The series’ most remarkable queer move this season was the introduction of Adria, a non-binary character played by non-binary actor Blu del Bario, who spends the majority of her time in the Science Room with Mark from Rent. Trills were at the center of one of the Star Trek Deep Space Nine episodes that offered a small slice of near-queerness amid an absurdly heterosexual franchise, and the introduction of Adria as a human host of a Trill family line (including their boyfriend, Gray, played by trans actor Ian Alexander) brings that legacy to bear with patience and care.
19. Gentefied (Netflix), Season 1 (0)
New in 2020
Adapted from a 2017 Sundance hit, Gentefied largely flew under the radar this year, which’s unfortunate: it’s very good! It’s a warm, bold comedy centered on a family-owned Boyle Heights taco shop facing the rapid gentrification of the neighborhood they love. One of the cousins, Ana, is an artist still dating her high-school girlfriend who’s offered a career opportunity that thrusts the personal and the political into immediate focus. Gentefied delivered big laughs and beautiful queer love and a stack of cliffhangers, all of which will return for a season two, bless us all.
18. Batwoman (The CW), Season 1 (0)
Last Year: #23
Batwoman’s first season starring erstwhile VJ Ruby Rose as Kate Kane aired 9 episodes in 2019 and 11 in 2020, having to wrap after 20 episodes due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In April, Heather declared it “the gayest non-The-L-Word thing on TV so far this year.” Kate Kane owns a gay bar, has lingering feelings for an ex-girlfriend, an eventual love triangle, lots of queer friendships and is part of a cast including a bisexual vampire, gay bartender and angsty lesbian teen. Oh and also she’s Batwoman. But we’re ever-so-very eager for Javica Leslie to inhabit the Batwoman suit when the show returns for Season 2,
17. Harley Quinn (DC Universe, now on HBO Max), Season 2 (7)
Last Year: Didn’t Rank
In its second season, Harley Quinn achieved new depths of attempted super-villain shenanigans and new heights of weird and gay. In new New Gotham, the series’ edgy, esoteric humor and balls-to-the-wall appetite for chaos truly has room to play (and destroy), and whomst amongst us cannot relate to dealing with feelings for one’s best friend by creating a whole new set of life problems with which to distract oneself?
16. High Maintenance (HBO), Season 4 (0)
Last Year: #22
This oddball New York anthology series co-produced by lesbian director Katja Blichfeld and her ex-husband, Ben Sinclair; reached an important milestone in Season 4: we finally published an entire article about it! Genial weed guy “The Guy”‘s brief journeys into the diverse patchwork of distinctly New York situations took on a level of unexpected escapism during a time when the idea of riding a bike around town and entering the homes of several strangers per day to deliver drugs — and, sometimes, to smoke from a communal pot dispensing device together — seemed essentially unfathomable. Consistently queer-inclusive, this year’s eighth episode, “Solo,” gave us a very rare story: a sweet if fleeting love affair between two non-binary people, converging at the intersection of curiosity and loneliness.
15. Feel Good (Netflix), Season 1 (1)
New in 2020
Mae Martin’s lean, funny, smart and genuinely touching snack of dark-light comedy, which they wrote, directed and star in; reminds us that relationships are not just between two people, but between two sets of insecurities, obsessions, fears, baggage and hangups. It’s interesting that so many masculine-of-center and non-binary queer comics have emerged with self-created shows that traffic in this self-deprecating relationship-torpedoing territory usually dominated by white male comics (e.g., Louie, Seinfeld, Crashed) — Take My Wife, One Mississippi, Work in Progress and now, Feel Good. Unsurprisingly, the genre looks way better on Mae than it ever did on Jerry.
14. Teenage Bounty Hunters (Netflix), Season 1 (3)
New in 2020
Fake it til you make it. Or out. Whatever works.
Jenji Kohan’s comedy about twins who become bounty hunters just to add a little bit of excitement to their lives had a late-emerging bisexual twist that became one of the shows’ sweetest spots. Alas, like so many other queer-inclusive series in 2020, Netflix axed it when it’d just begun to find its footing.
13. She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (Netflix), Season 5 (0)
Last Year: #19
In its final season, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power handed the fruits of its bounty into the hands of its loyal queer viewership with “an ending befitting an epic film saga.” Most importantly, after so many moons of gal-palling around, the series’ central ‘ship sailed hard into the horizon, providing a fitting end to a show with an enduring legacy of queer representation in the all-ages space.
12. P-Valley (Starz), Season 1 (9)
New in 2020
Playright Katori Hall and an all-women team of writers and directors transformed her play, Pussy Valley, into a unrestrained, blue-and-pink-neon family portrait of sex workers in the Mississippi Delta that earned unanimous critical acclaim. Out gay dancer/choreographer/actor Nicco Annan plays Uncle Clifford — a role he originated onstage — the non-binary owner/proprietor of The Pynk. Amid the hyper-femininity and masculinity of the industry, Clifford is a revelation.
11. Betty (HBO), Season 1 (3)
New in 2020
Betty (HBO)
Betty brims with life — with busy streets, chance encounters, friendships forged over a shared attitude — and centers gender non-conforming and queer characters; including Kirt, a charmingly oblivious tomboy and Honeybear, a Black videographer from a conservative family who skates with abandon and dates with reservation. Like High Maintenance, Betty delivered the joy and struggle of interlocked lives during an isolated time.
10. Dead to Me (Netflix), Season 2 (3)
Last Year: Didn’t Rank
The first season of “Dead to Me” was buzzy but missed our radars due to its’ heterosexuality. In Season 2, a queer storyline featuring special guest Natalie Morales and series co-star Judy (Linda Cardellini), and it is one of the chiller elements on the wild stage of this female-centric dark comedy that asks big questions about grief with slapstick emotion.
9. High Fidelity (Hulu), Season 1 (3)
New in 2020
Yet another series on this list cancelled after one great season, High Fidelity is also yet another series that illuminates the benefits of re-telling a story originally centered on a straight cis white man by removing him entirely from the picture. In this case, Rob became a self-sabotaging, incidentally seductive, sardonically art-snobby navel-gazing twentysomething Black bisexual woman — and damn did the story look even better on her. Zoe Kravitz defiantly embodies the character’s edgy sentimentality to a killer soundtrack, surrounded by a compelling cast.
8. Work in Progress (Showtime), Season 1 (0)
Last Year: #21
Did the back half of Work in Progress improve upon the first half, or was there just a lot less competition this year? Hard to say! Drew called it “a hilarious triumph of specificity” and it’s hard to find a better sentence about Work in Progress. In 2020 we watched between our fingers as Abby stumbled towards an epic knife twist of a finale, daring us all to love ourselves and each other as people who make mistakes rather than as the walking mistakes we so often feel we are.
7. Twenties (BET), Season 1 (0)
New in 2020
You could call this a “Situationship,” I call it trouble.
Lena Waithe’s first stab at telling her own story in “Master of None” crowned her the first Black woman to win a Comedy Writing Emmy. Twenties is her second. Hattie, embodied by winsome newcomer Jonica T. Gibbs, isn’t the first young, ambitious writer character with ego to spare and a refusal to compromise their artistic goals in favor of activities like “getting a paying job” to headline a TV program, but she’s absolutely the first Black masculine-of-center lesbian lead character to do so. After a middling pilot, sticking withTwenties pays off, blending hijinks with life lessons amid a classic Hollywood backdrop. Also worth noting: Kym Whitley’s delightful performance as Hattie’s gossipy mother.
6. One Day at a Time (Pop), Season 4 (0)
Last Year: #7
(L-R): Marcel Ruiz as Alex, Justina Machado as Penleope, Rita Moreno as Lydia, Ray Romano as Brian, Isabella Gomez as Elena and Sheridan Pierce as Syd in ONE DAY AT A TIME. Photo Credit: Nicole Wilder/POP TV.
It feels impossible that a show this beloved by its fans could struggle so mightily to find a home, but it did, and this year we said goodbye to this charming, politically progressive sitcom about a Latinx family in Echo Park that brought Rita Moreno back into our lives and delivered a hard-won feel-good queer storyline. Multi-cams are generally the domain of wealthy white people and their abundant families, but they’ve also long been a vehicle to bring less-often-spotlighted, but incredibly common, working class and middle class lives into center stage; including many of Norman Lear’s own programs. One Day at a Time will take its place in the annals of television history with the best of them.
5. Mrs America (Hulu), Limited Series (10)
New in 2020
Photo: Sabrina Lantos/FX
The history of various civil rights movements tend to reveal how little the hard work of activism has changed, even as the objectives of each wave have been summarily or partially achieved. In this star-studded Hulu series we saw all those big names — Sarah Paulson! Cate Blanchett! Nicey Nash! Uzo Aduba! — trudging through the interpersonal work of political progress, including storylines where lesbians and women of color feel pushed out of the party platform and where an activist’s marriage, commodified to advance a movement goal in a debate with Phyllis Schlafley and her husband, is challenged by her recently-ignited bisexuality. Who ignites it? Roberta Colindrez as effortlessly sexy photographer Jules.
4. The L Word: Generation Q (Showtime), Season 1 (0)
Last Year: #13
The first three episodes of this series’ inaugural run were only impressive enough to warrant a #13 finish against last year’s bevy of worthy contenders, but now we look back upon those wanton days of L Word Generation Q-enabled community with more fondness — and it didn’t hurt that Episode 104 (which aired at the very close of 2019, after the 2019 list had been completed) was when the series truly picked up with a drama-filled birthday party featuring an improbably sexy backroom threesome and preceded by Bette Porter and Shane smoking weed on the kitchen floor. In ensuing episodes we got a love story for Angie, the return of Tina, a surprising emerging romantic and sexual tension between best friends and even Roxane Gay. Now we’re all impatiently awaiting its return.
3. Sex Education (Netflix), Season 2 (1)
Last Year: #12
As Otis spun off into new levels of self-obsessed faux-selflessness in our sophomore season, Sex Education gave us plenty to chew on elsewhere: a budding romance between certified fave Eric and new kid Rahim, Ola leaving Otis and finding herself in a queer relationship with eminent weirdo Lily, and Maeve falling for Issac, her self-deprecating neighbor, who uses a wheelchair. One of its most groundbreaking moments took no more than two minutes, however: an asexual student comes to Jean for advice, and is told she is not broken for not wanting sex. Finally!
2. Little Fires Everywhere (Hulu), Limited Series (0)
New in 2020
Despite receiving mostly positive reviews and five Emmy nominations and, obviously, a bevy of gay Emmys — this limited series didn’t make any critic’s 2020 best-of list. Interesting! I went into it knowing that Izzy (Megan Stott), the black sheep of her WASPy Shaker Heights family, would be explicitly queer, which wasn’t the case int he book. But we were not told about the bigger queer storyline — the one centering Mia Warren (Kerry Washington / Tiffany Boone)’s herself. Add a whirlwind flashback to New York City’s edgy ’80s art scene featuring Anika Noni Rose as a photographer who takes Mia under her wing and into her bathtub? My God. But it spoke to us now, too. On the precipice of a mass generational reckoning with white supremacy and institutionalized racism, Little Fires Everywhere reminded suburban white Elder Millennials and Early Gen-Xers of the dreamy post-racial bullshit that defined our youths. While not without flaws, its pitch-perfect depiction of a specific time and a specific place hit us all in different ways for different reasons, but hit hard.
1. Vida (Starz), Season 3 (1)
Last Year: #8
When Vida’s premiere date was announced in early 2018, it felt like a fever dream, like something we never imagined television would let us see. We were adrift in the ocean of mostly-white shows with mostly-straight writers rooms and mostly-poc shows with mostly-white writers’ rooms. Now Tanya Saracho was out here saying she had an all-Latinx writers room, an all-woc directing team, centered on a family with a queer matriarch (with a butch wife!) and a queer daughter?
The show that resulted was as unapologetic as promised. Vida captured queer life from every angle: sticky bathroom finger-fucking, drag kings, drag queens, face-sitting, genderqueer gen z’ers, old-school butches, bar dykes, chosen family, hate crimes, true love, class conflict, the itchy insistence of capitalism upon those who rarely benefit from it — all of it with wit, intelligence, consciousness and, of course, life.
The most ubiquitously beloved series from our voting took its final bow in the manner of your wife looking hotter than fire on the morning she left you, with a bittersweet finale that honored its characters and its subject matter. The only thing wrong with Vida was that more people didn’t watch it.
Our Critics’ Picks For The Best LGBTQ TV of 2020
Drew Gregory // Natalie Duggins // Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya // Valerie Anne // Heather Hogan // Carmen Phillips // Riese Bernard
Drew, Writer
Veneno (HBO Max)
10. Work in Progress (Showtime)
Queer characters deserve the same complexity, idiosyncrasy, and unlikability as the cis straight white men of prestige TV. It’s a joy to watch Abby McEnany’s fictionalized self precisely because it’s often not a joy. She is a difficult character — selfish, cruel, immature — and how lovely to get a fat queer dyke with depression, anxiety, and OCD who is allowed to be those things while also being funny, loving, human.
9. Better Things (FX)
Pamela Adlon’s Sam Fox is the best mom on TV. She’s loving and thoughtful and treats each of her children like individual people all the while being her own individual person. It’s such a warm and comforting experience to spend time in her world and point of view. This season really did right by its queer, possibly trans character and I’m grateful it approached those identities with its usual open-heartedness.
8. Betty (HBO)
The main reason I love Crystal Moselle’s follow up to her film Skate Kitchen is the vibes. It’s just so fun to hang out with a bunch of cool, mostly queer skater girls as they ride around New York. But the show’s cinema verité style also creates an honesty and its honesty creates a casual depth. Janay’s storyline of confronting her friend accused of assault and accepting her own experience of assault has especially lingered in my mind. Betty manages to mix the serious with the fun and even though it only lasted six weeks it ended up being my biggest comfort show of 2020.
7. P-Valley (Starz)
So many of our best TV writers start out as playwrights! I feel like this is a very underdiscussed aspect of the last two decades of “golden age of TV” discourse! Anyway, Katori Hall is an amazing playwright and this show based on her play Pussy Valley does not disappoint. Its incredible writing is populated with a phenomenal ensemble cast — especially Brandee Evans and Nicco Annan — and elevated by its all-female and nonbinary directing team that includes Kimberly Pierce and Sydney Freeland. The dancing is amazing, the music is amazing, and I really recommend stepping into its world. There may not be any explicitly queer women in the first season, but Annan’s Uncle Clifford is a nonbinary icon you won’t want to miss.
6. Feel Good (Netflix)
Mae Martin is so charming and delightful it’s easy to forget their show is kind of devastating. The humor and the romance is revealed to be as much a defense mechanism as it is just humor and romance. And that’s not to say the show isn’t still hilarious — it is — but in exploring addiction, shame, and gender it reveals a painful depth. This is one of the few times I’ve ever seen dating as a GNC person explored on screen and I’m grateful for its resonance. And grateful we’re getting a second series!
5. Sex Education (Netflix)
Given my obsession with the first season, I went into Sex Education’s return with equal parts excitement and hesitation. Hesitation not needed! While it wasn’t perfect, the second season deepened the show, taking risk after risk and landing most of them. And it got gayer! Eric got a love interest worthy of him — though he inexplicably made other choices, ugh teenagers — and Ola and Lily found someone worthy of them — in each other! I love all the characters on this show so much even when they’re fucking up. I understand them in their successes and failures and attempts. There’s a goodness at the core of Sex Education — a belief that we all deserve pleasure and connection and that no hang up is too great to move through. I’m so excited that next season is adding a trans character to its loveable group of horny misfits.
4. High Maintenance (HBO)
The web series High Maintenance started my first year of college and the HBO show started my last. My experience of New York happened alongside this show’s development and my experience of queerness happened alongside show co-creator Katja Blichfeld’s own self-discovery. This show reminds me of those things — New York, queer discovery — and it reminds me of the deeper meaning they both hold — the messiness of being human. Watching this season from across the country during a pandemic stabbed my heart with homesickness, but it also brought comfort. The show continues to deepen, we all continue to deepen.
3. Little Fires Everywhere (Hulu)
I spent two weeks living with my parents in the suburbs when in between homes this year. That’s also when I watched Little Fires Everywhere. One night, walking my parents’ dogs with my dad, we were talking about how for some people queerness is an identity, but for me it’s a culture. My dad didn’t understand. He didn’t see why being gay should determine where you live or what you do. “Do you consider this a culture?” I said gesturing around us. Houses all the same, schools within walking distance, taking your dogs on a nightly stroll. My dad said, no. But he’s wrong. The suburbs are a culture — one that is often oppressive to anyone who isn’t cis, straight, and white — and never have I seen that captured as acutely as this remarkable series.
2. Veneno
Ten minutes into this Spanish limited series about complicated trans icon Cristina La Veneno, a person looks at herself in the mirror. She has what most would call a boy’s chest. Her hair is long but androgynous. Her face doesn’t read male or female. She bikes to school wearing a baggy jean jacket and walks to class inside herself. “Dreams” by The Cranberries plays over the soundtrack. We’re looking at gorgeous trans actress Lola Rodríguez presented “as a boy.” We’re looking at Valeria before her transition. It’s such a simple moment, but it’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. The whole show is filled with moments unlike anything I’ve seen before. Amidst the ever-shifting styles and the layered stories, Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi’s show centers authenticity in the telling of trans stories. And they understand that authenticity doesn’t always mean realism. It’s a remarkable, complicated work, and it’s what we deserve. We should never again settle for less.
1. Vida (Starz)
Okay I know I can be pretty hyperbolic — I’m enthusiastic! — but I feel comfortable saying Vida is my favorite show of all time. It’s just everything I ever want. It’s a super queer dramedy created by people telling complex, emotional stories drawn from their own experiences. And it has the best sex scenes in anything ever. Tanya Saracho is such a special artist — both in her artistry and in her commitment to principles — and this is a crowning achievement in an industry that does not often allow for so much of what it achieves. I’m sad it was canceled, but, of course, it was canceled! Something this special isn’t allowed to go on in our racist, sexist, homophobic industry. And yet it’s work like this that starts to change the industry. It’s work like this that gives me hope for the future. Each one of these last six episodes was a gift. Each of the show’s twenty-two episodes is a gift. I’ll revisit them for the rest of my life — in rewatches and in my heart.
Natalie, Writer
Trigonometry (HBO Max)
What’s interesting — and slightly dispiriting — about my Top 8 shows of 2020: only one of them, Katori Hall’s P-Valley will definitely live to see another season (Trigonometry hasn’t gotten its second series renewal yet). Seeing how most of 2020 has been an absolute dumpster fire, that tracks. Still, though, I hope that new and continuing shows — *cough*Gen Q*cough* — take notice of where the bar’s been set and strive to exceed it.
8. How To Get Away With Murder (ABC)
For six seasons, we got to watch one of the greatest living actors of our time play a messy bisexual character — who was more like me than any other character I’ve ever seen — on primetime television. What an absolute gift.
7. Trigonometry (HBO Max)
When we say “representation matters” nowadays, we’re mostly talking an underrepresented person seeing some version of themselves on screen. It’s about making folks who’ve been ostracized feel less alone in the world. But there’s always been a second component to representation: to expose the majority to the experiences of a minority group and hope that they learn something in the process. For me, Trigonometry fulfills that second component of representation, demystifying polyamory in a way that I hadn’t seen before.
6. High Fidelity (Hulu)
Top five favorite things about Hulu’s High Fidelity: Cherise. Cherise. Cherise. Cherise. And Zoë Kravitz.
Don’t get me wrong, Kravitz shines as Rob — and, of course, I love seeing a hot bisexual mess — but it’s Da’Vine Joy Randolph’s Cherise that steals the show. Her character could’ve easily fallen into trope-y territory but Randolph infuses the character with such depth and vulnerability that you can’t help but love her. Every conversation Cherise has about music isn’t just a rhetorical exercise…it’s a slight movement towards the musician that she’ll one day become. I’m remiss that we won’t get a Season 2 of High Fidelity — one that would’ve shifted Randolph to the lead role — to see how far Cherise could go.
5. P-Valley (Starz)
If Hustlers elevated the glamour of the lives of strippers, P-Valley brings those tales back down to earth. Set in the fictional city of Chucalissa, Mississippi — M-I-Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter-I-Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter-I-Hump Back, Hump Back-I — the show follows the travails of the employees of The Pynk,* a strip club in the Delta.
(*It’s “Paink,” not “Pink.” You gotta put some Southern twang on that.)
I remain not entirely sure how or why there are no queer women among the cadre of dancers at The Pynk but their stories are compelling nonetheless…and their performances will leave you astounded. But the true star of the Pynk is the club’s owner, Uncle Clifford. She is unapologetic and unafraid: sporting a perfectly coifed beard with a lavish wig and boots even as she throws in with the city’s religious leaders to stop the gentrification that’d mean an end to The Pynk. Her love story with up-and-coming rapper, Lil’ Murda, is a particular highlight.
[Will it ever stop being weird that the guy who played Barack Obama in Southside With You falls in love with a stripper at The Pynk? No, it will not.]
4. One Day At A Time (Pop)
There’s a great scene in Scandal where Olivia Pope is confronted by her father about her delusions of grandeur and he asks — in that way that only Papa Pope can — about he taught her.
Papa Pope: Did I not raise you for better? How many times have I told you? You have to be what?
Olivia: Twice as good.
Papa Pope: You have to be twice as good as them to get half of what they have.
It’s a conversation I’ve had before with my own father and one that I’m reminded of as I reflect on One Day at a Time‘s end. Because if ever there was a show that was twice as good and got half as much, it was ODAAT. They adapted to every single hurdle placed in front of them, while never losing sight of what made this show so magical.
Focus more on comedy, less on drama? Sure. Moving from streaming to cable? No problem. Cut the show down from an hour to 30 minutes? We can do that. Produce an animated episode of television in eight weeks at the start of a pandemic? Hustlers gon’ hustle, let’s do it. No matter the challenge, Gloria Calderón Kellett and her crew rose to meet the moment.
I’m heartbroken that we won’t see Elena, Penelope and abuela on our screens again — and soon I’ll revisit those portrayals and revel in how incredible they were — but, for now, I’m still angry about a TV landscape that wouldn’t give a show that was twice as good more than half of what they have.
3. Mrs. America (Hulu)
I was weary about Mrs. America…mostly because I didn’t want to see Phyllis Schlafly iconized any more than she already is (in Republican circles, at least)…but the miniseries skillfully avoids lionizing Schlafly and her repugnant views. The series succeeds, not as a show solely about Schlafly, but an ensemble show about the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment. The performances are masterful: Rose Byrne as Gloria Steinem, Elizabeth Banks as Jill Ruckelshaus, Margo Martindale as Bella Abzug, Tracey Ullman as Betty Friedan and Uzo Aduba as Shirley Chisholm.
It was a veritable Dream Team of actresses but here was something particularly poignant about watching Aduba’s portrayal of Chisolm, the first black woman elected to Congress and the first to run for a major party’s nomination, as we moved closer to electing a woman of color to the vice presidency.
2. Little Fires Everywhere (Hulu)
There’s a moment in the Little Fires Everywhere finale where Elena shows up at Mia’s door to tell her that she won’t be renewing her lease (as if that were ever in doubt). She finds her daughter’s glove on the doorstep and if there were ever any hope that Elena would hold her tongue and accept some accountability for how her life has fallen apart, it’s gone. Elena is so sure of herself in that moment — so invested in painting herself as the better mother, despite her husband’s assertions to the contrary — that she can’t even fathom being wrong.
“You do know your daughter was pregnant, right? That’s just another feather in your mothering cap,” Elena spits.
Mia pauses and smirks, knowing that Elena’s “elegant racism” has vastly overplayed its hand. That smirk? That smirk…brought me so much joy. It was so much of my experience with racism bound up in one Kerry Washington slight smile.
1. Vida (Starz)
I have so many misgivings about how the third season of Vida went — how it was cancelled, how it was cut to just six episodes, how it was overshadowed, first, by less compelling queer television and then by COVID and the political uprisings — but, at the end of the day, I want to remember the show not by what Tanya Saracho and the her team couldn’t control but what they could: the stories. And, my god, those stories were magnificent.
For my money, Vida will go down as the best queer series in television history. In three far-too-short seasons, it set a new bar for what queer television could be and established itself as the standard upon which other series — who are truly aspiring to greatness — should measure themselves against.
Heather, TV Editor:
“Adventure Time” Distant Lands (HBO Max)
So many of my top shows of the year are also so many of our other writers’ top shows of the year, so I’m going to narrow down my choices to the five I think no one else will choose to write about! Every show on my little list here meant something extra special to me — and, I think, to the queer TV canon — in this specific 2020 hellscape.
Batwoman (S1) (The CW)
With the exception of The L Word: Generation Q, Batwoman was, hands down, the gayest thing on TV in 2020. A lesbian main character and the world’s most popular gay superhero headlining the show, and half a dozen supporting queer characters and love interests. The series also just had a real queer sensitibilty. Every lesbian was falling in love with every other lesbian; there were coming out stories from multiple angles; Kate owned a gay bar; Rachel Skarsten as Alice; and, unlike Batwoman: Elegy, which is a terrific and revolutionary collection of comic books, Batwoman’s queer writers and lesbian showrunner really were able to grapple with the complex nature of Kate’s compounded history with secret identities. It was also just fun! And creepy! And ridiculous! And I, for one, cannot wait to see what Javicia Leslie’s Ryan Wilder brings to the series. I know in my heart it’s going to be even better.
Adventure Time: Distant Lands — Obsidian
Adventure Time‘s series finale, “Come Along With Me,” finally allowed Marceline and Princess Bubblegum to give in to the subtext and angst and smooch on their cartoon lips, and their curtain call saw them snuggled up in bed watching TV together. It was a huge victory for two characters who spent eight years dropping hints about what they meant to each other, and why, and what happened that caused them to have such an intense and antagonistic relationship. Like all of the supporting characters’ storylines on the series, theirs was fractured, moving them forward in time and occasionally revealing something about their past. Adventure Time: Distant Lands — Obsidian stopped donking around and filled in all the blanks with care and affection, and in probably the greatest gay fanservice scene ever, the episode ends with the couple dancing and collectively flashing back to the origin story of the shared t-shirt that launched a million fan fictions.
Harley Quinn (HBO Max)
Harley Quinn’s second season is a near-perfect season of gay TV that includes character growth for both Harley and Ivy, and satisfying love story that sees them riding off into the sunset together in the exact same car they escaped in during their first episode of Batman: The Animated Series. There are few queer fandoms as long-suffering as those who pinged Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy as more than friends in the ’90s, and while the hints have continued for three decades and finally landed in the comic books in recent years, Harley Quinn‘s animated series is the first time the couple has gotten the on-screen treatment they deserve.
One Day At A Time (Pop)
I don’t know how exactly how One Day at a Time always managed to strike such a perfect balance of laughing with and at Elena in a way that also made me feel like I was in on the joke — but it was the one comedy series I always felt completely relaxed watching because I knew the show was never going to punch down. And, of course, it wasn’t just Elena and Syd who brought the queer laughs. Judy Reyes’ Ramona, a friend of Penelope’s from her veteran support group, talking about how Rachel Maddow was her Outlander — “What I wouldn’t do to get into her blazers. Sometimes I picture her naked, beating the crap out of Mitch McConnell” — was one of my favorite TV moments from 2020. The laughs were hard to come by this year, but ODAAT always earned them, and they never traded punchlines for pathos. The show always handled that tricky sitcom balance with deftness. This is the series I will miss the most. It was the one constant narrative joy in the entire four years of the Trump administration.
She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (Netflix)
She-Ra and the Princesses of Power‘s final season finally gave queer nerds what we’ve been craving our entire lives: the luxury of seeing ourselves in a legendary space opera and epic fantasy story, not just as sidekicks, but as main characters who save the day with their heroism and also with their BIG GAY LOVE. Every lesbian, bisexual, and queer character has their moment to shine in the finale, from longterm couple Spinarella and Netossa, to Bow’s gay dads, to fan favorite baby angel Scorpia and her new love interest Perfuma. And it wasn’t just the quantity of characters; it was the quality of representation. Much like Steven Universe, She-Ra took so many of the lessons of queer adulthood and imparted them onto fully realized characters that landed across generations.
Kayla, Writer:
DARE ME — “Scorched Earth” Episode 107 — Pictured: (l-r) Marlo Kelly as Beth Cassidy, Herizen Guardiola as Addy Hanlon — (Photo by: Rafy/USA Network)
10. Work in Progress (Showtime)
I feel like it has become somewhat of an Austoraddle TV Team inside joke that half of us prefer nice characters who live happy lives and half of us prefer fucked-up characters who live frustrating or sad lives. I fall into the latter category, so I gravitate toward depictions of queerness that are very very messy, and Work In Progress does that so well!
9. Dead To Me (Netflix)
Dead To Me was already a knockout surprising show in its first season, and then when the second season got GAY AS HELL? I felt like it was a personal gift to me. But queer storyline aside, this dark comedy checks so many boxes for me. I love an achingly good depiction of a truly unhealthy relationship dynamic, what can I say.
8. High Maintenance (HBO)
High Maintenance just gets better and better all the time? At this point, it has made me feel every emotion there is to feel. It makes me miss New York so so so so much.
7. Killing Eve (BBC)
I know that the most recent season of Killing Eve was pretty divisive, but I really loved it? It’s the bleakest season for sure. But the bizarre combination of aesthetic maximalism and brutalism is something I love about this show. Its intermingling of beauty and terror has always been a compelling part of its visual storytelling. Season three also marks such an interesting era for Eve, who is so deeply submerged in her worst tendencies that she’s more like Villanelle than ever. These two are forever merging and repelling, like same-poled magnets that can never get too close.
