The Final Season of ‘Harlem’ Gave Its Characters Happy New Beginnings

After nearly four years, Harlem has come to an end. Back in November, it was announced that the third season of Tracey Oliver’s take on friendship in your 30s, was getting a third season. But viewers were a little shocked when it was then announced in January that the third season would be the show’s last. The show also got fewer and fewer episodes per season, which is really a shame. Season one was ten, season two had eight, and the final season only has six. And yet, despite the limited space to tell the women’s stories, Oliver and her crew worked extra hard to make sure that everyone got their happy new beginning.

Season three opens right where season two left off: We find out which one of the crew is pregnant. Shockingly, it’s Camille. She was told that she probably wouldn’t be able to have children, but surprise! Angie is still engaged to Michael, and is preparing to star in Girls Trip: The Musical, a not-so-subtle nod to Oliver’s most famous work.

Quinn ended season two jumping into a relationship with her old college boyfriend. Now, she is single and focusing on being Quinn motherfucking Joseph instead. So of course she meets a handsome athlete who is going to make her really think about what it is she wants in life. (More about this later.)

Tye has an interesting arc this season. Season two ended with her taking a vow of celibacy after finding out she was dating mother Aimee (played by Rachel True) and her daughter Zoe. It turns out to be a good thing, as it allows Tye to focus on creating Q’s sister app, P, a dating app for polyamorous people. It’s through that endeavor that she meets Eva (played by Gail Bean), who works for the venture capital company financing the app.

The two are quickly enamored with each other, and most importantly, Eva respects the journey Tye is on. Eva pushes Tye to be a better version of herself, questioning her about running away from her family instead of coming out to them, insinuating that her choice may have something to do with her inability to commit.

Their relationship escalates quickly, with Eva casually dropping that her mother (played by Robin Givens) is coming to town and wants to meet Tye. Oh, and she just so happens to be a psychologist who has a tendency to analyze Eva’s romantic partners. As someone who is a walking red flag, naturally Tye freaks out, jeopardizing her relationship with Eva in the process. But in the end, she kind of proposes?

It’s hard to distill a journey like the one Tye goes on in only six episodes, especially when you’re trying to balance four storylines. Tye makes a serious 180 in terms of her behavior, but we don’t get to see enough of their interactions to fully grasp how they got there. Most of the time, we see Eva pushing a little harder than Tye wants, and her trying to run away. It’s hard to know if it’s time, seeing her friends seemingly settling down, or actual growth that leads Tye to want to commit to Eva.

Regardless of how quickly they got there, Eva does one very important thing: gets Tye to begin unpacking her relationship with her family. Granted, I would have suggested therapy before suggesting she get on a plane to Atlanta to confront them, but what do I know? Love makes us do a lot of things. Still, I think there deserved to be more care put into this part of Tye’s journey. So much of her storyline in seasons one and two focused on repairing her relationship with her ex-husband Brandon, so I was hoping we would see her process what going home would mean for her with her friends.

Any queer person knows the unique stress of having to come out to your family. During her conversation with Eva, Tye makes an offhand comment about her family being homophobic. Suddenly she’s just willing to get on a plane and subject herself to potential mistreatment? It seems out of character to have her jump into a situation where she could be hurt.

And then the proposal at the end? Listen, I love a good romcom moment. But those moments have to be earned, and I simply do not believe that Tye and Eva earned that moment. There was an opportunity to show Tye making a vow to commit to the relationship and maybe agree to find a way to work through her issues together. Instead, she’s getting down on one knee in Eva’s apartment building and presenting her with her grandmother’s ring. I get the need to wrap up a story with a bow, but after the season they’ve had, I simply cannot believe happily ever after is in their future.

And what about our girl Quinn? She finds herself falling hard for sexy baseball player Seth. He is willing to give Quinn everything she’s ever wanted: marriage, a family, stability. And she’s so ready to go all in with him. But then he reveals to her that he’s ethically non-monogamous, shaking Quinn to her core. Seth wants to make her his primary partner, but can Quinn really handle it?

