The Top 30 Dykes on Bikes on TV and in Movies

Bicycles on TV mean independence, coming of age, letting go, transformation! Motorcycles on TV mean bad bois! So it’s no surprise that lesbian and bisexual TV characters are on bikes all the time. I was recently watching Kiersey Clemons and Sasha Lane’s glorious coming-of-age indie comedy, Hearts Beat Loud, tears raining down my face during their bicycle scene, and a whole reel of other dykes on bikes on TV and in movies started playing in my mind. And now I have made that imaginary slideshow into a list, just for you.

As always, this list was compiled by me and Riese Bernard and Carmen Phillips and Valerie Anne and Natalie and Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya.

Paige McCullers, Pretty Little Liars

Paige got up to all kinds of shenanigans on her bicycle, most notably riding it to Emily’s house in the middle of the night in the middle of a thunderstorm to apologize for taking out her internalized homophobia on Emily and also unexpectedly kissing her — and then she got back on it and pedaled off into the lightning, soaked in rain and shame and a little hope too, my precious chaotic baby gay lamb. Also notable: Paige lost a bike race to Emily on purpose near the end of the show, a sweeping gesture to show she wanted to stay and make things work with her first love. (They did not work.)

Naomi Campbell and Emily Fitch, Skins

Skins works really hard to make sure you don’t miss the symbolism of Naomi and Emily taking off on bikes together; for example, the song that’s playing when they’re on their way to the lake to skinny dip and scissor is called “Jump In.” They also ride a bike in the follow-up season, an upgraded moped, because their relationship is upgraded. There are zero bikes in Skins Fire, which is frankly just further proof that bollocky wankshite doesn’t exist.

Therese Belivet, Carol

Therese on or near a bicycle is a perfect thing because it’s when her misandry is at its all-time highest. In the first few minutes of Carol, she lets Richard pedal her to work while refusing to discuss his damn boat tickets, and then later when he’s pushing his bike beside her she just flat out asks him if he’s gay because she’s gay.

Team Dana, The L Word

“Lifecycle” is one of the best episodes of the fifth season of The L Word, which is the second best season of The L Word, and the only one besides season one that is not physically painful. (Most of the time.) In this episode, everyone wears Team Dana jerseys and rides a thousand miles for breast cancer and all their secrets and lies and cheating come out around the campfire. Also Bette tells Tina she likes her butt in her cycling shorts.

Kate Messner, Everything Sucks

Nothing says “lil’ ’90s lesbian” like a ten-speed Schwinn, so it makes perfect sense this was Kate’s choice of transportation for scooting around Boring, Oregon in her flannel shirts and Tori Amos tees.

Sam and Rose, Hearts Beat Loud

Kiersey Clemons is on this list not once, not twice, but three times. Most recently she was finding her way on a bike as Sam in Hearts Beat Loud. I don’t want to spoil this scene for you — it’s climactic! — but let’s just say she reclaims her trauma with the help of her girlfriend doing an activity usually written as father/daughter bonding in a very father/daughter movie. It queers the trope!

Chase, Easy

Oh hey again, Kiersey! In a season one episode of Netflix’s drama, Easy — titled “Vegan Cinderella” — Chase falls for a girl and gives herself a crash course in lesbian things like cycling in Chicago and not eating meat. The results are mixed. She doesn’t get killed by a car, which is lucky because she doesn’t know how to wear a helmet and swerves all over the place while texting in the dark. But she also can’t keep up the charade. My favorite part of the episode is when she scuffs up her new bike helmet on purpose, right outside the bike shop where she bought it, to make it looks like she’s owned a bike for more than 30 seconds.

Diggy, Dope

As Diggy in Dope, Kiersey pedals around Inglewood with her best friends Jib and Malcom between band practice and trying to get girls to like them back. They spend so much time on their BMXs in this movie, always moving, trying to figure out who they are and how far they can go.

Rosa Diaz, Brooklyn Nine-Nine

Rosa loves her motorcycle more than most things, and it sure does love her back. Look at them together! She’s a hardass, but that doesn’t stop her from using her bike rush to the aid of her friends, including zipping Terry to the hospital when his wife is in labor. (Steph Beatriz really does ride a motorcycle; she started taking lessons in 2014.)

Quinn Fabray, Glee

And then she had sex with Santana Lopez. Twice.

Alex Danvers, Supergirl

When your sister can fly, you’ve gotta have an almost-as-cool way to get around!

Root and Shaw, Person of Interest

Sometimes you and your girlfriend are tracking the same bad guy and she shows up on her motorcycle outside the place you were having a shoot-out and just happens to have an extra helmet waiting for you so you can hop on the back of her bike and ride to safety. Sometimes.