6. Star Trek Discovery (CBS All Access)
I’m very on record as loving this wonderful space show, which leans into a lot of my favorite sci-fi tropes but in a way that feels exciting and satisfying. It’s so well acted, and the action sequences do not disappoint, but there are compelling stories there, too. It’s a show I find myself wanting to watch over and over.
5. Schitt’s Creek (Pop)
The same thing happened to me that I think happened to a lot of people with Schitt’s Creek, which is that we initially just had fun laughing at these ridiculous characters to all of a sudden being way too emotionally invested in their lives???? The character arcs are surprisingly deep and complex, and the final season sticks the landing. I miss the show already, but it was also the right time to end it.
4. Sex Education (Netflix)
I have loved this show since its start, and it just delights me over and over again. Frank and hilarious about the horrors of puberty, it’s a sharp and layered comedy with incredible characters. And the overall trajectory of the show is that it just keeps getting gayer and gayer, and that’s how it should be for all shows!!!!!!
3. Feel Good (Netflix)
As I wrote in my review for The A.V. Club: Much more than just a show about modern dating, Feel Good looks at all kinds of relationships: fractured ones, blooming ones, evolving ones. It’s impeccably detailed on aesthetic, story, and character levels. Mae Martin is a genius. Also LOVE TO SEE STRAP-ON SEX ON MY TEEVEE.
2. Vida (Starz)
I have so many feelings about Vida that I’m feeling overwhelmed trying to sum up how I feel about its final season, but this show is about as close to perfect as it gets. Its world-building is fantastic. So when you get to this final season, you feel like you’re really living amongst these characters and their lives. It also has some of the best sex scenes on television, and I like my television to be very sad and very sexy!!!!!!!
1. Dare Me (USA)
If I’m being honest, Dare Me gets this number one slot on my list not because I technically think it’s the best of all these shows but rather because I’m perpetually bummed that it was not an instant hit because IT DESERVED TO BE AN INSTANT HIT. But instead, it was cancelled, and I’m forever bitter about it!!!! Because it’s a very smart and twisty thriller stacked with compelling characters, particularly its messy teen girls who are terrifying and lovely all at once. BRING BACK DARE ME.
Valerie, Writer:
“Wynonna Earp” (SyFy)
This was very hard, because remembering what aired this year is nearly impossible because time became even more abstract than ever in 2020, but also because I’ve spent a lot of my extra quarantine time watching shows I definitely should have already seen but didn’t, like Imposters and Station 19, and I’m halfway through Vida now. So I was very surprised when I broke it down and actually had a really hard time narrowing it to only ten. (Sorry to Legacies and Motherland: Fort Salem, who got the boot due to my arbitrary logic of wanting to make sure to honor shows that won’t qualify for future lists.) But this is the best my mushy 2020 brain could come up with, here’s hoping it doesn’t make my 2021 self furious when I look back.
10. Little Fires Everywhere (Hulu)
I’ve never enjoyed a show making me so uncomfortable so much. The acting was so superb across the board, including but not limited to the teenagers and flashback versions of Mia and Elena, and every single character was so interesting and complex. I was so sucked in and I hadn’t expected to enjoy this show quite so much.
9. Harley Quinn (HBO Max)
The chaos of Harley Quinn is so appealing to me and combined with the logical and calm Poison Ivy, this cartoon was non-stop delight for me. I live for a Hufflepuff/Slytherin combo, the high-energy impulsive eager gal and her grounded, reality-checking, protective pal. Plus, I’ll never get tired of cannon queer cartoons which leads me to…
8. She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (Netflix)
Despite knowing how many queer people worked on this show behind the scenes, because of how many queer characters there already were, and because of a lifetime of being let down by television, I really and truly never thought they would Go There with Catra and Adora. I will never get over how important and impactful seeing queer love quite literally save the universe will be to the children watching this show, and how thus how important it was to me.
7. One Day at a Time (Pop)
When the last chunk of One Day at a Time episodes aired amidst the pandemic in June, I had been in a “shit this is going to last a lot longer than two months” slump and it was the first time in weeks I really laughed in a genuine, uninhibited way. It was written (and performed) with such heart, combining fun goofs with serious topics in a way that made me laugh and cry regularly. I’ll miss the Alvarezes a lot.
6. Batwoman (The CW)
Listen, I’m as surprised as you are to see Batwoman on my list, but the truth is, while we did already have queer characters on CW DC TV, Batwoman came along and doubled our ranks. Kate Kane is a lesbian, and the show didn’t shy away from that fact. They gave her a lesbian bar and sprinkled a bunch of queer friends and ex-girlfriends into her past and present in a way that was closer to authentic than most shows that aren’t in The L Word universe accomplish. The show balanced humor and drama in a fun way, and also: Rachel Skarsten. And honestly based on what we know about Javicia Leslie so far, it can only go up from here.
5. Dead to Me (Netflix)
Dead to Me was one of my biggest TV surprises last year. I watched season one on a lark and was enchanted. The chemistry between Christina Applegate and Linda Cardellini was electric and then Season 2 gave us a bonus queer Natalie Morales, and oh what a gift she was. Even though the women’s situations, settings, and lives are so different from anything I’ve ever experienced, their conversations feel so authentic that it’s hard to look away.
4. Haunting of Bly Manor (Netflix)
I’ve already spewed all my feelings out about this show but I’ll summarize a bit: I love horror movies and ghost stories and there are so, so few centered around queer women, that to have a lesbian love story at the heart of a Mike Flanagan production brings my spooky gay heart so much joy. Plus, we all need a good, full-body sob now and then, right?
3. Teenage Bounty Hunters (Netflix)
Another surprise hit for me, this quirky comedy was an absolute delight I consumed way too fast, not knowing it would be the only existing season. I might never forgive Netflix for cancelling this show because of how Season 1 ended, but I enjoyed the journey of it so much. Teenage Bounty Hunters was a unique story with unique characters and unique arcs for its queer teens and it’s a shame it gets the boot while 900 remakes of 90s shows are announced every week.
2. Legends of Tomorrow (The CW)
I don’t know how they’ve done it, but Legends of Tomorrow has managed to avoid the Curse of the CW DC TV shows and hasn’t lost any of its levity or the core of what makes it great post-season 3. Season 5 was just as ridiculous and wacky as ever, following no rules except the golden rule: have a lot of fucking fun. And with an un-killable bisexual badass and her lesbian clone girlfriend at the helm of the spaceship, co-captains for life, everyone taking their orders from their space moms happily (even the grumpiest man among them), it’s one of the queerest shows I’ve ever watched, and never ceases to make my nerdy heart sing.
1. Wynonna Earp (SYFY)
Gosh it feels so good to be able to include Wynonna Earp on a year-end list again! Season 4 came back with a bang (in some cases, quite literally…thanks, 10pm time slot!) and reminded me why it was well worth the wait through the extra-long hiatus. Waverly and Nicole are going through their own shit, they’re going through shit together, and the mid-season finale ended with a queer proposal for the ages. Wynonna Earp crammed more delicious content into six episodes than a lot of shows do with 22 and there are still a few more coming in 2021. Yipikaye, motherfuckers.
Carmen, Interim Editor-in-Chief
“Twenties” (BET)
Twenties (BET)
I started this year really not liking Twenties (I can say that, right?). I always thought Jonica T. Gibbs was captivating as Hattie — the fact that Hattie was a carbon copy of nearly ever woman I ever dated in my 20s certainly didn’t hurt — but overall the show didn’t work for me, feeling too much like it wanted to be taken seriously as a “prestige comedy” over doing the actual work to get there.
This is a weird way to open a summary of why I consider it to be one of the very best this year had to offer, but hear me out — somewhere along the way, Twenties eased into itself. It came from behind to not just become good, but legitimately great. In Hattie we are saying a Black stud fully formed, not a sidekick or one note love interest. She’s a fuck up, but loyal to her friends, hardworking, ambitious. By centering its narrative around hopes and dreams a young Black butch, Twenties is having conversations about queerness the likes of which aren’t happening anywhere else on television.
Betty (HBO)
Betty was a purposefully cultivated, understated, small slice of joy in this hellish year. It’s pretty much not like anything else on queer television (cinema verite is a style that doesn’t often find its way to our waters) and the final result is absolutely fucking breathtaking.
High Fidelity (Hulu)
High Fidelity was easily one of the best shows of the year, and it should never have been cancelled by Hulu. It’s strength stands on not only on one helluva script, but also Zoe Kravitz’s most magnetic, mature performance to date: “On TV… a young black woman doesn’t get to pick a pack of cigarettes, a whiskey neat and her lonely artistic obsessions over family or emotional obligations. She’s never allowed to stumble haphazardly and figure out her own shit, fuck off what others’ think. By keeping most of Rob’s characterizations exactly the same as previous versions, and instead mapping them onto a biracial black woman grappling with a quarter-life crisis, everything else about High Fidelity kicks into high gear.”
Mrs. America (Hulu)
Mrs. America doesn’t have the strongest queer performance on this list, but no matter — it more than makes up for it on power of its performances from so many of the best women actors working today. A cast of Cate Blanchett, Sarah Paulson, Margot Martindale, Tracy Ullman, Niecy Nash and Uzo Aduba — each playing some of the most iconic women of the 1970s (or in the case Cate Blanchett’s Phyllis Schlafly, infamously evil) — is a lot to live up to, but somehow every episode of Mrs. America was better than the one before. It’s nuanced and elegantly detailed, coming across as if your feminist history textbook made a stop down Big Little Liars Emmy bait lane. That description will either delight you or bore you, but if you’re anything like me it will be the former and Mrs. America will more than deliver your dreams.
Little Fires Everywhere (Hulu)
So much about Little Fires Everywhere is brilliant and there are at least thousand reasons of equal importance as to why it deserves to be considered one of the best of the year. But for me, it all comes down to this one scene — less than a scene, a single image really — from the episode “The Uncanny”:
“To see it in real time — to watch the playfulness, the acceptance, (and to be very honest — the sexiness of it, I don’t think I’ve ever seen two Black women laid so bare on television before), it’s simply unreal. Even once the surprise has been lost, I find myself returning to it time and again in my memory. A truly perfect moment of acting, of cinematography, of television. Easily the best of the year.”
Vida (Starz)
I’ve been so fortunate to write more words about Tanya Saracho’s exquisite and brilliant Vida than anyone else on this website, and as the show takes its last bow, may I tell this story. Ahead of dramedy’s third and final season, Starz gave Saracho fewer episodes to work with and a smaller budget to boot. But in a mythologizing moment Tanya Saracho marched into her writers’ room and wrote on the whiteboard: “Six Masterpieces.”
This season of Vida was Saracho’s last party on the dance floor, and to quote my third season review, “few get to say that they’ve truly made history. That what they’ve touched won’t be the same after they’ve gone. Television won’t be the same after Vida. That’s just a fact.”
Riese, CEO
I wrote all the blurbs in the Top 25 myself and therefore am TOTALLY BLURBED OUT! My Top Ten is mostly represented in that Top 25, though: The L Word: Generation Q, Better Things, Mrs. America, Little Fires Everywhere, Work in Progress, Betty, Twenties, Vida and The Circle.
Shows that didn’t make my Top 10 but I really enjoyed a lot this year include Dare Me (USA), Star Trek Discovery (CBS All Access) (which continues tackling the highs and lows of organizational leadership but in space!), Schitt’s Creek (Pop), The Haunting of Bly Manor (Netflix), The Chi (Showtime) and two HBO Max shows that flew mostly under the radar this year: Pure, centered on a girl with compulsive sexual thoughts and Trigonometry, leaning into Throuple TV 2020, which Natalie wrote about in her Top Ten.
What were your favorites?
Autostraddle’s Favorite Lesbian, Bisexual, and Queer TV Couples of 2020
In recent years there’s been a very cool trend on TV where we see more lesbian, bisexual, and queer TV characters who are single — which is to say that the only indicator of their gayness is not being in a relationship. Or! Where a queer character actually dates multiple people on the show, and not just the side-character whose sole personality trait is “girlfriend of main gay character.” But of course there are also lots of queer couples to love and root for, and we all needed a little bit of extra love in our life in 2020. As always, creating a list of Best Queer TV Couples of 2020 is pretty impossible because of, you know, subjectivity, but our TV Team did get together to pick out our favorites.
While you’re here, you might also enjoy our lists of:
Autostraddle’s Favorite Lesbian and Bisexual TV Episodes of 2020
and!
Autostraddle’s Favorite and Least Favorite Lesbian, Bisexual and Trans TV Characters of 2020
and!
The Best Lesbian, Bisexual, and Queer Movies of 2020
Honeybear and Ash, Betty
This was tough for me, because so many of the couples I enjoyed most this year weren’t exactly what I would call couple goals. I enjoyed watching these relationships explicitly because they were doomed in a way that felt painful and relatable. But one couple that tapped into the shred of romanticism left in my cold 2020 soul was Honeybear and Ash on Betty. Oh you’re surprised I love the skater girl couple who bond over their desire to make and score movies? Of course, you aren’t. I just love how real they feel! The awkwardness of their first encounters, the way Ash has to gently push Honeybear to take the risk of owning her identity. It’s challenging in a way I love and cute in a way I adore. The apology/love confession video Honeybear makes was just too perfect. The cinema verité quality of the show and the short amount of episodes in season one didn’t give us a ton of time with these two, but I can’t wait to watch their love develop when they return. — Drew
Sophie and Finley, The L Word: Generation Q
I have more than once thought to myself, “were we ever so young” when thinking back to January and the borderline adolescent joy we experienced collectively over the possibility of this fictional partnership. How innocent we were, then. Sadly, we have not been able to see that relationship develop in 2020 due to 2020, but here’s holding out hope for 2021. Sophie’s at her happiest when she’s with Finley, and has the patience and maturity to help Finley through her myriad emotional issues/baggage while maintaining boundaries to protect her own sanity and time. They have a sweet, honest friendship and are both good at saying no to each other when it’s what they need. Sophie’s ambition and ability to get Finley to open up and be vulnerable is unrivaled. Their intimacy is organic, their chemistry is palpable. Can’t wait to see part two of that airport scene! — Riese
Lily and Ola, Sex Education
The development of Lily and Ola’s friendship and eventual relationship is very well done in season two of Sex Education and included a lot of sweet and surprising moments. Also it’s an absolute upgrade for both of their romantic lives! — Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya
Waverly Earp and Nicole Haught, Wynonna Earp
After a too-long hiatus, it’s so nice to be able to include Wynonna Earp in my roundup lists again. Waverly and Nicole have really been through it, but the first half of the fourth season had them fighting to get back to each other and trying to find new ways to fit back into each other’s lives, even though much has changed for both of them. And they still have a lot to face ahead of them, Nicole’s trauma of taking care of herself and a teenager alone for months, Waverly coming to terms with her angeltude, rejecting her calling in the Garden and using her powers to…stop Margo Clanton and save her girlfriend. IT’s all so lovely and gay; the second episode gave us an epic gay sex scene and the mid-season finale gave us a little light in the darkness in the form of a big queer proposal. — Valerie Anne
Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy, Harley Quinn
I’ve been drawn to Harley Quinn as a character since Suicide Squad — I love a chaotic woman who isn’t afraid to dart back and forth over the line between what is considered by society to be traditionally feminine and what isn’t. From a distance it seems like she’s a ditzy blonde with boy problems but as you get closer you realize she’s actually a highly intelligent woman with trauma and wit to spare and who could kick your ass if she wants to (and let’s be honest, she wants to.) The cartoon version of Harley channels all her chaos and heart and also helps her break out of the Joker narrative she’s often stuck in, giving her a band of misfits and a best-friend-turned-girlfriend to help her through it. Harley and Ivy are my favorite kind of couple, not only because the friends-to-lovers trope is one of my favorites. They are the Slytherin/Hufflepuff type of combination. The chaotic and the neutral, the untethered and the grounded, the optimist and the realist. They fit together like puzzle pieces, it just took them a while to realize it. — Valerie Anne
Sterling and April, Teenage Bounty Hunters
I’m still mad that this show was cancelled but that means this is my last chance to shout about how much I loved Sterling and April and how much I wish we got to see more of them because of how they ended up. I think they were on a really interesting journey, and it was such an interesting dynamic to see two girls in Catholic school, one realizing she’s bisexual and being excited about, one knowing she’s gay and being okay with it but not being ready to come out yet. They were cute and fun and funny and it’s really a shame that their happy ever afters (whether together or not) will have to exist only in fanfiction. — Valerie Anne
Ava Sharpe and Sara Lance, Legends of Tomorrow
I know Caity Lotz has spent quarantine getting herself soft-cancelled, but the fact still stands that Ava and Sara are one of the best couples the CW DC Universe has ever seen. Co-captains, partners, they love each other and they work together to save the timeline and take care of their chaos children on the Waverider while keeping everyone from getting dead. It’s nice to have a relationship portrayed where their story isn’t always ABOUT their relationship, but they still have sweet moments like conversations about being leaders, dramatic hope-we-don’t-die kisses, and just cute long-time girlfriend moments. — Valerie Anne
Maya Bishop and Carina Deluca, Station 19
A year ago, including Maya Bishop on any list of mine would’ve been unthinkable. Her decision to snag the captain’s chair from her best friend — after having committed the grievous sin of dating her best friend’s ex before that — soured me on the character and I was unconvinced that Maya deserved good things. Even when she first meets Carina Deluca, I found myself thinking, “Maya doesn’t deserve her!” The thing is, I’m not sure Maya believed she deserved Carina either. Not really.
“I don’t need a girlfriend,” she 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. She pledges to spend the everyday working to regain Carina’s trust. It’s a beautiful evolution…for Maya, for them as a couple and, inevitably, for my feelings about them both.
But even beyond the storyline, what draws you into loving them as a couple is the undeniable chemistry between their portrayers, Danielle Savre and Stefania Spampinato. It’s palpable. As good as the writing for the pair has been, what radiates between them is something that can’t be written…something so natural and compelling that you invest in them despite yourself. Even their Station 19 castmates were stunned silent by the immediate chemistry between the pair at their first table read. Admittedly, it is entirely possible that Stefania Spampinato would have chemistry with a houseplant but this feels different…more electric.
If you can watch and resist being drawn to them, you’re a stronger person than me. — Natalie
I love a Shondaland gay couple, I just do. There’s probably not another (presumably straight) production company that I trust more with our stories. From the minute Arizona Robbins’ ex Dr. Carina Deluca walked into Joe’s Bar (site of so many famous Shondaland hookups over the years) and shook hands with Captain Maya Bishop of Station 19, I was a goner almost immediately. They are my candy of the week, my good place. Their chemistry is off the charts and well documented across fandom online (even the powers that be behind Station 19 picked up on it, and have made Stefania Spampinato and Danielle Savre a central focus of their social media presence). But the thing that will always get me about them is not just the fire in their eyes, it’s the fact that no matter how dark Maya gets, no matter how she pushes away or lets her depression or her anxiety get in the ways of her own dreams — Carina is there. She’s steady, and strong, a port in the storm when Maya needs it most. I JUST LOVE THEM, OKAY!?!? — Carmen
Gemma, Kieran and Ray, Trigonometry
In the fourth episode of Trigonometry, Gemma’s sitting alone outside when Kieran comes to sit down next to her. Without turning in his direction, she says, “you love [Ray],” and then she pauses, turns toward him and adds, “don’t you?” With tears threatening to spill over his eyes, he admits that he does. It’s less important in that moment what Kieran says — Gemma already knew the answer and, besides, she loves Ray too — but that they’ve chosen that moment to stop hiding it from each other, for fear of undermining their relationship. Just hours removed from getting married, Gemma and Kieran realize that their love for Ray doesn’t diminish their love, it amplifies it. Gemma and Kieran spend their first night as man and wife, welcoming Ray into their relationship.
Throuples are having a moment right now but, for me at least, none of the popular depictions of polyamory have been demystifying until Trigonometry. Every throuple I’ve seen feels less like a committed relationship and more like a monogamous couple carrying along this third wheel (see also: You Me Her and Gen Q). More often that not, I find myself rooting for one side of the triangle over the other. But, with Trigonometry, there’s a synchronicity to Gemma, Kieran and Ray that makes their relationship feel authentic…and it leaves you wanting to see this throuple succeed. — Natalie
Dre and Nina, The Chi
The Chi’s third season was a constant struggle for me, but also this summer it became one of the only things I could talk about. Almost 90% of that was because of Dre and Nina. In The Chi’ first two seasons, Kevin’s lesbians moms were small side characters. So much so that in order to pull off their increased role in the new season, Dre was renamed and recast entirely (now portrayed by Miriam Hyman). This should have been a recipe for disaster! Instead, in its third season The Chi managed to pull off the most grounded, revelatory, grown up Black gay love story that I’ve ever seen, and I haven’t stop thinking about it even as summer turned to fall or right now, as I write these words and snow falls out of my window.
I think it’s because their wedding was gorgeous and filled with so many community moments — doing the Electric Slide on the dance floor, teens sneaking wine and getting tipsy when the adults weren’t looking, aunties who are unsure how this whole lesbian thing works and “does the femme-y one take the butch-y one’s last name?”, and buying pizza for everyone when it turns out your caterer was lackluster. No, it was probably because of their incredibly hot wedding night sex. But actually it’s much later, when after a family tragedy involving their daughter brings up a lot of Nina’s own PTSD, Dre kisses her cheek and tells her all she wants to do is mend her in her broken places. It was the single most romantic thing I saw all last year.
The splitting a spliff and slow dancing in their living room didn’t hurt either. — Carmen
Charlie and Alex, The First Time
I had to get permission from Drew to include this, because technically speaking The First Time is a short film, and not television. However, hear me out! These 15 minutes are the greatest queer romantic comedy I saw this year, and also the year before that, and probably also the year before that as well. I deeply loved it. My favorite queer rom-com is Jen Richards and Laura Zak’s Her Story (which if you somehow missed in 2016, you need to fix that immediately! It’s a short binge and also perfect. So there!) And there’s this moment about 7 minutes into The First Time when Drew holds her head a certain way and smiles and first of all — I have been friends with Drew Gregory for two years and she’s never once told me she’s this good of an actor! But also second of all — she reminded me so much of Jen Richards in Her Story and I swooned. I talk a good game that “Love is a Lie” but also wow I love love. It’s a secret, don’t tell anyone.
What I loved most about Charlie and Alex was that over the course of a short arc, you get to watch them move from strangers to friends and also finally to something like lovers. But it never comes across as rushed or with false notes. Despite its short run time, it feels luxurious and slow, the same way that time stops when you meet someone and wonder “could they be my person?” The First Time captures that small moment of wonder, of magic. I have easily watched these 15 minutes more than anything else on television (err, film) in 2020 and regret none of it.— Carmen
Angie and Jordi, The L Word: Generation Q
In episode five of Generation Q, “Labels,” Bette is bickering with her daughter during morning drop off at school. Bette is making plans to get to Angie’s school play extra early with Aunt Alice and Uncle Shane, just to make sure they get a good seat (we don’t know yet that Angie’s only working crew on this production, which honestly only makes this whole deal even more perfect). Angie’s begging her not to come, afraid that she will die of embarrassment — and that’s probably because she knows that they are going to scream and cheer and take photographs as she moves set pieces during the between scenes blackout, which of course they will because that’s what this kind of family does.
During this back-and-forth, Jordi is sitting in the backseat silent. Bette asks Jordi what time her parents will get there, and Jordi has to explain that her parents aren’t coming. But don’t worry, she promises that it’s not a big deal (her eyes very much scream the exact opposite). Angie and Jordi grab their backpacks and get out of the car. Afterwards Bette gets a text from her daughter. Angie tells her that she can come, but only for Jordi. Over the course of this year we’ve talked a lot about the sweetness and unexpected emotional intelligence that Jordan Hull brought to Angelica Kenard-Porter. But in that moment, with that quiet protective energy, I knew she had everything in her to be a romantic lead.
In the next episode, she kisses Jordi as Uncle Shane looks on from the car, and she absolutely proves me right. I maybe never got the girl in high school, I maybe never had the bravery to wear rainbow chucks with my school uniform or even to look the girl I loved in the eye — let alone to tell her. But Angie does, and its sweet yes, but also surprisingly emotional and healing. I wish her and Jordi the world. — Carmen
Elena and Syd, One Day at a Time
I am going to miss these two nerds so much! It’s funny that I’ve seen a hundred queer couples on TV at this point, and it was finally these two teenage dorks who really reflected my own reality back to me for maybe the first time. They’re sweet and they’re silly and they communicate and work to balance their own needs with each other’s needs and each have their own hopes and goals for the future, and personalities, but they make such a match together too. They make each other better and they make each other happier and they make each other feel safer and those are some of the greatest things anyone in your life can ever do for you. — Heather
Mareceline and Princess Bubblegum, Adventure Time: Distant Lands
Adventure Time: Distant Lands — Obsidian was fan service at its absolute best. It showed us a glimpse of Marceline and Princess Bubblegum’s post-finale domestic bliss, sent them on a fresh adventure to showcase their new dynamic in action, and filled in basically ALL of the subtext blanks fans had to fill in for themselves over the course of the show’s ten-season run. Only in the comic books have Marci and PB ever been like this: goofy and domestic and fiery and affectionate and together-together. Plus the song Marci wrote for PB that she played at the end of the episode is one of the most romantic things I’ve ever heard. — Heather
Sophie Moore and Julia Pennyworth, Batwoman
Okay, hear me out. Sophie and Kate were obviously meant to be the couple of Batwoman’s first season. And with Kate doing a little dilly-dallying here and there. Julia arrived to reveal more of Kate’s past and also offer up a different, less traumatic, more cheeky part of Kate’s dating history. But what actually happened was that Sophie and Julia had more chemistry than Kate had with either of them, and the writers leaned into it. That is so rare on any TV show when it comes to two women characters, especially two women supporting characters, and it’s also true to how damn messy queers are in real life. This is something that would absolutely happen in any circle of gay friends. I loved it. I kind of hope we haven’t seen the last of it. — Heather
Autostraddle’s Favorite Lesbian and Bisexual TV Episodes of 2020
The best queer TV episodes of 2020 list is not an easy one to make, so instead we asked our whole team — and not just our TV Team — to pick their favorite episode of queer TV of 2020. What came together was a list as varied as our writers identities and interests! Cartoons! Dramas! Hauntings! And even reality TV! While you’re here, you might also enjoy our list of favorite and least favorite lesbian, bisexual, and trans TV characters of 2020. And, as always, we’d love to read about your favorites in the comments.
She-Ra and the Princesses of Power 512 and 513: “The Heart Part 1” and “The Heart Part 2”
She-Ra and the Princesses of Power‘s final season — and especially its two-part finale — finally gave queer nerds what we’ve been craving our entire lives: the luxury of seeing ourselves in a legendary space opera and epic fantasy story, not just as sidekicks, but as main characters who save the day with their heroism and also with their BIG GAY LOVE. Every lesbian, bisexual, and queer character has their moment to shine in the finale, from longterm couple Spinarella and Netossa, to Bow’s gay dads, to fan favorite baby angel Scorpia and her new love interest Perfuma.
But mostly the episode belongs to Catra and Adora. Catra who sacrifices herself for Adora (again!), Catra who finally gets real and begs Adora to stay, Catra who confesses her way-more-than-friends feelings; and then Adora, who is able to summon the power of She-Ra only to save Catra, and then able to use that power to reset the world. It’s the final hour of that last movie in any Star Wars trilogy or Lord of the Rings film. And it’s all just so normal! Adora also finally learns something that most fantasy heroes don’t — that she is worth more than what she can give to other people, and that she is worthy of love simply because of who she is. — Heather Hogan
Dead To Me 206: “You Don’t Have To”
I’ve been known to incorrectly predict queer vibes on TV, but when I shouted, “THIS IS GONNA BE GAY” while watching season two of Dead To Me, I was happily correct. A whole lot happens in this episode — Charlie gets grounded, Jen realizes she’s falling for the identical twin of the dude she killed — but let’s just get to the gay stuff. Judy and her new gal pal Michelle have a flirty “friend hang” at a taco stand. Michelle reveals that she’s still living with her ex girlfriend, but Judy ignores the red flag.
Later, they finally start making out at Michelle’s place until Michelle’s ex-girlfriend gets home, and guess who she is — DETECTIVE PEREZ! THE DETECTIVE WHO’S BEEN INVESTIGATING JUDY! I love an abrupt plot twist. Here are two more reasons why I love this episode: 1. Judy never “comes out.” When she starts dating a woman, no one says a damn thing about it. 2. Natalie Morales and Linda Cardellini are absolutely adorable together. — Malic White
Vida 306: “Episode 22”
Vida was by far my favorite queer show of recent years. Watching the finale was painful, but I tried to savor every beautiful and satisfying minute. Emma yelled “Que soy marimacha” in front of her father and his entire congregation. She also took a nostalgic walk past buildings we’ve come to know over the three seasons of the show. Eddy got to have a moment of romance after two seasons of tragedy. There was a telenovela-style big reveal of a long-kept family secret. And my absolute favorite scene was Nico’s grand romantic gesture asking Emma to move away with her, perfectly framed on a fire escape staircase.
The episode aired during the height of the US exploding with anger over systemic racism, and showrunner Tanya Saracho Tweeted, “It feels so wrong to try to celebrate or observe anything that has to do with Vida ending right now. How can I say goodbye? The world is on fire.” I understand why she would feel this way, but I truly believe media, including fictitious characters and stories, have the power to move progress forward. And Vida did that in a beautiful and organic way.