She decides to be open minded about it and meet Seth’s current partner, Sabrina. But after Sabrina gives her a laundry list of rules to follow if she’s going to join their polycule, Quinn realizes that monogamy is the thing she wants.

It was such an interesting choice to give Quinn the storyline that deals with non-monogamy, because anyone who’s ever watched Harlem knows that she is not going to be about that life. Of the core four, Quinn is the most traditional, and while there may have been a brief second where you could suspend your belief into thinking that she’d go for non-monogamy, you know it simply isn’t happening.

I would have liked to see Tye get Quinn’s non-monogamy storyline actually! Her character seems more suited to the lifestyle, and since she’s starting a dating app for polyamorous people, it could have been awesome to see her try it. And if she didn’t like it, she could say it was something she attempted. But I do give the show’s writers a lot of credit for handling the storyline with grace, and not making Seth or his lifestyle the butt of every joke.

With her romance over and Camille’s baby on the way, Quinn frets over her options for motherhood. After running into a friend at Camille’s baby shower who used a sperm donor, Quinn begins to realize that she can have a baby without the man and the marriage. So she attends an info session about becoming a single mom by choice. And as she’s leaving, who does she run into? Isabella, the hot as hell politician Quinn dated in season two!

When I tell you that I screamed seeing Isabella pop up on the screen. I loved her and Quinn’s relationship; she brought something out of Quinn that no one else did. As they begin to walk out of the conference room, Isabella gives Quinn her easy smile and says that she’s been thinking about her. Maybe now that Quinn is a little more settled, the two of them could give romance another chance? Anything’s possible.

I will certainly miss the besties of Harlem. It would be nice to see them move into the next parts of their lives, but I’ll just have to make up the rest of their journeys in my mind instead.

Harlem season three is now streaming on Prime.

There Has Never Been a Better Time To Read About Two Girls Falling in Love at the End of the World

“Surprisingly, people don’t seem to have an appetite for dystopian literature after the end of the world.”

This line from the middle of Lily Braun-Arnold’s debut YA novel, The Last Bookstore on Earth struck me as soon as I read it. Technically, we are not experiencing the end of the world, no matter how much it feels like we are. What we’re living through is more like the end of the world as we know it. But given the decisions made by our current president, an actual apocalypse doesn’t feel that far off.

Braun-Arnold’s book takes place in suburban New Jersey after “The Storm,” an acid rain that wiped out thousands of people and places. The main character is Liz Flannery, a 17-year-old girl who worked in the same independent bookstore that she currently lives in. After losing her family in The Storm, she sought refuge in the bookstore, and fear of leaving the familiar shelves has kept her there for over a year.

The Last Bookstore on Earth is told in real time, but there are chapters that flash back to Liz’s life in the days and months leading up to and immediately after The Storm. We learn she sheltered in the bookstore with her former co-worker and crush Eva. However, Eva had a strong need to leave and see what was left out in the world. While Liz is totally alone most of the time, the store has become a bit of an outpost for people stopping through the area. People come and leave messages or packages for loved ones who might end up passing through the area to varying degrees of success.

When one of her regular passers-through tells her that a second storm is coming, Liz is thrown into a tailspin. She’s not sure the store could possibly withstand a second storm — she never fixed the damage from the first one, and she doesn’t have the resources or strength to do it by herself. But when mysterious stranger Maeve shows up thinking the bookstore is abandoned and seeking shelter, Liz begins to believe that maybe a future is possible for her. That is, if they can survive the second storm together.

I admit, it’s been a long time since I’ve read a dystopian YA. Mainly because adulthood was enough of a horror-show. But as we moved into a second Trump presidency, I found myself looking for something that would mirror the feelings I was having about that. When I discovered that catalyst for the apocalypse in The Last Bookstore on Earth was acid rain, it just felt right. The book was released just as Los Angeles, where I live, began to burn. Just as the rain decimates the New Jersey Liz once knew in the book, parts of the city I call home became burned out shells of the places they once were. In the world of the novel, the California fires would be one of the harbingers of what was coming.

