Pop Culture Fix: Meet the “Many Queer Characters” of the Gossip Girl Reboot

Hey it’s 2021, but you can’t make me stop drinking my 2020 Christmas blend coffee! Here’s your first Pop Culture Fix of the New Year!

+ We already know that the forthcoming Gossip Girl reboot is going to  be “very, very queer” and will have “many queer characters.” The show’s official Instagram has now dropped individual photos of the new cast and the names of their characters with little teasers like “power” and “perspective” and “influence.” None say “GAY!” (yet). Any guesses on who our new Upper East Side queers are?

+ In 2020, women directors directed 16% of Hollywood’s top grossing films, up from 12% in 2019 (in large part because theater shutdowns allowed films like Emma and Portrait of a Lady on Fire to nudge their way into the top 100, thanks to promo from major streaming platforms like Hulu and Netflix). IndieWire recently published a breakdown of the way the pandemic affected women filmmakers. No breakdown on how many of those 16% were women of color.

+ Black cartoon characters from our childhoods that were ahead of their time.

+ Tessa Thompson’s Must-List.

+ Dungeons, Dragons, and Diversity.

+ Comic Book Resources agrees with many of you that Wonder Woman teased Cheetah’s bisexuality.

+ How Pose is filming its epic ball scenes during a pandemic.

+ Related: What happened to Ryan Murphy?

+ Batwoman‘s season two premiere features one of my all-time favorite battles: Batwoman vs. Batman.

+ How the final season of Chilling Adventures of Sabrina brought back talking Salem.

+ Happy first Monday of the New Year, friends.

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Heather Hogan

Heather Hogan is an Autostraddle senior editor who lives in New York City with her wife, Stacy, and their cackle of rescued pets. She's a member of the Television Critics Association, GALECA: The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics, and a Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer critic. You can also find her on Twitter and Instagram.

Heather has written 1718 articles for us.

5 Comments

  1. The cynic in me read that headline and thought we were getting exactly one cis gay white man and nothing else in the reboot, I am happy (if) I am proven wrong.

    Luna Lu is played by trans actress Zíon Moreno who some of you may know from the Netflix show Control Z where she also plays a trans girl/woman, so I am hopeful this will be the case here again.

    As for my totally wild and based on nothing guesses (except vibes from the Instagram photos ofcourse):
    Otto Bergman – gay
    Kate Keller – lesbian/bi
    Akeno Menzies – ace/aro
    Audrey Hope – straight
    Julien Calloway – straight
    Max Wolfe – straight
    Monet de Haan – straight
    Zoya Lott – pan?

    Also in service of being less of a bitch this year I am foregoing a probably meanspirited paperbag comment and just note that I am a bit disappointed that there aren’t any dark(er)-skinned characters in the main cast.

  2. Me, looking at the cast of the Gossip Girl reboot: “wait, this isn’t three pictures of the same girl?”

    Whew, the colorism just jumps out.

  4. I was absolutely delighted to see Austin Walker from Friends at the Table featured in the “Dungeons, Dragons, and Diversity” article. F@TT is one of my favorite role-playing game podcasts. The stories and the characters are incredible, not to mention the music! Highly recommend to anyone looking for queer RPG podcasts made by queer people.

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