It’s not wrong to observe how the show ending was especially hard then and still celebrate the three amazing seasons it brought us. Tanya assembled a beautifully diverse cast of queer characters allowing some people to see themselves on the small screen for the very first time. She told these stories with honesty, beautiful cinematography, brilliant writing, acting and music. And most of all she gave us the gift of Emma. How can a character look so hot no matter what she’s doing? — Tracy Levesque
For my money, Vida will go down as the best queer series in television history. In three far-too-short seasons, it set a new bar for what queer television could be and established itself as the standard upon which other series — who are truly aspiring to greatness — should measure themselves against. Every episode of the show is remarkable but the series finale remains a standout.
Unsurprisingly, it is Emma’s final scenes that still reverberate deeply. Her presence in East LA at all is improbable — in the pilot, Emma refers to living in Boyle Heights as being “stuck” — but, by the finale, Emma has reclaimed her home. The scars of what happened here…of what caused her to be sent away…are finally healing. She steps into her father’s church ready to defend what’s hers — this bar that she barely even wanted in the beginning but now calls home — and when he pushes back, lashing out at the hedonism he witnessed, Emma claims her identity loudly.
“Oh, not just my mother, Victor…Your daughter, la hija del pastor, is a queer. Que soy marimacha. Que soy marimacha,” Emma announces to the entire church. It’s a far cry from the Emma who told Lynn, “I don’t identify as anything. I’m just me,” in Vida‘s first season. It is a superbly written character arc… every moment we’ve spent with Emma has been leading to this wholesale embrace of all facets of her identity. Emma’s evolution over these three seasons, and its culmination in the finale, are the highlight of the series for me. — Natalie
The “showiest” parts of Vida’s stellar series finale happens much earlier in the episode, Emma reclaiming her own shame about being queer and instead finding pride, finding a new understanding for her mother’s own pain bravery that has otherwise haunted her throughout the series, and standing in her father’s storefront church and proclaiming “Que soy marimacha.” It’s a show stopper, a climax three years in the making. And it’s certainly worthy of all praise for both Mishel Prada as an actor and Tanya Saracho as writer and showrunner. Emma, who has gone out of her way to eschew labels and has been looking for words to describe her own journey, staring down her mother’s abuser and calling herself a dyke. It’s a coming-of-age never before told, and one I’ll never forget.
But for me, the image I will never let go of comes much later. When Nico meets Emma on the fire escape of Vida’s Bar. It’s the big romantic swoon, Nico asking Emma to run away with her. But what most caught me was the shot itself — it is a near perfect copy of West Side Story. And while West Side Story itself has a complicated history in Latinx cinema, there is no denying that Tony and Maria on that fire escape is one of the first times a Latina character (even one played by a white actress, Natalie Wood) is cast as a romantic lead. Saracho does very little by chance, so I know the staging of Vida in this moment was purposeful. It’s queering one of — if not the — most famous romantic moments in our Latinx canon to date. Without even saying it, she’s already said so much. — Carmen
Dare Me Season 105: “Parallel Trenches”
Dare Me is a murdery teen thriller about cheerleaders and their ruthless coach that should not have been cancelled after just one season because god it was so good!!!!! It spins a tale of obsession and manipulation, and watching it feels like watching a cheerleader flung into the air—something gorgeous and terrifying. “Parallel Trenches” is one of my favorite episodes of television to air all year. It tells the same story from three different perspectives, touching on the ways trauma warps memory and perception. It’s a pivotal episode for the series. — Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya
The Circle 105: “Sliding Into DMs”
Remember The Circle? It was that reality competition show on Netflix where a bunch of people were alone in an apartment and could only communicate with others through their screens. Wild premise, I know. But even before it became the most unfortunately prescient program of the year, its recreation of our social media lives felt sharply relatable. And something I learned from Are You the One? season eight is I actually love reality TV when it’s super gay. Unfortunately, the first American season of The Circle got less gay as it went along (and more male and more annoying), but those are early episodes were a DELIGHT. The peak of the show arrived in the season’s fifth episode, “Sliding Into DMs.”
Newcomer “Adam” (actually the obnoxious Alex) goes on a date with “Rebecca” (actually the delightfully clueless Seaburn) and their bizarre faux date is one of those things that’s so straight it becomes funny in a gay way. Then bisexual fan favorite Sammie and bicurious Miranda have a sexting contest with Joey that feels less about Joey and more about their own flirting. And, of course, this is the episode where Sammie shares her #ImTheDaddy picture which causes real life lesbian Karyn to speak for all of us in declaring her love. It feels almost too easy to draw parallels between The Circle and our current way of life. But I’d be lying if I said I haven’t received a pictured in quarantine that made me shout “I love her!” followed quickly by — “Oh God I wonder what she’s like IRL.” Upside down smiley face emoji. And send. — Drew
The Haunting of Bly Manor 109: “The Beast in the Jungle”
Jamie kisses Dani’s hand in Valerie’s pick for Best Queer TV Episodes of 2020.
I’ve already waxed poetic about this show on this >very website page but I still have to specifically call out the finale as one of my favorite episodes of queer TV in the history of ever. Jamie and Dani’s story arc is better than a lot of lesbian movies I’ve seen, and the entire episode was full of queer joy and heartache and love and pain. It’s two women in love who have their fair share of trauma, who are taking their lives together one day at a time, because they know better than anyone that tomorrow isn’t a guarantee. The episode fills my heart all the way up and then makes me cry so very hard every single time I watch it. And sometimes even when I’m just thinking about it. — Valerie Anne
The Big Flower Fight 108: “Fairytale Finale”
Perhaps it’s surprising to see my name here in this roundtable, seeing as I barely watch TV and thus never contribute to any TV coverage on Autostraddle dot com. However, while I don’t think I’ve binged quite as many things as the average human during this pandemic year, I have watched more TV than is regular for me because what else is there to do? Truly not much of anything. Anyhow, all of that said, have you heard of the show The Big Flower Fight? It’s not really specifically gay but it also is deeply gay because it’s a show where a bunch of florists and artists get together to compete in a pretty friendly and kind way over who can make the most beautiful giant flower structures and then every week one team wins BEST IN BLOOM (are you kidding me with that gay name??!?!)?
And there are a few queer contestants on the show, and the host wears really excellent suits every week, and ***SPOILER*** the lovable gay art school couple Andrew and Ryan do win the whole damn thing, which is why I chose the finale episode specifically as my favorite LGBTQ TV episode of 2020, but that’s not really why this show is so gay. It’s more the whole thing, the entire energy behind it, do you know what I mean? Anyhow please don’t yell at me for this choice, I found the show when Brandon Taylor tweeted about it and I thought wow, this would be perfect to watch with my mom when I have to move back in with my parents and we’re all stuck at home together because there’s a pandemic and I need some fun and easy stress-free TV for us to watch together and you know what? I was right!
It was perfect, and the queer couple are joined by so many other neat characters, particularly an amazing father/son duo who made me cry real tears because of the dad’s love and support for his anxious son! Which, if you think about it, is also pretty gay. Anyway I loved this show, I hope there’s a season two and I hope there are more lesbians this time around! — Vanessa Friedman
How to Get Away With Murder 611: “The Reckoning”
How to Get Away With Murder‘s final season was, perhaps, it’s queerest. Not in the way I’d hoped for: there was no reunion with Eve, no torrid affair with Tegan Price… just a dark-skinned, 53-year-old black woman coming to grips with her own identity in a cerebral way, not a sexual one.
Coming out is a young person’s game, especially on television… the stories we see over and over again are about young people coming into their full selves and proclaiming their identities, loudly and proudly. Even as a young person, that wasn’t Annalise Keating’s story. She’d fallen into a relationship with a woman during law school… but instead of professing her love for that woman or telling her mother that she’d found happiness and peace with Eve Rothlo, she ran to therapy. She was black and “from the damn Bible Belt,” she couldn’t be gay.
It takes Annalise Keating nearly three decades to come out to her mother. She’s almost cavalier in her admission — Her name is Eve, Mama. And we were more than just friends — belying the toll it’s taken to get to this point. The reality is, she doesn’t know any more about her identity in “The Reckoning” than she did as a law student… but she’s facing a possible life sentence, her mother’s got dementia… and, suddenly, admitting the truth doesn’t feel like the scariest thing in the world. — Natalie
High Fidelity 404: “Good Luck and Goodbye”
I know there are the official love languages but if I could create my own, I’d say mine was music. I was a fan of the original High Fidelity film but when the series came out I was all over it. It’s been some time since I connected so deeply with a fictional character and then Rob came along. In this episode, she starts her official journey down the road of ex’s past to figure out why she was destined to be left and to be alone. This episode explores what it’s like to be heartbroken, to think that you were the cause of every failed relationship that you’ve had. I have been there, wanting (but never actually) to reach out to the women who I gave my heart to so they could tell me — what’s wrong with me?
The episode starts out on a high, Rob sees that maybe there was nothing really “wrong” with her, but that the relationships just played out as they were meant to. She gets over confident, rejects warnings from friends to quit while she’s ahead, and goes to her biggest and most recent heartbreak. By the end Rob realizes she’s bit off more than she can chew, she wasn’t ready, she has to stop and do what she dreads the most — fucking feel and figure her shit out for herself. The plan was for other people to do the work for her and for a minute it worked. Looking at yourself can be difficult, and to risk sounding like an after school special, at least it gets slightly easier every time you have to do it. — Shelli Nicole
The L Word: Generation Q 108: “Lapse in Judgement”
There’s a lot about this episode that flopped, like Bette’s campaign for mayor and the underwhelming yet somehow celebrated reconciliation between Nat and Alice. But, we also got Roxane Gay and a touching callback featuring Angie and her Mom, Bette Porter, doing a nice little midweek hike to let some air in. And we also got a terrific cliffhanger, and my favorite sex scene in L Word history. It’s not glossy or overdone, there’s no male gaze, just two girls — one who is terrified of sober sex and actual intimacy, the other whom is engaged to somebody she definitely shouldn’t marry — who know and understand each other, who can switch from fear to lust to joy again and again.
Finley has never looked happier than she does in this scene, and Sophie is so emotionally present. I’ve thought about this scene a lot this year. We all have those things, maybe. “Remember when we did [xxx] in [January or February or even early March] like civilization wasn’t near collapse?” For me, somehow, THIS moment — sitting on my bed at 1am texting Drew and Analyssa about this episode, just totally losing it over two fictional characters hooking up as if we were all bored closeted teenagers — is the one I think about when I think about the things we had the room to care about so entirely. — Riese
Little Fires Everywhere 106: “The Uncanny”
At last we came to Mia’s most fully inhabited flashback episode, where her story becomes queerer than I’d expected in my wildest dreams from a book that didn’t explicitly assign queerness to any of their characters. Tiffany Boone plays teenage Mia Warren as she leaves home for New York City. Amid the ‘80s art world, where artists were defining and building movements that pushed established boundaries and eventually the limits of their own bodies, she is enraptured by Pauline Hawthorne, an artist with whom Mia eventually falls in love. Seeing Pauline fall right back is so sweet and perfect. “Art should either bring something new into the world or something strange and familiar and terrifying, or at the very least uncomfortable,” Mia says, and it’s true about art and it’s true about this episode — which juxtaposes Mia’s with Elena’s during that same early 80s time period — too. — Riese
When I tried to think back — past the upheaval and pain of this year — to really focus on television, more than full episodes that came back to me, it was images. Flashes of these moments of perfection where everything else seemed to melt away and for a brief, flittering moment I could get lost in the story. I used to take “getting lost in the story” for granted, you know, in the before times but now my focus is much harder to fight for, my anxiety is too high to let go of. Anyway, one of those brief perfect moments came in this episode: Mia Warren and her queer mentor who has become her lover, Pauline Hawthorne, together alone in Pauline’s bathtub.
The image itself is already famous by the time it happens on screen, a photograph of Mia in that bathtub is her most prized possession and follows her throughout the series. But to see it in real time — to watch the playfulness, the acceptance, (and to be very honest — the sexiness of it, I don’t think I’ve ever seen two Black women laid so bare on television before), it’s simply unreal. Even once the surprise has been lost, I find myself returning to it time and again in my memory. A truly perfect moment of acting, of cinematography, of television. Easily the best of the year. — Carmen
10 Times Things Went Well But Also Very Badly For Lesbians on Rooftops
While many countries across the world continue to make hard-fought gains in LGBTQ+ rights, from marriage equality to employment protection, there’s one place where queer people still struggle to stake their claim: the roof. We’re used to seeing straight heroes parkour halfway across a city skyline or declare their undying love from the rooftops, while it feels like queer women are just left to their usual specialities up there: snot-filled breakups and death.
To validate whether my base assumption that we’re getting a raw deal is really true, I decided to survey the cultural landscape for all roofs where queer women have made notable appearances in film and TV. And so I present ten rooftop scenes where events ranged from actually quite good to very much the worst. Any omissions are intentional, because I love getting shouted at for missing stuff out.
Imagine Me & You (2005)
It’s a real mark of our collective queer delusion that everyone tries to forget how weird it is when serial roof marauder Piper Perabo climbs on top of her car to screech about wankers over the standstill of London traffic. We’re just overwhelmed that everyone’s alive! If you’re wondering why this list starts with the high of such an unquestionably happy moment, it’s because I want you to know how far we have to fall.
Bad Girls (Season 2, 2000)
Season two of everyone’s favourite British women’s prison drama features a high stakes confrontation on Larkhall’s roof, where fearless and very attractive governor Helen Stewart heroically talks down a desperate prisoner, rescuing her newborn baby in the process. Witnessing these events prompts killer-with-a-heart-of-gold Nikki Wade to declare her love for Helen. Despite the incredibly clunky dialogue, it turns Helen gay! (eventually). It even turned Heather Hogan gay! I bet it turned you gay just thinking about it.
Flirty Dancing (2019)
Britain’s Channel 4 has a thing about dating shows that cast aside notions of getting to know someone by boring means like, say, talking to each other. Remember, this is the channel that aired Naked Attraction where your first glimpse of a prospective date is from the genitals down. Last year saw its latest riff on the theme — a show that’s essentially a blind date where the first thing the couple has to do upon meeting is wordlessly dance a pre-choreographed routine with each other that they have spent a week practicing by the themselves while professional dancers convince them with pop psychology that this is a surefire way to romantic success.
I don’t know how it works, but I do know that it definitely did work for cute country lesbians Sarah and Faye, whose intros gave every impression they were just waiting for the right person to codependently waltz through life with. Their follow-up date by the riverside encompassed standard topics such as lamenting the lack of lesbians bars, allergy checks and long-term commitment plans, so this was a great success!
The L Word (Season 4, 2007)
My favourites parts of The L Word are always the bits where it’s just a bunch of queer friends getting up to some antics. And could anything be more queerly caper-some than breaking into a building so you can climb onto the roof and steal a giant sign to woo back your lesbian lover (who has sensibly decided to fly across the country to flee your emotional bullshit)? This is an excellent example of rooftop lesbianism if your love language is making grand gestures and routinely denying the existence of consequences.
Set It Off (1996)
There are so many nuances to this unarguably fantastic scene as the four friends get high in every sense after an all-night cleaning shift. Yes, everyone’s laughing while they’re lamenting their shitty wages, as the idea foments that the only way they’re going get what they’re due is to take it themselves, with just enough seriousness that you can tell shit is going to get real very soon. This means not so great consequences for everyone including Queen Latifah’s iconic butch lesbian Cleo, but we can keep this little bit of happiness can’t we?!
Below Her Mouth (2016)
Uniquely on this list, Erika Linder’s character Dallas is actually qualified to be on a roof, seeing as she’s a roofer. I bet she even has a risk assessment! While I’d love to endorse this as positive representation of a lesbian-owned small business, unfortunately this is an example of a bad roof situation, because seeing it means you must be watching this really not very good film.
The Happiest Season (2020)
We now all realise that the rooftop incident at the start of this surprisingly divisive film is a comprehensive foreshadowing of everything to come: Harper leaving Abby hanging by herself and just when you think she might step in and scoop Abby up, she abandons her to the painful consequences. I think this is a bad time for lesbians on roofs unless seeing KStew in anguish triggers a Pavlovian response that you might be seeing Aubrey Plaza soon!
Skins (Season 4, 2010)
Time for the queer vertigo to really set in! If you would advise any couple to maybe not hang out in locations of inherent peril, it would be Naomi and Emily, whose fragile relationship would not survive falling off a stepping stool, never mind a concrete high-rise in Bristol.
This scene is a very bad time for everyone, Emily sat feet dangling over the edge while she essentially reads a graphic novel of Naomi cheating on her, while Naomi bawls behind her, probably wondering what sick bastard thought this up.
Some believers of the conspiracy theory that there was a follow-on called Skins: Fire may claim further bad times for Naomi on rooftops, but I couldn’t possibly comment.
Coronation Street (2019)
This is less a case of lesbian upon roof and more roof upon lesbian. Popping into Underworld to pick up the rings on her wedding day, Rana really should have known that a visit to Corrie’s blighted knicker factory carries a significant risk of death on any day of the year, so choosing to go on a day so overloaded with heteronormative importance was bound to end in disaster. When the factory’s roof collapsed on top of poor Rana, she managed to hold on just long enough to exchange vows with devastated co-bride Kate, showing that even though Corrie can’t manage to commit to happy endings for its lesbians, at least it commits to lesbian drama.
Lost and Delirious (2001)
Regular readers of the site may remember Riese’s iconic list of dead TV lesbians. If you’ve long been outraged by the exclusion from this list of Paulie from Lost and Delirious for spurious classification reasons, now is the time to rejoice as we finally let her take centre stage, alongside her beloved falcon!
Heartbroken when her girlfriend abandons her for compulsory heterosexuality, Paulie’s decision to jump from the roof is probably not even the most dramatic or bizarre thing she does in this film (I think the duel wins, personally). Does Paulie really die, or does she transmogrify into a falcon? Is it even a falcon? (She only ever calls it a “raptor” which I for real thought was just a dinosaur until I looked it up.) Would this film have been vastly improved if she had nursed a dinosaur back to health instead, but then it viciously hunted down every single character? Those are personal questions that only you know the answer to in your heart of hearts.
In conclusion, I’m surprised there have been so many ups as well as downs along the queer parapets. On the whole, roofs seem significantly less deadly than cars, but slightly more likely to cause drama than outer space. Maybe it’s time we all get up there and find out!
What’s New and Gay in December 2020 in Netflix, Hulu, Amazon and HBO Max?
What’s new on Netflix in December 2020? What’s streaming on Netflix in December 2020? What about Amazon?! HBO Max?!!! Well I have all those answers for you right here right now. Here’s what’s streaming in December 2020 with lesbian, bisexual, queer and trans characters!
A “(??)” means I’m not sure if there’s anything involving queer women and/or trans people in the film or show.
Netflix Gay Streaming December 2020
The Prom (Netflix Original) – December 11
Based on the 2018 Broadway Musical, The Prom follows a high school student in small-town Indiana who’s been banned from attending the prom with her girlfriend. Two Broadway stars (played by Meryl Streep and James Corden) who recently participated in a major flop, determine this cause is what they need to resurrect their public images and they head to the Midwest with two additional actors (played by Nicole Kidman and Andrew Rannells)
Tiny Pretty Things: Season One (Netflix Original) – December 14
This series about a competitive and prestigious ballet school populated by ruthlessly determined lithe dancers has been compared to Black Swan, Center Stage and Pretty Little Liars. The book actually attracted a bit of controversy for the positioning of its LGBT characters, which did include Sei-Jin, a closeted lesbian dancer, although no character by that name is listed on imdb. Update: Netflix The Most tweeted that “a gay ballerina takes center stage in this thrilling new whodunit.” So…..
Anitta: Made In Honorio (Netflix Original) (2020) – December 16
Bisexual Brazilian pop queen Anitta is the focus of this intimate documentary in which she will open up about fame, family, and her fierce work ethic.
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020) – December 18
Based on August Wilson’s play, this critically acclaimed film stars Viola Davis as the titular Ma Rainey, the “Mother of the Blues.” The action unfolds over the course of an afternoon recording session in 1920s Chicago, with Ma in a fight with her white manager and trumpeter Levee (Chadwick Boseman, in his final film appearance) setting his sights on Ma’s girlfriend. So far this film has been categorically critically acclaimed!
Bridgerton: Season One (Netflix Original) – December 20 (??)
Shondaland’s first big Netflix production follows the escapades of the eight children of the late Viscount Bridgerton in early 19th-century England and the high society scandal sheet written by the mysterious Lady Whistleon (played by Julie Andrews) that keeps the town a-flutter. The trailer indicates a man-on-man hookup but we’re not sure if there will be any queer lady stuff this season. Look out for Nicola Couglan, who plays Clare on Derry Girls.
The Con is On (2018) – December 21
This film features the one and only Uma Thurman as “queer crime bitch” Harriet aka Harry. Maggie Q plays Irina who is still in love with Harry because they had a thing. Also there’s like, jewel thieves and little witty quips and British men and fancy women and all the things that go into films of this nature you know what I mean.
Dare Me: Season 1 – December 28
This criminally underrated and unjustly cancelled show about All-American yet homoerotic cheerleaders in a small Midwestern town with secret desires and loyalties will hit Netflix approximately one year after its debut on USA. Maybe everybody will fall in love with it and then it will come back, like what happened with You on Netflix, except that Dare Me is better than You.
Chilling Adventures of Sabrina: Season 2, Part 4 (Netflix Original) – December 31
Despite planning for Part Five already being underway, this creepy little show was cancelled in July and Part 4 will be its last dance. This season, The Eldritch Terrors will descend upon Greendale and the coven will have to fight each threat one-by-one on a journey to The Avoid, aka the End of All Things.
Hulu Streaming in Gay December 2020
Under the Tuscan Sun (2003)
Sandra Oh plays a lesbian named Patti in this mommi-fest about a San Francisco writer (Diane Lane) finds out her husband has been cheating on her takes an Italian vacation with Patti to get over her depression re: her ex husband and writers block.
Nurses: Season 1 Premiere (NBC) – December 8
NBC picked up this medical drama from its Canadian home to have something new for its fall schedule, and we are not complaining because there are girls making out in the trailer. Five young nurses embark on a high-stakes world of nursing in a busy downtown hospital, including Ashley Collins, “a wild and unapologetic adrenaline junkie who lives for the fast pace of the hospital,” who eventually starts a little something with a woman named Caro.
Letterkenny: Season 9 – December 26
The Ninth season of this “Surprisingly Queer Canadian Comedy” is here for your post-Christmas viewing. I’ll have you know that in 2019, a year that took place 20 years ago, Valerie finished all six seasons within one single week and called it her “happy place show.” That bodes very well for you!!! She warns that there are a lot of men in this program, including “self-proclaimed hicks on a farm and hockey bros slinging insults back and forth” but eventually everybody emerges from the Candian stereotypes the show is focused on including Katy, who is sassy, funny, smart and queer.
Streaming in Queer on Amazon Prime December 2020
A League of Their Own (1992)
The gay-but-not-gay film beloved by gay girls all over the world and by that I mean me as a child; is coming to Amazon Prime for you to marvel in how gay this movie is without becoming actually gay!!!!! Can’t wait for the actually gay TV series, it’s gonna be a hoot!
The Wilds: Season One (Amazon Original) – December 11
Here, let me just bestow this synopsis upon you if I may: “Part survival drama, part dystopic slumber party, The Wilds follows a group of teen girls from different backgrounds who must fight for survival after a plane crash strands them on a deserted island. The castaways both clash and bond as they learn more about each other, the secrets they keep, and the traumas they’ve all endured. There’s just one twist to this thrilling drama… these girls did not end up on this island by accident!” There is a lot of queer stuff in here too, so.
Blackbird (2019) – December 18
This emotional drama follows Lily (Susan Sarandon) and Paul (Sam Niel), a couple who’ve summoned their family and loved ones to the beach house for a final weekend together before Lily ends her life, and her battle with ALS, on her own terms. But also they have to deal with all their unresolved family shit really fast! Her daughter Anna (Mia Wasikowska), brings her partner, Chris, played by non-binary actor Bex Taylor-Klaus, to bear witness to it all. Kate Winslet and Rainn Wilson are in it too.
Showtime Season Ones: Also in the month of December, you can watch Season One of select Showtime programs for free without subscribing to the Showtime add-on. Those include the first seasons of The L Word: Generation Q, Ray Donovan and Work in Progress.
December 2020 Streaming and Queer on HBO Max
Stylish With Jenna Lyons (HBO original) – December 3
I false alarmed y’all on this last month b/c they changed the debut date in which former J.Crew creative director Jenna Lyons, a very fashionable lesbian, debuts her eight-part reality series in which she is building her own brand.
Euphoria Special Episode (HBO original) – December 6
Something related to this program is happening this December on HBO Max. However, “this is not Season 2.” There are two parts. Part one is called “Rue.” Intrepid fans have seen Zendaya and Hunter around L.A. filming. It allegedly resumes shortly after Rue relapsed and Jules left her at the train station, circa Christmastime.
Let Them All Talk (HBO original) – December 10 (??)
I am including this here because one of the characters in this paean to white women of a certain age will acknowledge at some point that she had a threesome in college??? Anyhow, watch Meryl Streep, Candice Bergen and Dianne Wiest improvise on a cruise ship for a week!
Homeschool Musical 2020 (HBO Max Original) – December 17
Laura Benanti was sad about all the kids who had their high school musicals cancelled this year and invited them to submit songs on social media — eventually the project became this documentary, which followed seven aspirants finding their voice in unprecedented times, including a trans teenager.
Wonder Woman 1984 – December 25 (??)
Nobody wanted to wait anymore for this film so HBO Max is bringing it right to our living rooms!! Or apparently it is viewable at a number of movie theaters in various locations, if you want to gamble with your life or whatever. The trailer does apparently hint at something queer maybe possibly happening and Kristin Wiig will be playing Cheetah / Barbara Ann Minvera, who is apparently “a complicated queer villain” but I feel like if this was truly going to be gay somehow Heather would already know?
Autostraddle’s Favorite and Least Favorite Lesbian, Bisexual and Trans TV Characters of 2020
Every year, our TV Team complies a list of our favorite and least favorite TV characters. (For example: 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016.) We used to call it a list of Best and Worst TV Characters, but an amazing thing happened over the last several years: It became harder to quantify what’s good and bad because of the massive influx of complicated LGBTQ+ characters, which makes the distinction (thankfully) harder to make. It’s also impossible for us to make those kinds of proclamations when there’s too much TV for all of us to consume. It’s been fascinating over the last two years especially to watch this list become parsed by genre. Many of us pick our favorites in the category of TV we enjoy watching most because there are several characters to choose from in each one, and because we now have the luxury of not watching genres that we don’t like.
In the intro for last year’s list, we wrote that representation is more important than it ever has been. Our definition of “good” representation has changed so much over the last decade. At first it was simply rep that didn’t villainze us, and then rep that didn’t murder us, and now what we need is representation that explores, as we said in 2019, “the fullness of humanity of all LGBTQ+ people at the intersections of the myriad oppressions we face” — especially for people of color and trans people.
Here’s what we loved this year, and what pained us to see.
LEAST FAVORITE
Drew
Villanelle and Eve, Killing Eve
Hello, it is I, Drew Gregory, here with a hot take. If you follow this site closely you might be confused because Eve was literally on my list of favorite TV characters OF ALL TIME. And yeah okay do either of these individuals deserve to be considered the WORST of the year? No. So let’s call this a most unimproved award. I love Killing Eve! And I’m not someone who thinks it should’ve ended after season one. In fact, my favorite season is season two. See the hot takes keep coming! But season three? Sigh. I just hated what they did with the characterization of our leads and their relationship. It rang false and even worse I was bored. I think my issue isn’t necessarily with how they were developed as much as it’s where the focus leaned. Season three prioritized Villanelle as the protagonist and I frankly don’t think it works. She’s better kept an enigma. And while I understand as the seasons continue we need to learn more about her there’s no reason to decenter Eve to do so. Why did we meet Villanelle’s family before Eve’s?? Just a baffling choice and one I’m going to blame on the all-white writers room. Anyway, enough complaining from me today. May season four restore two of my favorite characters on TV back to their rightful place in this roundup!
Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya
Jamie, The Haunting Of Bly Manor
I hesitate to say all this, because I know there are lots of people out there who simply LOVE Dani and Jamie’s relationship. And also, calling Jamie the worst seems a bit harsh when in reality, the character is quite nice and doesn’t really do anything wrong over the course of The Haunting Of Bly Manor. Like, she’s just gardening and mostly minding her own business. Good for her! I just think the character is so woefully underdeveloped that I never really latch onto the romance at the heart of this gothic ghost story.
Eva Rhodes, The Bold Type
I can’t believe The Bold Type tried to romanticize Kat falling for a GAY REPUBLICAN, and I’m still mad about it!!!!!!
Valerie Anne
Dex Parios, Stumptown
To be fair, Dex wasn’t the worst character overall but they did her real dirty. And her bisexuality seemed like a box they checked and then didn’t really feel like expanding on it all that much. It’s kind of a shame the show was cancelled because I would have been interested to see if they gave Dex oh I don’t know literally any women to befriend, and if they would give her a proper girlfriend or continue to shoehorn her and Grey together. I really wanted to love this show and it made it really hard for me.
