Quiz: Which Queer Character From the Flanaverse Are You?

Mike Flanagan’s latest and final Netflix horror series The Fall of the House of Usher dropped just before the weekend, and we’re recapping an episode a day because there are just. so. many. queer. characters!!!!! But really, the full Flanaverse is full of queer characters in general. So many, in fact, that I tried to limit myself to main characters for this quiz because it was starting to get unruly! Characters from Usher, The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor, Midnight Mass, and The Midnight Club are all possible results! Just answer a series of questions (I went with 13 questions, as it is indeed the spookiest number — did you watch Friday the 13th on Friday btw?)

And if you’re a fan of the Flanaverse, definitely tune into those The Fall of the House of Usher recaps! I’m breaking down all the Edgar Allan Poe references I can find, and I’d love to nerd out in the comments with fellow horror gays about this series about soooooo many bad gays!!!!!

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Haunting of Hill House’s Spooky Lesbian Empath Helped Me Understand My Own Ghosts

“I have enough of my own grief, I don’t need yours, too.”

When Theo Crain spoke these words in the sixth episode of the Netflix thriller series The Haunting of Hill House, I felt it in my soul. Because while Theo’s empathy is a bit supernatural, the heart of it is relatable to me in a way I haven’t seen to explicitly on screen before. Even in real life, being an empath sometimes feels a bit supernatural; it’s not something everyone experiences, it’s out of my control, and it’s very powerful.

Haunting of Hill House shows us two versions of Theo Crain. The young girl who grew up in a house riddled with lively siblings and lurking ghosts. She was always cold and even though she was the middle child and not the oldest, she was always looking after her younger siblings. Her mom gave her gloves — partially because she was always cold, partially because she was also… sensitive. She could sense things others didn’t seem to. And, as we learn through the older version of herself, she could sense things about people or things just from touching them. Grown-up Theo is a child psychologist and will take her gloves off to shake the kids’ hands to get a better sense of how they’re feeling and how she can help them.

For someone so good at reading others’ emotions, she’s pretty bad at dealing with and/or sharing her own. So she puts on her gloves and fights with her siblings as they’re haunted by her sister’s ghost. Literally and figuratively.

The difference between being an empathetic person and being an empath is hard to explain. Especially when I haven’t entirely figured it out to begin with. I only recently even allowed myself to consider myself an empath, because I was afraid it made me sound conceited, like I thought I was kinder or more understanding than everyone else, which isn’t the case at all. Being an empath isn’t a moral high ground by any means; it just means we are in tune with the emotions of others in a way that can affect us more than it might the next person, regardless of their capacity for empathy. We can care the exact same amount as someone, but the experience can be vastly different.

I once wrote this fairytale about a girl who lives in the woods and comes across a series of strangers who need her help. One older couple’s wagon is stuck on a stone, so she helps them remove the stone from the road and puts it in her pocket. She comes across a boy who’s carrying a basket of stones and twigs; he asks if she’ll remove the pesky stone on top that keeps rolling off, so she helps him… and puts it in her pocket. Her cloak grows heavy and her shoulders grow tired, and when there’s a storm that causes the river to overflow and sweep her in, she almost drowns from the weight of these stones she took from other people. Eventually my plan was to have her learn she can set the stones down, but she ended up building a wall with them around her cabin. When I realized that probably wasn’t the best solution to the problem of taking on other people’s burdens, I abandoned the story.

But the thing is, when I hear about someone else’s pain, it IS like picking up a heavy stone. I carry that pain for longer than I should, feel it deeper than is strictly necessary. And often it’s perfectly fine — I’m happy to relieve someone of their burden, and most of the time, I have the capacity to hold another stone. (It’s why Theo became a psychologist; it’s our skill and we don’t mind using it when we’re able.) And there are some people who know how to show me their stone and describe it to me and maybe let me hold it but don’t leave it with me when they go. So for a long time, it was the best metaphor I could provide. Until I met Theo Crain, who is literally and metaphorically haunted by other people’s pain.

Theo Crain grew up in a tumultuous household, with siblings to take care of, and ghosts to contend with. And maybe that’s why she developed this ability to be hyperaware of her surroundings.

Or maybe it just helped her navigate it. I too grew up needing to be in tune with the emotions of the adults around me, and I’m also not sure if this was a skill I was born with or one I developed out of necessity. I was a precocious child, so by the time my brother was born when I was four and a half, people often forgot I was still just a little kid. I was told things and complained to about things that my tiny mind probably shouldn’t have had to process yet. And my mother has always been quick-tempered. Granted, it couldn’t have been easy; for almost my entire life she had two kids and two jobs, for example. Plus she comes from a long line of hot-blooded Italians. But for me that meant having to assess and navigate her mood at any given moment. I feel strongly that I developed a sense of humor early on because if she was laughing, she wasn’t yelling. And the opposite was also true — my mother was the person I was spending the most time with, so her joy was my joy. Keeping her happy was in my best interest, too.

Our personalities clashed in a way I don’t think she ever really comprehended. She would start to raise her voice and I would start to cry, which would make her angrier. She didn’t understand that her anger was causing me pain. That I was having to feel my guilt or indignance (depending on whether or not the scolding was justified) and also her anger and disappointment all at once, and it was more than my little body could handle.

So I learned to read her. How to know when it was okay to ask to watch TV and when I should just make myself scarce. When it was a good day to beg to go to a friend’s house and when I should just shut up and get in the car. As I got older, I learned to steel myself a little better, externally. And was often accused of not caring enough. But just because my face wasn’t showing it didn’t mean I wasn’t feeling it, deeply and viscerally. It doesn’t mean I wouldn’t spend hours lying awake in bed thinking about it later. It doesn’t mean I can’t feel it like a fist around my heart.

Being an empath affects me in a lot of ways. I can’t watch the news. It feels like drowning. I have to get my news online, where I can control, for the most part, how much I take in and when. If I go into really old houses or any cemetery, I feel like someone put a heavy blanket over my shoulders. I can feel the weight of that history. I can’t watch shows that involve a lot of second-hand embarrassment without being physically uncomfortable. Small talk grates on me like nails on a chalkboard. My ankles still ache when someone mentions the movie Misery. When I can tell someone is being fake with me (and I can almost always tell when someone is being fake with me) I have to control the urge to shake them by the shoulders and be like DROP! THE! ACT!

It’s also the reason I can’t watch reality TV shows that feel disingenuous to me, but will watch Critical Role (aka a bunch of friends playing D&D and making each other laugh and cry) for hours. I crave authenticity.

From the outside, I might look conflict avoidant. And maybe I am. But it’s not because I don’t think conflict is necessary, or I think everyone should just get along. It’s because other people’s rising frustration can rumble inside me like an earthquake. And when I personally am responsible for hurting or upsetting someone else, it’s like one of those mimic spells fictional witches put on people; every time my words stab someone else, they stab me in turn.

I think this contributed a bit to my hesitancy to come out when I first realized I was a lesbian. My Catholic upbringing made me believe that the people in my life would think it was wrong, and the thought of someone reacting poorly to the news felt impossible to bear on top of being a teenager or a college student and all the other shit I was dealing with. It felt like an emotional response I could avoid taking on.

So when I heard Theo speak that line. That line. “I have enough of my own grief, I don’t need yours, too.” It washed over me like a cold chill then wrapped me up in its warm arms. It’s why I pull away from people when I’m upset instead of seeking out comfort. That line was the truest thing I’d heard in a long, long time.

Theo Crain came to me in a time I needed her most. Much like Theo, dealing with things like funerals and death and mourning can be so overwhelming something can actually snap. In Haunting of Hill House, when Theo touches her little sister’s dead body, she feels so much that she eventually feels nothing. Like the circuits shorted out. And that’s sort of how I felt after my grandfather’s funeral. I’m no stranger to death and grief, but my Papa was the closest person I’ve ever lost. On top of a few other things, I just kind of hit a breaking point.