Villanelle, Killing Eve

I cannot watch Killing Eve due to my aversion to blood and, um, killing. However, Killing Eve expert Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya tells me this is when Villanelle first shows up in Tuscany to kill Eve and she leans against her bike and eats an apple with a paring knife while a song called “When a Woman Is Around” by a band called Unloved plays in the background — and I guess that’s when everyone knew she was gay for Sandra Oh! (Villanelle, I mean. Everyone already knew Kayla was gay for Sandra Oh.)

Alice Pieszecki and Shane McCutcheon, The L Word

When Alice can’t join Dana on her corporate float at Pride in season two, she and Shane hop on the back of Harley-Davidsons with some legit Dykes on Bikes instead. Alice tells the corporate float gatekeeper to write that on her clipboard and then takes her rainbow romper to the front of the parade.

Laura and Aubrey, Casual

In the second season of Casual, Laura and Aubrey finally come to grips with their feelings for each other after — what else! — a bike ride. They kiss on right on the mouths after looking out over the city and contemplating the ephemeral nature of love and the fact that they stole those bicycles.

Tasha Williams, The L Word

Tasha rode her bike in the opening credits of The L Word and she also rode it around the military base before she quit the army to protest DADT. Alice didn’t deserve Tasha or her bike, but they sure do look good together on it.

Kat Edison, The Bold Type

Kat realizes she’s a grown-up queer person who wants to actually try to be in a grown-up queer relationship when she’s in a SoulCycle class and the instructor is yelling about upping the torque and downing the torque and mostly just letting go and not being afraid to chase what you want most in this cruel, hard world. Kat gets off her bike and runs (literally runs!) straight to Adena’s apartment to kiss her in the streetlight/moonlight and promise she wants to try.

Nomi and Amanita, Sense8

Amanita’s motorcycle gets a lot of play in Sense8. She rides it in the Pride parade with Nomi, but she also uses it to chase down an agent who resurfaces and goes after her girlfriend. It’s sexy and functional.

Ilana and Abbi, Broad City

Ilana has a lot of mishaps with her bike, but it has produced two fan favorite moments on the Broad City. 1) Her song “I Bike” and its follow-up hit “I Tweet.” 2) The image of her true love Abbi standing on the back of it as they ride through Manhattan after a day of madcap adventure that almost has Ilana ditching her boy pal on an important day (because she only wants to hang out with her true love Abbi).

Emily Fields, Pretty Little Liars

I think of Paige as Pretty Little Liars‘ main cyclist, but Emily Fields was always using bicycles to seduce women! She also very often pushed her bike beside her on the sidewalk in downtown Rosewood, especially when Spencer was around, which I assume was a power move to try to seem gayer than her best friend. (It didn’t work.)

Did we miss anyone? Hit is up with your favorite dykes on bikes in the comments!

The Queer Women of “Easy” Return for Season 2 With a Lesson on White Feminism

In the new second season of Joe Swanberg’s Chicago-set Netflix series Easy, the queer women from season one return, now fully in a relationship, trying to navigate their new life together. The second-to-last episode of the season — which follows the same structure as season one, consisting of standalone stories that occasionally overlap in very small ways — focuses on Jo (Jacqueline Toboni) and Chase (Kiersey Clemons), letting us into these characters’ lives in even more intimate ways.

The story ends up being less about dating and more about feminism. Chase is taking a burlesque dance class with her best friend Amber (Jaz Sinclair), and Jo is busy working on putting together a feminist art show that she has been organizing for a long time. Jo’s fine with Chase doing burlesque when she thinks it’s just for exercise (and when Chase is dancing for her privately at home), but the second Chase expresses an interest in dancing at an actual show, Jo gets immediately weird. She feigns support, but it’s obvious that she’s upset, that she isn’t nearly as progressive about body politics as she thinks she is. The flaws in her feminism become even more clear on the night of her art show, when a group of performers do what is essentially a burlesque dance framed as performance art. Chase sees the hypocrisy right away. Frankly, drawing a distinction between burlesque and the dance performance at Jo’s show is very White Feminism.

Jo and Chase’s fight is personal, but it’s bigger than that, too. “Lady Cha Cha” doesn’t shy away from making Jo look like a total asshole. Being a feminist is a huge part of her identity, and Chase pushes back on her, challenges her to see her hypocrisy, and then she eventually does change for the better. The story doesn’t feel cynical. A lesser comedy would try to turn Jo’s hypocrisy into some sort of lazy joke about feminists, but Easy instead uses it to craft honest and compelling character growth.