Liz and the other characters don’t have time to pontificate about the ills of climate change and how it has changed their lives. They’re simply too busy trying to survive. They’re living in a desolate wasteland; areas are patrolled by gangs and brigades who are looking to protect the resources they have and steal others. Drinkable water has become practically forgotten. Most people have to ration food and will turn anything they can into a shelter. Liz isn’t at the bookstore because she wants to be; it’s because it’s one of the places that is still mostly standing, the one that doesn’t remind her of the family she lost.

Survivor’s guilt is a huge part of Liz’s story. And how can it not be, when she was the only member of her family to make it through The Storm? The Flannerys were a good example of what I imagine many families will look like as the climate crisis continues to alter our lives. Liz’s father took the obvious warnings seriously, suggesting that the family move to Alaska where things might be a little safer. Her mother is vehemently against the idea, as is Liz’s twin sister Thea. Both her mother and sister write her father off as a conspiracy theorist who is making things worse than they are. For her part, Liz is more on her father’s side, believing that something was coming to change their lives.

It takes a while before we find out what happened to Liz and her family on the day of The Storm, but we see the effects from the very first page. Liz is frozen by the choices she made that night — the anxiety hangs like a lead weight in her chest, coloring every moment of her life in the after. My heart broke for Liz; I can’t imagine what it would feel like to be the only one left. And to spend all of your time trying to figure out why. That’s the one thing she can’t wrap her mind around: Why did she survive when her whole family died? What does it say about her that she was chosen to survive?

That’s what makes Liz’s initial interactions with Maeve so interesting. Everywhere Liz is soft, Maeve is hard. Maeve has had to see and do things to survive that she doesn’t want Liz to know anything about. And for a while, it’s working. The pair are learning how to be around a person again, but also attempting to make surviving the second storm more of a reality. Their feelings for each other grow from tentative to protective and loving, not only because of their situation. You can tell they see the parts of each other no one has ever seen before.

Suddenly, Eva returns, throwing their plan for survival into a total tailspin.

Another thing I really loved in the The Last Bookstore on Earth was the way Braun-Arnold pulled in the stories of random characters Liz encounters. They are hand-scribbled notes to show that world that these people existed, that their lives mattered before The Storm. It makes the story feel a little more alive. When you’re only hearing the thoughts of one character, the little breaks are a nice change of pace.

I don’t want to give away too much; one spoiler could ruin the entire experience. But as the world feels like it’s crumbling around me, it was really nice to see two teen girls fall in love against all odds. And in a bookstore, which may feel like a random choice, but totally works in this story. Bookstores represent a lot to different people — Braun-Arnold captures the magic of your local indie bookstore so well. It’s a place of comfort, of joy…well, it’s a place you feel protected.

My First Makeout Was Reenacting the Kissing Scene From ‘Cruel Intentions’

January is Makeout Month at Autostraddle.com

You’ve never been kissed? my friend messaged me.
I shook my head, even though she couldn’t see me. No, I typed.
Well, we’re going to have to fix that.

My lack of kissing was a sensitive subject for me. It wasn’t for lack of trying. There had been boys I wanted to kiss, but they never wanted to kiss me back. Over the years, those close to me — my friends, even my mom — had told me that it would happen one day. But I was beginning to think they were lying to me. I was 17, nearing the end of my junior year of high school, and one of the last in my immediate friend group to have her first kiss. It was absolute loser behavior, and I was sick of it.

What do you mean? I wondered. Surely she wasn’t offering.
Have you ever seen Cruel Intentions? she asked.
Yeah, why?
When I come over, we’re going to do the scene where Sarah Michelle Gellar teaches Selma Blair how to kiss, okay?
We’re going to act it out?
Yup! I’ll send you the scene

I sat and looked at my computer in complete disbelief. We had only been friends for a few weeks, but here she was, offering to help me with my problem. Not only that, but she was doing it in a way that made sense for a couple of theater kids.

As promised, she sent me the scene so I could learn my lines. I don’t remember if she sent them from a website or if she typed them from memory. Once I got the lines, I immediately began rehearsing. I was a drama major; learning lines was easy. But as a 17-year-old who knew she was going to have her first kiss soon, it was nerve-racking. In my mind, first kisses were supposed to be spontaneous. They always were in movies. It felt weird to know when mine was going to happen. And not just know about it but actively prepare for it.