“And I’m just I’m just floating in this ocean of nothing, and I wonder if this is it, if this is what death is, just out there in the darkness, just darkness and numbness and alone.”

The problem with this numbness, this emptiness, is that after a while it starts to feel wrong. At first it’s great; almost freeing. Almost light. But then you realize it’s not sustainable. Because as overwhelming as the feelings can be, and as much as it can suck to have your whole mood thrown off by one friend randomly telling you about their bad day before asking if you’re ready to hear it, the numbness gets old after a while. And scary. And sometimes trying to get out of that space can be hard. And sometimes we can act out. Like when Theo almost kissed her sister’s husband.

“Honestly, I had to do it, because it felt better than nothing. That thorough fucking shame was so much better than that horrible, empty nothing.”

Theo Crain and I also share some bad habits that we use to cope with this shared trait of ours. One is avoidance; redirecting the feelings so you don’t have to feel the ones that are threatening to consume you. Theo used sex and one night stands, while I redirected the emotional pain I was feeling into physical pain because that was easier to understand, to control.

And as I got older, I used a different tactic that Theo also employs: avoidance. Theo wears gloves to avoid taking on the feelings of others; I just kept people at arm’s length in a more metaphorical way. Of course, that’s hard to do when you’re an empath. I have complete strangers tell me their whole life story on a regular basis. I’ve had people tell me at the end of our first conversation that they can tell I’m “emotionally intelligent.” Which doesn’t mean I can’t be immature or quick-tempered myself sometimes but I am just usually in tune with the people around me.

Being an empath isn’t all taking on grief and being weighed down by other people’s sorrow. I also get to absorb people’s joy. A friend putting their hand on my arm is like putting a marker down on a paper towel. The longer it’s there, the more the color spreads. The same way a downer of a news story can drain me, a hug from someone I love can fill me back up again. And being able to share in people’s joy — even fictional people or people I don’t know personally — often makes the rest worth it.

Theo learns this eventually, too, choosing to ditch the gloves in the end and surround herself with people she loves whose touch she welcomes. To use the good feelings to balance the bad instead of avoiding feelings altogether. That taking other people’s joy along with the grief can keep you from getting lost in the storm. And maybe someday we’ll both learn how to relieve someone of their emotional burden, but then put it down and walk away from it instead of letting it haunt us.

Monsters & Mommis: Three Trips to Hill House

Monsters & Mommis is a five-week miniseries celebrating queer horror. It’s Halloween month, so let’s plan our costumes, get slutty, and, of course, watch some scary movies. This week, three adaptations of Shirley Jackson’s classic novel: Robert Wise’s The Haunting (1963) starring Julie Harris and Claire Bloom, Jan de Bont’s The Haunting (1999) starring Lili Taylor and Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting of Hill House (2018) starring Michael Huisman and Kate Siegel.

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The first time I saw a naked woman was in a horror movie.

I was 11 and I’d rented The Shining from Blockbuster. My parents had a rule that I could watch R-rated movies if they were based on a book I’d read and I’d just devoured Stephen King’s novel. I scurried to my room and popped it in my 13″ TV/DVD player combo.

I loved horror movies and horror books. I rarely got scared and when I did I enjoyed the feeling. But due to the oddly specific restrictions on my viewing the horror I’d consumed had been a mix of classics and corny PG-13 affairs. I’d yet to discover the potential for gore. I’d yet to discover the potential for sex.

The scene begins with Jack Nicholson investigating the haunted Room 237. He enters the bathroom and finds a woman lying in the tub. She’s young and bland and modelesque. He looks on practically salivating, his face like a cartoon wolf. She stands. She’s completely nude. She walks towards Jack and the camera and us.

I grabbed my remote control, finger on the off button, eyes darting back and forth between my bedroom door and the woman on the TV. I didn’t understand the feelings inside me. I’d never been so scared.

Jack meets her in the center of the room. They embrace. They kiss. My heart raced, sweat gathering between my hand and the remote.

Jack’s kiss is long and deep, until, suddenly, he stops. He looks in the mirror and the camera whips around to reveal the woman is a corpse, old and decaying… and laughing.

I jumped so suddenly that I fell off my bed. Smack onto the carpet. I lay there, face down, filled with giddy shame. The woman’s laughter continued.

The Shining owes its existence to an earlier novel. Two decades before Stephen King invented a labyrinthine building haunted by the protagonist’s psychology, Shirley Jackson did the same. King called Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House “one of only two great novels of the supernatural in the last hundred years.”

But where King’s novel reveals, Jackson’s holds back. Where King finds sex and fear and fantasy, Jackson finds subtext and terror and ambiguity.

Jackson’s novel has captivated readers and writers and filmmakers since its release. It’s influenced the genre through King and Kubrick and a long list of other famous (mostly male) names. It’s also directly been adapted for the screen three times by three different men.

They share the same house, the same skeleton, but thematically, stylistically, even narratively, little else. They’re drastically different works, but they do have one common thread. From 1963 to 2018, they all have a queer woman named Theo.

The first adaptation is also the most loyal. Robert Wise got his start directing movies for Val Lewton, but eventually became known for classic musicals West Side Story and The Sound of Music. The Haunting falls somewhere in between.

Shot on 30mm anamorphic wide angle lenses that weren’t even officially approved for production, the movie has an epic (and distorted) feel to it. But learning from his low-budget roots, and the source material itself, Wise’s film knows when to withhold.

More than ghosts, this film is about the psychology of its lead character, Eleanor. Nell for short. She’s spent her entire life taking care of her demanding and critical mother, but now her mother has died. Racked with guilt and a loss of purpose, she eagerly signs up for Dr. John Markaway’s investigation into the paranormal history of Hill House.

Nell is a strange protagonist. Especially for a Hollywood genre film. She’s quiet and anxious. She’s bitter and unpleasant. She’s cold and desperate. Julie Harris is perfect in the role, never attempting to make Nell even the slightest bit charming.

Joining Nell at Hill House are Theodora, chosen for her ESP, Luke, the young man set to inherit the building, and Markaway himself. All the other expected visitors fail to show up out of fear.

From the moment she enters the house, Theo is oozing with sexuality. Her extrasensory perception doubles as a tool for flirting as she guesses Eleanor’s nickname and makes a comment about new clothes she senses Nell brought. By this point, Nell is just relieved to see another person. Her enthusiasm makes it seem like she might be flirting back and Theo responds with a glint in her eye.

Claire Bloom plays Theo with a casual confidence. She’s not a caricature of queerness or eroticism. She’s simply a woman who knows what she wants and who she is. The first night she invites herself into Nell’s room and when Nell refuses she easily responds, “Alright we have a date for breakfast.” Then she mentions that she approves of Nell’s secret plan to change her hair.

That night they experience their first encounter. Theo screams and Nell rushes to her room. They huddle together on Theo’s bed, cold from the spectral presence, warm from each other. With only some turns of the doorknob, a few loud bangs, some interesting camera angles, and two committed performances, Wise creates a scene of absolute terror. And sex appeal. When the moment passes, they giggle together, in shock and sensual solidarity. The disbelief of a phantasmic orgasm.

This is the closest they’ll be. As the house increases its hold on Nell, she increases her resistance. She begins to obsess over a crush on Dr. Markaway and become cruel towards Theo. She tells Theo she’d rather be innocent than like her and when Theo asks for clarification Nell says, “Now who’s being stupid and innocent. You know perfectly well what I mean.” Later she adds, “The world is full of inconsistencies, unnatural things. Nature’s mistakes they’re called, you for instance.”