Both roles are much more complex than last season, and Toboni and Clemons effortlessly rise to the challenge, bringing Jo and Chase to life, making them feel real and their world feel lived in. So much of their episode in the first season hinges on their chemistry, and that dynamic is certainly on display here, but their story here is more layered, fuller. Swanberg’s flexible approach to dialogue gives their easy chemistry a place to breathe. Their relationship, flaws and all, is believable, their world wholly immersive. I could easily watch an entire series about these characters, and that includes Amber, whose friendship with Chase is on the periphery but just as meaningful and well developed as the central romance. And Sinclair, Toboni, and Clemons could easily carry a series. In “Lady Cha Cha,” they’re joined by real-life queer, black, femme burlesque dancer Jeez Loueez, who adds to the very authentic feel of the episode in terms of its portrayal of Chicago, burlesque, and queerness.

So, should you watch the other episodes? One of the nice things about Easy is that every episode really, truly is self-contained. The characters’ lives overlap in subtle, believable ways that don’t feel gimmicky. You can even watch season two without watching season one, even when it comes to the characters who appear in both (do at least watch “Vegan Cinderella” from season one if you haven’t already, so you can get a feel for Jo and Chase’s origins).

Here’s what I’ll say about some of the other episodes: “Package Thief” is almost an episode of Black Mirror in its scrutiny of surveillance, and it features what I believe to be Aubrey Plaza’s best performance of her entire career. The brothers of “Spent Grain” are like every guy who has ever mansplained craft beer to me, but you’ll probably end up shipping their wives played by Aya Cash and Zazie Beetz, who almost make the episode worth it? Swanberg’s loose scripts and very natural dialogue sometimes lead to overlong episodes, and that’s definitely the case for “Spent Grain” and “Conjugality,” which features great performances from Kate Berlant and Michaela Watkins and is ultimately pretty critical of the extremely annoying man played by Marc Maron that it’s centered on. Jo actually appears in “Prodigal Daughter,” which is a great episode because of its central character Grace. “Side Hustle” is a very smart episode. And “Baby Steps” isn’t explicitly queer, but Kate Micucci and Megan Ferguson do maybe decide to raise a baby together in the end, and it’s super beautiful.

The Best Episode of Netflix Series “Easy” Is Also Its Gayest, Duh

Easy, a new Netflix series from filmmaker Joe Swanberg, presents eight standalone stories about relationships. All filmed in Swanberg’s signature improv-based style and all taking place in Chicago, there is technically some consistency to the show, especially in tone and aesthetics. But Easy varies significantly from episode to episode in its depth and naturalness. With a few exceptions, much of Easy amounts to people talking about life and love instead of just living. One of those exceptions, however, is “Vegan Cinderella,” the second episode of the batch and the only one centered on a relationship between two women. The only explicitly queer story in the bunch, “Vegan Cinderella” refreshingly doesn’t seem like some empty stab at inclusivity, like the token episode to ensure that Easy isn’t too narrow in its depiction of modern love. It’s the best episode of the eight, the most lived in and full. In its tale of Chase (Kiersey Clemons), who tries to become a vegan and a bike rider in order to impress Jo (Jacqueline Toboni), the passionate activist she starts dating, “Vegan Cinderella” most effectively accomplishes Easy’s clear desire to paint honest and visceral depictions of love.

Now, I must admit that I’m biased in my preference. “Vegan Cinderella” centers on two queer women living in what appears to be the very neighborhood where I lived in Chicago before moving to Brooklyn a few months ago. In other words, I feel very close to the story. And in fact, my connection to Jo and Chase runs a little deeper: Toboni, who plays Jo, and I had an informal conversation as she was preparing to take on the role, because she knew I was a queer woman deeply embedded in the queer dating culture of Chicago. I talked to her about some of my own experiences, and she asked me some questions. It was all very casual and Swanberg wasn’t involved at all, so I’m not trying to tell you that the character Jo is based on me or anything like that (I have never been a vegan, for one). But I did provide some insight.

So, yes, I do have a very tangible connection to this episode and its characters, but I was still struck by how relatable I found “Vegan Cinderella.” First, it made me miss Chicago for the first time since I moved to New York. Swanberg often sets his projects in Chicago, and he shoots on location, giving his work distinctly Chicago visuals. The Chicagoness of Easy is more subtle and meaningful than street signs or shots of Lake Michigan or the L. “Vegan Cinderella” has the thick wood doorframes, the ugly, fortified vestibules leading into walk-ups, the pale orange-colored streets distorted by a steady, heavy snowfall at night—sights I didn’t even realize would conjure up my memories of Chicago until they were there on my computer screen, backdrops to Swanberg’s snapshot of young queer love.