Even though it felt weird to know when it was coming, I also felt a sense of comfort. Learning lines and saying words that someone else wrote took the fear out of it. I didn’t need to be nervous that I was going to say or do the wrong thing and totally ruin the moment. Someone else had done the hard part for me. And when it came to commitment, I was a consummate professional — I would never drop a line. Not when the stakes were so high.

It was the first time she was coming over to my house, so I wanted everything to be perfect. I nervously straightened up my room, making sure nothing was out of place. I knew the kissing wasn’t going to happen right away, but there was a heightened sense of anticipation in the air. We sat around my room for about an hour, going through my CDs and magazines and listening to the radio. Then she turned to face me.

“Are you ready?” she asked. I nodded.

My door didn’t have a lock, so I got up and slid a milk crate full of magazines in front of it. Neither of my parents were home, but my mom had a habit of just walking into my room without knocking, especially since my room was immediately next to the front door. The last thing I wanted was for my mom to interrupt my first kiss. Quickly, I scurried back to my bed, sitting dutifully and waiting to be told what to do.

She had brought a cheat sheet with the lines in case we needed them, but I assured her I was off book. These were the most important lines I was ever going to say, I was sure of it.

“Now close your eyes and wet your lips,” she said, using her command of the situation as character motivation.

She had the cool and in charge energy of Kathryn, and I definitely had the same nervous excitement of Cecile. When I said “it was nothing,” though, I knew it was definitely something. That simple kiss made my brain fuzzy. But the best was still yet to come.

“Let’s try it again, only this time I’m going to stick my tongue in your mouth,” she said. I knew that was the line, but sweat pricked at my armpits in anticipation of what was coming next. “When I do that I want you to massage my tongue with yours. That’s what first base is.”

I don’t think she had to say the line about closing my eyes; they were probably closed already. Her lips met mine for a second time before her mouth opened. I followed suit, allowing her tongue to touch mine. The fuzziness in my brain had been erased by a million tiny explosions as our tongues continued their dance. I can guarantee that our making out lasted much longer than the scene in the movie did. Now that I was finally kissing someone, I wasn’t too interested in stopping.

Eventually, we did come up for air so that we could finish the scene. But after that, our lips found each other again. Despite my fear that our makeout session was a one-time thing, her eagerness made me think that it wouldn’t be.

And it wasn’t.

That one afternoon in my bedroom led to four months of making out. Sometimes, it was stealing kisses when we were hanging out with the friend who introduced us. Other times, it was sliding the milk crate against my door so we could kiss and hastily paw at each other under our shirts. Or locking her bedroom door and kissing until our hands slid down each other’s pants. There was one night that we made out behind a stranger’s car while our friends ran around us playing hide-and-seek. That same night, after everyone fell asleep, we found each other again and snuck off to a quiet corner to kiss some more. We didn’t need a script anymore.

Our hookups didn’t last past the summer, but I went back to school that fall standing up a little straighter. I never spoke to that girl again — I have tried to find her over the years to no avail. I hope she knows how much that summer meant to me, how I would return to it when I needed to remember parts of myself. And while it has become a humorous anecdote in my queerness journey, it will always live in the softest part of my heart.

I Watched ‘The Holiday Junkie’ With My Wife and It Was Sweeter Than a Peppermint Latte

I love a cheesy holiday romance movie. And when I say cheesy, I mean it as a compliment! Once, a friend of mine told me that I was so cheesy, she wanted to put me on top of a plate of tortilla chips. There’s something so wonderful about the predictability of a holiday romance made for a network like Hallmark or Lifetime. Even when the couple might doubt that things will work out for them in the end, you know it will. The dialogue is hokey, and everything is a little too cutesy, but that’s what makes it all so enjoyable! Honestly, the cheesier the movie, the more I’m going to love it.