These bigoted turns are muttered with a frantic bitterness. She desperately wants to be accepted in this outside world, but she keeps manifesting justifications for why she might not be. Nell isn’t necessarily queer, but this film is still the most thematically linked to queerness. It uses Theo’s identity as a metaphor for freedom. Nell is in a sense closeted, if not from queerness, then simply from living. She’s so concerned about doing the right thing that she’s done absolutely nothing. Even the death of her mother, the first active choice of her life, was not something she initiated, but something she allowed to happen by ignoring her mother’s cries.

Until this fateful moment Nell had always done the right thing. But Theo’s entire life is wrong. And while Nell is falling apart due to this one, understandable, moment of weakness, Theo is completely unphased. If the lesson Nell needs to learn is to forgive her imperfections, Theo has surpassed her tenfold. Theo has learned, be it from confidence or ESP, that her imperfections aren’t imperfections at all. She’s just gay.

As Nell continues to descend into madness, or the house continues to grab hold of her depending on your beliefs, the style increases only slightly. There are brief moments of practical effects like when a wood door seems to bend like rubber. But mostly it’s just editing and camera work and Harris’ troubled performance.

By the time, Nell rebuffs Theo’s kindness for the last time and drives her car directly into a tree, the question of what exactly has occurred cannot be answered. Theo says maybe Nell will be happier staying with the house, even in death. Maybe it was her destiny. Or maybe she was simply unable to accept her inner truth, whatever that may have been.

Jan de Bont’s 1999 remake has a bad reputation likely because it’s bad. Known for the Speed films and gay classic Lara Croft: Tomb Raider – Cradle of Life, de Bont trades in the stylistic and thematic subtlety of the novel for big special effects and a convoluted plot. But any movie starring Lili Taylor that makes Owen Wilson play a character with his brother’s name and features a bisexual Catherine Zeta-Jones is not without pleasures.

This version starts almost exactly the same as the original. Nell’s mother has died and she lives with her sister and she’s miserable. But this time, it’s not a ghost study she signs up for but a sleep study. Dr. Marrow is investigating fear and he needs unwitting subjects. He invites a group of people to Hill House with the intention of dropping subtle hints about its haunted origin and hoping their imaginations get the best of them.

While Bloom’s Theo presented a grounded sexuality, de Bont and Zeta-Jones have none of these concerns. She enters the film wearing a black mini dress, tights, black boots, and a feathered red jacket. She says she packs a lot, because asking people to carry her bags is how she makes friends. She quickly tells Nell that she has a boyfriend and a girlfriend and she’d love for them to all live together if they could just get along. She changes in front of Nell getting off on her discomfort.

It would seem that Theo’s sexuality has benefited from the thirty plus years between adaptations. Her ability to bluntly say she has a girlfriend is new at least. But as the film goes on her bisexuality feels less like a part of her identity and more like a coded way of saying she’s promiscuous.

During the repeated scene where she and Nell huddle together on their first haunted night, the intimacy is gone. There’s a scare and the women jump apart instead of together. And after this scene, Theo seems to lose all interest in Nell, focusing instead on Owen Wilson’s Luke. The tender queer flirting of the original is replaced with adolescent expressions of heterosexuality.

The subtlety of the horror is gone as well. Statues move and ghosts appear in bed sheets. The late 90s CGI is fun and silly, but quickly grows tedious as the movie goes on and on. Most of the second half is just Nell running around trying to solve the mystery of the house. She discovers that one of the ghosts of Hill House was her great grandmother, an unnecessary justification for her destined presence. The film ends with her getting the main bad ghost trapped in the wall, freeing the ghosts of a lot of children, and killing herself. Her own ghost floats to the sky in a moment that would be funny if you weren’t so desperate for the movie to end already.

The greatest joys of this thematically empty movie arrive in its most explicit moments: Theo’s sultry opening scenes and towards the end when Owen Wilson is suddenly decapitated.

Last October, Netflix released a ten-episode adaptation of Hill House. Horror director Mike Flanagan’s radical take on Jackson’s novel abandoned and morphed much of the original story. Rather than focusing on one troubled young woman, he instead created a family. There is still a Nell, a Luke, and a Theo, but who they are is vastly different.

The show jumps between the past and the present. In 1992, Hugh and Olivia Crain move into Hill House with their five children: Steven, Shirley, Theodora, Luke, and Nell. They’ve been flipping houses: moving into places with potential, fixing them up, and selling them for a profit. They’re only supposed to be at Hill House for a summer.

The first half of the show spends an episode with each sibling. We begin with Steve, the skeptic. On their last night in the house, Steve slept through the chaos that led to his mother’s death, and he maintains everything that occurred can be blamed on mental illness. And yet he’s a famous horror novelist who used the lore around his family to sell paperbacks.

Shirley thinks of herself as the responsible sibling and chose an even more morbid profession. She and her husband run a funeral home where he’s front of house and she’s downstairs prepping bodies.

Theo lives in Shirley’s guest house despite having a PhD and a job as a child psychologist. She’s gay in the Shane McCutcheon sort of way, picking up women and then quickly putting them down. She wears gloves that she removes only to shake the hands of her young patients.

Luke and Nell are twins. Luke has spent most of his life battling drug addiction, going in and out of rehab, and alienating himself from everyone in the family. Nell has had an equally troubled life. Haunted by visions of what her child self named “The Bent-Neck Lady,” she’s lived a life in dread. Her brief moment of happiness vanished when her husband dropped dead within a year of their marriage. She spirals. Her episode ends with her returning to Hill House and being hung from the floor where her mother jumped.

These episodes range in quality and the back half of the show struggles to sustain itself. It’s not that the show isn’t good. It’s very good, and, at times, even great. But Flanagan overestimates our investment in all the characters, or, I should say, my investment in all the characters. And as the ghosts become more explicit, and the barrage of special effects no longer illicit fear, the characters are all we have.

With Nell dying in the middle of the series, the emotional arc of the show shifts to Hugh and Steve. Whereas the novel and the two films are centered around a uniquely disturbed female character, Flanagan’s ensemble begins and ends with the men. Hugh sacrifices himself to the house in the presence of his eldest and Steve accepts the truth of his family’s trauma. The show opens with Steve, it closes with Steve, and, I regret to say, Steve is even less interesting than his name.

It’s not that Flanagan’s approach is inherently wrong. Just like it wasn’t inherently wrong for Bradley Cooper to take a three film Hollywood legacy about a female star in an abusive relationship and make it about an alcoholic male rocker. But it is disappointing given the revolutionary nature of both the novel and the original film. It’s also disappointing considering how good the show is when it does focus on Jackson’s two women.

The best episode of the show is almost definitely the one about Nell. But I think the missed potential is even clearer in my personal favorite, Theo’s episode: “Touch.”

It begins with a brief scene where 1992 Theo comforts her sister through a nightmare. Nell grips her hand tighter and tighter until Theo pulls away. She realizes in horror that nobody is in bed with her. At least nobody living. We then go to the present where Theo is comforting someone once again, this time a patient, a young girl who speaks of a specter named Mr. Smiley haunting her new foster house.

Theo explains to the girl that it’s normal to put up walls when scared; it’s normal to disassociate. Gloveless, she shakes the girl’s hand and seems disappointed by the experience. We learn the reason for the gloves is ESP. Usually, by touching someone she can understand their deepest pain. It’s why her mother gave her the gloves, a wall of her own. But with this girl she gets nothing.

Because of her present-day cool girl exterior, Theo’s flashbacks are the most revealing. We watch a portrait of a precocious child who has decided her family’s well-being is entirely her responsibility. Shirley may take on the role of caregiver, but it’s actually Theo who managed the emotions of her siblings. Living in Shirley’s guest house may seem like a result of arrested development, but it’s really a way for Theo to keep an eye on her sister.

Theo’s ability to see the pain of others with merely a touch becomes a metaphor for anyone who grew up in an abusive household, hyperaware of conflict, taking on everyone’s burden as their own. She carries within her a frantic desire to make things right. Her father may spend his whole life declaring, “I can fix it,” but Theo knows those who can actually do it, don’t say it out loud.