And the familiarity doesn’t stop there. Ultimately, it isn’t Swanberg’s snapshot of young queer love so much as Clemons’ and Toboni’s. Swanberg brought his same loose approach to Easy that he has brought to his films. He doesn’t write scripts. Instead, he brought rough outlines to his cast, who were then responsible for filling in some of the blanks. Most of the dialogue in Easy is improvised. That can be a blessing and a curse. Not every actor in Easy successfully fills out their character with natural performances. And that approach makes it clear why some episodes feel like rhetoric on love instead of a more dynamic and nuanced examination of relationships, sex, and love. But though the story of “Vegan Cinderella” is very simple, Clemons and Toboni give such round and grounded performances that it brings the story to life.

Clemons and Toboni have an effortless chemistry with each other, giving the episode its intense but warm energy. Jo and Chase’s love story starts — as many real-life love stories between queer women do — with nervous glances that turn into confident, unsubtle eye contact at a concert. They tumble home and hook up. Sweaty, urgent, nonlinear, a little awkward because of the newness of these lips, these bodies that they’re exploring after a concert meet-cute, but still exuding a strong sureness in their desire for each other, Jo and Chase fuck. It’s one of the best queer sex scenes I’ve seen on television in a very long time, and its easy naturalness sets the tone for the rest of the episode. The episode captures that strange mixture of excitement and insecurity that comes with a new relationship, that push and pull between certainty and doubt that comes from the rush of falling for someone you’ve just met. There’s a nervous energy to the episode, but it never feels fraught either.

With its remarkable sense of time, place, and character, “Vegan Cinderella” is both specific and universal in its tale of two women falling quickly but convincingly for each other. We know them as instantly as one comes to know a new lover, and as paradoxically, too. We might not have all the finer details of their lives leading up to this moment, but we know what drives them. Chase throws herself into the relationship with her earnest curiosity and ambition. Though she’s technically doing it to impress a girl she has just met, her failed foray into veganism isn’t shallow so much as a little too impulsive. In fact, impulsive behavior runs deep in Chase, who has gone through a brief religious phase, lasered off her leg hair when she thought that was the cool thing to do and now regrets not rocking a more natural look, and seems to generally take on qualities of others, especially of those she’s dating. Jo’s passions are strong and sincere, but she is not the militant conversionist or arrogant hippie liberal vegans are often made out to be on television. When she sends along videos about veganism to Chase, it comes off more like a slightly unconventional G-chat flirtation strategy than proselytizing.

And we get to see both characters outside of each other, making it feel like more than just a love story. Jo brings the same swaggering confidence to her petition work as she does to her interactions with Chase. And the episode also deftly depicts female friendship through Chase and her best friend Amber (Jaz Sinclair, who is as charming and engaging as her co-stars), which makes for a very small but essential part of the narrative, contributing to the lived-in feel of “Vegan Cinderella”’s universe.

Though Jo and Chase both embody certain qualities associated with millennials, Easy thankfully isn’t punitive about their youth. There’s certainly a lot of humor to the episode. Chase, at one point, rubs her helmet in the grass to make it appear more used—all part of her plan to make Jo think she has always been a bike rider. But it never feels like Easy is making fun of these characters so much as honestly exploring the very real, very unchill things people sometimes do in the early stages of relationships.

And it all works especially well because of its unexpected ending. “Vegan Cinderella” ends on a bright note, entering the small canon of TV love stories between queer women that get a happy ending. Jo watches Chase get out of an uber and strap a helmet on from the window in her apartment and playfully calls her out for pretending to ride her bike, and Chase promptly pukes, revealing yet another deception. She ate a whole pepperoni pizza. Jo smiles without missing a beat and reminds Chase she never asked her to be vegan. She never expected it from her and she would never want her to change just for her benefit. What Chase thought were uncertainties about the relationship were really just uncertainties about veganism.

The snapshot of Jo and Chase that we get is warm and optimistic without ever becoming cloying, and that’s rare to find on television these days. “Vegan Cinderella” is about how people try to change themselves for the sake of relationships and how we sometimes absorb parts of our partners, even when that’s not in our best interests. But it tells that story by showing it, by focusing on the very specific and naturalistic arc of Jo and Chase. (And better yet, it does so without falling back on any tired jokes about the “urge to merge.”) It’s sweet and fun, but it isn’t empty. And I felt like some of my experiences as a queer woman in Chicago were being genuinely reflected back to me, which again, is not something I find on television that often. Easy gets it right.