Hallmark and Lifetime are severely lacking in the cheesy sapphic holiday romance department. (Under the Christmas Tree and Friends & Family Christmas are two notable exceptions.) So when I heard that one of Lifetime’s new seasonal offerings,The Holiday Junkie, starring Jennifer Love Hewitt, has a lesbian best friend character, I grabbed my wife Beth, and a homemade peppermint brownie to watch. JLH directed The Holiday Junkie in addition to starring in it, and her husband Brian Hallisay plays her love interest. Openly queer actress Lynn Andrews stars as the lesbian best friend.

The Holiday Junkie is the story of Andie, a 30-something year old woman who runs Christmas decorating company The Holiday Junkie with her mother. This is the first Christmas she’s running the company alone since her mother’s death. When a rich venture capitalist hires Andie to decorate his house, she sees it as a way to prove her company is a worthy investment for him. But when she arrives at the house, she meets Mason, the “house manager.” A series of mishaps keep delaying the family’s return, forcing Andie and Mason to keep spending time together. As the days go by, Andie cracks through Mason’s tough shell, infecting him with her special brand of Christmas cheer.

Okay, so confession: Beth and I are big fans of Jennifer Love Hewitt. Back in the 90s, I always had her on my favorite actresses list, even though I mostly knew her from reading Tiger Beat and watching LFO’s “Girl on TV” video a million times. A couple years ago, I realized that I had a massive crush on her, and that’s why she was a favorite. She has that perfect All-American girl next door vibe about her.

JLH is currently starring on the show 9-1-1, which my wife and I have been obsessed with. (Shoutout to our favorite TV lesbians, Hen and Karen Wilson!) So it wasn’t hard to convince her to watch our favorite 9-1-1 operator stir up a little Christmas magic!

Before we started watching the movie, my wife and I made a bet. She believed that Jennifer Love Hewitt would cry three times. One thing about JLH, she’s a crier. My wager was that she would only cry once in one truly climatic scene. We’ll see which one of us is right. Without further ado, enjoy us watching The Holiday Junkie.

Sa’iyda: Okay, if she’s going to wear fake glasses, the least they can do is put clear lenses in them! You can see right through them.

Beth: Yeah, you can. They can fake it better.

Sa’iyda: Calling it: her mom is dead, but she talks to her voicemail like she’s still alive.

Both: Oh look! A set!

Beth: It’s Sue from 9-1-1!

Sa’iyda: And the guy from The Cosby Show! The one who was married to Denise.

Sa’iyda: There is no liquid in that cup she’s holding.

Beth: Nope, none. She’s practically tossing it around.

Sa’iyda: She’s drinking like it wouldn’t be a scalding hot latte.

Beth: Pretty soon, you can make me a latte (I’m getting her an espresso machine for Christmas).

Sa’iyda: Sure can! I love to steam milk.

Sa’iyda: Holy shit, this house is huge.

Beth: That is one handsome man.

Sa’iyda: I know! I love that her husband is starring as the love interest. So cute.

Beth: Ooh, what are his tattoos?

Sa’iyda: Like, look at his perfectly groomed facial hair. And those cheekbones! My god.

Beth: The fake glasses are back again.

Sa’iyda: What kind of sociopath bites a candy cane like that? I suck on it until it’s practically gone before I chew it.

Beth: We have our first cry! How far into the movie are we?

Sa’iyda: Fifteen minutes.

Beth: You sure you want to stick with one?

Sa’iyda: Yes, maybe she wanted to get it out of the way.

Both: OH MY GOD. He’s not wearing a shirt.

Sa’iyda: She gets to wake up next to that every morning! Holy shit, do you see his abs?

Beth: He has more tattoos? I wonder what they all are!

Sa’iyda: Who cares?

Beth: I want his outfit.

Sa’iyda: I feel like you have something similar? It’s just a flannel over a henley.

Sa’iyda: Ooh, is he an artist?

Beth: Someone is.

Sa’iyda: A wedding invitation. Either his fiancee died on Christmas, or she left him.

Sa’iyda: Okay, ‘Prop & Lock’ is a very clever name for a props company. I like the imagery.

Beth: “I’m gay, not blind.” The best friend gets it.