We learn that Theo came out to her family by fucking a bridesmaid at Nell’s wedding. There’s a lack of vulnerability to this approach, keeping this part of herself hidden for so long only to brazenly flaunt it as if it’s not a big deal. When she has sex in the present with a one-night-stand named Trish, she keeps her gloves on and continues this lack of vulnerability. For her sex isn’t about connection, it’s about distraction.

Troubled by the little girl and Mr. Smiley, she makes a sudden house visit. She awkwardly asks if she can see their basement to better understand the girl’s imagined trauma. Lying on the basement couch, she removes her gloves. She grips and feels and hurts. Back upstairs, gloves still off, she shakes the foster father’s hand. And then she really knows. This man has been molesting the girl. She’s taken the pain in exchange for knowledge.

The episode ends with Theo having sex with Trish again, this time without gloves. She tells Trish to touch her and we sense the start of a crumbling wall. But the moment doesn’t feel triumphant. It’s sad. The first steps towards abandoning our defenses are the hardest and Theo has so much further to go.

Kate Siegel is incredible in this episode and in the show as a whole. Theo is always sharp and cool in the presence of others, but her subtleties manifest so differently depending on people’s needs, and her willingness to open up to these needs. She’s a complicated character in the most complicated moment of her life, and Siegel portrays all of this with a watchable ease. And in this particular episode, written by Elizabeth Ann Phang, Siegel is given writing to match her performance.

It’s a shame then that the finale gives her such an empty final dream sequence. It’s a shame her story ends with her committing to Trish and throwing out her gloves. It’s a shame such a complex character is wrapped up neatly in a montage while her brother monologues.

The history of horror cinema is filled with queer women, but almost all of it was made by men. And almost all of it lives in subtext.

There’s nothing inherently lesser about this approach. As far as I’m concerned, the original adaptation remains the most accomplished. It’s less a question of whether subtlety is superior to explicitness and more about which stories and approaches and characters are given the freedom for this explicitness. Which stories get a naked woman kissing the protagonist before turning into the demon of their nightmares. Which stories get to rise above an ensemble. And which stories instead are forced to live exclusively in subtext and supporting roles.

As The Haunting of Hill House has found new life across decades, the queerness has become more explicit yet less important to the overall work. This doesn’t have to be the case. The most recent adaptation was a radical reimagining. That’s what I want: radical reimaginings. But the radical reimaginings I envision are ones that center queer women, not a man named Steve.

Autostraddle’s Favorite and Least Favorite Lesbian, Bisexual and Trans TV Characters of 2018

This has been an unbelievable year of representation for lesbian, bisexual, queer, and trans women on television. Riese broke down GLAAD’s findings just a few weeks ago, but the bottom line is: there are more of us than ever before, on more kinds of shows than ever before, and there are more ways to watch us than ever before, and there are more queer people of color to watch than ever before. In fact, as Riese pointed out, “for the first time ever, LGBTQ characters of color (50%) outpace white (49%) characters! Just barely but still!” All of those things are evident in our TV Team’s annual list of our favorite and least favorite characters. There were so many really good LGBTQ characters on TV in 2018 that there were only a small handful of shows that we all watched (Jane the Virgin, Pose, One Day at a Time, The Bold Type, and Black Lightning.) For the first time ever on this list, you can actually see the personalities of our writers shining through in the things they chose to watch and how they chose to write about them because we weren’t all forced to watch and argue about visibility on the same six shows. Below are our choices; we’d love to hear yours!

None of these write-ups are the Official Position of Autostraddle on any of these shows or characters; they are the individual opinions of our TV writers. 

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FAVORITE

Riese, Editor-in-Chief

Nancy Birch, Harlots

Nancy Birch pinged from the jump, but in Harlots’ second season, she finally rang the bell and said out loud that she was queer, and specifically that she was in love with Margaret Wells. Maybe she always had been. Nancy — a dominatrix who’d do anything for the women she loves — sort of dresses like a low-rent pirate, and always looks vaguely hungover or that she did her makeup and then slept on it. She’s like an old-fashioned hyper-aggressive Mommi, you know? I want her to like, punish me.

Villanelle, Killing Eve

Wow, why are all of my favorite characters this year basically women I want to have aggressive sex with? I’m not sure. Anyway, Villanelle is a psychopath serial killer. You know the scene where she’s eating chicken pot pie leftovers out of the container and she’s got that long winter underwear shirt on and the shirt is on top of another shirt and her elbows are on the table and she’s eating like a medieval man? Wow, right? Anyhow, Villanelle is everything we don’t want lesbian characters to be (besides dead) (and yes, I know that some people read her as bisexual and I think that’s valid and perhaps even correct, I just read her differently and I think that’s okay don’t @ me) and yet she is so fucking weird that she won my heart. I can’t wait for season two of this very bizarre show.

Leila, The Bisexual

Ah yes, and here we have yet another slightly unstable, sexually creative, broad-shouldered woman. This show was wholly original and brutally honest and felt really fucking real. A lot of shows were like that this year — tangibly authentic because they were written by people who understood deeply the stories they were telling. Akhvan has been called “the bisexual Lena Dunham” and although it’s safe to say Lena Dunham usually sucks (although I should admit AGAIN DON’T @ ME that I did enjoy the HBO series Girls), I get the concept behind it — Leila is a little destructive and sloppy, looking for love in all the wrong places, often shooting herself in the foot.  At the same time [unlike any of the girls on Girls], she is somebody I feel deep affection for. I understand why she’s doing what she’s doing, and listen, I support her journey. Plus, she is very tall and hot.

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Valerie Anne, Staff Writer

Waverly Earp, Wynonna Earp

Waverly Earp continues to be such a lovely, bright spot on TV for me this year. Nicole was a strong contender for this favorite list, being a loving girlfriend, a badass sheriff and a loyal friend to the Earp girls, but the Jolene episode really cemented Waverly as the one who owns my whole soul. I’ve always identified with Waverly in some ways, and aspired to be more like her in others, so I’m obviously biased, but I think she had a really strong season. She traveled the journey of having and almost losing hope, and learning things about yourself, some that hurt and some that make you stronger. And I mean she was revealed to be a LITERAL angel. A literal queer angel born of a creature from actual heaven. She’s the light I really needed in this dark, dark year.

Sara Lance, Legends of Tomorrow

Sara Lance, and Legends as a whole, delights and surprises me week after week. It just keeps getting stronger and funnier and weirder in the best ways. And seeing Sara in a semi-domestic relationship with Ava, giving other people the same advice she needed two years ago – it’s been truly a wonder to behold. The show just keeps leaning into the queerness (in all senses of the word) and I think they’re better for it. I mean they have a blonde, bisexual, badass babe as the undisputed Captain of this band of time-traveling weirdos and even when they travel to times that hesitate to accept her, her team never falters.

Theo Crain, Haunting of Hill House

I went into Haunting of Hill House looking for spooks and maybe some feels and it delivered on both tenfold. It had all the makings of the best horror movie you’ve ever seen, but then added a layer of character development that’s otherwise hard to accomplish in only 90 minutes. I have a special place in my heart for all the Crain siblings (except Steven… fuck Steven,) but Theo Crain wrapped her be-gloved hand around my heart and hasn’t let go since. As someone who considers herself an empath in the least supernatural sense of the word, Theo’s journey really spoke to me, and it didn’t hurt that she was also queer. Plus, (spoiler alert) despite being a queer woman in a horror scenario, she survives! It’s a miracle.