The Warrior Nuns, Warrior Nun
How are you going to have a whole band of warrior women and only very briefly hint at queerness from 900 miles away? Besides the watering down of the queerness from the source material, the signs of queerness are only there if you squint real hard; this show didn’t pass my Dad Test for representation and I’m not going to tell anyone what they should or shouldn’t like but I just want you all to know that you deserve better representation than the crumbs this show tossed in your general direction.
Rin, Siren
Rin also would also fall under Drew’s “least improved” category because this show went so hard on the throuple and the queerness in the first two seasons then backtracked slowly and steadily in the third and it made me grumpy because all I wanted was to be #hornyformermaids.
Heather Hogan
Eva Rhodes, The Bold Type
Kat and Eva’s storyline would have been stupid at any point in the last — forever many years, but in 2020? Written several years into Donald Trump’s presidency? At that point it’s not just senseless, or even just offensive; it’s downright harmful. Natalie has written extensively about how The Bold Type seems completely incapable of writing about the myriad marginalized identities Kat embodies. She is a Black bisexual woman whose very serious ex-girlfriend is a Muslim lesbian immigrant. You have to ignore not just one of those things, but all of them, to write this storyline. Who in their right mind is going to write the woman whose first love was Adena El-Amin falling for a Trump goon!? And then having entitled white liberal Jane Sloan — of all people — lecture her about it? I am honestly getting as angry writing about this as I was watching it ten months ago.
Eleanor Shellstrop, The Good Place
On a show where anything was possible, where a not-a-robot/not-a-girl character became a non-binary icon, Eleanor Shellstop’s bisexuality never paid off as more than a running joke. I love The Good Place. It’s one of my favorite shows ever. I thought the finale was literally perfect. But I can’t help myself; I do feel disappointed that this huge revelation Eleanor had about herself in the afterlife was never explored. It would have made for some excellent storytelling, character growth, and it would have been bisexuality like we’ve never seen it on-screen before. Instead, on this revolutionary comedy, the thing it ended up reminding me of most was Karen from Will & Grace.
Natalie
Kat Edison and Eva Rhodes, The Bold Type
I wasn’t going to write about The Bold Type in this space. I’d written enough about the failures of this Kat/Eva storyline and writing anymore about it just felt like overkill. Plus Kat’s portrayer, Aisha Dee, had spoken out so eloquently and so bravely about the storyline and her experiences behind the scenes…I thought it made sense to let that be the end of it, at least until we know about The Bold Type‘s future at Freeform.
But, as I sat down to write my entries for this post, I was reminded: the first time I participated in the TV team’s end of the year lists, I wrote about Kat Edison. As TV critics fawned over this show and queer fans, in particular, fawned over Kat and Adena, I wrote about how the show had, essentially, erased Kat Edison’s blackness while showcasing her queerness. I wrote about Kat being lectured on her privilege by a white female colleague.
Lots of people joined me in my outrage about this season — I got as much feed back about my Bold Type commentary as anything I’ve written for Autostraddle — but let’s be clear: it wasn’t an anomaly. Any hope that The Bold Type had evolved beyond that first season critique was dashed this season. The romance between Eva and Kat announced, unequivocally, that the writers are only capable of grappling with one facet of Kat’s identity at a time…because that relationship only works if you only think of Kat as queer.
Because, if you see Kat as a multidimensional character…if you see her as biracial and/or black and/or progressive and/or an activist, Eva and Kat don’t happen. Kat doesn’t risk her job, a career in publishing and a lawsuit to release RJ Safford’s tax return and expose his support for “conversion therapy” advocates, to turn around and romance the person who took it all away in the first place. Imagining a relationship between Kat and Eva only works if you make Kat into a shell of a former self — disconnected from her past and, particularly, her past with Adena — and until the season’s final moments, the writers of this show thought that was okay.
It was not okay, it was offensive…and the writers would do well to truly learn from this mistake or hire some new black and queer writers to do what they, clearly, aren’t capable of doing: writing a fully-fleshed out queer character of color.
Nomi Segal, grown-ish
For years, bisexual women on television have been stereotyped as overly promiscuous or hypersexual. Those tropes exist because those depictions were written, not to provide representation to an underserved community, but to titilate heterosexual men in the audience. As a bisexual woman myself, I’m sensitive to those depictions…but, at the same time, I worried about the pendulum swinging too far in the other direction. Were creators so concerned about tropes that they forced their bisexual characters to become prudes? After all, why should bisexual characters compelled to be monogamous, purely to avoid this stereotype, when the real issue is the male audience?
But then enter Nomi Segal, the semi-closeted bisexual freshman that befriends Zoey Johnson during their first week at Cal U. Free from her parents control, she invites one warm body into her bed after the next, without taking on the shame that we often foist upon women who own their sexuality (despite Ana’s best attempts). She had the sass and swagger that television usually reserves for its straight male characters…and I appreciated it.
But, boy, did the wheels come off this season. There wasn’t a single part of Nomi’s storyline that resonated with the character we’d gotten to know. Gone was the swagger and sass, replaced by indecision and clinginess. From the time of conception, to the due date of the pregnancy to the fact that Nomi — of all people — would choose having a baby over exercising her right to choose…not a single thing about this storyline made sense.
FAVORITE
Drew
Emma Hernandez, Vida
I’ve written more about Emma than any other character ever. She was number one on my list of all time favorite characters and I’ll adore her forever. I have nothing to add that I haven’t said before, but it wouldn’t have felt right to leave her off this list.
Mae, Feel Good
There are few characters I’ve enjoyed spending time with this year as much as Mae Martin’s fictionalized self. They’re funny and sincere and exude charm in moments both light and dark. I’ve seen so little work explicitly about what it’s like to date as a gender nonconforming person and watching Mae navigate that was deeply resonate. And I feel like it’s so rare we get a queer hottie whose charm is awkward and overtalkative! Queer hotties are always so aloof! I appreciate how Mae is anxious and insecure and lost in herself and the world but still a heartthrob. Representation matters, folks!
Uncle Clifford, P-Valley
Gender nonconforming Uncle Clifford falls in a sweet spot where I don’t mind that he’s played by a cis queer man but I am going to include him on this list. Mostly I just want to call attention to this character and this show that does not explicitly have queer female leads BUT is a show I think most queer women and just all people would appreciate. Uncle Clifford owns The Pynk, the strip club the show is centered around, and his ever changing outfits, hair, and gender presentation are as amazing as his personality. He acts as the club’s tough mommy of tough mommies as well as the city’s ever scheming outsider. His love story with Lil Murda is lovely and complicated and I love watching him find the balance between his feelings and boundaries. I will think about the moment with them in the forest and Valerie June on the soundtrack for the rest of my days.
Mia Warren and Izzy Richardson, Little Fires Everywhere
I was somewhat late to this series and I happened to binge it when I was stuck at my parents’ house in the suburbs for two weeks. That’s what I would call an immersive experience! Mia and Izzy are very distinct characters, but I love watching them both navigate their difference in the face of the monotonous sameness of suburbia. They rebel and they connect and they find something like chosen family with each other. The decision to make both of these characters queer for the series was not simply appreciated because I like queer characters — it becomes integral to who they are and why they’re drawn to one another. I can’t imagine them any different than they are here. Two lost queers in a painfully straight world.
Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya
Beth Cassidy and Addy Hanlon, Dare Me
Dare Me is one of the most underrated television shows from the past year, and I will seize every opportunity to shout that at people!!!!! Beth and Addy’s complicated, fraught, and sometimes toxic best friendship is a major focus of the thriller, and I don’t want to give too much away about what happens between them because I want you to WATCH THE DAMN SHOW, which will be hitting Netflix at some point. But Beth and Addy are very well written, messy, mean teen girls full of contradictions and complexities. Their dynamic is very Are They Going To Destroy Each Other Or Are They In Love? Which, yes, happens to be one of my favorite dynamics.
Fabiola Torres, Never Have I Ever
I found Never Have I Ever to be very uneven in its first season, but I do really enjoy lil gay nerds, and Fabiola is a super sweet lil gay nerd.
Valerie Anne
Hope and Josie, Legacies
I LOVE QUEER TEEN WITCHES. And even though I don’t think the show is going to give us the Hope/Josie relationship I so desperately want, these two girls continue to be so much fun to watch. They are strong and messy and complicated and determined and loyal and hilarious. (Though also I just ship them both + happiness so if Josie/Jade is the ship I should get on I’LL GET ON IT.) This silly little spinoff of The Vampire Diaries brought me more joy than I ever could have anticipated, and due in no small part to these two.
Bess Marvin, Nancy Drew
Nancy Drew is another show that I enjoyed far more than I expected, and the queering of Bess Marvin is a cherry on top of this mystery romp. Of course I’m trash so I ship Nancy and Bess despite there being a perfectly lovely canon relationship between Bess and Lisbeth, but either way, the silly, quirky, easily distracted, estranged, kind heiress of an evil fortune is a delight to have on Team Gay.
Alex Danvers, Supergirl
While the show itself has made and continues to make missteps on and off screen, there’s no denying that Alex Danvers is a lesbian superhero. She might be human, unlike her teammates, and she might not have super strength or shape-shifting abilities or prophetic dreams, but she has a huge heart, tactical brilliance, and loyalty built into her genetic code. Her relationship with Kelly isn’t quite fleshed out enough to make my favorite couples list, but through no fault of hers or Kellys. Though I will say Kelly is proving to be exactly what Alex needed, keeping her grounded, and I hope we get to see more of those two in the final season. I would also like to take some space here to shout out the amazing Nia Nal, who doesn’t get nearly enough screentime but who shines whenever she does appear. (Also I want little more in life than to befriend Nicole Maines but that is neither here nor there.)
Natalie Morales Michelle Gutierrez, Dead to Me
There’s something about the way Natalie Morales plays Michelle, with an ease and comfort and magnetism that grabs your attention and refuses to let go. Especially since the show bounces back and forth between being tightly wound and chaotic so to have a character slide in all calm, cool, and collected is noticeable and very enticing. Plus we love when queer people play queer people.
Heather Hogan
Annalise Keating, How to Get Away With Murder
I don’t want to write this because I don’t want to say goodbye to Annalise Keating, and while I know that Viola Davis is only going to go on to play a zillion more brilliant roles and win a zillion more awards — let’s go, EGOT! — for them, including her upcoming turn as Ma Rainey, having an actress of her singular caliber on broadcast network TV every week as a proud Black bisexual woman was a revelation and a revolution. I will, now and forever, point you to Natalie to read about Annalise (and Tegan), but I just want to add my name to the endless list of people who mourn her loss, and cheer that the show did her such justice in the end. There will never be another Annalise Keating because there is only one Viola Davis, and it was an honor to watch her in this role.
Poison Ivy, Harley Quinn
Harley Quinn’s second season is honestly a perfect gay season of TV that includes massive individual character growth for both Harley and Ivy, and a super fun and super satisfying love story that — spoiler alert! — sees them riding off into the sunset together in the exact same car they escaped in during their first episode of Batman: The Animated Series in the ’90s. Ivy, especially, was an absolute delight in season two, as she grappled with her feelings for Harley, her boring as heck relationship with KiteMan, and the dissonance of loving an agent of chaos while also longing for some stability and security. One of my most favorite types of queer characters is the deadpan sarcastic misandrist with a heart of gold, but those are usually supporting characters and hardly ever have whole seasons dedicated to peeling back their layers to reveal their soft caramel center.
Marceline, Adventure Time: Distant Lands
Speaking of deadpan sarcastic misandrist supporting characters with a heart of gold, Marceline the Vampire Queen returned to our screens one last time in Adventure Time: Distant Lands — Obsidian, and not only did the epilogue show us Bonnie and Marci in domestic bliss, it also filled in basically all the blanks of their relationship and moved them both forward even more on their own journeys. Marceline was, of course, the breakout star of Adventure Time, but even her own mini-series wasn’t enough to answer all the questions fans had about her. Obsidian pulled together her childhood trauma, her early punk-rocker days, and her current more mellow but still kinda feelings-timid self. We learned how, exactly, she and PB ended up estranged, and how much Marci has grown, and how PB is the pink in her cheeks and she’s finally okay with being a little bit soft. Obsidian is hands-down the best pay-off I’ve ever seen for queer TV characters. It was just subtext, and then a little maintext, and now it’s one of the greatest gay stories ever told. I almost can’t even believe it happened.
Catra, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power
Oh. Ha! Welp, another tough cookie with a gooey center! I’ll be the first to admit I thought Catra’s story had been pushed beyond redemption before the beginning of the final season, but the funny thing about love is that it flares up at the most inconvenient times and makes you do things you never thought you’d do. In Catra’s — the queen of self-preservation — case, sacrificing herself for Adora and her princess rebellion pals. But the bravest thing Catra did wasn’t risk her life for Adora, which, by the way, was a repeated gesture in the final season — she also risked her heart. She confessed her love to Adora and begged her to stay. And that was the thing that saved the day! Adora found the strength to save herself because she found the strength to save Catra, and once that was done, she saved the entire universe. GAY LOVE SAVED THE GALAXY. The final season of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power was all the best things about all the greatest fantasy, sci-fi, animated, and queer stories — and it allowed us to see these lesbian characters in ways we only ever get to see straight male heroes.
Elena Alvarez, One Day at a Time
I’m not sure what else to say about Elena that I haven’t already said. She reminds me SO much of myself. Just this complete and total lesbian nerd who takes everything too seriously but is also such a goof, who loves her partner and her family above everything, and has big dreams and big plans and even bigger anxiety. In the history of TV, I have never been more relaxed watching a TV show than I was watching One Day at a Time, because even though there were plenty of lesbian jokes, none of them ever felt like punching down. They were all crafted with love by a team of writers that included so many queer humans, and the people delivering them were full of nothing but endless affection for Elena. I wish One Day at a Time‘s road had been easier, and I wish it was still going strong, but I guess the adversity surrounding it probably made me appreciate it even more. I feel so lucky that I got to watch this labor of Latinx love succeed for as long as it did.
Angelica Kennard-Porter, The L Word: Generation Q
To be honest, I got my fill of WeHo’s lesbian scene when the original The L Word was on TV, and what ultimately made me cave and watch Gen Q was Angelica. Dang, she was a cute baby! And she was an even cuter queer teen! Shy and sweet and such smart-assery! I loved her relationship with Bette more than I have ever loved anything about Bette. Same with Shane. And her crush on Jordi was so real it made my little youthful heart bang around inside my chest like I was back in high school. Angelica made Gen Q for me, and I would happily watch a five-season spin-off about her life.
Kate Kane, Batwoman
Seeing Kate Kane come to life on my TV was a dream come true. I’ve been reading comic books for as long as I can remember and following Batwoman from the very second she came out, which coincided so closely with my own coming out. It wasn’t Ruby Rose who made the character for me, though I did really enjoy seeing a masculine of center character swagger around with her tie undone and her motorcycle always in the background. What made Batwoman for me was the storylines, all the ways it adhered to the comic books where it needed to, and veered away when it was necessary (Nocturna, for just one example.) And I honestly feel like one season was enough. It covered the Elegy arc. It gave three dimensions to something that was revolutionary and beloved. And now it’s time to pass that mantle onto Javicia Leslie. That’s the whole thing about superheroes: they arrive when we need them most. There was a time when Kate Kane — who was kicked out of West Point because of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and who held it down for the gays during the fight for marriage equality — was who the world needed. And now who we need is a Black bisexual badass fighting for social justice outside the police force. I’m so glad Kate existed on-screen. And I’m so glad she paved the way for Ryan Wilder.
Natalie
Lucia Acosta, Party of Five
Party of Five doesn’t reveal immediately that they’d have a queer character among their main cast, a rarity among TV shows these day. In fact, the initial sides for the show described Lucia as “extremely smart, driven and a bit sheltered. She’s inexperienced when it comes to guys — she spends most of her free time excelling at school and extracurriculars.” The misdirection isn’t malicious, it’s meant to keep you focused on the thing that matters: that the five Acosta children have had their parents ripped away from them by a draconian immigration system. What’s most important, in the moment we meet Lucia Acosta, is that she’s been orphaned by her own government and left to face more than any teenage girl should ever have to do.
But slowly, Party of Five starts to drop breadcrumbs… and for a while, it feels like only you can see it. Everyone else reads Lucia’s actions as a byproduct of her parents’ deportation — her discomfort with her mother’s religion, the abrupt break-up with her friends — but you notice it. You notice it because her path feels so familiar… you’ve been there… and you realize before the show ever deigns to tell you that Lucia is queer.
“Your sister wants my eyes on her every second but you — I don’t know — I have a feeling you don’t want me to look at you very closely, am I right about that?” Lucia’s mother asks her, when the family reunites (temporarily) across the border.
It’s an incredible thing to be seen, to have the world see you for exactly who you are, but there’s something special about that time when the only people that can really see you are other queer people. Before you can say the words aloud, they know… they see you.. .and a community, unwittingly, builds. I’m just remiss that Freeform didn’t give Party of Five and Lucia, in particular, more time to grow that community.
Annalise Keating, How to Get Away With Murder
There’s a moment in the How to Get Away With Murder finale where, while giving her closing argument, Annalise mentions a detail about her history. If it’s something she’s mentioned before, I don’t recall… but the moment she says it, I wince. I’ve described HTGAWM as cutting too close to the bone — of being a weekly reminder of all the ghosts I’d worked so hard to keep at bay — and as the show takes its final bow, it takes one last swipe. It is another moment where my story and Annalise’s painfully interwine and another moment where I find myself a little glad that the show’s at its end.
But the story of Annalise Keating isn’t about those painful remembrances. It’s not even a story of happiness, much to my chagrin. Hers is a story of survival or, as Eve Rothlo eulogizes, “I think we all seek that person in our lives — someone who shows us it’s possible to survive whatever good or bad is thrown at you.”
Annalise Keating wasn’t just my first chance to feel seen, she was a model of survival (though, you know, hopefully I’ll manage without all the murders and conspiracies). There’s a way out of the trauma, Annalise Keating showed me that… and for that lesson, I’ll be forever grateful.
Riese
I’m not including L Word Generation Q or Work in Progress because I wrote about them last year!
Hattie, Twenties
Lena Waithe proved there’s still some life left in the “thwarted yet overconfident writer tries to make it in Hollywood” genre with Hattie, who is as naive as she is ambitious and as charming as she is self-centered. Infused with familiar sweeping Old Hollywood soundtrack and distinctly modern prestige Los Angeles aesthetic, Hattie stands out as a black masc lesbian who, unlike similar stories in this vein, actually does have something new to say. Also she is very hot and very funny! I always relate to characters who say shit like, “I don’t want some stressful 9-to-5 that takes me away from my writing” (a sentiment shared by, for example, Eileen Myles in “Cool for You” and Sylvia Plath in “The Bell Jar”) because that’s how I felt in my twenties too!
Mia Warren, Little Fires Everywhere
Kerry Washington and Tiffany Boone both executed award-worthy performances as this incredibly complex and captivating queer protagonist in a story which, in my opinion, elevated the source material. Together they brought to life this strong-willed artsy weirdo finding her way through the dizzying early ’80s New York City art scene as a teen and eventually finding herself at odds with the status quo and the frustrating denialism of late ’90s suburbia. “You didn’t make good choices, you had good choices” was a searing moment that I will never stop thinking about.
Carmen
Sophie Suarez, The L Word: Generation Q
I don’t even know what to say about Sophie Suarez. She’s perfect. That’s all I got. Perfect human is perfect. KThnxBye.
Ok, so since Rosanny Zayas put so much of herself into this role, I can do more than four sentences in return. I loved The L Word: Generation Q. What brought me back to my third rewatch this year was Sophie Suarez.
In what’s ostensibly a fantasy series about (less white, still thin) rich lesbians, Sophie is grounded and real. She loves her family, she’s loud, she’s smart and funny. I knew, one some level, that I was always going to love Sophie — because queer Afro-Latinas on screen are a rarity and so we stick together — but I didn’t know that Rosanny Zayas was going to be absolutely resplendent. I didn’t know that watching Sophie would make my heart stop and then catch in my throat. It’s a standout because its anything but. Sophie feels like she could be standing in your kitchen in her boxer-briefs eating cereal right now, you know? She’s your bro. She’s in community with us, which makes it one of the greatest queer performances of this year.
Rob Brooks, High Fidelity
I’m going to take my minute to yell about how good Zoe Kravitz was this year in High Fidelity’s starring role, because I am still incredibly pissed that Hulu cancelled this great series in its first season and I will never have the opportunity to yell about her again! So!
As Robyn “Rob” Brooks, Zoe Kravitz fully ascended into exactly the kind of actor I’d always hoped she would be — part ironic smart ass, part quiet rock star swag, and charismatic beyond description. More than that, she’s comfortable taking up space on screen in ways that we haven’t been able to enjoy from her before. Rob is selfish, neurotic, unsympathetic, a bad friend, and emotionally stagnate. She’d rather have a pack of cigarettes and her lonely artistic obsessions over family obligations. She’s also in nearly every scene of High Fidelity, and it simply wouldn’t work without Zoe’s warmth beneath the dry wit drawing you in.
Over 10 episodes and five hours, Zoe Kravitz never loses her audience, even as Rob slowly descends into losing herself. And that’s what makes the character magic.
Mia Warren, Little Fires Everywhere
Moving from one queer Black Hulu queen — that I’ll never get another chance to scream about — to the next, let’s talk about Mia Warren. Little Fires Everywhere wasn’t mercilessly cancelled like High Fidelity (it was always intended as an one season miniseries), but if you missed it because the series had the unfortunate timing of premiering right when the pandemic first sent us into quarantine, please do yourself the favor of rediscovering it now.
A lot of people will talk about how mesmerizing Tiffany Boone was at capturing the likeness and physical habits of a young Kerry Washington in Mia’s flashbacks (and Riese is right, she is phenomenal) — but what most struck me about Kerry’s performance itself was how queer it felt, even though most of the explicit gay parts happen without her on screen. Kerry Washington reaches back to a young Mia within her mind’s eye, bringing forth a history that a different actress actually lived. It sounds complicated, but comes across as elegant and sublime to get lost in.
Everything about Mia Warren is at once messy, conflicting, and somehow above all — familiar. She’s fierce and self-determined, chaotic and terrified. I could have watched her forever.
Tegan Price and Analise Keating, How to Get Away with Murder
I wished with all my might for Tegan Price and Annalise Keating to end their time together in a romance. I dreamed of it. I thirsted for it. But what How to Get Away with Murder gave me instead was even more rare and precious — the Ride-or-Die friendship between two Black queer women at the top of their game and supporting each other when it seems the world is collapsing down around them. Amirah Vann is a criminally underrated talent on her own, and once she had a screen partner in Viola Davis… there really is nothing like watching masters of their craft at play.
Annalise and Tegan are individually iconic, and Annalise Keating remains to the my strongest argument the most important Black queer woman character we’ve had on television, but together Vann and Davis discovered a love between their characters that couldn’t be defined by simple categorization. And that was a gift.
Emma Hernandez, Vida
Emma Hernandez has made my Favorite Characters list every single year since Vida premiered three years ago; I am so proud to award her this perfect record because she damn well earned it. To tell the truth, it can be hard to write about Vida because after so many years of nearly exquisite queer television at every turn — what more can there possibly be left to say? Tanya Saracho left it all on the floor, and that’s never more clearly seen than in her writing of Emma.
I realize we’re supposed to limit ourselves to 2020 television, but to fully undestand how staggering — how breathtaking! — it is to have seen Mishel Prada’s work this year, we absolutely have to go back to 2018 when Emma first returned home to bury her mother. We don’t know yet that Emma is queer, and we learn almost immediately that her queer Amá kept the love of her life secret from her daughters. Its always assumed, by Emma and by us, that her mother’s own internalized homophobia is what cleaved an irreparable gash in their relationship, a wound full of ice and mutilation that Emma is now left to unpack in her mother’s wake. It’s not until Vida’s third act, ahem by that I mean this year’s third and final season, that the story unfolds into something unexpected, harrowing, and ultimately, providing Emma with the healing that she needs.
We often associate queer “coming-of-age” stories with teenagers, and though I wouldn’t have described it this way before now, Emma Hernandez is an adult coming-of-age. She breaks masks and finds bravery beneath what she buried.
There’s the stories we tell ourselves, and the stories that our families tell us about ourselves. But there’s also the stories our families tell to cover themselves from us. Somewhere between those stories is the truth.
Here’s What’s New and Gay in November 2020 on Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and HBO Max
What’s new on Netflix in November 2020? What’s streaming on Hulu in November 2020? What about Amazon?! HBO Max?!!! Well I have all those answers for you right here right now. Here’s what’s streaming in November 2020 with lesbian, bisexual, queer and trans characters!
Wanna see what was up in October? Here you go.
LGBTQ+ Women Related Content New To Netflix Streaming in November 2020
A New York Christmas Wedding – November 5
Jennifer is a little wary about her upcoming wedding to a man named David, and then she meets her guardian angel who seems a little gay! Anyhow, he shows her another version of her life wherein her Dad is still alive, her priest is very cool and hip with the modern times, and she’s engaged to her real true love, HER BEST FRIEND GABRIELLA. Which reality will she decide to indulge??!!
American Horror Story 1984 – November 13
Heavily influenced by classic horror slasher films of the ’80s, Angelica Ross is a regular character in this ninth season of the FX horror anthology series.
V for Vendetta (2005) – November 15
Has this movie just been like… making the rounds all year? I feel like I have written a blurb for this film four times for different networks
Lesbian and Gay Content New To Hulu Streaming in November 2020
Skins (UK): Seasons 1-7 – November 1
After being ruthlessly yanked from Netflix at some point in recent memory, the entirety of this highly influential British TV series about messy, inept, angsty, good-looking teenagers in Bristol struggling to find themselves and keep their shit together is coming to Hulu. The third season introduces us to Naomi and Emily, a romance for the ages. Season Five delivers Franky, who becomes a lot less queer in Season Six. Don’t watch Skins:Fire aka Season Seven.
Foxfire (1996) – November 1
This is truly a big month for streaming networks delivering ’90s movies with light lesbian content that absolutely had a MAJOR impact on my personal development. Foxfire is one of my favorite queer movies of all time! Teenage girls take revenge upon the men who violate and oppress them! Jenny Lewis is also in it!
Wild Things (1998) – November 1
Another homoerotic ’90s classic, this neo-noir crime thriller stars Neve Campbell, Denise Richards, Mat Dillon and Kevin Bacon got a lot of attention for a threesome scene that caused me to audibly gasp in a movie theater in Arkansas in 1998.
Killing Eve: Season 3 – November 6
Our favorite black comedy drama spy thriller’s third season finds Eve recovering from Villanelle’s attempted murder of her and adjusting to civilian life while Villanelle finds her lesbian wedding interrupted by Dasha, her trainer and former assassin. The cat and mouse game proceeds all season long with great outfits and sexual tension.
Grey’s Anatomy: Season 17 Premiere – November 13
The premiere of Season 17 will be set one month into the pandemic with Seattle Grace handling an influx of patients who have been injured in a fire. Two episodes will air on premiere night, the second being “a lot more character based.”
Station 19: Season 4 Premiere – November 13
Like Grey’s, Station 19’s action will unfold against a resplendent pandemic background, and Season 4 will see love blooming between station captain Maya Bishop who has faced her childhood trauma and is ready to commit to girlfriend Dr. Carina DeLuca.
Burden of Truth: Season 3 – November 21
The CBC legal drama’s third season, which aired in January in Canada and this summer on The CW, will land on Hulu this month. Season Three finds Luna working with Kat, a young associate at Joanna’s law firm. And by “working with” we mean…. working with but also… ;-)
The Happiest Season (2020) Hulu Original – November 25
I have been anticipating this event for what appears to be nearly two years, a lesbian Christmas movie starring Kristen Stewart and Mackenzie Davis, co-written and directed by Clea Duvall and also featuring Dan Levy, Alison Brie and Mary Steenburgen.
Bombshell (2019) – November 26
Heather’s review of Bombshell explains all the reasons why this film is problematic and bad, but honestly I enjoyed it quite a bit despite all that. It tells the story of conservative asshats like Megan Kelly and Gretchen Carlson who came forward to get Roger Ailes ousted from Fox News for being a sexual predator and paid the price. Kate McKinnon plays an actual lesbian working at the network ’cause it was the only job she could get and is undoubtedly a highlight of the whole damn thing.
LGBTQ+ Content New To Amazon in November 2020
Transhood (2020) – Hulu Original – November 12
This documentary was filmed over the course of five years in Kansas City and follows the lives of for young people and their families as they navigate growing up transgender in America’s heartland. You can see the trailer here.
American Horror Story 1984 – November 13
Heavily influenced by classic horror slasher films of the ’80s, Angelica Ross is a regular character in this ninth season of the FX horror anthology series.
Uncle Frank (2019) – November 25
Alas there aren’t any gay women in this film but it’s a gay Alan Ball film so I just wanted to tell you about it. Listen sometimes we enjoy gay male materials. Set in 1973, Uncle Frank follows 18-year-old Beth (Sophia Lillis of I Am Not Okay With This) as a visit to see her Uncle Frank — the family black sheep because he is GAAAAAYYY — turns into a road trip back to South Carolina with Frank and his boyfriend to the family patriarch’s funeral.
Bombshell (2019) – November 26
Wow, Amazon and Hulu are BOTH getting their little fingers upon this film on November 26th. Big day for bombshells.
November 2020 HBO Max Lesbian, Gay & Bisexual Content
Cruel Intentions (1999) – November 1
Once again we have a homoerotic thriller from the ’90s! This soapy teen take on Dangerous Liaisons stars Ryan Phillippe, Reese Witherspoon, Sara Michelle Gellar and Selma Blair includes one (1) same-sex kiss and a lot of sex, in general.