Sa’iyda: Cry number two, not even a half-hour in. You still think three?

Beth: I’m going to up it to five. That feels better.

Sa’iyda: I love her jacket. Her jacket game is always strong.

Beth: Is she really going to bake six dozen cookies?

Sa’iyda: It’s not impossible. She’s just wasting her time rolling and cutting them. Skip the cookie cutters and focus on easier stuff.

Sa’iyda: Called it! His fiancee dumped him on Christmas. That’s why he hates Christmas and is also reluctant to have feelings for Andie.

Beth: You’re very good at this.

Sa’iyda: I know, thanks.

Cry count is now at three as Andie tells the story of how her mom died right before Christmas.

Sa’iyda: Oh, well yeah, a dead mom still beats a breakup.

Beth: Who doesn’t dip their mozzarella sticks in sauce? What is wrong with her?

Sa’iyda: That is so weird, I don’t even have a response. Sociopathic behavior.

Beth: Who picked out the plates for these pancakes? They’re too small.

Sa’iyda: Too small! So the best friend needs to put herself on the dating apps again? There’s a messy lesbian breakup story.

Beth: IS THAT BUCK’S LOFT? (Buck is a character on 9-1-1, JLH plays his sister Maddie.)

Sa’iyda: Is it? Oh, it definitely is. Can you imagine that phone call?

We have officially hit the fourth cry.

Sa’iyda: Um, I’m obsessed with this 90s first grade teacher sweater her mom left her. Immaculate vibes. No notes.

Beth: They’re kissing like people who have kissed before. Hot.

Sa’iyda: Her gay best friend is wearing shoes on the bed? Truly unhinged behavior.

Beth: Wait, did they have sex?

Sa’iyda: I think so!

Beth: I really like his jacket.

Sa’iyda: It is surprising you don’t have a Carhartt jacket honestly.

Sa’iyda: That’s cry number five babe. Not even an hour into the movie.

Beth: I told you!

Sa’iyda: These singers are terrible lip synchers. They’re not even moving to the same beat!

Six cries in less than an hour. She’s on a roll.

Beth: What is Riley wearing?

Sa’iyda: A tiny Santa hat! Whimsical! I love it.

Beth: Cry number seven! Should I have upped it to ten?

Sa’iyda: I don’t know. But I love the pink lights on the wall. The handsome man understands romance.

Beth: Ooh, I like her flannel.

Sa’iyda: I love it! I also love Riley’s green jumpsuit. I want one of those.

Beth: He’s wearing a tool belt.

Sa’iyda: That’s hot. I want a tool belt.

Sa’iyda: “I’m gay, but I’m hungry” feels like something I would get on a tee shirt.

Beth: Here we go, the unveiling of the lesbian trauma.

Sa’iyda: Ooh, a bisexual woman who wouldn’t leave her husband for the lesbian. What a progressive idea.

Beth: Well it’s better than falling for a straight woman I guess.

Sa’iyda: That is so Buck’s apartment.

Beth: Ooh, she got him the toy he wanted as a kid.

Sa’iyda: It’s called ebay, it’s not that hard!

Beth: Is that Jennifer Love Hewitt singing?

Sa’iyda: Yup! Saves money if she’s on the soundtrack. I love Riley’s suit.

Beth: Are those their kids? So cute!

Sa’iyda: “Slay!” Sounds like a fifth grader. I heard all the kids saying that at school.

Cry number eight is the biggest one, complete with Jennifer Love Hewitt covering John Waite’s “Missing You” in the background. With less than ten minutes before the movie is over, we’re calling it at eight cries.

Sa’iyda: Is Riley wearing jeans in bed? I have questions about her etiquette.

Beth: No no, they’re sweats. You can see the drawstring.

Sa’iyda: Yes Andie! Get that venture capital money girl! Get your man!!

Beth: So the thing we learned is that we spent the whole movie lusting over the handsome man?

Sa’iyda: Babe, we’re gay, not blind.