Mel Vera, Charmed

The new Charmed is, well, charming me way more than I expected. I went in hesitant because I loved the original, but hopeful because I loved the actresses cast as the new sisters. The show has proven to be so much fun, with a pointed and hopeful tone reminiscent of season one of Supergirl. I love Mel because she’s out and proud and smart and bold and not afraid to speak her mind. Well, unless she’s talking to Niko, but that’s just because she loves her a lot and can’t tell her she’s a witch! You know, normal girlfriend stuff. Anyway, I love her a lot. This season took a surprising turn for Mel and Niko’s relationship, but so far the show has given me faith that they aren’t about to sweep Mel’s queerness under the rug anytime soon.

Karolina Dean, Marvel’s Runaways

Honestly I can’t tell you what it is about Karolina Dean that I love so much. There’s something about her story, her loyalty to her friends, her disillusionment in her parents, her discovering the power within her  –and discovering she likes kissing girls (well, one girl in particular) — I love it all. Karolina and Nico’s first kiss and the way she smiled after, like she finally let out a breath she didn’t realize she was holding, it was so perfect. And their second, too! As much as I love me some angst, the EASE with which Karolina came out to herself was so inspiring and I think important for people to see; you’re not any less queer for not having struggled with it, you know? Anyway, I love this sunshiny rainbow and her goth girlfriend so much and can’t wait to see what they get up to in the new season.

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Natalie, Staff Writer

Annalisa “Quiet Ann” Zayas, Claws

There’s a scene in “Scream,” the Ann-centric episode in Claws‘ second season, where Desna’s trying to figure out whether to side with the Russians or Uncle Daddy and the Dixie Mafia in their ongoing feud. She turns to her crew for advice and, eventually, lands on Ann. The voiceover comes in, revealing Ann’s thought: “You’re gonna ask me about loyalty?”

That Ann’s angry at that moment isn’t a surprise to the audience — the day’s been filled with reminders of what she lost: her child, snatched from her arms at 17; her freedom, taken away when she’s sent to prison for stabbing her cheating girlfriend; her family, lost to her when she returned from prison, changed; the love of her life and her would-be family, sacrificed so that Desna could skate on a murder charge. Ann’s rage is not a surprise. What is surprising is that, rather than letting the silence lay thick or worrying about how she’s heard, as is her wont, Quiet Ann speaks for herself, “I think you got a lot of nerve asking me about loyalty.”

It’s a fundamental shift in how Claws has treated Quiet Ann for the prior 13 episodes. It also addresses one of the show’s fundamental flaws from the first season. At the time, I lamented that, despite offering us intriguing but brief glimpses into Quiet Ann, “each and every time there’s a possibility to make this show’s butch Latina into something other than a plot device, the writers go the other way.” Thankfully, with this scene, the show’s writers’ uncorked Quiet Ann. Her genie is not going back into its bottle ever again.

Blanca and Angel Evangelista, Pose

For the longest time, I didn’t see myself on television, but still, I had that impulse to find commonality between myself and the people that I welcomed into my home. I wouldn’t get to see all of me, but I’d always find something — Dwayne Wayne’s nerdiness, Brian Krakow’s unrequited love for Angela Chase, Pacey Witter’s “black sheep” status — to ensure that I could see some part of myself in stories that looked nothing like mine. As time passed, I started to see more characters on television that looked like me and loved like me and shared my experiences… and that representation, in a word, was amazing.

It is amazing. It’s amazing that we’ve reached a point where a person can wrap themselves in a cocoon of characters that affirm who they are on a regular basis. Is this how cis white dudes feel all the time?

This year, I’ve started to wonder — to worry, honestly — if we’ve grown too attached to the need to see ourselves on-screen. There’s value in representation, always, but there’s also value in seeing and investing in the stories that aren’t your own, particularly those from other marginalized communities. It’s how we build empathy. Are we choosing to be seen over seeing others? And, if so, what implications does that have for our community?

I stepped into the world of the 1980s New York ballroom scene over the summer, not because I saw myself in the characters immediately, but because even if I didn’t, their stories were ones worth hearing. Cis folks hear trans people’s voices most often in protest: of bathroom bills, of military service bans, of cis folks’ collective silence in the face of their community’s deaths. There’s more to the trans community than that. Pose gives trans women space to be sing, act, dance, direct and write. The show is worth watching for that reason alone.

But when you dig into Pose, you find yourself investing in these characters because, whatever our differences, we share a common humanity. I saw myself in Blanca Evangelista (played exquisitely by Mj Rodriguez), the matriarch of her chosen family. A woman who, instead of being content to inherit something, someday, took a step out on a ledge, and built something of her own. She is a woman who wants to leave a legacy, to leave some proof that she was here. She is a woman who, in the face of discrimination, keeps coming back over and over again, to move us a little closer to justice. She is a woman who cares for others and works tirelessly to secure their future. She is me, in every way that counts.

If Blanca is the person I am, Angel is the person I wish I were. There’s such a certainty to her – a certainty that I keep thinking she shouldn’t have yet, she’s so young – that I envy. Angel’s been through some stuff. As Stan says, sometimes it feels as if she’s been “disinvited from the rest of the world.” Still, she’s a believer in the possibility of it all. I long for her sense of belief and, as the season progresses, find myself drawn to Angel. That’s in part because Indya Moore is magnetic, but also because I’m desperate to protect that spirit in her. A spirit I want so desperately to see in myself.

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Carmen, Associate Editor

Eddy Martínez and Emma Hernandez, Vida

I thought about separating Vida protagonist Emma Hernandez from her stepmother Eddy for the purpose of this list. Certainly, the commanding performances by Mishel Prada and Ser Anzoategui each deserve their own recognition.

Prada’s Emma is tightly wound and multi-layered, an iceberg whose mass is 90% beneath the surface of its tip. It’s brave to deliver such a careful performance for a character that, quite honestly, it takes a couple of episodes to even like. That’s perhaps what is most wonderful about Emma; her love is hard won. But once you’ve opened yourself to her, there’s no turning back. She’ll consume your thoughts. I know she has consumed mine.

As Eddy, Anzoategui took the complete opposite approach. They opened their emotions wide and gaping right from the first moment we meet. Eddy’s eyes are mournful and haunting, her heart feels so visceral that you can almost see it beating on the table. She’s desperate to find any way forward after the death of her wife, she’s desperate to build a relationship with the daughters she’s left behind. Anzoategui never loses themself to Eddy’s rawness, instead choosing to shade the widow’s emotions with nuance. There’s a silent bathtub scene in Vida’s third episode that I still haven’t put down nearly six months later. It’s a testament to Anzoategui’s work.

Still, the most gripping performance I saw between a pair of actors this year was the dance created between Prada and Anzoategui together. They found honesty, even when its ugly, between their characters. They found love between all the rubble and broken hardness. For that, I’m pairing them together. (The fact that Prada also had this year’s hottest sex scene certainly doesn’t hurt.)

Blanca Evangelista, Pose

I’ve tried writing about Pose at least four times, and each time it’s ended up in the scrap pile because, really, what is there to say? Its goodness has surpassed words. Yes, watching Pose is important and culturally significant because it boasts the largest cast of trans women of color in television history. I do not want to shortchange that fact. I also wouldn’t want the historical weight of this moment to overshadow the fact that Pose is just damn good, supremely crafted television. It’s not a stretch to say that you’ll see it on a lot of critic’s year end lists, and not just the gay ones. This show is a powerhouse; it’s a force to be reckoned with.

Natalie is absolutely right: it’s important to watch television that doesn’t necessarily reflect you. I’d go as far as to argue that as a queer community, it’s our responsibility to lift up those voices of our siblings who aren’t being heard. We have to see our own humanity, because few others will grant us such grace. That said, the reason I love Blanca Evangelista (richly colored and portrayed by Mj Rodriguez) is because of how much she reminds me of myself. I wrote this summer, “Blanca Evangelista is the kind of character I’ve been waiting my whole life for. She’s an Afro-Latina, Puerto Rican, and fighting like hell to keep her queer chosen family together and make a name for herself in this world.” It’s still true. She’s the closet I’ve ever come to seeing all of me at once. And for that, she will always have my heart.

