Howdy, howdy, howdy — here’s your Monday Pop Culture Fix!
+ On Saturday night, right after Team USA won another gold medal in women’s basketball, Sue Bird kissed Megan Rapinoe on the sidelines, and our traffic went THROUGH THE ROOF.
Riese thought we were under attack. It was our biggest sudden traffic spike since we started tracking real-time traffic in 2018. We got over ten thousand views in ten minutes at midnight on a Saturday, which is usually the slowest hour of the week. Luckily it was just straight people frantically Googling what they did not know and landing on Autostraddle dot com.
Last night @autostraddle had its biggest traffic spike ever when sue bird kissed Megan Rapinoe and for five minutes the entire world was googling “Olympics basketball gay” https://t.co/UAbcltyVGx
— riese (@autowin) August 8, 2021
I would be remiss not to also mention that four of the five starters on Team USA — Brittney Griner, Breanna Stewart, Diana Taurasi, and Sue Bird — are gay, gay, gay, and so is their often-times six man, Chelsea Gray. And so is 3 x 3 gold medal winner Stefanie Dolson. So! 🏀🌈
+ How Gossip Girl broke the fantasy of being the world’s most special girl.
+ I am so torn between being constantly annoyed at everything Ryan Murphy touches and also really wanting to watch American Crime Story: Impeachment. Here’s the first teaser Beanie Feldstein is doing nothing to quell my curiosity.
+ And also here’s the trailer for Diary of a Future President season two!
+ If everything’s a little bit gay, what happens to queer film and TV?
+ Dominic Fike, Minka Kelly, and Demetrius ‘Lil Meech’ Flenory Jr are joining the cast of Euphoria.
+ Jennifer Beals talked to EW about Bette’s season two love journey on Generation Q.
+ This NYT profile of Ashley Nicole Black is an excellent read to kick off your week.
+ Also: Margot Robbie really did that foot escape in Suicide Squad 2.
+ Why is The Owl House so far ahead of the rest of Disney when it comes to queer representation?
+ Jes Macallan on her directorial debut in last night’s “wackadoo” Legends of Tomorrow.
+ Ellen’s goodbyes begin next month.
+ Elliot Page will be honored at OutFest with the LGBTQ film festival’s annual Achievement Award.
i was excited about y: the last man until i realized that the way trans people are addressed in the comic means an implied holocaust of trans women and now i am… less excited
Yeah exactly and a lot of really violent language and imagery about people who choose not to have breasts.
There is a trans woman writer (the very smart and talented Charlie Jane Anders) on the show so hopefully it will be addressing/correcting the problematic aspects from the comics.
speaking of Olympics gays…SAM KERR KRISTIE MEWIS
https://www.instagram.com/p/CSVjck4JPD5/
Someone make this Olympics into a DCOM right now. There is nothing more DCOM than two girls in the Olympics dating each other and having to play each other in a medal game
This romance really deserves a Stef Schwartz column. Message me, Stef, I’ll be your research assistant/source for this piece.
Okay I asked Stef and she’s gonna make your dream come true!
I love Sam Kerr, she’s an absolute baller and I’m here for it. So excited for Stef’s in-depth reporting on her current boo situation!
I love Sarah Paulson with my whole heart, but I’m upset about her casting in that Ryan Murphy movie as Linda Tripp. Fat, talented actors exist.
Y The Last Man pissed me off as a teen because of how the cishet male writer wrote about trans people, lesbians/queer people in general, and feminists. I feel like there’s so much uphill work with making series palatable to the 2020 world, why even bother? I know that Charlie Jane Anders was added to the writer’s room in 2019 so that makes me take pause… Although I just looked this up to confirm and there’s been no update about that/nothing posted on her social media so lol nevermind.
On the other hand, Agent 355 and Dr. Allison look hot.
I’m lucky enough to be friends with Charlie Jane, and she hasn’t mentioned this *at all*. Last time I checked, she was pretty much exclusively focused on promoting the YA trilogy she’s working on.
(That’s an amazing friendship!)
And yeah, there were announcements in 2019 and then like nothing since soooooo… That really says it all tbh! I’ll give that series a no thank you.
That Gossip Girl article was really really good
Yes! My fave thing I read so far this week!
Somewhat related to the rapinoe/bird traffic…I was similarly confused when an AS link showed up in my mostly-straight work groupchat last week. Took me a minute to understand what was happening. Apparently AS also has the market on articles about the Babysitters Club.
I submitted a hot tip that QUINN from Canada Soccer became the first trans, nb to win an Olympic medal (gold).
Was really looking forward to seeing that here.
There’s a list publishing at 6am tomorrow with them on it! You’ll like it!
Thank you Heather! :)
Thank you for sending in that tip so quickly!
I’m conflicted on Impeachment because I really wish we, as a society, would leave Monica Lewinsky alone. She went through an absolutely horrific ordeal, yet she transformed herself into an absolute force for good. I can’t imagine she doesn’t know about this new show, which I’m sure is dredging up old shit for her. Again.
Oh! Monica Lewinsky is actually a producer on this show!
http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2019/08/american-crime-story-impeachment-bill-clinton-monica-lewinsky-producing-statement-beanie-feldstein
Oh that’s great! I feel much better about the show now!
I’m going to file most of the issues with “Y: The Last Man” as “acceptable breaks from reality” as TV tropes calls it. The story is about a literal journey through a metaphorical landscape; the fact that the landscape in question probably can’t exist (or at least not exactly as presented) in reality doesn’t invalidate it as a work of fiction, otherwise Sci-Fi and Fantasy wouldn’t exist. And the fact that some of the issues were tackled in a way that were easier to digest by an mid 2000s mass-market audience is practically a prerequisite for it to have become reasonably well-known to begin with. Even if touching on certain LGBTQ+ issues were unavoidable due to the concept, it wasn’t about that, or really aimed at an LGBTQ+ audience – rather, I believe it’s fundamentally about examining *cishet* issues.
That said, an early 2020s audience isn’t the same as a mid-2000s audience. The explosion of LGBTQ+ representation over the 2010s changed that. Hopefully it won’t be a straight-up adaptation and will take that cultural shift into account. But even in the best case scenario, it’s still going into “acceptable breaks from reality” territory, and likely some of those are going to be “acceptable” only from a cishet perspective… if only because it’s a distraction from the story to insert heavy-handed educative moments on side issues which only tangentially relate to the themes of the story.
I’m not watching ACS: Impeachment because I think it’s going to be a hatchet job on the Clintons.