13 Sapphic Holiday Romances To Devour This Winter

There are few things I love more than a good romance. Or even a bad romance. One of those things? A good (or bad!) holiday romance. Anyone who knows me knows I’m a sucker for a cheesy Hallmark Christmas rom-com. Yes, they’re predictable, but that’s the charm of them! My biggest issue? Not enough sapphic holiday rom-coms.

And that’s where books come in! While TV networks are slow to catch on that sapphics want to see our love stories on-screen, books are willing to keep up with the demand. These stories make you want to curl up on the couch in a thick sweater with a mug of your favorite hot chocolate while sitting next to your twinkling Christmas tree.

Because what is the holiday season about if not a little romance? (I say this as a person who got engaged on Christmas!)

Make My Wish Come True by Rachael Lippincott & Alyson Derrick

Teen actress Arden James is more well-known for her party girl persona than her acting abilities. So when a picky director won’t give her a role because of her off-screen antics, Arden and her publicist make up a lie. They say that she’s from a small town (technically not a lie) and that she’s dating her childhood best friend Caroline (huge lie), which she can prove when she goes home for Christmas.

Caroline isn’t interested in anything having to do with Arden James. She’s been out of sight, out of mind for years. But when Arden shows up on her doorstep promising her an article in Cosmopolitan in exchange for pretending to be her girlfriend for 12 days, Caroline knows that it’s the journalistic opportunity she needs. What could possibly go wrong?

I’ll Be Gone for Christmas by Georgia K. Boone

If you wished that holiday classic The Holiday had a sapphic element, you’re in luck with this new holiday romance.

Bee Turner needs to get away from San Francisco. Everything is too much. So when her best friend suggests she list her sleek apartment on popular house swapping site Vacate, Bee jumps at the chance to escape. Meanwhile, Clover Mills has been having a year. Between losing her mother and ending things with her fiancé as a result, she needs to get out of her small Ohio town. When she hears about Vacate, her bags are packed faster than you can say cable car.

When she gets to San Francisco, Clover can’t seem to avoid Bee’s sister Beth, while Bee keeps finding herself in the presence of Clover’s ex, Knox. Maybe holiday magic is a real thing after all.

It’s important to mention that only one of these storylines is sapphic, featuring a late-in-life coming out story.

Make the Season Bright by Ashley Herring Blake

Ashley Herring Blake sapphic holiday romance? Say less, I’m already in.

Charlotte Donovan is living the dream as a violinist in New York City. Nevermind the fact that she was left at the altar five years ago and she never hears from her single mother. She’s ready for Christmastime in the city when her ensemble mate Sloane invites everyone to Colorado for the holiday.

The group aren’t the only ones in Colorado for Christmas — Sloane’s sister has brought home her friend Brighton, who just happens to be Charlotte’s ex. Now the two women have to pretend that they don’t know each other. Except that gets increasingly harder as their past comes back to them with a vengeance.

I’ll Get Back to You by Becca Grischow

There is something about a holiday romance that just begs for a fake dating storyline. Technically, this is a Thanksgiving story, but honestly, it’s all the holiday season in my mind!

All Murphy wants is to get out of her small Illinois town and start her life somewhere else. Instead, she’s stuck working in the same coffee shop she’s been working at since she was sixteen, and she doesn’t think she’ll ever be able to pass that pesky community college class that’s keeping her from graduating.

Murphy’s string of bad luck could potentially change thanks to former classmate Ellie Meyers. Ellie’s mom just happens to be the same professor whose class Murphy keeps failing. Ellie and Murphy realize that they are each other’s best bets for the next step in their goal lists, so they hatch a fake dating plan. Except the dating quickly feels not so fake…

This Christmas by Georgia Beers

No-kill animal shelter Junebug Farms decide to sponsor their town’s annual Christmas parade as a way to bring more attention to the shelter. And they will use the parade’s king and queen to create videos to ensure that all their pups are delivered to their forever homes on Santa’s sleigh.

What they don’t know is that the parade is going to have two queens this year. That is if longtime dog walking volunteer (and resident matchmaker) Mia Sorenson has her way. Mia rigs the voting so that her granddaughter Samantha and her friend Keegan get the gig. But will the two women overcome years of beating around the bush and the public embarrassment to make true love real?