Annalisa “Quiet Ann” Zayas, Claws

Judy Reyes proved this year that it’s not the size of the role, it’s what you do with it. I’m selecting Quiet Ann for this list based on the strength of one single episode.

“Scream” was an episode of queer women’s television unlike almost any other this year. It’s a stand out in a year full of stand outs. In fact, I’d argue that even when we take a long historical eye towards the queer women’s TV canon, this episode is still going to hold its own. In less than 45 minutes, Reyes took a someone who previously had not been much more than a silent comic relief and perfunctory side character, and found the depths of her soulfulness. It’s hard to do much with a character who rarely talks, a character for whom “quiet” is literally in her name. Yet, Reyes proved that Anne isn’t quiet because she’s an afterthought. She’s quiet because she’s interior to herself. She’s thoughtful and considerate. She’s full of pain and remorse, but also stubborn hopefulness in the face of hopeless surroundings. It’s hard to bring such meditative introspection to a television dramedy that’s made a name for itself in over the top parody, but the Scrubs alum is the exact right woman for the job. She threads the needle every time.

Anissa Pierce, Black Lightning

ANISSA. MOTHER F*CKING. PIERCE. If you didn’t think I was going to include our very own black lesbian superhero on this list, you were gravely mistaken. Before she even made her debut last January, Anissa’s bonafides spoke for themselves. She’s the first lesbian superhero on the CW. She’s the first black lesbian superhero ever. She’s a bullet-proof black lesbian on the very network that, until perhaps recently, was most famously tied to the killing of one of their lesbian characters with a gunshot. She’s a bullet-proof black lesbian in a country where black people are still fighting for the very respect of our lives as we continue to be shot down as victims of police and state violence. And that was all before the first episode aired.

What followed was even better. Anissa is brave; she’s tenacious (okay, and a little impetuous); she’s smart – like nerdy book smart, she’s in medical school smart; she loves her family and fights against systemic injustices in her community. She also has relatable flaws. She puts up walls and flits between romantic loves because the very idea of commitment startles her. Did I mention she’s been gifted with some of the best fight choreography this year? And that those fights happen almost exclusively against other women badasses? Nafessa Williams has delivered an easy-to-love performance this year, and I can’t wait to keep on loving her!

Catra, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power

I recently came across a tweet on my timeline where a fan described Catra’s storyline as one of the best origins for an antihero this year. And sure, maybe that sounds hyperbolic, but I think that fan was on to something. It’s easy to care for Catra right from the beginning. She has a comeback for every putdown. She’s almost effortlessly cool with her torn up black jeans and perfectly spiked hair. She’s all edge and dark, warm colors in She-Ra’s otherwise pastel rainbow colored We’re Going To Win in the End! world. Most interestingly, Catra is dangerous. She’s legitimately threatening.

I intended for She-Ra to be pleasant background noise while I completed my Saturday morning chores, but Catra demanded all of my attention. What became clear was how much Catra hurt. She deeply felt the loss of her best friend. Her funny comebacks were thinly veiled covers for the old wounds she didn’t want you to see. She self-sabotaged herself at every turn, as if she was afraid to really try. By the time I arrived at the episode dealing with the emotional abuse that Catra and She-Ra dealt with in their childhood, I was in tears. I don’t remember the last time I cried at animation not made by Pixar! Here was Catra, filled up with a lifetime’s worth of pain and just trying to bottle it before it poured over everything.

It’s hard to make an animated villain that doesn’t feel, well, broad and cartoon-sh. Catra was completely three-dimensional. Also, did you catch her in that tux at Princess Prom? Can you swoon over a cartoon character? Because I think I just did.

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Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya, Staff Writer

Sadie, The Bisexual

The second I set my eyes upon the gay art Mommi that is Sadie, I was smitten! Look, like all characters on The Bisexual, she has her flaws. She makes Leila’s own sexuality journey kind of about herself. And then she rebounds with her employee. But, would I gladly volunteer to co-parent the child she desperately wants to have? Fuck YES. Ruin me, Mommi!

Theo Crain, Haunting Of Hill House

I really, really loved Haunting Of Hill House and aside from its technical stunner of a sixth episode, the best chapter is easily the one dedicated to its resident empathic lesbian Theodora Crain. Because of her, I firmly believe that gloves should be a lesbian fashion trend. Let’s just say that an emotionally withholding, somewhat messy lesbian who tries to fuck way her problems is… something I’m very drawn to.

Jane Ramos, Jane The Virgin

Am I listing my favorite television characters or the television characters I want to date? SAME THING! Jane Ramos’ intense confidence and the way she gradually melts over Petra Solano was easily one of my favorite parts of Jane The Virgin this year.

Arthie Premkumar, GLOW

Okay, so we barely got a glimpse at Arthie’s sexuality questioning or the potentially blossoming romance between her and Yolanda last season of GLOW, but I’m so starved for queer South Asian representation that I gotta give her a shoutout. Hopefully next year on GLOW brings much more!

Emma Hernandez, Vida

She’s hot; she’s complicated; she’s a control freak; she’s an emotional disaster. So Vida’s Emma hits all the right buttons when it comes to the television characters I enjoy watching. Crying while masturbating? A goddamn icon.

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Heather Hogan, Managing Editor

Rosa Diaz, Brooklyn Nine-Nine

Brooklyn Nine-Nine has always been one of my favorite can’t-miss shows, but in 2018 I became a full-on evangelist for it, largely because of the way it handled Rosa’s coming out storyline. First of all, because noted bisexual Stephanize Beatriz was consulted by the writers on it; and second of all, because it was just so good. It’s very rare to see a character come out as bisexual and say the word “bisexual.” It’s even rarer when it’s an established character on a broadcast network show. What made Rosa’s story great was more than just the stats. It was just so Rosa. The sheepish, but gruff, way she told Boyle she was dating a woman. The time limit she gave the squad — exactly one minute and zero seconds — to ask questions. And then her heartbreaking, heartwarming, uncompromising coming out episode with her parents. It was so funny and so real and so Rosa.

Elena Alvarez, One Day at a Time

One Day at a Time has been on for two seasons and I’ve probably watched it more than any other comedy ever, besides The Golden Girls. (And, as you’ll see by comparing my list to everyone else’s, my heart beats for comedies.) Often times sitcoms stop with the revelation of a queer character’s sexuality — but ODAAT gave Elena a season two storyline that was as sweet and awkward as any first time queer romance I’ve ever seen on TV. I scooted closer to the TV when she was trying to figure out if Syd liked her, cheered when they had their first kiss, and swooned like a cartoon character when they went to their first dance together. Plus, Elena had lots to do outside of her relationship; she grew as an individual person, too, learning more about herself, her culture, her family, and even her gender presentation.

Leila, The Bisexual

Because I am a human afflicted with humanity’s narcissism I am most drawn to TV characters whose bumbling, sweet nerdiness (see above) remind me of myself or whose sense of moral courage and heroism (see below) show me the me I want to be. What I am not drawn to is messy TV characters, especially messy queer women TV characters — but among the many revelations I had while watching Desiree Akhavan’s The Bisexual this year was that messy queer women TV characters are usually just sloppily written queer women TV characters. Akhavan’s Lelia is generous and selfish and hard and sharp and still full of wonder and boi is she messy! But that only made me love her more! She’s authentic in a way I’m not sure I’ve experienced from a mid-30s queer woman on television. And the way the show explores her bisexuality is definitely not something I’ve ever seen. It doesn’t indict anyone; it just asks a lot of questions and generously explores the answers.