Now and Then (1995) – November 1
Roberta — played by Rosie O’Donnell as an adult and Christina Ricci as a child — was supposed to be a lesbian in this film, but test audiences were “creeped out” by Roberta, a gynecologist, delivering the baby of another character. Hard to believe some of us grew up during this time period afraid to be ourselves. Anyhow!!! So you will just have to tell this lesbian story in your own head, which won’t be hard because this is up there on the beloved films by girls who turned out gay list. All our favorite ’90s child actresses (Christina Ricci, Thora Birch, Gaby Hoffman, Ashleigh Aston Moore (RIP)) play BFFs growing up during an eventful small-town summer in 1970. Riding bikes, sharing secrets, knock three times on the ceiling if you want me, twice on the pipe, etc.
Industry: Season 1 – November 9
Lesbian content in this BBC/HBO co-production, which follows a group of ambitious young twenty-somethings competing for jobs at an international finance film after the 2008 financial crash, looks like it might land somewhere between “zero” and “yikes” but um, we’ll see! As is often the case in prestige dramas of the financial nature, there’s a gay male situation for sure, which also lowers our chances but again, truly anything could happen!!!!
Stylish with Jenna Lyons: Limited Series – November 26
Former J.Crew creative director Jenna Lyons, a very fashionable lesbian, debuts her eight-part reality series in which she is building her own brand.
11 of the Best Lesbian and Bisexual TV Butt Moments
Welcome to Butt Week, friends! An entire week dedicated to butts and butt-adjacent stuff: how-tos, thoughtful essays, original art, pop culture critiques, music and more! You are absolutely not ready for this and yet it is happening to you, right now. Today Valerie’s got some teevee butts for you!
When I was thinking about what I could possibly contribute to Butt Week, I decided to stick to my wheelhouse: Television. And while I could have taken this literally and gone a little more PG-13 and talked about all the times we got to peep a bum in queer TV shows, my wily little brain went an entirely different direction. So without further ado, some of my favorite butt moments in lesbian/bisexual/queer television history.
Emily Fields says she doesn’t want to get splinters in her perfect derrière at pity prom, Pretty Little Liars
I’m pretty sure you could think of any noun and one of the Liars has said something ridiculous about it at one point or another.
Anissa and Grace kick each other’s butts in a sexy way, Black Lightning
I think Carmen said it best: “Listen, what I’m saying is that as far as I’m concerned this is another Thunder Grace sex scene, and you will never be able to convince me otherwise.”
“You have a lobster on your butt,” Garnet to Pearl, Steven Universe
I know I’m just immature enough to be watching cartoons when a phrase like this makes me giggle like a kid.
Theo Crain falls on her butt because she’s been drinking her feelings, The Haunting of Hill House
If I had a nickel.
Sameen Shaw uses the butt of her axe to kick some butt, Person of Interest
Is this cheating? Who cares, I made up the rules, I can break them!
Brittany gives Santana’s butt an encouraging slap before performing Valerie, Glee
I’ll be honest this is the first thing I thought of. My name is Valerie, this moment was designed just for me and you’ll never convince me otherwise.
Maze grabs Linda’s butt during a “friendly” hug, Lucifer
This was hard to narrow down. Butts were slapped or squeezed innumerable times on this show, mostly by Maze.
Nicole Haught compliments Wynonna’s butt. Wynonna Earp
If you’re not complimenting your friends’ butts what even are you doing?
“How’s your butt?” – Sara Lance to Alex Danvers after she fell out of bed, Crisis on Earth X
Hopefully now that Alex has Kelly this is a less controversial statement, but Alex and Sara having a one night stand is one of the most epic things they’ve ever done in a Legends of SuperFlarrow crossover event.
When Shane lost the “Too Hot” game because she (understandably) couldn’t keep her hands off Carmen’s butt. The L Word
I didn’t MEAN for Sarah Shahi to show up in this list twice, but I’m not MAD at it.
And a bonus shoutout to this moment because the first time I heard it I didn’t realize that “fanny” didn’t mean “bum” in this (British) context:
“I love tits and fanny,” Emily Fitch, Skins
And in my defense of including this (yes I have to defend myself when breaking my own rules) she DOES say “bum” in that lil coming out speech.
What are your favorite butt-related (and butt-adjacent) moments from queer TV history?
Let Us Now Praise One-Off Vampire Episodes
I don’t know how, as a culture, we carved out a niche for vampire-focused special episodes of TV. I’m not totally sure why we have so much vampire-based media in general — where is the love for werewolves, or perhaps something fresh and unexpected, like a selkie? Nonetheless, at some point in the development of the current American televisory landscape, it became a matter of course to devote at least one episode over a show’s run to vampires, as a bit, as a serious matter, or sometimes both. Somehow we have enshrined vampirism into the pantheon along with Christmas, Halloween and sometimes Thanksgiving as deserving of its own 20-45 minutes in the sun each year, particularly in the realm of procedurals, and you know what, sure! Why not. Vampires as conceived in various founding myths are weird, scary, and sexy and/or gross, all of which are strong elements of good television; today, we celebrate those things, and each other.
The characterizing elements of a Vampire Episode, as I see it, are this: it must prominently feature the idea of vampires as part of the A-plot; however, the show’s overall plot and larger universe cannot have vampires as a central theme or recurring element (although they can exist in the world of the show), or that is no longer a Vampire Episode but a regular episode of a Vampire Show. For this reason we will not be discussing Buffy, The Vampire Diaries, the Originals, the Strain, Penny Dreadful, Supernatural (thank god) or like two dozen other shows today. A Vampire Episode does not have to occur in a procedural, but often does, for some reason. It does not have to be a Halloween episode, but is allowable. The vampires can be real or revealed to be fake, and also what is “real” anyway, you know, when you think about it? Much to think about. This is not all of the vampire episodes ever made, but they are pretty good ones, if I do say so myself.
The X-Files, “Bad Blood”
[SNL’s Stefan voice] This episode has everything! Luke Wilson with buck teeth! Slapstick autopsies! Horny Scully! Fun facts about vampire lore! That kid from the Sandlot! It’s an extremely fun episode that’s good for showing to people who aren’t into the X Files but open to trying exactly one episode and are vaguely aware that Mulder and Scully have a dynamic. Perfect vampire episode, no notes.
The X-Files, “3”
It would be difficult to accuse the X Files of ever doing too little, and this ep is a great example – often media has to decide whether vampires are a) scary or b) sexy or c) not real and just humans playing dress-up, and here the X Files was just like, why choose! Maybe we really can have it all. Come for the vampires, stay for Mulder being real horny for a woman who seems from where I stand like a raging lesbian. He has a type! Also a delight to consider the role of this episode in the larger universe of the X Files where somehow all the shows’ supernatural phenomena exists simultaneously, implying that these vampires and the Bad Blood vampires coexist.
Law & Order SVU, “P.C.”
You could be forgiven for not really thinking of this one as a vampire episode, as it is also the Kathy Griffith plays a militant lesbian in charge of the police-critical group LesBStrong who launches a campaign against the SVU while also trying to make a pass at Benson (and Stabler??)? Lots going on here. You can reminisce about it more fully here, but in the meantime we have vampires to discuss – in particular Trey Greenway of death metal band “Vampyre Sacrifyce,” who drinks the blood of his fans. When it is revealed that the blood-drinking only occurs after mutual consent and testing (!), SVU is forced to back down, delivering an important lesson about consent and RACK with SVU’s trademark nuance and delicacy.
Law & Order CI, “Lost Children of the Blood”
If I’m being honest I wrote this entire article so we could talk about this episode, because it is a trip. If you are on some sort of painkillers currently that impact your sense of reality or perhaps feverish, you should either definitely or definitely not watch this episode, depending. First of all, a reminder that there were whole seasons of TV where Jeff Goldblum was a main character on Law & Order: Criminal Intent? The deep dive into “vampire culture” as imagined by the creative minds at Law & Order headquarters truly pays off. Get ready for a lot of goblets!
Psych, “This Episode Sucks”
I personally find Psych a great background watch or palate cleanser after I’ve watched, like, The Keepers; you may not, and that is okay! I think we can agree, however, that of all the centuries of pop culture vampires to reference in a procedural sitcom (is that a genre?), the vampires of Interview with a Vampire are absolutely the funniest.
So Weird, “Vampire”
It’s possible that So Weird will never receive its critical due, which is just my personal cross to bear and it’s fine, whatever. But if you do have Disney + and want to revel in how clever and early 2000s it was to have “a dorky study group online where the forum moderators are all teenage vampires,” this is the time!
Xena: Warrior Princess, “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”
Lmao this episode description!: “There’s subtext-as-text, and then there’s Xena. In this 42-minute runaround of network restrictions, Gabrielle hunts for bloodsucking Bacchae and ends up enjoying the company of women a little too much. It includes Xena begging Gabrielle to turn her, and someone asking if you can tell just by looking if a woman’s really a… Bacchae.”
What are your fave noncontiguous and tonally baffling yet ultimately delightful vampire episodes? Enlighten me!
The Straight TV Couples We Won’t Apologize For Loving
We are, of course, a bunch of queers writing for a queer website, so even when we’re doing roundtables where we don’t have to choose queer shows and characters, we almost always do anyway. But this week, we decided to share those rarer than unicorn straight couples that we won’t apologize for loving. It turns out that even those of us who thump our chests and proclaim loudly that we’re Team Love Is a Lie are a bunch of dang softies!
Will you tell us yours, too?
Rebecca and Greg, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend
Drew
Okay, so my actual answer is Moe and Noah on Trinkets but I just talked about that. And my possibly less controversial answer is Jane and Rafael on Jane the Virgin but I also talked about that plenty last year. So instead I am going to say something that is probably objectively wrong: oh my god I think I like Rebecca Bunch and Greg Serrano??
Greg is introduced as the guy Rebecca probably should be with instead of his friend/her crush Josh. They actually have chemistry, they actually have things to talk about, they actually seem to get to know each other. But both characters have too much shit to work through and actor Santino Fontana inexplicably wanted to leave one of the greatest television shows of all time to go star in Tootsie on Broadway so in season two it was goodbye Greg. He returned in season four, now played by Skylar Astin, and it shouldn’t have worked, but for me it just did. Now sober, Greg had definitely grown a lot during his absence, but he was still a sarcastic dick and the exact kind of guy I usually wouldn’t want my friends to date! And this is a show that ends with Rebecca choosing herself and musical theatre over any of her love interests! So why the hell am I still stuck on Greg??
Here’s my answer: musical theatre. It’s my only explanation. It’s my only explanation for tolerating Jamie in The Last Five Years and it’s my only explanation for shipping Rebecca and Greg. Musical theatre has the power to let me inside the brain of a straight woman who wants to date a man like Greg. Suddenly I understand falling in love with someone that arrogant, that negative, that insufferable. I see his charm! I see his appeal! I see their love! In fact, I actually liked Rebecca with all three guys?? What a powerful artform.
Davia & Dennis and Malika & Isaac, Good Trouble
Natalie
When Good Trouble debuted last year, I knew I’d care about the straight relationships…after all, I’d watched Callie and Mariana Adams Foster grow up over five seasons of The Fosters so, of course, I’d be invested in their relationships in this new spin-off, right? But, much to my surprise, Good Trouble introduced an expansive ensemble cast that I grew to adore and, somehow, I started to care about their straight relationships more than the characters I’d always known.
The thing that binds my love of Davia’s relationship with Dennis and Malika’s relationship with Isaac is how, through each of them, you get a window into the trauma that they’re carrying. For years, Davia’s had to endure her mother’s abuse about her weight and she carries that shame into her relationships. No matter what image she showcases on Instagram, she’s scared that her mother’s warnings — that no one would love her because she was fat — are true and that being someone’s mistress ought to be enough. You can see her falling slowly for Dennis but never being able to commit to the possibility until Dennis says it aloud. She needs his voice, his love to drown out the echoes of her mother. But, of course, Dennis is reluctant to do that because he comes to the table with his own trauma. He carries so much pain over the loss of his son and so much guilt for having failed his family in such a profound way that he feels unworthy of whatever kindness is offered to him. He’s at the Coterie to hide, not to be seen… and Davia makes him feel so exposed. I grew so invested in them and hoping they’d find their way past their pain and to each other.
Similarly, with Malika: she’s who Callie might have been if Stef and Lena hadn’t welcomed her into their home. Years in the foster system have left her fearful of trusting that the ground beneath her feet will still be there tomorrow. When she meets Isaac, he confirms all her skepticism but then, after she rejects him, Isaac does a thing that Malika doesn’t expect: he keeps trying. Malika is a dark-skinned black woman who grew up in the foster system and was homeless before she ended up at the Coterie…people don’t keep trying to win the affection of people like her. The more Isaac shows up, the more Malika can let go of her past trauma and fully embrace the love that’s being offered…. and watching her learn to love Isaac and learning to let him love her feels like a profound triumph and I cheer it on every week.
Khadijah and Scooter, Living Single
Carmen
If you’re a lover of the specific subgenre that is Iconic Black Sitcoms of the 90s (and there are many of us, I salute you!) — then you probably knew I’d have a Living Single couple on this list, and you’re probably surprised that the couple is not Maxine and Kyle. Maxine Shaw Attorney at Law (Ride the Maverick!) and Kyle Barker, exquisite dresser and stockbroker, are the lead Will-They-Won’t-They couple of the series. Their hot, sexy enemies-to-lovers dynamic SPARKED from the high heavens and there’s no denying that, least of all by me. So then why would my heart settle on another love story instead?
Because I never want to be enemies with the love of my life, that’s why. The complicated drama of hating each other — but being drawn together nonetheless — makes for captivating television, but who the hell wants that mess in their actual lives? My heart is far too sensitive for such volatility. Khadijah and Scooter (excuse me, he’s grown now so we call him Terrence) have been best friends since diapers. The first time they have sex? The next morning they laugh together about how it was the first time they’d seen each other naked since they were five years old and sharing a bathtub. I love love that is warm and lived in, like wrapping your softest, warmest throw blanket up to your neck on a cold winter’s night, sipping hot cocoa. I want a love story that feels like home.
If Queen Latifah did one thing as Khadijah James, it was keep a NBA roster of fine men on her arm, but we always knew that it would come back to Scooter. In the show’s finale, on New Year’s Eve, when he returns to finally sweep her off her feet… to be new and in love with your best friend? There’s nothing like it.
Dwayne and Whitley, A Different World
Carmen
When this roundtable was first suggested, I complained that I haven’t loved a straight couple in 25 years, which is true, and so may I please present you with the other 90s Black sitcom couple that has my heart.
Here’s the deal with Dwayne Wayne and Whitley Gilbert. They are college sweethearts, but not at first. No, at first Dwayne is a skinny math nerd, a bonafide geek who no girl will seriously date. And Whitley is a pampered, bougie Southern princess who thinks everyone is beneath her. To be honest, in the early years they are both… well, annoying.
But the beauty of Dwayne and Whitley not that opposites attract, it’s that in a true coming-of-age, they grow up together. In Whitley, Dwayne not only grows into his own versionof cool, he ultimately learns patience and how to care for someone other than himself. In Dwayne, Whitley learns that there is so much more to the world than money; she also learns how to stand on her own two feet and outside of the princess shadow cast by her bougie and overbearing parents. It takes them four years of college (well, five for Whitley) but when they graduate they aren’t just getting a piece of paper degree — they’ve become better people. Love did that for them. They grew up in love. And really, what’s a better love story than that?
In conclusion, this summer I once explained that I loved this couple so much by describing myself as a “Whitley Gilbert, looking for a queer Dwayne Wayne with flip-up glasses ❤️” and Natalie pointed out that since I am myself a Black nerd with a PhD, then aren’t I also my own Dwayne Wayne? And to be honest, she wasn’t wrong.
Coach and Tami, Friday Night Lights
Heather Hogan
My favorite scene between any married couple on TV, ever, happens in the fourth season of Friday Night Lights, “The Lights in Carroll Park,” two episodes after Glenn, a teacher at Tami Taylor’s school, gets drunk and kisses her in the parking lot of a karaoke bar. She jumps away from him, of course, and according to the rules of TV, it’s going to cause big problems in her marriage. When she doesn’t mention it to Coach in the next episode, that seems like a sure bet. But in “Carroll Park,” somewhere in the middle of the episode, Coach and Tami wake up in bed and he mumbles, “Guess who came to see me the other day? Glenn.” And Tami says, “Oh? And what did Glenn have to say?” They get into a sleepy, silly, groggy, foggy, early morning mumble-jumble talk-off about Glenn kissing her. She says, “Oh honey, he was so drunk; you didn’t hit him, did you?” And he says, “You just get kissed by so many people over at the school you forget to even talk about it?” He’s not mad because he’s not threatened and she’s not embarrassed because she knows that he knows what he means to her, what they mean to each other. Coach jokes about it throughout the episode, says she’s going to have Glenn over when he goes out of town, and “Don’t let him drink all my scotch.” But the episode ends with them in the car, down by the lake where they had their first date, kissing and pressing their foreheads into each other. Coach says, “Damn, I love you.” And Tami says, “Damn, I love you too, babe.”
That’s the kind of love I never knew existed when I was growing up. Not that kind where you run through the streets in the snow to stop an airplane from taking off, or chase somebody to the top of the Empire State Building on Valentine’s Day for a sweeping, soppy kiss. That was all fine and good and everywhere. The kind of love I never saw modeled for me in real life and also never saw on TV or in movies was steady and sure and gentle and firm and unwavering, the kind of love that challenges you to be a better version of yourself and gives you the space and empowers you to actually do it; the kind of love that’s refuge from the storm, not the storm itself; the kind of love that is so self-assured — not haughty, or cocky, but quietly and completely confident — that getting kissed by drunken Glenn in the parking lot will become just another in a lifelong series of inside jokes between you.
Coach and Tami are their own characters, with their own hopes and dreams and flaws and fears, and their marriage is its own character too, this whole other living and breathing thing that, as Coach says, needs to be nurtured.
When I met my wife, ten years ago, I asked her on our first date how she handled conflict. And I told her how I handled it (anxious-avoidant) too. And then I told her the most important thing to me, in the entire world, was to create the kind of relationships that are built on so much consistent goodness and grace that all conflict will become me and that person against the world, and not me and that person against each other. The first time I saw that in action was the first time we watched Friday Night Lights together. And now I have the great good fortune to see it in my own life, too.
Jim and Pam, The Office
Riese
Sorry for being basic but it’s true! They make each other laugh. They have great running bits. They have a very cute love story. My only complaint is how they seem to hold each other back a little bit from whatever their respective dreams are, sometimes. But G-d, they find the other person just so delightful! I love them. Remember THE TEAPOT
Tami + Coach Taylor, Friday Night Lights
Riese
Best marriage I’ve ever seen on television! There were no broad strokes here, just real, flawed, ambitious, impressive people navigating assorted ups and downs with a relationship rooted in mutual respect and a desire to see the other succeed. It’s too bad the child produced from this union was a total bitch!!!
April & Andy, Parks & Recreation and Veronica & Kevin, Shameless
Riese
I think I like both of these couples for the same reason — hot bossy women in relationships with men who are a little um, less smart, but also very charming and funny! Bonus points to K&V for when they had a throuple in Svetlana, justice for Svetlana.
Which Of Your Fave LGBT TV Shows Are Filming During the Pandemic and When Can You Watch Them?
When the COVID-19 pandemic took its hold worldwide, many of our favorite queer television shows halted production; like Gentleman Jack, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Bold Type, One Day at a Time and Riverdale. Some never had a chance to start, like The L Word: Generation Q, which was initially scheduled to start filming in July. Once it became clear that the pandemic would be with us for a while, productions began ramping up for shooting with extensive COVID-19 protocols, often involving “bubbles,” quarantining, and a lot of testing. So, what’s happening now with all those shows we were looking forward to?
911: Lone Star
Filming in Los Angeles began October 12.
9-1-1
Filming begins in October 2020.
A League of Their Own
Amazon has said this (very queer) TV adaptation of our fave (subtextually queer) League of Their Own will resume shooting in Spring 2021.
All-American
Production on Season Three started September 28th.
Batwoman
Production began September 3, but was paused last week due to a bottleneck for rapid COVID-19 tests in Vancouver. They’re starting back up now.
A Black Lady Sketch Show
Writing for Season Two has been completed, and they were five days away from shooting when the production shutdown kicked in. We have no new information on when they will start again.
Black Lighting
Scheduled to start filming Season Four in October 2020.
Brooklyn 99
In June, Terry Crews announced that the planned direction of the season would shift following the killing of George Floyd, which required scratching four “ready to go” episodes. We have no information on when they’ll start filming again. Production resumed November 2020 and it will return to air in 2021.
Burden of Truth
Season Four began filming in Winnipeg in August and will wrap in November.
Call the Midwife
Season 10 of this BBC show I still have not seen resumed filming in September 2020.
Carnival Row
Cara Delivingne’s fairy drama on Amazon was able to finish filming in the Czech Republic under “strict coronav
Charmed
Season 3 of Charmed began shooting in September 2020 and should wrap in November 2021.
The Chi
Filming on Season 4 will start in Spring 2021.
Claws
Production began 9/21 in New Orleans.
Dear White People
After Season 4’s filming was halted due to the pandemic, there has been no new news about when filming will resume. In September, Jeremy Tardy announced he’d not be returning, citing racial discrimination when attempting to negotiate pay.
Dickinson
The first three episodes of Season 2 will debut January 8th on Apple+, followed by new episodes every week after that. The series has also been renewed for season three.
Euphoria
HBO says filming won’t start in earnest until early 2021 but the cast has been spotted around L.A. filming what seems to be the “special bridge episode” Zendaya has mentioned in the press that should debut this year.
Gentleman Jack
Shibden Hall has announced that they’ll be closed for the filming of Gentleman Jack starting October 19.
Good Girls
Production resumes November 20th for Season 4.
Grey’s Anatomy – Returning November 12
Filming began in September, with Ellen Pompeo sharing a photo from set and saying Season 17 is “dedicated to all who have fallen and to everyone of you who by the grace of God is still standing.” The medical drama will start the season about a month and a half into the coronavirus pandemic.
The Handmaid’s Tale
Previously interrupted by the pandemic, the Hulu show went back to work on Season 4 in September, to wrap in March 2021.
Hanna
Season Three starts in November.
Hightown
Starz has scheduled filming to begin in “October 2020.”
Hitmen
Filming resumes in “early 2021.”
In the Dark
Filming scheduled for November 2020 – April 2021.
Killing Eve
As of July, the team was looking for solutions for filming Season 4, which was initially scheduled for August. The show films in multiple European locations, making it very complicated to shoot. The 2021 premiere date will absolutely be pushed back.
Legends of Tomorrow
Filming of Season 6 began October 6th and will continue though May 10th.
Lucifer
Filming the remainder of Season 5 and Season 6 resumed September 24th.
Manifest
Season 3 started filming in September 2020.
Motherland: Fort Salem
Filming of Season Two began on October 6th and is set to wrap March 2021.
Nancy Drew
Started in September 2020, should wrap in April 2021.
Never Have I Ever
Season 2 of Mindy Kaling’s Netflix property, which featured a very cute lesbian coming out story, is apparently casting for a Black, plus-sized LGBTQ character open to all genders. Filming is scheduled to resume in November.
One Day at a Time
The beloved sitcom is making its broadcast debut on CBS on October 12 with the six episodes already produced for Season 4. Season 5 isn’t a sure thing yet — and some of that decision will be guided by how well it performs on CBS.
The L Word: Generation Q
Production is set to begin in November 2020. They will be relying on “safety protocols and narrative tricks” to film intimate scenes. Production will wrap in February 2021.
Pose
Filming was halted just eight days into Season Three, but is starting back up this week (October 7th). COVID-19 restrictions will be echoed in the script — co-creater Steven Canals said: Things like kissing—we will likely forgo those moments. The place on our show where the biggest impact will be felt will be the ball scenes: Those scenes have 125 to 150 background actors. That’s tricky because that’s such an important and critical part of our show and the narrative. We’re just, only now, having conversations of, ‘Is there a world where we forgo these things?’
Queen Sugar
Season Five started filming in New Orleans on September 28th.
Riverdale
Pre-production on Season 5 started August 17, virtual table reads began September 2, and it looks like filming itself began the second week of September. They’re aiming for a January premiere date.
Sex Education
Season Three has begun filming in the UK — the show requires a “sunny’ environment and thus must be done in the summer. Emma Mackey assures that people are still making out. Should wrap in February 2021.
Shameless
The final season began filming in September 8th in Los Angeles and Chicago.
Stranger Things
Filming began September 28, 2020 in Atlanta.
Station 19
Set to debut with Grey’s Anatomy on November 12, Station 19 has already resumed production.
Star Trek: Discovery
Season Three debuts next week and the team returns to production for Season Four November 20th through June 2021.
The Flash
Seventh season production began October 1 and the premiere will include pre-shutdown footage from their previously interrupted filming experience.
The Umbrella Academy
Season Three starts filming October 2020.
Shrill
Extras casting for Season Three in Portland began in September (you too can apply for $13.25 an hour) for filming beginning in October.
Supergirl
A “possibly shorter season” began shooting September 28th, with the season premiere to be “done” by April 5.
S.W.A.T.
Began filming in early August.
Van Helsing
Filming has resumed in Vancouver under strict COVID protocols, with Ali Liebert joining the cast as vampire Nina.
Wynonna Earp
Season 4 finished filming from July – September 2020 in Calgary.
Younger
Season Seven starts filming October 2020.
In “Active Development”: Betty, Better Things, The Chi, Dead To Me, Dear White People, Good Trouble, Grown-ish, Warrior Nun, Work in Progress
No New Information: Feel Good
Cancelled: I Am Not Okay With This, G.L.O.W., Teenage Bounty Hunters, Harlots, Stumptown
Not In Production But Not Cancelled: Mindhunter,
What’s New to Stream in October 2020
What new things are coming to your favorite streaming platforms (by which I mean all streaming platforms) to entertain you while you remain indoors for the ten millionth month in a row? What’s streaming on Netflix with gay characters? What’s on Hulu with lesbians? Where are the bisexuals on Amazon? These questions and more: I’m going to answer them. By the way if you want to see all the shows we’ve written about this year, check out the 2020 Television Hub!
LGBTQ+ Women Related Content New To Netflix Streaming in October 2020
Schitt’s Creek: Season 6 – October 7
The final season of this wildly Emmy-laden series drops on Netflix October 7th. Canadian actor Karen Robinson plays Ronnie Lee, a lesbian with a partner and a small business and a spot on the town council, and her role gets a little bigger every season.
Deaf U – Netflix Original Docuseries – October 9
This docuseries follows a tight-knit group of deaf students, including pansexual social activists Renate Rose, who share their stories about life in D.C.’s Gallaudet University, a federally chartered private school fo the education of deaf and hard of hearing students. In the trailer, I think it’s Renate talking about how all the women at Gallaudet are very hot! And kissing some of them!
The Haunting of Bly Manor – Netflix Original Series – October 9
From the people that brought you The Haunting of Hill house comes The Haunting of Bly Manor. We have no idea whether or not it is going to be gay, but they did reach out to Valerie about sending a press kit so …. ??
40-Year-Old-Version – October 9
Upfront I must inform you that the gayness in the film is limited to gay men. However, it’s supposed to be really great! Produced by Lena Waithe, 40-Year-Old Version stars filmmaker Rhada Blank as a playwright once hailed as up-and-coming who feels she’s yet to prove herself worthy of that moniker and decides to pivot to become a rapper named RadhaMUSPrime. She teaches theater to high school kids and shuffles around to events suggested by her (gay) agent played by Peter King. Early reviews are glowing!
Kipo and the Age of the Wonderbeasts: Season 3 – October 12
Netflix’s whimsical post-apocalyptic dreamscape follows the ever optimistic Burrow Girl Kipo and her queer pals as they unravel the next bit of mystery about her identity. I don’t want to spoil you, so I won’t say too much, but you can be sure that Kipo’s hijinks will include found family hijinks, hard-won hope, laugh out loud mishaps, and a new musical genre in every episode. If you like Korra or Adventure Time or Steven Universe or She-Ra — and especially if you love all of those shows — you will be so happy to join Kipo on her adventures to make friends out of every human and mute on (and below) the earth.
A Baby-Sitter’s Guide to Monster Hunting – Netflix Original Movie – October 14
Indya Moore plays glamorous witch “Peggy Drood” in this children’s film about a high school freshman who’s baby-sitting job turns into her getting recruited into an international secret society of baby-sitters who protect kids with special powers from monsters.
Grand Army: Season 1 – Netflix Original Series – October 16
The trailer for this series features girls kneeling for the American flag AND girls kissing each other and is based on “Slut,” a play from activist group Arts Effect All-Girl Theatre Company, that tackled the sexual assault of a teenage girl and slut-shaming culture in high school. However, when the trailer dropped in September, writer Ming Peiffer revealed on twitter that she and the three writers of color who’d worked on the show quit after being subject to racist exploitation and abuse from the showrunner/creator.
Carol (2015) – October 20
It’s Carol. You know. You don’t need me to tell you about Carol.
