Feature image via Self magazine
There’s so much good gay pop culture news this week! I hope you enjoy it along with a nice glass of water. Staying hydrated is important if we’re going to keep demolishing the patriarchy.
Teevee
+ The AV Club chatted up Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer about the new season of Broad City, which debuts on this very night on Comedy Central.
+ Here is a Supergirl Season Three teaser trailer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irH6gtcR4Dk
+ Variety‘s Mo Ryan just keeps on doing the good work. Yesterday she unpacked the results of this year’s Boxed In study, which is San Diego State University’s annual deep dive into the careers of women in front of and behind the camera. The findings are unsurprisingly bleak. Mo wrote about them further in a Twitter thread that you can find right here.
Indulge a tweetstorm pls (story link to come). No industry is more prone to confirmation bias than TV/entertainment industry, I find. 1/
— Mo Ryan (@moryan) September 12, 2017
+ This isn’t gay, I just really love this headline: “Allison Janney Is a Cursing, Bird-Owning, Chain-Smoking Revelation in I, Tonya.”
+ Jill Soloway will be sticking around as EP, director and writer for Transparent but is stepping down as showrunner to focus on I Love Dick.
+ A San Junipero sequel? Maybe!
Movies
+ This is the best news I have ever heard in my entire life: ANGELA ROBINSON is adapting Terry Moore’s Strangers in Paradise into a movie!
+ The first clip from Battle of the Sexes is here and I can’t wait I can’t wait Billie Jean King is my idol I can’t wait.
+ According to Vulture, Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams “have incredible sex” in their new movie, Disobedience, which screened at the Toronto International Film Festival this week.
Is it graphic? Yes. Is it sexy and gorgeous? Yes, again. Is it a tad male-gaze-y? Sure, but also incredibly erotic to watch as a woman. Most of all, though, it’s moving, and very different from the coming-of-age lesbian scenes of Blue Is the Warmest Color and The Handmaiden. Here are two grown women who’ve done this before and are well past the discovery phase. Their only desire is to give pleasure to and receive it from one another, and they’ve been stymied for so long by circumstances: Esti because she cannot be who she is if she wishes to retain the life she’s built, and Ronit because the woman she loves cannot make the same choices that she has.
+ More TIFF from IndieWire: “Evan Rachel Wood is frighteningly good as an older woman who seduces a teenage girl in this erotic psychological thriller.”
+ Patty Jenkins will officially be back for Wonder Woman 2, and she’ll be the highest paid woman director ever.
+ IFC has purchased Ellen Page’s new zombie movie.
Queer Humans, Out and About
+ I’ll tell you what’s going to make your day today and it’s Samira Wiley’s profile in SELF magazine, written by Sarah Miller. Even the headline is so good: Samira Wiley Didn’t Ask to Be Your Role Model—She Just Can’t Help It. And so is the lede: “Samira Wiley is acutely aware of the significance of being a black, gay woman playing a black, gay hero in a popular, critically acclaimed television show.” She talks about being gay and coming out and being married and being an activist and her Baptist parents and it’s just such an warm and candid interview and portrait of her. I love it so much. I smiled the whole time I was reading it. I hope she wins her Emmy and keeps taking over the world.
+ Rhea Butcher wrote a beautiful op-ed about Edie Windsor in today’s New York Times.
Thanks to 26 points from @brittneygriner and 23 from @DianaTaurasi, the @PhoenixMercury are moving on. #WNBAPlayoffs pic.twitter.com/o74tHaQCOz
— espnW (@espnW) September 10, 2017
+ Here’s a great interview with Lena Waithe in which she talks about making sure people of color aren’t being exploited now that movies and TV shows made by and starring people of color are receiving critical acclaim.
Listen
I am so ready for Rachel Weisz to have a sex scene with a woman
She is my root since I saw her in The Mummy and I have literally waited since 1999 for this very moment
Also the novel this film is based on is really interesting and focuses on an intensely private orthodox Jewish community in North London (they did a lot of the filming a couple of tube stops away from me!)
Is the book the same title as the movie?
Yes. Disobedience by Naomi Alderman.
I actually leaped out of my seat when I read this, because SAAAAAME re: Rachel Weisz in The Mummy being your root. I am buzzing with excitement over this.
At the risk of getting all shrill and hysterical (like a man) and taking over Heather’s article with a million comments, I’m heading over to read that Samira Wiley interview STAT because she is everything that is good in the world!!!
You’re right, Men are so hysterical.
A movie about Jewish lesbians! Doesn’t seem like too many Jews or lesbians were involved in its making but…I’m being optimistic and I’m excited!
My Jewish lesbian fingers are tightly crossed!
Given the context, shouldn’t they be side-by-side, tightly pressed together?
From reading that review, I don’t think either character is a lesbian.
The characters in the book are both definitely into women (Esti is deeply closeted and unhappily married to a man, and has spent her whole adult life waiting for Ronit, the woman she loves, to come back). Rachel Weisz optioned the rights and produced the film herself, and it seems like she’s adapted it pretty faithfully (and actually made her own character MORE lesbian, as in the book she’s having an affair with a man, which is apparently omitted from the film).
I didn’t say they weren’t queer, I said from the review it doesn’t sound like they’re lesbians. Weisz’s character has sex with a man first thing after her father dies and the reviewer says McAdams character has passion with her husband which again, doesn’t sound like she’s a lesbian.
I refuse to die on this gold star hill
Who said anything about goldstars?! They’re both older mature women. They’re also actively having and enjoying sex with men as well as women. I’m trying to be accurate. People shouldn’t be tossing around the word lesbian willy-nilly and you DEFINITELY shouldn’t be erasing bisexuality.
Good for Patty Jenkins! Get that money!
I’m sure Gal Gadot is gonna get way more too
It’d be great if they someday achieved parity with mediocre men
WOW I just had the thought “I guess it’s time to start being productive at work” and instead I just opened up all of these articles and intend to read every single one!!!
Y’all, be prepared. If you read that Rhea Butcher article at work, you WILL be awkwardly crying in your cubicle. (It’s effing perfect. She should write all the things.)
Crying in my bedddd
Saaaaaaame
Tonya Harding film !!!!!!!!!!!
Hah. I was just thinking about Mo Ryan, thinking I should look her up again (I loved her when she wrote for the Chicago Tribune and I kind of lost track of her when she left) and here are these lovely links! Thanks Heather.
I AM SO EXCITED ABOUT A STRANGERS IN PARADISE MOVIE!!!!!!!
I couldn’t get the Battle of the Sexes clip to load but I watched the trailer. And I don’t know – I want to love this movie but while Emma Stone looks like Billie Jean, I feel like her portrayal’s missing something. But I’ll probably still watch the movie.
The actual battle of the sexes was a little before my time, but my mom’s a big tennis fan and I grew up watching Billie Jean and Chrissie and Martina.