She-Ra, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power

I was more excited about Netflix’s She-Ra reboot than anyone I know and was also more surprised than anyone when it exceeded every one of my expectations, including the fact that it’s maybe the queerest thing I have ever seen on TV in my life. Just so casually unapologetically queer. Adora, to me, is the perfect metaphor for growing up in an oppressive, oh let’s say, conservative white evangelical Christian community and lucking your way out of it to fight on the side of the good guys (who you’d been taught were the bad guys). She’s tough and smart and destined for greatness as she chooses goodness and also she just loves horses! (And Catra.)

June, Forever

I know this show has been out for several months now, but I still don’t want to spoil anyone who hasn’t seen it. I’ll just say that if Maya Rudolph doesn’t win an Emmy for playing a middle-aged woman whose simmering desires and rage are awakened by another middle-aged women who’s even angrier than she is, I will be shocked. This is one of those rare shows that when I was watching it, I was like, “Wait, have I never seen this queer story before? I haven’t! I really haven’t!” (Also, if you still haven’t read Caity Weaver’s profile of Maya Rudolph, you really have to rectify that.)

Ruby and Sapphire, Steven Universe

That they got married on Cartoon Network and smooched right on their non-binary femme Gem lips would be enough, but it’s not just the revolutionary representation that made them so great (again) this year; it’s that they’re brilliantly written characters who grow together and apart. They’re badass and they’re adorable and when Garnet marched into the most epic battle of her life, in her wedding dress, her battlecry was the best description of a relationship I have ever heard: “I am the will of two gems to care for each other, to protect each other from any threat, no matter how vast or how cruel!” Y’all couldn’t stop her 5,750 years ago and you cannot stop her now.

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LEAST FAVORITE

Riese, Editor-in-Chief

Lila Stanton,The Purge

I started watching The Purge to see AZMarie do pull-ups in a sports bra, and found myself surprisingly drawn into the show as a whole, primarily into a love triangle between Lila, Jenna and Rick. Mostly because I was certain Rick was an asshole and Jenna was going to leave him for her true love, Lila, with whom she exchanged sweet kisses by the pool at a white supremacist murder party. Lila was not like her terrible parents! She was a lesbian who loved equality for all mankind! Then, over the course of two episodes, she slipped directly into the gaping maws of the psycho lesbian trope, which led to her eventual death.

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Valerie Anne, Staff Writer

Jenna Betancourt, The Purge

Like Riese, I also had high hopes for Jenna and Lila at the beginning of this show, with the sexy flashbacks and the sexier poolside kiss. I thought for sure she was going to ditch her scheming, potato-of-a-man husband before things got too insane. Alas, she chose wrong. I also quit this show before having to watch Lila be tripped up by tropes because it’s 2018 and self-care is important.

Just, everybody, Shameless

I get that V didn’t have a lot of experience with bisexual people before she started being in a throuple with Kev and Svetlana, but I feel like she was very willing to go back to IDing as straight after Svetlana left (well, after she ACTIVELY made life miserable for Svetlana) and try to chalk it up to being kinky. Also, I’m mad that after eight full seasons of wishing for Fiona to realize she was bisexual, and really thinking they were going to go there with Nessa, they made DEBBIE be the Gallagher sister in a relationship with a woman?? DEBBIE??? I love this show, but hoo boi they made me mad this year. Don’t even get me STARTED on the Gay Jesus cult. JUST DON’T. I’m going to finish out the season but if they really think they can go on without Emmy Rossum they have another thing coming.

Peach Sallinger, Hashtag You on Lifetime

Peach is on my “worst” list not because I didn’t like her, but because i didn’t like her storyline. She started off so great. Shay Mitchell delivered her strongest acting performance to date, and Peach was the only voice of reason for miles around. However, if people who read the book hadn’t already told me she was a lesbian, I wouldn’t have known until it was revealed that she was maybe a psychopath and had dozens of photos of Beck sleeping and/or half-naked that didn’t appear to be taken with consent. :deep sigh: I stopped watching after she was smashed on the head with a rock but before she was murdered, and frankly I think the new exorcism movie Shay is in will treat her better than this show did.

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Natalie, Staff Writer

Nova Bordelon, Queen Sugar

This one hurts, y’all.

I wanted Nova Bordelon to be great. I wanted this character, an original creation of Ava DuVernay’s designed to add to the rich tapestry penned by Natalie Baszile, to be great. I wanted this character, imbued with the spirit and identity of the founders of the Black Lives Matter movement, to be great. And, most of all, I wanted this character, played by Rutina Wesley, who I’ve adored (read: thirsted over) since long before she came out as queer last year, to be great. I wanted Nova Bordelon to be great – for Rutina, for me, for the culture.

But, oh no…

Because, even though it’s 20GAYteen, and even though GLAAD gave Ava DuVernay an “Excellence in Media” award, Nova Bordelon was not great this season. Over the last two years, Queen Sugar has erased Nova’s bisexuality from her identity and it’s been so disheartening to watch. Hearing Nova cry out for freedom, echoing the very words she said to her girlfriend in Season One, to her sister’s ex-boyfriend, Remy, of all people has been like pouring salt in an open wound.

Carmen and I talked about a lot of this back in August when the latest season of Queen Sugar wrapped, so I won’t belabor the point too much, but I will say this: one of the things that made this television show great, from the outset, was its full-hearted embrace of revolutionary politics. Carmen, quite rightly, called the first season a “black feminist masterclass.” It stood firmly on the side of justice and representation and was unapologetic about it. What worries me about Queen Sugar’s bisexual erasure is that it might be symptomatic of a shift, away from the revolutionary, and more towards the respectable.

And if that’s the case — if this once revolutionary show is going to embrace respectability politics — then it has become a shell of its former self and may not be worth investing in at all anymore.

Bárbara and Mercedes, Perdona nuestros pecados

Earlier this year, when I was putting together our March Madness competition, I decided to create an International region, as a small way to acknowledge Autostraddle’s international readership. I scoured the Internet in search of 16 kisses worthy of inclusion in our contest and, in doing so, I stumbled upon Perdona nuestros pecados (Forgive Our Sins), a Chilean telenovela set in the fictional town of Villa Ruiseñor during the 1950s. The lesbian storyline on the show features Mercedes Möller, the sheltered daughter of the town’s mayor, and Bárbara Roman, the cosmopolitan but stifled wife of the town’s new police commissioner. They grabbed my attention in a way that few shows I discovered would — I’m pretty sure it was the couple’s second kiss in the church that hooked me — and I grew to love this pairing.

I’d watch the show live and glean what I could from the context and what little Spanish I know. I’d follow the hashtags on social media, discuss the show with other fans and eagerly wait for clips of the show and their translations. And, if the show had ended with its first season (which, by the way, included one of the best lesbian love scenes I’ve ever seen on TV), I would have no doubt included Bárbara and Mercedes among my picks for the Best of 2018. But apparently, even though it’s 20GAYTeen, I still cannot have nice things.

In an unprecedented move, the network decided to extend the telenovela for a second season and, for a while, it was good. With the romance between the women cemented, the story became more about the drama which was to be expected. Then the wheels came off and the writers subjected this couple to one awful trope after another and dug themselves into a hole so deep that they couldn’t really get out of it — and, in the process, diminished this once great couple.

Because we’re talking about our least favorite characters and we include pictures with our posts, it’s easy to attach our scorn to the actors but, honestly, it’s hardly ever about them (María Bello and Soledad Cruz were amazing). As with so many queer stories on television, Bárbara and Mercedes faltered because the writers got lazy. Too often, writers pen beautiful storylines about women falling in love because, even if they’re not queer women, that’s the part that they understand.After that, when it’s time to write about what a relationship between two women actually looks like, they can’t even fathom it. So, instead, they reach for tropes, either not realizing they were tropes or wrongly believing that they could succeed where so many others failed (spoiler alert: you can’t).