Rebecca – Netflix Original Movie – October 21
Drew very much loved the original adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s classic psychological thriller “Rebecca” (1965), which told the story of “about a young girl, a brooding man, and a mad woman ruining their tale of romance.” Our number one feeling about the trailer is … why does this seem so straight? “While it’s widely acknowledged that Mrs. Danvers is in love with Rebecca, this lesbian subtext recognized by even the straightest critics,” Drew wrote of the original Hitchcock film, “it’s rarely suggested that Rebecca was in love with Danvers too. But she was. That’s what I’m suggesting.” What will the remake suggest? It should be more gay. That’s what I’m suggesting.
Queer Content New to Amazon Streaming in October 2020
Girl Interrupted (1999) – October 1
This film is… not literally gay, but also it is gay? I feel like everybody has already seen it but JUST IN CASE, based on Susanna Kaysen’s memoir and starring Winona Ryder, Angelina Jolie, Clea Duvall, Whoopi Goldberg and Britney Murphy; Girl, Interrupted follows the protagonist as she’s checked into an asylum after a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder. Angelina Jolie won an Oscar for playing the
The Craft (2020) – October 27
This reboot of the cult classic beloved by queer women worldwide will stick to the original plot and was written by Zoe Lister-Jones (New Girl, Whitney). On Instagram, Michelle Monogan wrote that zoe is “making a tense and provocative movie tackling current social norms” that’s “scary and smart.” Trans actress Zoey Luna plays a 17-year-old Latina punk rocker kicked out of her house by her super-Catholic mother. Gideon Aldon, who played gay in my favorite movie Blockers, also stars, along with Lovie Simone and Cailee Spaney. No photographs or ANYTHING have been released yet.
Queer(ish) Content New to Hulu Streaming in October 2020
Monsterland: Hulu Limited Series – October 1
“Monsterland” is an anthology series of “deeply melancholic, philosophical horror, the kind that imagines a world of creatures in closets and under beds, but posits that humans may be the greatest monsters of all.” Episode 105, “Plainfield, Illinois,” features “a suburban lawyer debating life or death,” and the couple at its center is a lesbian couple, played by queer actors Roberta Colindrez and Taylor Schilling. Episode 107 is directed by our fave bisexual director, Desiree Akhavan.
October 2020 HBO Max LGBTQ+ Content
Best in Show (2000) – October 1
Christopher Guest’s mockumentary about showdogs features Jane Lynch as trainer Christy Cummings, a competitive handler working for poodle-owning couple Sherri Ann and Leslie Ward Cabot. But there’s more going on between Sherri and Christy than meets the eye, if you know what I mean and I think you do!
The Color Purple (1985) – October 1
This classic based on Alice Walker’s novel is set in rural Georgia is a raw emotional account of pain, passion and survival told by Celie, who seizes your whole heart with letters that trace her coming of age, falling in love for the first time and breaking free. The film de-gayed the story significantly, but subtext remains loud enough for the queer eye.
Equal: HBO Max Original Docuseries – October 22
A limited series tracing the LGBTQ rights movement, through heroes well-known and unsung, across the United States, made the revolutionary choice of casting LGBTQ+ actors in LGBTQ+ roles. Blending archival footage with scripted drama, the cast includes Heather Matarazzo, Shannon Purser, Sara Gilbert, Anne Ramsay, Alexandra Grey, Theo Germaine, Jamie Clayton, Isis King, Samira Wiley, Elizabeth Faith Ludlow and Haillie Sahar. You can read more about it here.
October 2020 CBS All Access LGBTQ+ Content
Star Trek: Discovery: Season 3 – October 15
The third season of Hot Women in Space finds our intrepid travelers in a sticky spot: nine hundred years in the future, where the Federation still exists but is in a bit of a pickle. Lesbian comic/writer Michelle Paradise has been promoted to co-showrunner for the third season. Tig Notaro returns as sarcastic lesbian engineer Jett Reno and Michelle Yeoh returns as the very mommi pansexual Philippa Georgiou. New characters include transgender actor Ian Alexander (The O.A.) as transgender character Grey, non-binary actor Blu del Barrio as non-binary character Adria, and um, a cat. Like an actual cat. In space?
What 4 TV Shows Do You Love More Than Anyone Else?
This week for our TV Team roundtable we decided to take that tweet that’s been going around about “name the four movies you love more than anyone else” because we love TV and we do what we want. (We also love movies! We just all collectively know, well, everything about TV.) These answers could not be more on brand if they’d been written by bots impersonating us. We want to hear your answers in the comments!
The Bisexual, High Maintenance, I Love Dick, Looking
Drew
These roundtables are fun, because sometimes I’m answering and I’m like GOD I’M SO MYSELF and I feel that here. Not just because I feel anxious about whether I really can claim to like these more than anyone I know, but also because my answers are just so aggressively me. These four shows are slice-of-life dramedies with sharp dialogue, big hearts, and messy queers. They aren’t perfect, but they don’t strive for perfection. They’re just trying to capture something real and in the process they captured me.
I watched Looking because I loved Andrew Haigh’s indie hit Weekend and from 2014 to 2016 this show was one of my few connections to queerness of any kind. I was just this straight boy running around my college campus telling other definitely totally absolutely straight people they should watch it.
I Love Dick was what I was watching when I officially came out to myself. Half a bottle of wine in my system, sitting next to my girlfriend, watching something so female and so queer — I just knew.
The Bisexual was released on Hulu around the time I was starting to doubt my relationship with that same girlfriend. This messy, self-destructive queer journey on-screen was everything I wanted and what I’d eventually create a few months later.
And High Maintenance. Oh High Maintenance. Co-creator Katja Blichfeld came out between seasons one and two — so did I. This web series I casually enjoyed as a confused college student, became something deeper, not just on-screen, but in my life. I feel like I came out alongside the show. It’s gotten queerer and more trans and more vulnerable and I just love it so much. It feels a part of me the way our favorite works of art always do.
The Secret Circle, Sharp Objects, The Haunting Of Hill House, UnREAL
Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya
The Secret Circle should not have been canceled after only one season!!!!!!!! I am convinced to this day that if this CW series about teen witches had been allowed to stick around, its queer subtext might have become main text. According to my own Twitter, I apparently have a lot of thoughts about this. I wish the Charmed reboot had filled the Secret Circle shaped hole in my heart, but alas it did not.
Sure, plenty of people liked the Amy Adams-starring TV adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects, but did any other people do so many repeat viewings of the entire series in such a short amount of time that their THERAPIST said “hey Kayla, maybe stop watching this show over and over again?” If so, let’s be friends.
Again, pretty sure there are plenty of people who loved Hill House, but you know how some people like to put on nice little comedies that they’ve seen a million times as a comfort thing? THAT IS ME WITH HILL HOUSE. I could simply watch this series over and over, especially the stunty episode “Two Storms.” Also, when my sister wouldn’t watch the show with me, I turned it into a stupid Instagram bit.
I almost gave this spot to The Hotwives, the absurdist and spot-on parody of the Real Housewives reality empire, but thinking about the way that series skewers reality television got me thinking about another series that digs its knife all the way into the horrors of the genre. UnREAL offers a scripted story about unscripted television, and its first season is SO FUCKING GOOD and underrated. Also, this one goes out to my mommy issues hive, because the dynamic between Quinn (Constance Zimmer) and Rachel (Shiri Appleby)……….yes.
Also, I want to add that I almost included The Morning Show, but it is simply a fact that I will never love The Morning Show as much as our very own Christina.
The Golden Girls, Grace and Frankie, Derry Girls, Original She-Ra
Heather Hogan
It says something about me that three of these four shows are set in the ’80s and ’90s, and all of them are about women living together and being the loves of each other’s lives. I’m a child of the ’80s, and I have an almost James Halliday-level of pop culture nostalgia about it, not because I think it was better than this golden age of TV and video gaming we’re living in right now, but because I have a perpetual longing to impart my 40-year-old wisdom and self-compassion onto my childhood self, to tell her that being such a weird little kid will be the thing people resonate with the most about her as an adult, to blow her mind with the knowledge that Dungeons and Dragons and Wonder Woman will become mainstream popular, to let her know she’ll find love and safety and the happiest home, and mostly to explain to her that the reason she’s relating to all these stories the way she is — in a way that’s so different than everyone else — is because she’s G A Y, and that’s going to be okay too, it’s going to be her favorite thing when she’s a grown-up.
I think, in some ways, all queer people engage with stories as their current selves and as their past selves, through the eyes of who they are and what they need and know in this moment, and through the eyes of the little kid who experiences the insecurity and pain and trauma that still informs so much of how they relate to the world. These four shows comfort and challenge me on both of those levels at the same time, and they never fail to make me cackle-laugh, out loud, no matter how many times I’ve heard the jokes. They also infuse my spirit with hope, which is not an easy thing to come by these days, and it wasn’t an easy thing for any of these characters to come by either. The Golden Girls in the middle of the Cold War, Grace and Frankie with their entire lives flipped and rewritten in their last chapters, the Derry Girls navigating the end of a decades long ethno-nationalist conflict, and She-Ra fighting fascism.
As they say in St. Olaf: hergenbargenflergenflurfennerfen.
Dracula, The Playboy Club, Dickinson, Elite
Valerie Anne
Long before I met the maltreated Morgana or the illustrious Lena Luthor, long before I knew she wasn’t always blonde or that you didn’t pronounce the “th” in her last name, I “met” the ethereal Katie McGrath by away of Lucy Westenra in the 2013 NBC adaptation of Dracula. I remain obsessed with her character, and with Lucy’s relatable passion for her best friend Mina (played by the queer-in-real-life Jessica De Gouw) and I just feel like not nearly enough people shouted about this show when it was on, or joined me in my funeral dirge when it was cancelled after just one season.
I can’t really put my finger on exactly why Dickinson spoke to me so deeply, but I felt appropriately dramatic about it when it ended. I simultaneously wanted to force everyone I knew to watch it and also not talk to anyone about it because I don’t want their opinions muddling my love of it. I don’t want to risk them not GETTING it, ya know? (How could you know, I barely know.) I am on the verge of a rewatch at any given moment but I’m afraid to mess with the magic of that first binge…but I have a feeling I won’t be able to resist much longer.
I was obsessed with Elite, the Spanish show that I would call Riverdale meets Big Little Lies? Mas o menos? But so few people I knew were even watching it, let alone as obsessed with me, that I started giving my friend updates as if it was drama happening in my actual social circle and not just a truly wild TV show I was watching with bated breath.
The 2011 Fall TV season was an absolute massacre of shows that were ahead of their time and didn’t even get through the first verse of their song before they were shepherd’s-crooked off the stage. Most notably, for me anyway, was The Playboy Club, which had an all-star cast with the likes of Amber Heard and Laura Benanti, a murder-by-stilletto, and a peek into the gay underground scene of the 60s. And that was all in the first three episodes! The only three that aired of the seven they filmed. The rest of the season is apparently lost to time with only me to mourn it.
The West Wing, Psych, Leverage and Friday Night Lights
Natalie
Breaking Bad. The Wire. The Sopranos. How to Get Away With Murder. Great shows, all of them…each of them among my favorites…but the process of revisiting them with any regularity is daunting. They’re all imbedded with so much trauma that no matter how incisive the writing is or how compelling the drama, they’re never going to be my “go-to binge.” That’s how I think of this prompt…which shows are my go-to shows…which shows can I just put on — no matter what kind of day I’ve had — and just sit, relax and enjoy. These are shows I have watched over and over again and, somehow, never tire of.
I was a latecomer to The West Wing but once a friend sat me down and made me watch “18th and Potomac” and “Two Cathedrals,” I was hooked. I was just starting to get into politics at the time and I wondered if there was a place for me in the arena. I didn’t know if I could succeed in a place that seemed to prize the accumulation of power above all things. West Wing showed me a version of politics where I belonged…where people worked out of a sincere belief in government’s ability to make people’s lives better. Admittedly, there are moments in the show that have not aged well but now, perhaps more than ever, I need the reminder that it’s possible to have civil servants dedicated to the general welfare and to remember what it’s like to have a flawed, but fundamentally decent, man as president.
[And, yes, I like any West Wing purist only begrudgingly acknowledge the non-Sorkin years…aside from “The Supremes” in Season 5 which is incredible. Also? Josh should’ve ended up with Amy…and, yes, I will die on this hill.]
Soon after Dulé Hill ended his run as Charlie Young on West Wing, he stepped into the role of Burton “Gus” Guster on Psych…and because I’m nothing if not a loyalist, I followed him there. It was a dramatic departure, from playing the body man of the president to playing the straight man to a fake psychic detective, but I loved it so much. By the time Psych premiered, I was a full-on pop culture junkie and the show fed that addiction like crazy. Every episode is just teeming with great pop culture references — including entire episodes dedicated to classics like Twin Peaks (“Dual Spires”) and Sixteen Candles (“Murder?… Anyone?… Anyone?… Bueller?”) — and, even after having watched the series an embarrassing number of times, there are still easter eggs I know I’ve missed.
Leverage might feel like a bit of a departure but as someone who grew up watching A-Team reruns as a kid, this show feels right in my wheelhouse. It’s a smarter, less violent version of that childhood classic, though, but essentially the same premise: a group of bad guys team up and become the good guys, dedicated to righting the wrongs committed by the rich and powerful. The stories of how the team manages to con the cons are always compelling but what makes the show worth watching is the chemistry between the cast. Are Hardison, Parker and Eliot the only throuple I’ve ever shipped? Possibly.
And, finally, Friday Night Lights…the ultimate of the “good guy” stories that have found their way into my TV comfort food diet. I love this show with the heat of a thousand suns. I love that it’s a show about the perennial good guys, Coach and Tami Taylor, and those aspiring to be the good guys.
“I said you need to strive to better than everyone else,” Coach Taylor tells aspiring good guy, Vince Howard, in one of my favorite moments in the series. “I didn’t say you needed to be better than everyone else. But you gotta try. That’s what character is. It’s in the try.”
In that moment with Vince, in so many other moments that make this show special, FNL tugs at your heartstrings but never feels overwrought. Unless it’s a storyline involving Julie…in which case it definitely feels overwrought because she is the absolute worst.
[Also? It’s amazing how Friday Night Lights just miraculously jumped from Season 1 to Season 3? Season two? I don’t know her.]
Announcing the Winners of the Third Annual Autostraddle TV Awards!
Did you hear the people vote, voting the votes of TV shows? This is the voting of the people who will watch Netflix again! And now it’s time to declare winners of this year’s coolest awards, the Gay Emmys!
We created the Gay Emmys two years ago because putting together the Gay Emmys is like when I used to take out all of my baseball cards or paper dolls and lay them all out on the carpet so I could look at them and think “wow, what a bounty!” Because my friends, the past few years have been a bounty for LGBTQ+ women and/or trans people on television, but the actual Emmys remain a bit lukewarm on us. This year, we had nearly 140 shows in the 2019-2020 Voting Period from which to select our favorites.
In fact, this year, there were enough LGBTQ+ inclusive shows that we were able to add even more categories from the actual Emmys — like separating Supporting and Guest roles, adding a Limited Series category and making space to applaud excellent Costume Design. We also ditched Best Coming Out Story for Outstanding Queer Teen Character, an award dedicated to the legacy of Santana Lopez, in memory of Naya Rivera.
As usual, a few shows swept the awards like a gust of wind barreling through your door and knocking over a half-full can of Spindrift. Pose had another healthy year following a triumphant 2019, and Vida took its final bow with a lot of trophies. (There are no trophies, just a website post.) (Our presentation is more similar to the actual Emmys this year than ever!!!)
I would like to thank, first and foremost, everybody reading this introduction, because truly so few people do these days! Sometimes I write totally nonsense introductions and nobody says a word!! Maybe they’re just worried about me and don’t know what to say. Next week we’ll be giving A+ members a little peek behind the curtain of the Gay Emmys process, plus some more data for your delight, so look out for that! Pray for it, hope for it, dream of it. I will be!
Outstanding Drama Series: Pose
2019 Winner: Pose
Runner-Up: How To Get Away With Murder
Other Nominees: The L Word: Generation Q (Showtime) // Killing Eve (BBC) // Riverdale (The CW) // Euphoria (HBO) // Dare Me (USA) // The Handmaid’s Tale (Hulu)
Going into its sophomore season, Pose found itself in a difficult and unenviable predicament. It easily had one of the strongest first seasons of television I’ve ever seen. A true masterclass of the art form. In fact, it won in this same category this time last year. It was a beautifully written and acted, intimate portrayal of a Black and Brown trans and queer chosen family the likes of which we have literally never seen on on television before. Just an absolute stunner by any definition. How do you top coming out of the gates so strongly?
It turns out that you do so by turning inward. If Pose’s first season was exquisite in its world building, then in its second season we saw character work that was absolutely previously unrivaled. We watched as Pray Tell grappled with the realities of living with his disease and finding love in the most unexpected places; as Elecktra continued not only to be the master of The Read, but a cornerstone and matriarch of her community; as Angel reached for stardom and Blanca faced the reality of her own mortality. Of all these characters, however, it was Miss Candy (Angelica Ross) that simply will not be forgotten. Though I firmly and adamantly disagree with the violent way that Pose chose to end her life, there is no denying that in her after-life, Angelica Ross brought such warmth, wisdom, wit and care to Candy. Many critics point to the episode that handled Candy’s death and subsequent memorial (2.04 “Never Knew Love Like This Before”) to highlight the best of the show’s second season. However, I would disagree. For me, the pinnacle of both performance and writing can be found in 2.09’s “Life’s a Beach,” when Elecktra takes her daughters on a road trip. So rare do we get to see Black and Latina trans women in the splendor and joy of their own company, let alone in a romp like this one. When it’s all over, in car mirror, there is Candy — with her sisters, taking in the sun.
An absolutely a perfect moment from a still nearly perfect show. — Carmen
Outstanding Comedy Series: Vida
2019 Winner: Jane the Virgin
Runner-Up: One Day at a Time (Pop TV)
Other Nominees: A Black Lady Sketch Show (HBO) // Sex Education (Netflix) // Betty (HBO) // Twenties (BET) // Work in Progress (Showtime) // Dickinson (Apple+ TV)
I’ve been lucky to write more words about Tanya Saracho’s brilliant Vida than anyone else on this website, and I am honored to be able to write the first summary of what is a near sweep in all Gay Emmys categories for the show takes its final bow.
In the course of three seasons, and especially this last year in its third act, Vida has been nothing short of magnificent. Each character transversing journeys that were at once hard, sexy, and incredibly beautiful — the likes of which, from a queer Chicanx and Latinx lens, have literally never been on TV in this way before. The writing, directing, cinematography, hell the acting — all of it’s immaculate. Characters and images that rip a hole in your spirit and stitch themselves in there instead, becoming a part of you long after you’ve turned off the television.
Of course it probably seems strange to award “Outstanding Comedy” to a show that began at the funeral service of a family matriarch and ends as one daughter tearfully takes ownership of the internalized homophobia she inhereited from her mother and instead sets it aflame with such power it cannot be forgotten. But ultimately, Saracho’s symphony is about finding the pockets of joy that exist within our grief, the family we create and hold on to throughout our sorrow. Life and art become one on Vida, which is perhaps yet another reason it earns its own name. — Carmen
Outstanding Limited Series or TV Movie: Little Fires Everywhere
Runner-Up: Mrs. America (Hulu)
Other Nominees: Dolly Parton’s Heartstrings (Netflix) // Mrs Fletcher (HBO) // Ryan Murphy’s Hollywood (Netflix) // Transparent Musicale Finale (Amazon Prime)
The Hulu adaptation of Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere, a project initiated by actors Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington and adapted with Ng’s support, elevates the source material, complicating its investigations of race and class and also giving two of its leads the greatest gift you can give a character: making them gay.
Little Fires is unsparing and exacting in its portrayal of a specific time and place — the late 90s, the midwest — when brutish racism (and sexism, for that matter) had been somewhat hidden from view, replaced by a facade of We Are The World multiculturalism, whitewashed fantasies of “not seeing color” and what Ta-Nehisi Coates describes as “elegant racism” — “invisible, supple and enduring,” underpinning every aspect of American life. Where a culture like this — socially liberal-to-moderate, not particularly religious — stood on gay people can be a little fuzzier. I experienced this dissonance constantly growing up, but I’ve never seen it examined on television like it was in Little Fires Everywhere through teenage-girl Izzy’s chaotic coming out story. Mia’s story of her first queer relationship in the edgy, widely-appealing fringe of the ’80s art world was both sweet and thrilling on so many levels.
Contemporary shows set in the ’90s tend towards the comic and campy, but Little Fires was quietly realistic, showing how much more capable we are of telling an accurate 1997 story now than we were in 1997. It’s not just about social conventions — it’s that late ’90s media was an active part of denialism that characterized conversations around racism in the ’90s. Watching it was a reckoning. — Riese
Outstanding Sci-Fi/Fantasy Series: DC’s Legends of Tomorrow
2019 Winner: Wynonna Earp
Runner-Up: Batwoman (The CW)
Other Nominees: Marvel’s Runaways (Hulu) // Black Lightning (The CW) // Supergirl (The CW) // Homecoming (Amazon Prime)
If the CW DC TV Universe was a family (and it sort of is, albeit a dysfunctional one), Legends of Tomorrow is the weird gay cousin. While technically from the same bloodline, definitely the most unique of the bunch, and definitely the queerest. With bisexual badass Captain Sara Lance at the helm, and her girlfriend Ava Sharpe by her side, the Legends go on wacky adventure after wacky adventure. Sci-fi is famous for giving us queer women just to take them away, since the worlds are higher stakes and the deaths are more frequent, but Legends defies those tropes at every turn, often killing Sara Lance just to bring her back again. Giving her a Totem of Death and having her survive a run-in with an actual god. She is the anti-trope and I (and Ava) love her for it.
Having been together for a while now, Sara and Ava are just two gals in love leading a team of misfits through time and space. The creators have talked about how they’re not interested in any Sara/Ava conflict being about their relationship – they’ve been there, done that – and are finding other ways to add excitement, angst, and adventure into their lives, which is a wonder to behold. — Valerie
Outstanding Lead Actor Portraying an LGBTQ+ Character in a Drama: Viola Davis as Annalise Keating, How to Get Away With Murder
2019 Winner: Mj Roriguez as Blanca, Pose
Runner-Up: MJ Rodriguez as Blanca, Pose (FX)
Other Nominees: Hunter Schafer as Jules, Euphoria (HBO), Zendaya as Rue, Euphoria (HBO), Roseanny Zayas as Sophie Suarez, The L Word: Generation Q (Showtime), Sandra Oh as Eve Polastri, Killing Eve (BBC), Indya Moore as Angel, Pose (FX), Jodi Comer as Villanelle, Killing Eve (BBC)
I feel like I’ve said too much and also not nearly enough about Viola Davis’ turn as Annalise Keating. I remain in awe that an actor of Viola Davis’ caliber — with an Emmy, Oscar and Tony to her name — would tackle this character… and that she’d take whatever chaos the show’s writers spun and turn it into something worth watching. To have seen Davis do this, over six seasons, feels like a profound gift.
Because Annalise Keating’s character felt like the truest reflection of me that I’d ever seen on television, I found it hard not to wish her bisexuality was pushed more to the fore. I wanted her with Eve, I wanted her with Tegan, I wanted her away from the men who only ever took from her. I wanted the low-hanging fruit but, instead, the show exposed the roots of the character they’d built over six seasons. In its final standout season, HTGAWM more about reconcilitation than romance and, as is her wont, Viola Davis carried it all effortlessly. — Natalie
Outstanding Supporting Actor Portraying an LGBTQ+ Character in a Drama: Angelica Ross as Candy, Pose
2019 Winner: Angelica Ross as Candy, Pose
During the first season of Pose, every time Angel stepped to a car as she worked the Piers, I held my breathe. I knew the stats — of the disproportionate amount of violence that black and brown trans women face, particularly those who engage in sex work, and how that violence sometimes turns deadly — and behind my closed eyes I braced myself for the worst to befall one of our beloved characters. That moment never came. I opened my eyes and Angel, Blanca and Elektra were still standing, loving themselves and their chosen families. I thought, “well, at least, they’re safe here.”
As it turns out, they weren’t.
I’m not sure I’ll ever find peace with how Candy’s story ended but in her performance, Angelica Ross embodies the very thing that made Candy such a great character: She takes whatever scraps she’s been given and weaves them into something beautiful. She balances the seriousness and the sass as Candy helps Elektra mummify a dead client in “Butterfly/Cocoon.” She is defiant and divine in “Never Knew Love Like This Before.” Ross gives us the opportunity to see Candy as clear as we ever have, even in death. And, thanks in large part to the depth of Ross’ performance, we get to see the people who loved/hated her — Pray Tell, Angel, Lulu, Blanca, her parents — as clearly as we’ve ever seen them too… and it carries us through the rest of the season. — Natalie
Outstanding Guest Actor Portraying an LGBTQ+ Character in a Drama: Jen Richards as Young Anna Madrigal, Tales of the City
Runner-Up: Lauren Glazier as Kay, Mindhunter (Netflix)
Other Nominees: Daniela Vega as Ysela, Tales of the City (Netflix) // Laurel Holloman as Tina, The L Word: Generation Q (Showtime) // Laverne Cox as Sophia, Orange is the New Black (Netflix) // Jen Richards as Young Anna Madrigal, Tales of the City (Netflix) // Alexis Bledel as Emily, The Handmaid’s Tale (Hulu)
Last year’s Tales of the City reboot was a marker of queer television past and future. The third sequel to the landmark original series took the generational conflicts inherent in its creations and made them its subject. So, of course, Jen Richards stole the show. Anna Madrigal, for better or worse, is an iconic trans character, and while she’s played once again by Olympia Dukakis, Richards takes over for the standout flashback episode. Richards isn’t just a phenomenal performer — she’s also one of the smartest cultural critics of trans media. It’s fitting then that her skills as an actor become their very own argument for the trans television we deserve.
This hour long short movie is carried by Richards as it recreates the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot and asks questions about what we owe our community and who in our community is even granted that quandary. A romance between a trans woman and a cop is something only a cis person would write, but Jen deepens what otherwise feels so wrong. In Richards’ hands, Anna becomes a woman so desperate to be who she really is that she forgets who that person should be. It’s a complicated performance for a character granted her complexity 25 years too late. It’s proof that as we move into this new chapter of trans media performers like Jen Richards should take the lead. — Drew
Outstanding Lead Actor Portraying an LGBTQ+ Character in a Comedy: Mishel Prada as Emma, Vida
2019 Winner: Mishel Prada as Emma, Vida
Runner-Up: Hailee Steinfeld as Emily Dickinson, Dickinson (Apple+ TV)
Other Nominees: Zoe Kravitz as Rob, High Fidelity (Hulu) // Kabrina Adams as Honeybear, Betty (HBO) // Mishel Prada as Emma, Vida (Starz) // Jonica T. Gibbs as Hattie, Twenties (BET) // Mae Martin as Mae, Feel Good (Netflix) // Isabella Gomez as Elena, One Day at a Time (Pop TV) // Abby McEnany as Abby, Work in Progress (Showtime)
There is no one like Mishel Prada. As Emma Hernandez, she’s created a queer character who is full of pain and resiliency, someone who’s small frame is built of steel and is unafraid to rise to the challenges around her. And yes, Emma is messy. But if we’re being real with ourselves, queerness is messy. Behind Emma’s ice cold mask is a femme looking desperately to unpack the baggage of shame left for her by her mother like it was some kind of expensive designer luggage. She’s tried to find it behind work at a corporate job, then in reinstating her family’s bar to its former glory, and in multiple choices of sex partners (some better advised than others). This year, Emma finally gets to the bottom of that suitcase — in her father, a figure who looms large both in her mother’s history and now in her own. From there what she discovers is that beneath her icy exterior is actually fire. A passion, pride, and confidence in herself that looks to even shake her to her own core.
There’s a fine dance that can be struck between performer and writer, and Mishel Prada and Tanya Saracho found it in each other. They created pure magic. — Carmen
Outstanding Supporting Actor Portraying an LGBTQ+ Character in a Comedy: D’Arcy Carden as Janet, The Good Place
2019 Winner: Rosario Dawson as JR, Jane the Virgin
Runner Up: Roberta Colindrez as Nico, Vida (Starz)
Other Nominees: Theo Germaine as Chris, Work in Progress (Showtime) // Kirby Howell-Baptise as Taylor Harding, Why Women Kill (CBS All Access) // Lolly Adefpoe as Fran, Shrill (Hulu) // Judy Reyes as Quiet Ann, Claws (TNT) // Patricia Allison as Ola, Sex Education (Netflix) // Ser Anzoategui as Eddy, Vida (Starz)
If you haven’t read A.E. Osworth’s Non-Binary Ode to Janet, you should start there: “Janet is also continuously and profoundly misunderstood. She’s called a ‘front desk lady,’ a ‘magical slave robot.’ And she is often called a girl. Calmly and with a smile, Janet often corrects those around her. ‘Not a girl,’ ‘not a robot,’ ‘not a person.’ In season two, episode ten, she does offer two thumbs up and the phrase ‘I’m luggage!’ to explain that she counts as a carry-on when it comes to traveling through a portal to the neutral zone. Thus the character of Janet lent me a minuscule-but-fun way to defuse, respond, chuckle my way through the constant annoyance [of being misgendered].”
Janet started out as a bit character, really, but over the course of four seasons, D’Arcy Carden brought her to life. Underneath her cheerful, accommodating persona was desire, longing, fear, desperation, hope, happiness, and even, at times, barely concealed rage at the injustices humanity — especially her four humans — faced en route to a fair afterlife. Whether it was approximating human crying, baby-talking a puppy about how the void could blow up existence, barfing up quarters, begging for her life and then reassuring Chidi that it was just a failsafe to keep from getting rebooted, to broadcasting his decision — “ATTENTION. I HAVE BEEN MURDERED. ATTENTION. I HAVE BEEN MURDERED.” — Carden gave every scene everything. She was consistently the most hilarious part of a historically funny comedy, and when pathos was necessary, she stuck the landing every time.
