Best (not-romantic) line of the night:
Tina: [rushing out of the choir room after Quinn] Quinn, can I talk to you for a sec? Artia said that you told him Brown is not an Ivy League school?
Quinn: [without even looking back over her shoulder] That’s not what I said; I said it’s barely an Ivy League school.
Becky also is back, roaming the halls of McKinley High. She’s got a boyfriend named Darrell and she’s also got a problem: She told him she was president of every club in high school, including glee club, which fact should give Sue a real thrill. She was able to fake being an astronaut, a surgeon, a speaker of Latin, a beekeeper, but Becky cannot fake the ability to swagger to song, so she asks Quinn and Tina to help her impress Darrell. And I don’t want to blow your mindgrapes right open on a Monday, but let me tell you a spoiler so you don’t pass out from shock in a little while: No dudes swoop in and fix Becky’s problem in the most offensive/patronizing way possible. Becky’s gonna get some hard truths from some ladies, and then she’s going to fix her problems herself. Like what Jane did when she left Dalton last week.
Glee, are you — I’m sorry, I need to sit down — are you learning? In your last season, are you finally getting it? Too soon to tell. I won’t believe! Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me three thousand times, a plague on your house for all eternity!
Or, like, no. Not a plague. That’s mean. I’m sorry. Just please stop. You’re stopping, right? You’re stopping. You’ve got this.
(If Rachel ends up marrying Mr. Schue like some theory I saw on Tumblr, Glee, I am going to set you on fire.)
ANYWAY. Becky looks at Quinn and goes, “Thanks, Kitty” and scoots on down the hallway.
Santana and Brittany are canoodling in the bed where Santana one time claimed she liked to lay on top of Brittany like a lizard to help digest her food.
Santana: Do you think human beings evolved from fish just so they could have legs to scissor?
Brittany: That and to have mouths to eat pizza, probably. I think I want to mash-up two Alanis songs and no Carole King songs because I spent too much time being boxed up inside that choir room by Will fucking Schuester.
Santana: Well, but if we do it the way Kurt and Rachel said, we might actually be able to help New Directions win Factionals.
Brittany: I like how you can be a kitten with me, you know that? I like how you don’t feel the need to skulk around like a panther and murder people when it’s just me and you.
Santana: I’d like to be a kitten with you in New York, actually. I’d like to go back to college. I’d like you to go back to college with me. I know a diner we can work at where we can earn enough money to afford an enormous loft in Bushwick and all the vintage furniture we’ll ever need.
Brittany: Yeah, duh. That’s the dream. Do you think the whole world is jealous of us?
Santana: No, but they should be. Coming home to you is like my soul docking up at its charging station. Like that feeling you get when you sit down in a hot bubble bath after a whole day of being on your feet. Like putting on pajamas, and every morning is Christmas.
Brittany:Â I’ve built my life around you, too, Santana; I should have said it a long time ago.
My girlfriend watched this episode of Glee with me, her first episode of Glee ever, actually. The only things she really even knows about the show are what she hears our friends talk about which is Faberry stuff, mostly. (An actual thing she said during the show was, “So Santana fucked Dianna Agron’s character, right, and everyone was like ARRRGH why didn’t Quinn Fabray fuck Rachel Berry?!?”) She asked me to explain the deal with Brittany and Santana, and so I said, you know, about how they were best friends and then Santana realized she’s a lesbian and was in love with Brittany, and Brittany helped her come out, and Brittany just loves who she loves, and they weren’t together and then they were together and then they broke up and then they got back together and now here we are.
I could tell my girlfriend wasn’t very impressed because when you say it like that, it does sort of sound like, well, like Buffy and Degrassi and South of Nowhere and Skins and Faking It and and at least seven teenage lesbian movies I can count off the top of my head.
Talking to her made me realize a thing I’ve always known but never been able to put into words: The magic of Brittany and Santana isn’t just the story — though that is part of it; you can watch the same narrative unfold ninety-nine times and have the hundredth one click into place in your soul for reasons you’ll never be able to quantify — but more even than that, the magic of Brittany and Santana is the way we experienced them. It was the genesis of brand new world, a once-in-a-lifetime adventure.
During one of the bleakest moments of modern gay history, Brittany tossed out what should have been a throwaway joke: “Sex isn’t dating; if it were, Santana and I would be dating.” But she didn’t say it into a vacuum; her words didn’t get lost in the fourth wall vortex. Prop. 8, an enormous emotional blow to marriage equality, had passed only a year earlier in California. A rash of gay teen suicides were being reported around the country due to an increase in homophobic bullying. Despite President Obama‘s campaign promises during the 2008 election, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and the Defense of Marriage Act were still going strong. The mood was dark and there was a since of dejection and hopelessness everywhere you looked in the world of queer pop culture. And then, a crazy thing: Twitter began to connect us to each other and to the people who make television in ways even the Jetsons couldn’t have imagined. (In 2008, the year before Glee started, Twitter reported 400 million total tweets; by early 2010, Twitter was reporting 50 million tweets a day. Astronomical!)
That’s the world Brittany spoke her throwaway line into, a world where queer women felt a lot hurt and a little helpless, and suddenly found themselves with access to the people in charge. And so Brittana fandom stepped into the darkness and seized a brand new power and began talking to the culture until the culture had no choice but to listen and to respond.
Santana didn’t come out as a lesbian because a bunch of writers holed up in some cabin in Vancouver between seasons one and two to toss around ideas about creating authentic and organic queer female characters. Santana came out because lesbian fandom demanded representation. Clearly, Glee wasn’t scared to tackle the gay thing and clearly Fox was giving them license to do things most broadcast networks at the time wouldn’t have dreamed of and clearly they had two female characters whose chemistry and storyline made perfect sense — and so queer women decided this was the moment they were going to stop eating crumbs off the floor and demand a seat at the feast.
Every one of Brittany and Santana’s relationship milestones has happened because fandom never stopped fighting for them. Throwaway jokes weren’t enough. Holding hands wasn’t enough. Canoodling in the background wasn’t enough. If Finn and Rachel could make out with their mouthparts, Brittany and Santana should be allowed to make out with their mouthparts. If Kurt and Blaine got ten duets a season, Brittany and Santana should get ten duets in a season. The show’s writers and producers antagonized Brittany and Santana fans on social media, mocked them with meta commentary inside the show, and scorned them in interviews with mainstream and LGBTQ media outlets. I will never, in all my life, forget Brittana fandom having to explain to Glee‘s creative team the difference between two people kissing and two people rubbing their necks together like giraffes.
But the theme of Glee from the very beginning was: when strong popular guys toss weak minority guys into the dumpster in the parking lot, the only way to win is to climb out and dust off the trash and Don’t Stop Believin’.
And so lesbian fandom took Glee at its word. Brittana fandom came together and held firm and relied on each other not to let the upside-down world convince them they were the ones who were walking on the ceiling.