We need writers to do better. Be creative or, better yet, hire queer women to tell their stories. I only hope the writers behind Bárbara and Mercedes learn that lesson before the possible spin-off.

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Carmen, Associate Editor

Lila Stanton, The Purge

That sure was a rollercoaster! Like Riese, I came to The Purge with very low expectations, just wanting to see AzMarie sweat a bit in a sports bra (by the way, not nearly enough of that! Thanks for nothing, show). And much like Valerie, I was a goner from the first poolside kiss. I was 100% certain that The Purge was going to end with Jenna and Lila was the quintessential horror movie “final girls,” raising the sword of justice and holding each other in their arms as daybreak rose on another day. They were going to be the Lesbian Avengers! The complete set up was there! Instead Jenna decided to raise her baby with a potato sack and Lila got a complete and total personality transplant! Why? I have no idea! I assume because without turning her into a psycho trope at the last minute, her death wouldn’t have made any sense! So the writers forgot all their character development, Lila turned into some caricature from The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, and then she died. Good times, folks. Good times.

Nova Bordelon, Queen Sugar

Natalie said all that needed be said upthread. The only thing I have to add are my tears.

Do you want the salted water from my very body Queen Sugar? Take it. You’ve already taken everything else.

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Heather Hogan, Managing Editor

Peach Sallinger, You

This was the weirdest year because almost no one on our TV team could think of any characters we hated. Even when we started digging down into, like, “Okay, but who was just written poorly?” I don’t know if that’s because there was so much excellent queer TV, none of us watched what was subpar; or if most things really were just good this year. Either way, that’s an excellent problem to have and my answer to this question is Peach Sallinger. It’s not because she was a lesbian psycho; I don’t mind that trope anymore and, frankly, it was refreshing to see Shay Mitchell play just a hardcore bitch. But like Valerie said, she was so underwritten it was hard to tell if she really was going to be a lesbian at all and then she got walloped in the skull with a rock almost as soon as we found out. Honestly, even if she’d lived, it wouldn’t have been worth the investment because every goddamn minute of this show was voiced-over by Dan Fucking Humphrey.

Netflix’s New “Haunting of Hill House” Gave Us a Lesbian Who Lives, Took Our Whole Weekend

It’s a busy month for horror fans, with new releases both in theaters and on streaming platforms, but it’s worth it to make time for the Netflix re-imagining of classic The Haunting of Hill House. You’ve likely heard by now that it isn’t a faithful reproduction of the original, and that’s true! But it’s worth it, and for more reasons than just the lesbian character. (Also, though, for the lesbian character.)

In the mid-90’s, the Crain family moved into the ancient Hill House mansion with the intent to fix it up, flip it and move out over the course of eight weeks. They don’t make it that long, with Hugh Crain escaping with his children one mysterious, horrifying night that sees his wife die mysteriously inside the house. Now, the house has stood empty for over 20 years, but the five Crain siblings — sensitive twins Nell and Luke; tough, brooding Theo; uptight Shirley and asshole celebrity writer Steven — are finding that the house won’t let them go until they face what really happened in it.

The Hill House adaptation, as others have noted, is only nominally related both to the original and to Shirley Jackson’s school of horror in general. Instead of six strangers entering Hill House, the story begins with six people leaving it in terror in the middle of the night and spending the rest of their lives trying to put the pieces back together. As genuinely interested in the occult and supernatural as she was, Jackson usually landed solidly in the camp of human nature being the true terror. While Haunting of Hill House definitely explores that theme — watching how callously the older siblings can wave off the struggles of the deeply traumatized twins is a trip! — its take is ultimately more empathetic than Jackson usually aimed for. The cruelty of the living characters in Netflix’s vision is borne out of their own pain, fear and damage, as opposed to the petty sort of genuine evil that Jackson saw in so many people (“The Lottery” is an accessible example). For devotees of Jackson and the original text, there are plenty of little superficial nods; the siblings’ names are taken from the original characters and Shirley herself, and the show keeps the book’s incomparable opening lines (although puts them in the mouth of Steve, an unfortunate downgrade):

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”

Also making it through relatively intact from the original Haunting is Theo, the psychic, self-assured brunette in smart trousers who is also understood to be a lesbian. Hattie writes about what made Theo such a remarkable character for her time:

“…she’s smart, has some great lines (and great style — lots of black and even *gasp* trousers) — she beats Luke at cards, which his aunt has already said is an impossibility. She isn’t married, or anything like Eleanor (who is financially dependent on her sister and brother in law) and she seems far more confident and perceptive than the other characters — okay maybe the psychic abilities help. Basically Theo kicks ass… In horror we’re so used to seeing women as victims or as evil, but Theo is neither. …there is no moral judgement placed on Theo — she doesn’t die. The house doesn’t punish her for her sexuality.”

Theo’s lesbianism is no longer subtextual in the adaptation; in the first episode we watch her take home the beautiful, tattooed Trish from a Boston-area nightclub, and immediately afterward whip out some truly impressive emotional unavailability. (If the lesbian sex doesn’t tip you off to her sexual orientation, Theo’s persistent focus on “having boundaries” as a pretext for being emotionally shut down will!) Poor Trish is confused about why they can’t talk about their feelings after sex, and hurt that Theo kicks her out immediately afterwards (while wrapped in a flannel, duh). That’s Theo’s whole thing, though. There’s no hint that Theo grows up with any overt messaging about shame over being gay, but we can see her keeping everyone at arm’s length from childhood on. Her psychic power is the ability to know things about people and events through touch, something that overwhelms her as a little girl until her mother gifts her a pair of gloves. She moves through life like that afterward, gloved in more ways than one — protecting herself from feeling too much, and simultaneously afraid of what will happen if she succeeds. The impossible tension makes her coil tight, constantly tensed; “a clenched fist with hair,” her brother describes her.

In many ways Theo’s sexuality is played as incidental to her character; her family is a little surprised but not upset when they learn about it, and despite Theo’s melodramatic performance of emotional stonewalling, her and Trish’s not-quite-relationship is maybe one of the more functional on the show. (It’s kind of a low bar!) But her relationship to intimacy feels honest and sad, true to her specific identity; a gesture at Shane-like lesbian fuckboy behavior made more nuanced with a view on how scared Theo has a right to be about how to move through the world feeling what she does. Although the show’s monologues aren’t generally its strongest point, Theo’s hits home; and if her epilogue feels a little too easy, it’s hard to be mad about that (after all, she lives!).

The new Haunting of Hill House is aimed at fans of contemporary horror like The Babadook or It Follows, films that really dive into the human trauma and grief that accompany horror, often bordering on the allegorical. Hill House succeeds with that effort most when it’s able to evoke the genuine, sick terror of not being able to tell when something is real or imagined, a real experience or just what you hope or fear most. It’s weaker when it leans too hard on the allegorical; a house is like a body, a marriage is like a house, all of them can be haunted; by the time Steve explains these things out loud in the finale, the point has already been sufficiently made over the previous nine episodes. Sometimes its psychological take on haunting makes a messy marriage with its outer scaffolding of classic gothic horror; the device of having us wonder whether any given horror is a product of the haunted house or crazed grief only works when the show feels in control of it, for instance. As is so often the case with television, the show gambles and loses a bit on the interest of its male characters’ relationships. Skeptical eldest brother Steve is just a fundamentally frustrating character who doesn’t work well as an entry point for the audience, and it’s unfortunate that so much time at the emotionally busy finale is spent on his relationship with his dad.

The new adaptation doesn’t feel particularly Jacksonian, but she’d likely appreciate its successes anyway; after all, she too was a frazzled mother of a gaggle of kids whose husband infantilized her and largely ruined her life. It’s not far off to call it “a spooky This Is Us,” but that isn’t a bad thing; at its best moments, the humanity and sadness of The Haunting of Hill House work along with the horror to make the relationships as memorable as the jump scares.