Who else could we have trusted to find the perfect balance of humor and heart when shepherding Chidi, Eleanor, Jason, and Tahani beyond the great beyond? — Heather
Outstanding Guest Actor Portraying an LGBTQ+ Character in a Comedy: Natalie Morales as Michelle, Dead to Me
Runner Up: Brittani Nichols as Barbecue Daddy #1, A Black Lady Sketch Show (HBO)
Other Nominees: Constance Zimmer as Claudia Nico, Shameless (Showtime) // Wanda Sykes as Moms Mabley, The Marvelous Mrs Maisel (Amazon Prime) // Michelle Badillo as Sam, Vida (Starz) // Patti Harrison as Ruthie, Shrill (Hulu)
You may know Natalie Morales from her time as Lucy on Parks and Recreation or her short-lived titular bisexual character on Abby’s or maybe even as Anne Garcia on Santa Clarita Diet. Somehow, you know Natalie Morales. But you’ve never seen her like Michelle on Dead to Me. In the words of Valerie Anne: “She floats in like cool silk on a hot day and even though she’s looking at Linda Cardellini the whole time you somehow feel like also she’s looking at you? I’ve never seen anyone flirt like this. It’s absolutely electric. There’s one part where she’s leaning on a doorframe and I have never wanted to be a doorframe but here I was, wishing I could be a doorframe.”
It’s weird that in 2020 it’s still so hard to believe so many actresses when they’re playing gay characters; I guess it’s a good thing Morales is herself queer! What’s great about Morales as Michelle is that she spends a lot of time doing that dance we all do, that we hardly ever see on screen, where she knows she’s got a connection with this woman — in her case, Cardellini’s Judy — but she doesn’t know if Judy likes her or just likes the attention; she doesn’t know if Judy is willing or able to act on the chemistry they obviously have with each other; she doesn’t know if making a move is going to startle her away like a baby rabbit or if not making a move is going to startle her away like a baby rabbit. When they finally do act on their feelings, it’s just as sizzling as the build-up!
I’m not sure how else to say it, so: Michelle embodies 80% of the advice questions we get from queer readers. What in the world is this woman I’m into thinking? What is she doing? What does she want? And should I do something about it? We never get to see that on TV, and in Morales’ hands it is an absolute delight. — Heather
Outstanding Lead Actor Portraying an LGBTQ+ Character in a Limited Series or TV Movie: Kerry Washington as Mia Warren, Little Fires Everywhere
Runner-Up: Kathryn Hahn as Mrs Fletcher, Mrs Fletcher (HBO)
Other Nominees: Judith Light as Shelli Pfefferman, Transparent Musicale Finale (Amazon Prime) // Addison Holley as Alex Cooper Trapped: The Alex Cooper Story (Lifetime) // Amy Landecker as Sarah Pfefferman, Transparent Musicale Finale (Amazon Prime) // Gaby Hoffman as Ari Pfefferman, Transparent Musicale Finale (Amazon Prime)
The version of Mia Warren that showed up on our Hulu screens earlier this year wasn’t a fixture of Celeste Ng’s original work. Though she considered it, Ng ultimately relented, saying, “I didn’t feel like I was the right person to try to bring a black woman’s experience to the page.”
When it came time to translate Mia Warren to the small screen, Little Fires Everywhere‘s showrunner, Liz Tigelaar, got together a writing team, including black writers like Shannon Houston, Raamla Mohamed and Attica Locke, to bring the story of a black Mia Warren and her black daughter, Pearl, to life. The change, however subtle, sharpens the edges of the class conflict that was a hallmark of Ng’s original work. The interactions between the Warrens and the Richardsons are more charged…they have more depth…and, despite the show being set in 1990’s Ohio, the change makes the show feel even more current.
But as incisive as the writing is, it’s Kerry Washington that brings Mia Warren to life. Mia suffers through one microaggression after another from Elena Richardson…and, as in life, the reactions to those are slight and nearly imperceptible…but in Washington’s adept hands, we feel each and every microaggression. The audience feels every slight pin pick until ultimately Mia breaks. Elena pushes her too far and assumes too much, Mia smirks and says, “You can’t stand it, can you? That someone would choose a different life than yours. What was it you gave up, Elena? A love? A career? A whole life? Because you’d rather stand here, disparaging my daughter, instead of seeing the truth about your own.”
That read was one of the most satisfying TV moments of the last year. — Natalie
Outstanding Supporting Actor Portraying an LGBTQ+ Character in a Limited Series or TV Movie: Tiffany Boone as Young Mia Warren, Little Fires Everywhere
Runner-Up: Megan Stott as Izzy Richardson, Little Fires Everywhere (Hulu)
Other nominees: Katie Kershaw as Amanda Olney, Mrs. Fletcher (HBO) // Bria Henderson as Margaret Sloan, Mrs. America (Hulu) // Ari Graynor as Brenda Feigen-Fasteau, Mrs America (Hulu) // Tiffany Haddish as Leila, Self Made (Netflix)
I thought I knew Tiffany Boone. I’d seen her in a few things before — her guest stints on Southland and Grey’s Anatomy, her arc on the short-lived Complications and, most notably, in her starring role on The Chi — but it wasn’t until Little Fires Everywhere that I truly got to see her. This show announced her: “this is Tiffany Boone and this is what she is capable of.”
It is difficult to play a younger version of a character that exists on the canvas, particularly when that older character is played by a seasoned actress like Kerry Washington. There’s a physicality to Washington’s characters — you can see it in everything from Chenile in Save the Last Dance to Olivia Pope in Scandal — and portraying it is a difficult needle to thread. But somehow, Tiffany Boone manages it…mastering Washington’s walk, the facial expressions (the lip quiver!), the mannerisms, the speech, the pacing…the resemblance is uncanny. She became Kerry Washington for hour of television and it was astounding to watch.
That Boone was not nominated for an Emmy for her performance is one of the most egregious snubs of this year and I am thrilled to see her recognized here. — Natalie
Outstanding Guest Actor Playing an LGBTQ+ Character in a Limited Series or TV Movie: Roberta Colindrez as Jules, Mrs. America
Runner-Up: Anika Noni Rose as Paula Hawthorne, Little Fires Everywhere (Hulu)
Other Nominees: Paget Brewster as Tallulah Bankhead, Hollywood (Netflix) // Michelle Krusiec as Anna May Wong, Hollywood (Netflix) // Annie Parisse as Midge Costanza, Mrs America (Hulu) // Queen Latifah as Hattie McDaniel, Hollywood (Hulu)
There’s something specifically dreamy about a masculine lesbian in a period piece, all that charm wrapped around so much striving and a long history of striking out more often than they succeed in their search for love or companionship. Mrs. America isn’t the first time a Roberta Colindrez character has charmed somebody’s pants off (literally) against formidable odds. Jules, a photographer who often works with various members of The Feminist Movement, only spends an episode with us but in that brief moment we see it all — her care to respect Brenda, her desire to respect herself, her having those eyes and that HAIR HER HAIR IS SO GOOD and those moves. Regrettably, like so many women of color in the feminist movement then and now, Jules only gets a few scenes, just long enough to inspire a political/personal journey for the white woman whose name appears in the episode’s title alongside her husband’s. I would watch Roberta Colindrez do literally anything, but I’m very pleased that so far she’s showed up in so many of my favorite places. — Riese
Outstanding Lead Actor Playing an LGBTQ+ Character in a Sci-Fi/Fantasy Series: Chyler Leigh as Alex Danvers, Supergirl
2019 Winner: Jamie Clayton, Sense8
Runner-Up: Caity Lotz as Sara Lance, Legends of Tomorrow (The CW)
Other Nominees: Ginny Gardner as Karolina Dean, Marvel’s Runaways (Hulu) // Sophia Lillis as Sydney Novak, I Am Not Okay With This (Netflix) // Lyrica Okano as Nico Minoru, Marvel’s Runaways (Hulu) // Nafeesa Williams as Anissa, Black Lightning (The CW) // Hong Chau as Audrey Temple, Homecoming (Amazon Prime) // Janelle Monae as Alex, Homecoming (Amazon Prime)
Unfortunately Alex hasn’t gotten nearly enough airtime on Supergirl lately (neither has her new girlfriend Kelly) but Chyler is giving us her best and not letting one single line or glance go to waste. Besides, she channeled some of that Alex Danvers bravery and Chyler herself came out this year, which adds a little something extra to the glint in Alex’s eye. From the first season before Alex was out, to Alex’s coming out journey, to her breakup storyline, to her new girlfriend plot, Chyler has always brought something really special and dynamic to Supergirl’s super-in-her-own-right lesbian sister. — Valerie
Outstanding Supporting Actor Playing an LGBTQ+ Character in a Sci-Fi/Fantasy Series: Maya Hawke as Robin Buckley, Stranger Things
2019 Winner: Nicole Maines, Supergirl
Runner-Up: Chantal Thuy as Grace Choi, Black Lightning (The CW)
Other Nominees: Megan Tandy as Sophie Moore, Batwoman (The CW) // Amalia Holm as Scylla Ramshorn, Motherland: Fort Salem (Freeform) // Azie Tesfai as Kelly Olsen, Supergirl (The CW) // Nicole Maines as Nia Nal, Supergirl (The CW)
Whether or not Robin Buckley was given to us as an apology gift for killing off Barb before they could lean into the chemistry between her and Nancy, I have accepted it as one. Maya Hawk delivered a hilarious, energetic performance of this take-no-shit teenager, which made it all that more impactful when she quietly came out to her best buddy. I honestly wasn’t expecting such smart, thoughtful lesbian representation to appear on a show where so much else is going on (like, monsters in the mall much) and it was a damn delight to behold. — Valerie
Outstanding Guest Actor Playing an LGBTQ+ Character in a Sci-Fi/Fantasy Series: Jeri Ryan as Seven of Nine, Picard
Runner Up: Christina Wolfe as Julia Pennyworth, Batwoman (The CW)
Other Nominees: Brianne Howey as Reagan, Batwoman (The CW) // Roxy Wood as Yvette, Supergirl (The CW) // Jeri Ryan as Seven of Nine, Picard (CBS All Access) // Riley Voelkel as Freya Mikaelson, Legacies (The CW) // Lisa Kudrow as Maggie Naird, Space Force (Netflix) // Christina Wolfe as Julia Pennyworth, Batwoman (The CW)
While Star Trek has a reputation for being a boundary-pushing paragon of inclusivity from the time The Original Series launched in the ’60s, it has always been lightyears beyond on LGBTQ+ rep, especially in the sci-fi and fantasy genre, which has historically been the most gay-friendly genre on TV. (What other awards breakout sci-fi and fantasy? Just these gay Emmys!) Fans, of course, have long read Kirk and Spock as gay, to the point that they were fanfic fan ‘zines existed long before the internet. By the time Voyager arrived in the ’90s, gay fans, GLAAD, and even Gene Roddenberry agreed that it was time for a queer character — but network restrictions kept the main cast straight. Still, though, fans read Jeri Ryan’s Seven-of-Nine as a lesbian (with many fans shipping her hard with Kate Mulgrew’s Captain Janeway). In recent years, former producers, including Jeri Taylor, admitted that they pushed hard for Seven to be a lesbian, but the networks wouldn’t budge.
Enter Picard. As soon as Ryan arrived on screen, fans were desperate to see her get the gay storyline Seven deserved. Our wish didn’t exactly come true, but it came mostly true. After killing Bjayzl, with whom she had sizzling chemistry, Seven finally made eyes at and clasped hands with Raffi while playing the kal-toh in the season one finale. It wasn’t fireworks, but it wasn’t subtext either. Ryan has been an outspoken fan of the idea that Seven is a lesbian for years, and she seemed just as excited as fans were when it finally happened.
Ryan never shied away from playing the kind of stoic, inured, battle-work borg-y women characters that were not so popular in the early ’90s, but are so beloved today. She fits right in on Picard and it’s a joy to see her getting a little bit of long-deserved love in her life. — Heather
Outstanding Performance by a Straight Actress in a Straight Role: Justina Machado as Penelope, One Day at a Time
2019 Winner: Justina Machado, One Day at a Time
Runner-Up: Rita Moreno as Lydia, One Day at a Time (Pop)
Other Nominees: Uzo Aduba as Shirley Chisolm, Mrs America (Hulu) // Melissa Barrera as Lyn Hernandez, Vida (Starz) // Issa Rae as Issa, Insecure (HBO) // Regina King as Angela Abar / Sister Night, Watchmen (HBO)
It is completely and totally BONKERS that Justina Machado hasn’t been nominated for an actual Emmy for her role on One Day at a Time. Manuel Betancourt wasn’t the only critic to wonder out loud this year: What does a Latino have to do to get nominated for an Emmy? And it’s not just the awards; it’s also, as Viola Davis said in her 2015 Emmy speech when quoting Harriet Tubman, a lack of opportunity for women of color. According to a recent report from the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, only 5% of the speaking roles in the top 100 movies of 2019 were Latino actors, even though Latinos make up 18% of the U.S. population! Add that Color of Change’s Normalizing Injustice report about crime on TV, which shows that American television perpetuates the propagandic lie that Black and Latino people are inherently more criminal than white people — and, hey, that’s why Autostraddle hosts our own Emmys!
There isn’t a dang thing Justina Machado doesn’t do as Penelope on ODAAT. The laughs? My god, the laughs. This season’s masturbation episode is one of the funniest things I have ever seen in my entire life, and she plays Penelope’s empowerment and mortification flawlessly. The feelings? I have never seen anxiety and depression depicted with as much compassion and honesty in a comedy as it has been in Penelope’s storyline. Sexy? Yes. Ambitious and successful? Yes. A goddamn activist? YES. A mom and a daughter and a woman in the world with her own hopes and dreams and silliness and missteps and triumphs, fighting for her family’s health and happiness safety in the middle of a White House administration that has targeted and villainized them at every turn? YES! One Day at a Time is THE show of this moment, and with Justina Machado in the lead, it has risen to every occasion. — Heather
Santana Lopez Legacy Award For Outstanding Queer Teen Character: Jordan Hull as Angelica, The L Word: Generation Q
Runner-Up: Zendaya as Rue, Euphoria (HBO)
Other Nominees: Patricia Allison as Ola, Sex Education (Netflix) // Hunter Schafer as Jules, Euphoria (HBO) // Emily Tosta as Lucia Acosta, Party of Five (Freeform) // Eris Baker as Tess Pearson, This is Us (ABC)
When Autostraddle’s CEO Riese first suggested the Santana Lopez Legacy Award for Outstanding Queer Teen Character as a new category for this year’s Gay Emmys — to be honest, I almost cried. It’s such an important memorial for Naya Rivera’s life work, and the impact that her performance left on a generation of queer people — many people on our Autostraddle staff included. The second thought I had was: Oh I am so excited for when we are able to give this award to Jordan Hull as Angelica Porter-Kennard. Truthfully, this category was full of winners — the runner up Zendaya is actually nominated for a (straight) Emmy this year for her stirring and incredibly memorable performance as Rue Bennett in Euphoria. I take nothing away from those performances when I say that it was impossible to take my eyes off of Jordan Hull in every scene that she was in.
Little baby Angie came into the sequel series as fan favorite for the last ten years of those of us who loved her mightly as a toddler, and those were already large shoes for any performer to fulfill. Instead, Jordan laced up Angie’s rainbow Chucks and ran with it! She became the emotionally mature, sweet, caring, heartbeat around which Bette Porter’s world revolved, and our world right along with it. She became the sparkle of her Aunt Shane’s eye. Her shy, teenage romance with Jordi was the stuff of the best romantic comedies. Angie is brave and a bit of a smart ass (credit her mother), but she loves fearlessly. It’s so easy to root for her, to see a bit of ourselves in her triumphs and fears. We talk a lot about “L Word origin stories,” how for many of us the show was watched in secret away from our families when we were young and in some form of the closet. I can’t help but think about the teens who are sneaking to watch The L Word now, and how excited I am that they have someone like Angie shining back at them. What a star. — Carmen
Outstanding Cis Male Character: Dan Levy as David Rose, Schitt’s Creek
2019 Winner: Rogelio de la Vega, Jane the Virgin
Runner-Up: Billy Porter as Pray Tell, Pose (FX)
Other Nominees: Ben Sinclair as The Guy, High Maintenance (HBO) // Leland B. Martin as Ari Thomas, Boomerang (BET) // Ncuti Gatwa as Eric, Sex Education (Netflix) // Billy Porter as Pray Tell, Pose (FX) // Jeremy Pope as Archie, Hollywood (Netflix) // Nicholas Ashe as Micah West, Queen Sugar (OWN) // Andre Braugher as Captain Holt, Brooklyn 99 (NBC)
Not long ago — but also a million years ago, because pre-pandemic — I was at a gay press day situation where Dan Levy was going to appear alongside about a zillion other gay actors, and regardless of age or label or gender, everyone in that room was universally the most excited to meet Levy. Unlike a lot of other actors and series on this list, Schitt’s Creek and Levy have gotten their much deserved (but overdue) praise. They’re nominated for real Emmys, and they’ve already brought home Television Critics Association and GALECA: The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics Association awards.
David Rose has become an absolute icon. You are incapable of having an emotion he hasn’t expressed better than you and that has been GIFed. You are incapable of watching Schitt’s Creek and not falling in love with him. You are, in fact, regardless of whether or not you claim your heart is cold and black, incapable of not crying when he gets his happily ever after. — Heather
Outstanding Performance by an LGBTQ+ Actor in a Drama: Angelica Ross as Candy, Pose
2019 Winner: Mj Rodriguez as Blanca, Pose (FX)
Runner Up: Indya Moore as Angel, Pose (FX)
Other Nominees: Sarah Paulson as Alice McRay, Mrs. America (Hulu) // Jillian Mercado as Maribel, The L Word: Generation Q (Showtime) // Rutina Wesley as Nova, Queen Sugar (OWN) // Holland Taylor as Ellen Kincaid, Hollywood (Netflix) // Fiona Shaw as Carolyn Martens, Killing Eve (BBC) // Mj Rodriguez as Blanca, Pose (FX)
There will inevitably be crossover in the general categories and the LGBTQ actor categories — the more we play ourselves the truer this will be. And I’m thrilled that Angelica Ross has won both for her portrayal of Candy on Pose. But when I think about this category I’m not just thinking about performance — I’m thinking about the visibility of that performer in their identities off-screen. Ross has always combined activism and art and it’s been thrilling as a fan and a trans woman to see what she’s accomplished in the year since Candy’s painful death. She gave a deliciously subversive performance in American Horror Story: 1984, making her the first trans woman to ever be a series regular on two shows. She executive produced and appeared in the trans web series King Ester. And just last month she inked an overall development deal with Pigeon Production Company. This is only the beginning.
“I honestly feel like the phoenix that is sort of rising out of Candy’s ashes,” Ross said. “I am Candy. Candy is me, and so the reality is that walking out of my house today, the possibility is that my story could end the same way. My story can end in violence, too. But to see the possibility which I think that people are going to get to see because I’m already working on some amazing projects is that they’re going to see a Black trans woman get her life.”
Candy’s death was controversial. I have a lot of complicated feelings about it and I know a lot of you do too. But I love everything Ross said in its aftermath. Pose isn’t Ross’ story and it isn’t Candy’s, but they both owned the narrative whenever they could. And someday it will be their story, someday it will be. — Drew
Outstanding Performance by an LGBTQ+ Actor in a Comedy: Ashley Nicole Black, various characters, A Black Lady Sketch Show
2019 Winner: Stephanie Beatriz, Brooklyn 99
Runner-Up: Kate McKinnon, various characters, Saturday Night Live (NBC)
Other Nominees: Abby McEnany as Abby, Work in Progress (Showtime) // Mae Martin as Mae, Feel Good (Netflix) // Gillian Anderson as Jean Milburn, Sex Education (Netflix) // Theo Germaine as Chris, Work in Progress (Showtime)
It is hard to pick out my absolute favorite part of A Black Lady Sketch Show — trust me, I’ve tried — but if we’re honoring just one part of the show, it feels right that it’s Ashley Nicole Black.
In ABLSS‘s hilarious inaugural season, Black was part of three sketches — The Invisible Spy, parts one and two, and Annoying Woman — that focus on people not seeing her. In the latter, she’s Jackie Woodson, a social-media obsessed influencer who returns to her hometown to celebrate her 10th grade English teacher, only to realize that no one in the town remembers her…even her parents. In “Invisible Spy,” she’s Trinity, a super-secret agent able to subvert the tightest of the security by being her regular, ordinary self. The Gay Emmys were meant to bring recognition to those who often go unseen by the mostly straight white men who make up the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences… giving this award to the invisible spy feels serendiptous.
So congratulations, Ashley Nicole Black, we see you… through the tears caused by the side splitting laughter you provoke… we see you. — Natalie
Outstanding Performance by an LGBTQ+ Actor in a Sci-Fi/Fantasy Show: Janelle Monae as Alex, Homecoming
2019 Winner: Nicole Maines, Supergirl
Runner-Up: Chyler Leigh as Alex Danvers, Supergirl (The CW)
Nominees: Jamie Clayton as Charlie, Roswell New Mexico (The CW) // Maisie Richardson-Sellers as Charlie, Legends of Tomorrow (The CW) // Ariela Barer as Gert, Marvel’s Runaways (Hulu) // Ruby Rose as Batwoman, Batwoman (The CW)
The first time Janelle Monáe appears on your screen in Homecoming, she’s adrift in a lake. She wakes up abruptly, dropping her phone in the still waters, and paddles the oarless boat back to shore. You don’t know who she is…she doesn’t know who she is…but you know you want to watch.
Part of that is because it’s Janelle Monáe and, as queer women, we’re all obliged to love her but also because it’s Janelle Monáe in this space…playing in the same science fiction fantasyland that she’s been concocting for herself since the beginning of her career. It feels like a place where Cindy Mayweather could exist or where Jane 57821 would be on the run from the Nevermind. In short, this role feels made for Monáe and Homecoming is at its best when it remembers that. — Natalie
Outstanding LGBTQ+ Director / Producer / Writer / Showrunner: Tanya Saracho, Vida
2019 Winner: Janet Mock, Pose (FX)
Runner-Up: Janet Mock, Pose (FX)
Other Nominees: Lynn Shelton, Little Fires Everywhere (Hulu) // Lena Waithe, Twenties (BET) // Liz Feldman, Dead To Me (Netflix) // Liz Tigelaar, Little Fires Everywhere (Hulu) // Katja Blichfeld, High Maintenance (HBO) // Abby McEnany, Work in Progress (Showtime)
I’ve wanted to be in this industry since before my earliest memories. Like I literally said in preschool that I wanted to direct movies. But the desire to write and direct film and television is not the same as the desire to navigate all the bullshit to get there. I love this industry and I hate this industry and some days it feels impossible and yet I know I’ll never accept that to be true. I say all this because there are a few people who give me hope, a few people who have managed to navigate this world in a way that fills me with awe. Tanya Saracho is one of those people.
Vida is the creation of someone who’s not only brimming with talent, but committed to her principles in a way that frankly shouldn’t be possible in our current climate. Throughout its three seasons, Vida had an entirely Latinx writers room. Twenty of its twenty-two episodes were directed by women of color — two by men of color. Several of those directors had never directed television before including Jenée LaMarque who directed seven episodes of the series. The show is unapologetic in its queerness with drag kings and a queerceñera and (in my opinion) the best sex scenes to ever appear in anything ever. The show is cast with actual queer and trans people who play characters, not identities. The show is explicitly political — and explicitly human in those politics — as it covers gentrification and immigration and so much more. These aren’t things to celebrate in theory. This is what is on screen. This is what Saracho knew had to happen not just to change the industry, but to make the best show possible.
So, of course, it got canceled. But first! There were three seasons! Twenty-two incredible episodes of this show that did so much that had never been done before. If every failure was this successful, we’d live in a very different world.
This was Tanya Saracho’s first show as a creator, but it certainly won’t be her last. And I know she’ll bring this same talent and these same principles to every project. She did it in the beginning — she did it when it was hardest. We are so lucky to watch TV while she’s making it. We are so lucky to have had Vida and so lucky to have whatever she does next. I’m in awe. I don’t know what else to say except that I’m in total awe. — Drew
Outstanding Animated Series: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (Netflix)
2019 Winner: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power
Runner-Up: Bojack Horseman (Netflix)
Other Nominees: The Owl House (Disney) // Steven Universe: Future (Cartoon Network) // Harley Quinn (DC Universe) // She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (Netflix) // Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts (Netflix)
The final season of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power was the stuff of queer nerd fever dreams. It was like Star Wars meets Lord of the Rings meets Harry Potter but MAKE IT VERY GAY. Like the logical flight point of Legend of Kora crawling so Adventure Time could walk so Steven Universe could run so She-Ra could fly! Like literally! She had her own spaceship! The final season anchored a lot of its emotional drama on longterm gay couple Netossa and Spinnerella, and of course Bow’s gay dads made an appearance. But the main story, of course, was that Adora and Catra finally confessed their feelings for each other in the most chaotic lesbian drama way — and then saved the world together because of their love. Oh, and also: Scorpia and Perfuma!
But the queerness of She-Ra isn’t contained to the romantic storylines. There’s the joy and healing of found family, the trauma of being different in the families we’re born into, there’s pathways out of evangelical fascism, there’s guilt and shame and redemption, there’s mental illness, and good heavens the rainbows! Mostly, though, in some really dark days, there’s hope.
She-Ra isn’t without its issues, though, and the creative team, which didn’t include any Black writers, made some serious behind the scene missteps that manifested in a disastrous fan panel a few weeks ago. Showrunner and made concrete commitments to hire Black talent and staff at every level on every show she works on in the future. — Heather
Outstanding TV Documentary: Visible Out on Television
Runner Up: Shakedown (Pornhub)
Other Nominees: AKA Jane Roe: The Real Woman Behind Roe v. Wade (Hulu) // A Secret Love (Netflix) // Circus of Books (Netflix) // Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness (Netflix)
Visible: Out on Television is the most ambitious LGBTQ+ TV documentary ever attempted — and it succeeds in so many thorough and surprising ways. Opening with the televised Army-McCarthy hearings, which was the first time the word “homosexual” was said out loud on TV, and which launched the Lavendar Scare that decimated Hollywood’s attempts at inclusivity for decades, and landing on Janet Mocks’ Pose, one of the most revolutionary shows in TV history, Visible leaves few stones unturned in its quest to examine the history of gay and trans storylines, actors, and personalities on TV. The analysis is deeply informed. Creators Ryan White and Jessica Hargrave tapped Rachel Maddow, Janet Mock, Ellen DeGeneres, Margaret Cho, Asia Kate Dillon, Lena Waithe, Billy Porter, Wanda Sykes, Wilson Cruz, and even Miss Major Griffin-Gracy to offer commentary.
What makes Visible isn’t that it’s exhaustive, it’s that it goes to great lengths to contextualize what became flashpoints on TV and examine how those moments changed our culture and our politics when they aired (or, in the case of, say, the Stonewall Riots — when they didn’t). Visible even hits up subtextual cult gay classics like Golden Girls and Xena: Warrior Princess. The documentary isn’t all celebration; it’s quick to point out that most progress achieved by TV has benefitted cis, white gays, especially men. It is rooted in the past, but it keeps its eyes on the horizon too. — Heather
Most Groundbreaking Representation (Show): Pose
2019 Winner: Pose
Runner-Up: Batwoman (The CW)
Other Nominees: Work In Progress (HBO) // Twenties (BET) // Party of Five (Freeform) // Vida (Starz)
A recently had the opportunity to write about Pose this year, and I’m going to quote myself a little here, because it’s as true as ever:
“It is sincerely dumbfounding how good one television show can be… With skill and artistry, Steven Canals and Janet Mock have tapped into a purity and resiliency and love that beats raw at the center of so many queer chosen families for Black and Brown trans and queer folks. Then, they splashed it in our full splendor across our screens, immortalizing us the same way white cis people have been able to see themselves for years. Pose is so much more than luxurious ballroom runways; it knows we’re fucking rich. It knows that small family dinners surrounded by the people who really see you are worth more than gold. It knows even in the specter of death, queer folks don’t falter. We hold on to each other harder and stronger — and that fortitude is worth an entire crown of jewels. We’ve earned our diamonds because we withstood the pressure.”
In their second year in a row winning the achievement of “Most Groundbreaking Representation,” there’s no one better at getting 10s across the board. — Carmen
Best Show That Got Cancelled: Vida
2019 Winner: Jane the Virgin
Runner Up: Dare Me (USA)
Other Nominees: Marvel’s Runaways (Hulu) // I Am Not Okay With This (Netflix) // Party of Five (Freeform) // High Fidelity (Hulu)
Earlier this week, Jeff Hirsch, the president and CEO of Starz, told investors that “women are really driving our business.” Even as other platforms try to branch out, Starz is committed to doing what it’s good at: “focusing…on a female demo with original and provocative series.” It was hard to read that reporting and not wonder why Vida, this show that focused almost exclusively on women and was as provocative as any show on television, couldn’t or shouldn’t have had a longer run. Vida is exactly the show that Starz says they wanted but now its end its run.
