Today, possibly as a Valentine’s Day gift to a certain segment of the lesbian community (me), photographer Collier Schorr and writer Alex Morris have blessed us with a Rolling Stone cover story starring our very own Kristen Stewart. The photoshoot is chock full of highlights including “Kristen Stewart wearing a sliver of underwear and a t-shirt that says ANIMAL on it,” “Kristen Stewart wearing short-shorts with athletic socks and a t-shirt that says EAT ME on it,” “Kristen Stewart removing her shirt in front of a rack of barbell weights” and “Kristen Stewart wearing a jock strap and a cropped leather jacket while suggestively biting her finger.” Here’s the cover:
Unfortunately, Instagram has already begun removing imagery from the shoot from its platform for allegedly containing “nudity or sexual activity,” a move that is both sexist, ironic, and a direct attack on a certain segment of the lesbian community (me), considering what Stewart told Rolling Stone about her desires for the cover and the fact that the cover literally says “Uncensored” on it:
…she wants the cover image to send a clear message: hyper-sexualized, left of andro, and flipping the gender script. “If I got through the entire Twilight series without ever doing a Rolling Stone cover, it’s because the boys were the sex symbols,” she points out. “Now, I want to do the gayest fucking thing you’ve ever seen in your life. If I could grow a little mustache, if I could grow a fucking happy trail and unbutton my pants, I would. Guys — I’m sorry — but their fucking pubes are shoved in my face constantly, and I’m like, ‘Ummmm, bring it in.’”
Collin shared a removal notice to her stories, stating, “spread the images as they are being censored.” Well, if she insists:
A few weeks ago, I declared Stewart’s Variety Magazine cover story to be the most revelatory interview she’s ever done, but I take that back — this Rolling Stone cover story is, in fact, the most in-depth and personal interview Kristen Stewart has ever done.
In a story laced with Coors Light and weed, freewheeling from Stewart’s living room to her home gym to her other house to a local dive bar that serves the only wings Stewart considers worth eating, Stewart discusses her sexuality journey, her career path, her future with Dylan Meyer, her gender presentation, her Queer Studies self-education, Love Lies Bleeding and, of course, her dogged determination to get someone to fund her adaptation of Lidia Yuknavitch’s bisexual memoir, The Chronology of Water, which she describes as “so taboo it’s almost horny.”
Stewart paces and obsesses and challenges Morris to a chin-up contest and also asks Morris if she knows the story’s angle yet and asks if she wants to play a game of pool, which Stewart notes is “the party trick of any fledgling lesbian.”
We learn that when Dylan Meyer first moved into the house where Stewart now lives most of the time, Stewart had no curtains and only three forks and also never drank coffee and never slept. She sleeps now, though, and her and Meyer wake up early and go to bed early together. Kristen Stewart takes baths outside and reads Kathy Acker and Jeanette Winterson, Kristen Stewart has a Playboy pinball machine.
Kristen Stewart says she chose to come out on Saturday Night Live during a period of time when she already considered herself “physically out with [her] body.” While workshopping her monologue, Stewart expressed concern that it was “the most boring monologue ever.” But that joke about being gay? That was the joke the monologue needed to be the monologue it was.
Kristen Stewart knows she’s often dated her creative collaborators but also that’s just who she is, even with Dylan, and even though these movies they want to make are her and Dylan’s babies,. they want to have actual babies one day too. In fact, there is “no fucking way” that she won’t have human babies, too, discussing the possibility of reverse IVF with Dylan, where they carry each other’s embryos. While the concept of childbirth scares her — particularly the pain involved, and not being able to smoke weed to dull said pain during pregnancy — she thinks being pregnant is “radical” and therefore worth doing, regardless.
Kristen Stewart explains that playing butchy dykey Lou in Love Lies Bleeding felt less like an exploration of a new side of herself than like a return to who she’d always been — “who you are when you’re 11 — physically, the clothes you choose to wear — before you’ve just been pummeled by male expectation.” Once she hit puberty, things got weird:
I was immediately aware that these guys who I was friends with saw me as not fuckable. My sexuality is totally fluid. I’m all over the fucking map — and I think I was then. But I also really wanted to be normal and hot, so I was like, ‘Cool. I’m going to do everything I can to try and fucking figure out how to look like a girl and get these guys to like me.’ That’s it. It’s totally a normal story.”
She found it “really fucking fun” to be able to “have the little, dykey sister be the main protagonist in a movie” because “That’s never the main character in a movie. That’s never the one that you want to fuck. I mean, that’s the one some people do, but not the one that you are prescribed to want to fuck.”
Today, as this story lights up the lesbian social media community, we can only clasp our gay hands together and praise Saint Valentine for blessing us. Also, this is cute:
You can read the entire story, and see all of the aforementioned photographs, on Rolling Stone.
God damn it, she is so hot.
WOW. I really appreciate the camaraderie of the interview write-up, Riese (said with full sincerity!)
I saw this shoot earlier elsewhere and my immediate response (well, after ‘Jesus Christ 😳’) was to assume (from some sort of sexist bias) that the photographer of this shoot was a man and to think how surprising it was he’d been able to create something so perfectly expressing/catering to a specific dyke gaze. Reading this now, I’m like, oh, *of course* it was Collier Schorr. Amazing to see Kristen like this on the cover of Rolling Stone