Vida represents the absolute best in queer television and the landscape is diminished without it. The show set a new bar for how we see ourselves and should be the standard against which future shows will be judged. — Natalie
Best TV Episode With LGBTQ+ Themes: Vida S3E6 “Episode 22″ (Finale)
Runner-Up: Little Fires Everywhere S1E6 “The Uncanny”
Nominees: Pose S2E9 “Life’s a Beach” // A Black Lady Sketch Show S1E1 “Angela Bassett’s The Baddest Bitch” // Euphoria S1E4 “Shook Ones Part II” // The L Word Generation Q S1E4 “LA Times” // Hunters S1E8 “The Jewish Question” // She-Ra and the Princesses of Power S5E13 “Heart Part 2″ // Dickinson S1E3 “Wild Nights” // Vida S3E6 “Episode 22″ // Killing Eve S3E8 “Are You Leading Or Am I?” // High Maintenance S4E8 “Solo” // Mrs. Fletcher S1E7 “Welcome Back”
My favorite endings aren’t endings at all. I know there are a lot of fandoms that really crave finality. I understand the desire some queer people have for an overcorrection of all our tragedy. I get it. But life has no finality except death and while Vida may have started with that exact kind of conclusion it ends with something that is open, hopeful, real.
Vida deserved more episodes, more seasons, but a show like Vida isn’t one that ends with its final episode. These characters will live on in their own imagined world and the legacy of the show will live on in its impact on Latinx, queer, and female-led television. What I love about this finale is Lyn and Emma’s growth. I love how small it is. I love how monumental it is. There’s this idea in storytelling that characters need a drastic arc to show they’ve changed. But that’s not how people change. Lyn has found something like independence. Emma has found something like interdependence. They’ve each received some closure and that closure will always be incomplete. That’s life. This is the end of a chapter, not the book.
It’s difficult to pull off something this subtle and have it hit so hard. But Vida does, because Vida is a special show. Hyperbole is lazy, so I’ll resist the urge to say Vida is the best show I’ve ever seen. But it’s special. I’ll say that. Vida is a really special show. I already miss it dearly. — Drew
Outstanding Hairstyling for an LGBTQ+ Character: Sophie Suarez “The L Word: Generation Q”
Runner-Up: Tegan “How To Get Away With Murder“
Other Nominees: Toni Topaz “Riverdale” // Eve “Killing Eve” // Anissa Pierce “Black Lightning” // Bette Porter “The L Word: Generation Q” // Bishop “Deputy” // Nico “Vida”
There is a lot that I loved about Sophie Suarez (and her magnetic performance by Rosanny Zayas) last year, but for today let’s zoom in on the hair. The production team behind The L Word: Generation Q easily had more than a dozen uniquely queer hair and costume stylings to deal with — a tall order to for anyone! — and they outdid themselves by always paying attention to the small, authentic details first. From Finley’s armpit hair to Alice’s impeccably coifed bisexual bob, the entire community was accounted for. And then there was Sophie Suarez.
Sure, we can talk about her perfectly shaven undercut or how neat the lines of her edges really were (perfection!). We can talk about her expertly moisturized, much loved, and clearly defined curls piled messily — but also somehow always, neatly — on top of her head. But instead I want to reminisce about a small moment right at the beginning of the series, in episode 2. You could have blinked and missed it. Sophie is talking while getting ready for her day, and in the mirror she pulls out a toothbrush. She leans in close, turns her face up towards the yellow bathroom lighting, and proceeds to lay down the edges of her hair. Now using a toothbrush for bringing order to your rizos is time honored Black tradition, and for Afro-Latinas in particular it’s passed down from bathroom ritual to ritual across generations. But watching it happen so casually on my television — I was stunned. For all the queer attention to detail that Generation Q promised, until that one tiny moment, wow I never actually expected to see all of myself on air. — Carmen
Outstanding Costume Design for a Show With LGBTQ+ Characters: Deidra Govan, The L Word: Generation Q
Runner-Up: Sam Perry, Killing Eve
Other Nominees: Analucia McGorty, Pose // Bina Daigeler, Mrs America // Ceci, Black Lady Sketch Show // Beth Morgan, G.L.O.W.
The other nominees in this category were flashier choices — they made costumes after all, some of the loudest costumes television calls for — costumes for drag balls, for ’70s feminists and their enemies, for sketch comedy, for lady-wrestlers in Las Vegas. But the winner and the runner-up in this category had a more subtle task to perform. The original series’ interpretation of L.A. Lesbian Chic was iconic in its own way — Bette’s giant collar shirts, Shane’s gauzy t-shirts and skinny ties, Helena’s pencil skirts, Jenny’s poofy dresses. The L Word: Generation Q‘s queer style was more deliberately positioned around grounded and often gender non-conforming glamour, managing to pinpoint that indescribable thing that makes a certain take on high fashion still feel queer. We found our beloved characters expressing themselves in Wildfang suiting, designer jumpsuits, boxer-briefs, cheeky button-ups and pants with rises as high as their wearer’s ambitions. Sleeker versions of Bette, Alice and Shane emerged in “grounded glamour” with creative takes on bright power-suits, velvet blazers, creative neckwear, bold accessories and enormous eyeglasses while our millennials looked like actual queer millennials on our best days, from casual classics like Tomboyx underwear, Vans, off-shoulder sweaters, fun prints on polos and button-ups to Dani’s more professional future-Bette tailored sets and downtime workout clothes. We love fashion. — Riese
Fan Favorite Categories
Fan Favorite Couple: Adora and Catra, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power
2019 Winner: Juliana and Valentina, Amar a Muerte
Fan Favorite LGBTQ+ Character: Villanelle, Killing Eve
2019 Winner: Valentina Carvajal, Amar a Muerte
Fan Favorite Out LGBTQ+ Actor: Sarah Paulson
2019 Winner: Katherine Barrell, Wynonna Earp
Fan Favorite Most Anticipated Season Two: The L Word Generation Q
What’s Gay and New and Streaming On Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and HBO Max in September 2020
Honestly this month is shaping up to be half-decent by pandemic standards for all of us here at home craving LGBTQ tv shows and movies on streaming networks! We are adding HBO Max to the list, as they are actually doing lesbians a solid with tons of queer films in their archives and creating new content relevant to our interests. An up-and-comer, that one!
LGBTQ+ Women Related Content New To Netflix Streaming in September 2020
Queer content Leaving Netflix this month: Once Upon a Time
Set it Off (1996) – September 1
This era-defining heist film stars Jada Pinkett, Vivica A. Fox, Kimberly Elise and, of course, Queen Latifah; as four friends in L.A. who work at a Janitorial Services company with a shitty boss and decide to go ahead and rob a bank. Queen Latifah plays the seminal role of masculine lesbian Cleo Sims.
Bookmarks: Celebrating Black Voices (Netflix Original) – September 1
Amongst the celebrities participating in Netflix’s effort to “bring children’s stories from prolific Black creators centering around themes of identity, respect, justice and action to the screen” is lesbian author Jacqueline Woodson reading her book The Day You Begin. Other readers include Jill Scott, Misty Copeland, Karamo Brown, Lupita Nyong’o and Tiffany Haddish.
Girlfriends: Seasons 1-8 – September 1
The beloved sitcom that Natalie called “one of the greatest celebrations of black girl friendships on TV” is arriving, in full, on Netflix AND one of the four women at the sitcom’s center, Lynn, is bisexual,.
Away: Season 1 (Netflix Original) – September 4
The bad news is that this show, in which Hillary Swank goes into outer space without a personality with the aim of marching all over Mars with her intrepid crew, is bad. The good news is that there is a queer storyline involving Lu Wang (Vivian Yu), a Chinese taikonaut who is a chemist and had an… intimate relationship with NASA translator Mei Chen.
Get Organized with The Home Edit (Netflix Original) – September 9
Clea and Joanna, inventors of “the home edit” organizational system and author the book that apparently explains it all, take on organizing projects from celebrities (e.g., Reese Witherspoon, Eva Longoria) and regular people, including one woman who says she just came out and wants to start fresh with all of her belongings in tiny labeled boxes.
Ratched: Season 1 (Netflix Original) – September 18
Ryan Murphy’s take on One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’s villain Nurse Ratched stars queer actress Sarah Paulson as the titular character and queer actress/activist Cynthia Nixon as Gwendolyn Briggs and my friends, they are GAY as hell. The series already has a guaranteed Season Two, with plans made for four. As portrayed in the novel, which included a character hospitalized for his homosexuality (this was dropped for the film), asylums of the era did often offer “treatment” for the gays, so maybe we’ll have the privilege of seeing our queer ancestors tortured like we did in American Horror Story: Asylum. Murphy says this origin story will attempt to figure out “every little detail about her childhood, her relationships, her sexuality.”
The Good Place: Season 4 – September 26
The final season of this innovative and beloved half-hour comedy is now on Netflix if you want to model your bisexual bob after Kristen Bell’s.
Van Helsing: Season 4 – September 27
In this reimagining of the classic Dracula story, it is vampires who dominate the world and humans who are struggling for survival. Vanessa Helsing, the daughter of a famed vampire hunter, is at the center of the story and also, she is bisexual. Three other main characters and four recurring characters are various shades of queer as well, including Dracula herself, played by Battlestar’s Tricia Helfer.
Wentworth: Season 8 – September 30
Finally an answer to the question I’ve been asking google for weeks: the Australian prison series’ penultimate season arrives in in the U.S. on September 30. “Way back” top dog Lou Kelly and her partner turn up, terrifying current inmates. Returning homos and bi-os include Allie Novak, Joan Ferguson (yup, the bitch is back from the dead!), Ruby Mitchell and Marie Winter.
The Boys in the Band (Netflix Original) – September 30
Ryan Murphy’s production of the 1968 play, which he revived on Broadway in 2018, will feature a cast of entirely openly gay actors including Andrew Rannells, Jim Parsons, Zachary Quinto and Matt Bomer. It’s the story of nine gay male friends who come together for a birthday and end up experiencing high levels of emotional drama instead! There aren’t any lesbians in it, obviously, but you know — it’s like an important gay history situation if that kind of thing oils your engine.
Queer Content New to Amazon Streaming in September 2020
Addicted to Fresno (2015) – September 1
Natasha Lyonne plays a lesbian, as usual, in But I’m a Cheerleader director Jamie Babbit’s dark comedy Addicted to Fresno, which also stars Aubrey Plaza and Judy Greer. Shannon (Greer) and Martha (Lyonne) are codependent sisters in a cycle of Martha picking up the pieces for Shannon, the recovering sex addict.
The Boys: Season 2 (Amazon Original) – September 4
In Amazon’s universe of “depravity and violence,” superheroes are known to the general public, under the thumb of an exploitative corporation, and prone to narcissism and vanity. “The Seven” are the corporation’s top superhero team and “The Boys” are vigilantes attempting to reign in corrupted heroes. One of the Seven, Queen Maeve, a warrior / feminist / humanitarian, is bisexual. The New York Times says this season is more relevant than ever because it’s very cynical and so are we!
Blackbird (2019) – September 16
This emotional drama follows Lily (Susan Sarandon) and Paul (Sam Niel), a couple who’ve summoned their family and loved ones to the beach house for a final weekend together before Lily ends her life, and her battle with ALS, on her own terms. But also they have to deal with all their unresolved family shit really fast! Her daughter Anna (Mia Wasikowska), brings her partner, Chris, played by non-binary actor Bex Taylor-Klaus, to bear witness to it all. Kate Winslet and Rainn Wilson are in it too.
Queer(ish) Content New to Hulu Streaming in September 2020
Not Another Teen Movie (2001) – September 1
Ever seen an animated gif on tumblr circa 2009 where Mia Kirshner is taking off Chyler Leigh’s glasses like she’s about to kiss her? Or (also on tumblr) their homoerotic lad mag photoshoot? That’s from/because of this movie, a parody of classic teen flicks, in which Mia plays a parody of Sarah Michelle Geller’s character in Cruel Intentions. In general it’s about as gay as the teen movies it parodies (which’s to say, not really).
Things You Can Tell Just By Looking At Her (2000) – September 1
Calista Flockhart plays a lesbian whose girlfriend is dying of cancer in this Sundance fave that debuted on Showtime and weaved together five separate stories focused on the “interior lives of women.” It also stars Cameron Diaz, Glenn Close, Amy Brenneman and Holly Hunter.
Woke: Season 1 (Hulu Original) – September 9
Sasheer Zamata plays a lesbian reporter for a local newspaper in this dramedy about a Black cartoonist on the verge of mainstream success whose perspective on racial inequalities in the U.S. shifts when he’s racially profiled by aggressive policemen.
Pen 15: Season 2 (Hulu Original) – September 18
This program isn’t gay but also it’s weird and we all love it so let’s just be honest!!! We are all excited about this and we want to see it!!
LGBTQ+ Streaming Coming to HBO Max in September
V for Vendetta (2006) – September 1
A dystopian political action film from the Wachowskis starring Natalie Portman in this movie that A*terE*len’s Sarah Warn called, in 2006, “One of the most pro-gay films ever.”
Unpregnant (HBO Max Original) – September 10
The daughter of “Jesus Freak” parents needs an abortion and enlists her ex-best friend, Bailey (Barbie Ferreira of Euphoria) — described by Entertainment Weekly as “a sarcastic, queer loner with little tolerance for Veronica’s new friends” — to join her on a wild road trip to the closet clinic willing to provide one! In New Mexico!
We Are Who We Are: Limited Series – HBO Max Original Series – September 14
This series from the producer of Call Me By Your Name focuses on a group of kids living on a U.S. Military base in Italy in 2016. Fraser Wilson, an introverted 14-year-old, arrives in town with his Moms, Sarah (Chloe Sevigny) and Maggie (Alice Braga), and befriends Caitlin (Jordan Kristine Seamon), who, the trailer suggests, is a trans man, despite being played by a cis actress. It also appears that we can anticipate a love triangle involving Caitlin’s mother, Jenny (Faith Alabi) and Maggie. So if you’re looking for a drama chock-full of queer shit that you will feel resolutely uncomfortable/conflicted about for the entire viewing (because “military” and because “casting a cis actor in a trans role”), have I got the limited series for you.
Potentially Gay Watch:
Shows that ping softly upon the gaydar this month but could not be confirmed at press time include Netflix’s original series The Duchess (the “best friend” has potential), Netflix’s Enola Holmes (It’d be too obvious for Enola, Sherlock Holmes’ misfit tomboy sister, to be gay, but the show has a tinge of gay spirit), Utopia (sci-fi teen ensemble shows usually have some gays, but we frequently must wait for Season 2 for it), Hulu’s Fargo Season Four (outlaw pair of one woman + one woman in drag), HBO Max’s quarantine-comedy film Coastal Elites (just like, on the off chance that Sarah Paulson is playing a lesbian?)
My Top 10 Television Characters: Valerie Anne, Who Loves a Hard Shell and a Gooey Center
In My Top 10 Television Characters, various members of Autostraddle’s TV Team will be telling you about the TV characters nearest and dearest to our hearts, EVEN the ones that aren’t lesbian/bisexual/queer. Today, TV Team’s Valerie Anne reluctantly picks between her favorite children even though it was emotional torment for her.
I’m starting to think I’ve done something wrong to be punished with being forced to choose “Top 10” anything. And yet time and time again here I am, forced to narrow my life’s passion down to a mere TEN choices. It’s impossible! Impossible. I put it off as long as humanly possible but here I am with a list. I’m positive I missed very important characters, since I’ve watched and loved hundreds of TV shows in my life, but these are ten that I wish to speak about upon this day.
10. Every character Katie McGrath has ever played.
YES I’M CHEATING RIGHT OUT OF THE GATE DON’T @ ME. But here’s the thing! Over the course of her career, despite her IMDb list not being particularly long, she has played such a wide range of characters — and specifically, my favorite kind of characters — that I couldn’t possibly fit just one. In fact, I think you’ll come to see a theme in this post of two archetypes specifically (“hard shell/gooey center” and “like me”), and she has performed both of them perfectly on many occasions. And so, so many of them queer. My top three K’tay McGrawww characters are Lucy Westenra from Dracula and her soft longing and dedication to/unrequited love for her best friend; Saskia from Secret Bridesmaids Business with her brash tongue and hard outer shell with a soft gooey center and her dedication to/unrequited love for her best friend; and Lena Luthor on Supergirl with her boss bitch attitude, genius brain, fierce outfits, and dedication to/unrequited love for her best friend.
9. Sara Lance, Legends of Tomorrow
Over the course of her eight years in the Arrowverse, Sara Lance has made one of the most impressive journeys of any character, let alone one who started as a presumed dead socialite on a vigilante show about a grumpy man. She was a closed-off assassin, a vigilante, a dark soul with a dark outlook. Then she was a vigilante learning how to be a better friend and sister. Then she was a smart-mouthed time traveler who shot from the hip and played the field. All the fields. And now she’s a compassionate leader, a Paragon of Destiny, a loyal friend, and a loving girlfriend. She stayed hard in the places that help her be strong for the people who rely on her (and also her arms), but is no longer afraid to show her soft side either, because she knows there’s strength in that too. Plus she’s died like a hundred times and it never sticks, because Sara Lance is a bisexual badass who will defy anything she has to, whether it’s literally the Death Totem or figuratively the Bury Your Gays trope.
8. Elena Alvarez, One Day at a Time
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Elena Alvarez is the teenager I never got to be. She’s the teenager inside of me now. Our lives look pretty different on paper, but we have some fundamental things in common. We both love learning and get very passionate about the topics we care about. We’re both huge nerds who love sci-fi and video games. We both put too much pressure on ourselves to be Good — good at things, and good people. We both have little brothers who annoy us to no end but who we’d do a murder for. We’re both gay! Though that’s not a thing I was ready to confront about myself in high school, so I ended up keeping a lot of those other things about me tamped down, too. Not open the Pandora’s Box of my personality. So Elena is equal parts healing my teenage self retroactively, and also bringing me so much joy for the teenagers who will be able to point to Elena being adorable and gay on their TVs and say, “Me gay, too.”
7. Emily Fields, Pretty Little Liars
Emily Fields came to me on the heels of my own coming out journey and she felt like a gift. “Oh you came out to your parents? Here’s an adorable lesbian for you to bond with people on the internet about. Emily herself was that kind-but-tougher-than-she looks type I’m drawn to — and also had that dedication to/unrequited love for her best friend I love so much. Pretty Little Liars changed my life in ways you wouldn’t think a chaotic teen drama that blurred the lines of reality could. But even ten years later, I still remember feeling that flutter of my heart when Emily and Maya got into the photo booth together. And I still make the jokes we all made in our #BooRadleyVanCullen days.
6. Cosima Niehaus, Orphan Black
It almost feels silly to have a favorite clone, since they’re all so brilliantly portrayed by Tatiana Maslany, but Cosima was it for me. She technically falls into the “like me” category of my favorite types of characters, though we’re not exactly the same. She’s sarcastic and very go-with-the-flow most of the time, but like a dog with a bone once she’s fixated on something. Prone to kindness but defensive about the people and things that she loves. She’s quicker to forgive than to forget, and her mind is wide open. All very relatable. But she’s also confident and flirty and unafraid in ways I aspire to.
5. Theo Crain, The Haunting of Hill House
I wrote a whole essay about Theo Crain because while on the surface it makes sense she’s on this list because she fits that tough on the outside, gooey on the inside archetype, it goes deeper than that. I’ve never seen being an empath portrayed so accurately, even though it was heightened to a metaphor. She puts up walls, not to keep people out so much as to protect herself, and gives more of herself than she’d ever let on.
4. The Danvers’ Sisters, Supergirl
Hi there I’m cheating again HOW’MEVER hear me out: Kara and Alex Danvers both have characteristics that are fundamental to who I am, and also characteristics that are so different from me I find them compelling to watch. Alex has that big sister energy and is loyal almost to a fault. She’s smart and gay and hard on herself. Those are all things I relate to. But she’s also a natural and skilled leader, occasionally quick-tempered, and can take things too seriously sometimes. Those things I find fascinating in someone who has so many qualities I relate to, since I don’t relate to those. Kara Danvers also has traits I see in myself: a relentless optimism and penchant for hope that can be exhausting to maintain, something I’ve never seen on TV before quite like this. She goes all in when she loves something or someone, and she will always put others before herself, occasionally resulting in her taking too much on alone. But she also has things I can’t fathom, like her confidence in herself and her abilities. Together they make a duo I love watching, especially because they embody one of my favorite principles: Blood doesn’t make a family, love makes a family.
3. Santana Lopez, Glee
Santana Lopez was such a unique character. She falls squarely in the role of “hard shell, gooey center” but she took it to a new level. She was “mean” but she wasn’t a villain, not really. Coming out didn’t make her less snarky, didn’t magically “fix” her quick wit and take-no-shit attitude. It was a little “I was mean because I was closeted” — maybe she lashed out at times she wouldn’t have otherwise. But once she came out she could still tear someone down with her vicious, vicious words when she needed to, then go sing a soft ballad to her girlfriend in the choir room. Naya Rivera played Santana with such a confident energy, head held high and saying every word without hesitation or a second thought. Even though I am so, so different from Santana, and sometimes can’t even make a sassy joke to a close friend without immediately apologizing, I was drawn to her like a moth to a flame. And you know how she was so kind to Sweet Marley Rose, especially when she found out Kitty was bullying her? I think that’s at the root of what I want here. I want to be the Sweet Marley Rose to someone’s Santana. I love to be the one person the tough-as-nails girl is soft around. Plus, Naya’s singing skills were next-level. And I hope someday I can listen to those songs again without my heart breaking.
2. Faith, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
I’m not really doing the math here but I feel like I’m leaning more toward the “hard shell, goey center” type and it all started with Faith. Maybe there aren’t as many “more like me” characters out there, but even on Buffy alone, there was Willow. So at a formative age, I was presented both paths, and when I got to this second slot and knew I had to choose between them, it didn’t take long to decide. Maybe it’s because there’s more baggage when it comes to watching characters that are more like me, maybe it’s because I’m extremely gay and all I want is to be a Slytherin’s Hufflepuff. But I’ve loved Faith since the moment she appeared before my 11-year-old eyes. In fact, when I came out to my dad, he was like, “Yeah I know” and when I asked how he knew, he used Faith as evidence. There have been many Faith-like characters I’ve been drawn to over the years — Jessica Jones, Ashley from South of Nowhere, Sarah Manning from Orphan Black, Dutch from Killjoys — and it all comes back to the Slayer the Council Forgot. Also I will probably always hold a little grain of resentment for the Scooby Gang for how they treated her; all it would have taken was a little bit of sympathy and a lot less judgement and Faith could have been redeemed a lot sooner.
1. Waverly Earp, Wynonna Earp
Picking a #1 is hard because a) I hate absolutes b) how can I choose between a character I’ve loved for 22 years and a character whose journey is still unfolding, but when it came down to it, it had to be Waverly. Granted, Wynonna herself has a lot of the Faith aspects I love and is definitely up there in one of my favorite characters of all time, but I already chose the Danvers’ sisters as a duo and don’t want to get fired for my inability to follow simple listicle rules. But Waverly is perfectly imperfect and I love her. She was a good, smart kid who felt left out, left behind, like she didn’t belong. She did everything she could to prove herself, until finally she found a thing she was good at and a group who appreciated her for it. She’s constantly trying to figure out who she is and where she fits, all while being kind and dedicated and passionate. If you ever want to know what it’s like to be a relentless optimist with a lifetime of underlying depression, watch the episode of Wynonna Earp called “Jolene.”
Honorable mentions: Peyton Sawyer (One Tree Hill), Eleanor Guthrie (Black Sails), Fiona Gallagher (Shameless), Fleabag (Fleabag), Jenna Faith Hope (Impulse), Gail Peck (Rookie Blue), Nia Nal (Supergirl), Arizona Robbins (Grey’s Anatomy), Sweet Marley Rose (Glee), Adora and Catra (She-Ra), all of the girls on Elite, every woman in the TVD universe
Where to stream gay TV:
89 Queer TV Shows to Stream on Netflix
32 Lesbian, Queer & Bisexual (LGBTQ+) TV Shows Streaming Free on Amazon Prime
62 TV Shows On Hulu with LGBTQ+ Characters
My Top 10 Television Shows: Ro White, Who Loves Scary Women
In My Top 10 Favorite Television Shows, various members of Autostraddle’s TV Team will be telling you about the TV shows nearest and dearest to our hearts, EVEN the ones that don’t have lesbian / bisexual / queer woman characters.
Today, Ro White shares their feelings!
When the Autostraddle TV team requested “Top 10″ TV lists, I balked. I don’t watch much TV, and I lack the language to write about it. My Netflix history looks less like a well-curated selection of quality entertainment and more like a jumble of jokes, werewolves and lesbians (which honestly sounds like a cool party, but I digress).
If you’re reading this, you must want to know me, and in that case, you’re in luck. You can scroll through my top ten shows and know exactly who I am and who I’ve been — a consistently queer, formerly goth, recovering musical theater nerd with a penchant for dry humor and scary women. Sharing this list is like showing you my diary if all my love poems were about Sandra Oh. Readers, this is a big step for us. Let the vulnerability parade begin:
10. The Secret World Of Alex Mack
With her giant flannels and backwards hats, Alex Mack was the quietly queer icon I needed while coming of age in the Midwest. Alex is a typical preteen girl, but after coming into contact with a top secret chemical, she develops superpowers, including telekinesis and the ability to morph into a silver puddle. She can’t control these changes, and sometimes they’re embarrassing. I’m sure this Nickelodeon series was meant to be a metaphor about puberty, but for me, it was all about gay stuff.
9. Sense8
I’ve been a fan of the Wachowskis since I saw The Matrix as a kid. Discovering Bound at an Indiana Blockbuster Video solidified their place in my heart. This Wachowski-made Netflix series has everything I adore — science fiction, suspense, small women beating up large men, strap-on sex and a surprise group sing-a-long that was ultimately a strange but endearing artistic choice.
8. Saturday Night Live
Ok, they don’t always nail it, but after spending seven years doing a weekly live show myself, I have a deep appreciation for creating hilarity under a deadline. The weirder the premise, the harder I’ll howl. Kate McKinnon as Justin Bieber never fails to make me scream-laugh.
7. Are You Afraid Of The Dark?
Some of my earliest memories involve hiding behind the couch while the Are You Afraid Of The Dark? intro music played. I could handle the episodes themselves — each formulaic story led to a somewhat happy ending — but that intro music still fucks me up. I would wait until the Midnight Society announced the day’s story before peering out from my hiding place. Some episodes that are permanently seared into my brain include “The Tale of the Lonely Ghost,” “The Tale of the Dead Man’s Float” and “The Tale of the Super Specs.”
6. The Haunting Of Hill House
I adore supernatural horror, and allegorical horror about human grief (a la The Babadook and Hereditary) is my favorite flavor. I came across The Haunting Of Hill House when I had the flu and smashed through the whole series in two days. I was of course drawn to Theo, Hill House’s resident lesbian psychic who can feel other peoples’ trauma through touch. Could there be a more Sapphic supernatural power? I feel attacked.
5. Shrill
The cast of this show is a parade of comedy’s weirdest weirdos. Shrill features Aidy Bryant as Annie, a young journalist learning how to stand up for herself, in a star-studded cast including John Cameron Mitchell, Julia Sweeney, Jo Firestone and more. Lolly Adefope plays Annie’s queer roommate with incredible charm. I’m particularly obsessed with comedian Patti Harrison as Ruthie, Annie’s unhinged coworker who steals the show with one-liners like, “Scaring people makes me horny.”
4. Killing Eve
The ferocious hype around Killing Eve deterred me at first, but while quarantined and unemployed, I finally gave in. This series includes all of my favorite things: gore, deceit, the eroticism of female rivalry and admiration and also Sandra-motherfucking-Oh. Killing Eve’s bizarre, dark humor is often hard to grasp. I find myself laughing and I don’t know why. I love that.
3. Buffy The Vampire Slayer
My Buffy geekdom runs deep. Buffy got me through junior high. Buffy got me through high school. Instead of going to senior prom, I stayed home and rewatched my favorite episodes because I was 18, deep in my feelings and barely surviving the Hellmouth of Indiana. This is the show I return to when I’m sick or sad. The aesthetic yanks me back to my preteen goth roots and the stories remind me that friendship conquers all. Willow and Tara were the first queer female couple I ever saw on TV, and (SPOILER!) Willow avenging Tara’s death in season 6 is the epitome of my Aries Dyke Energy.
2. Work In Progress
Produced by Lilly Wachowski and filmed in my home city of Chicago, Work In Progress chronicles the life of Abby, a middle-aged, self-identified “fat, queer dyke” who falls in love with a much younger transgender man. I should disclose that a bunch of my friends are on this show, but that’s not why I love it. Work In Progress offers three things I rarely see on TV — an intergenerational queer relationship, education that doesn’t feel pedantic and an actual butch character who’s not a cop or a person in prison.
1. Dead To Me
Dead To Me is part thriller, part female buddy dramedy rolled up into one exquisite take on human grief. I’d hate to spoil the plot, so I’ll leave you with this: actors Christina Applegate and Linda Cardellini lean into the romance and depth of female friendship with unfiltered honesty and the best comedic timing I’ve ever seen. Watching their characters unravel is a masterclass in acting. I cannot wait for season 3.
Honorable mentions: Wishbone, Herstory, The Babysitter’s Club, Vida, All That
Where to stream gay TV:
89 Queer TV Shows to Stream on Netflix
32 Lesbian, Queer & Bisexual (LGBTQ+) TV Shows Streaming Free on Amazon Prime