Make You Mine This Christmas by Lizzie Huxley-Jones

Haf hasn’t had the best year, and all she wants to do is go to a Christmas party and have a good time. But her good time gets a little too festive: she gets drunk and kisses Christopher under the mistletoe while his ex-girlfriend just happens to be watching.

Suddenly, a drunken kiss turns into a fake relationship, with Haf joining Chrisopher’s family for the holiday season so he can save face. But word to the wise Haf, don’t fall in love with your fake boyfriend’s sister…

Most Wonderful by Georgia Clark

The Belvedere siblings’ lives are all falling apart when they show up to celebrate Christmas in the Catskills with their singer/actress mother Babs. Oldest daughter Liz has become a showrunner who can’t figure out season two of her hit show, and also can’t get a handle on her crush on the show’s star Violet. Her comedian middle sister Birdie is chasing skirts more than she’s chasing gigs, causing her to fear that she will be a flash in the pan. And then there’s their little brother Rafi, who proposed to his coworker girlfriend in front of the whole office and got turned down.

During their time in the mountains, each of the siblings learns a lot about themselves, their eccentric mother, and each other. And of course, there’s also a little holiday romantic sparkle.

The Christmas Swap by Talia Samuels

The last thing newly single businesswoman Margot wants is a holiday romance. But when sweet Ben needs a girlfriend to spend Christmas with him and his family, she can’t say no. She knows that nothing will happen — she’ll get a couple weeks away from London, Ben gets his family off his back. It’s a win-win situation.

There is something that Margot didn’t anticipate when making the deal: Ben’s sister Ellie. She has Margot majorly rethinking the whole holiday romance thing.

A Holly Jolly Christmas: A Second Chance Lesbian Romance by Emily Wright

Everything you need to know about this story is right there in the title. If there’s another trope I love for a holiday romance, it’s second chance.

Holly hasn’t been home in the two years since her brother died. Her family is still grieving, her ex won’t stop calling, and everything gets worse when she bumps into her first love, Vicky Castleton.

While Holly is trying to heal the broken parts of herself, her family and best friend keep pushing her to confront her past. And as she spends more time with Vicky, it’s clear that Holly has never gotten over her. Is Christmas the perfect time for her to risk it all for love?

It’s a Fabulous Life by Kelly Farmer

A sapphic It’s a Wonderful Life you say? Love it!

Bailey George is ready to bid adieu to Lanford Falls and finally leave her responsibilities behind for a vacation in New York City. But then the person taking over her leadership position for the town’s Winter Wonderfest gets sick, and obligation keeps Bailey from following through with her plans. While she’s pretty bummed about being stuck in Lanford Falls, things get a little better when her crush Marla agrees to help her out.

Unfortunately for Bailey, things just keep going wrong. Then one night, she finds herself under the town’s old bridge. When she wishes that she had never been born, a drag queen named Clara Angel shows her that Lanford Falls wouldn’t be better off without her. And holiday magic can make any dreams come true.

How to Excavate a Heart by Jake Maia Arlow

Shani didn’t mean to hit May with her mom’s Subaru. It was just another part of the curse of Winter Break, including the way Shani got dumped. But she’s going to push all that aside and focus on her month-long paleoichthyology internship. After all, that’s why she’s in D.C.

But when a dog walking gig serendipitously brings May back into Shani’s life, it’s easy to forget about fish fossils and heartbreak. Especially when they get snowed in together on Christmas Eve. Things were never supposed to turn out this way. Will Shani be able to accept that sometimes plans change?

Season of Love by Helena Greer

When artist Miriam Blum’s great aunt Cass dies and leaves her the family Christmas tree farm, she has to face parts of her past that she really doesn’t want to. All she wants to do is sit shiva (yes, there is something ironic about a Jewish woman running a Christmas tree farm), avoid her parents and get as far away from the farm as she can. But of course, life has other plans.

The business is about to go under, and to save it, Miriam must work together with Noelle, the farm’s grumpy manager. The chemistry between them is enough to burn the trees to the ground, but will that help them save the farm?

In the Event of Love by Courtney Kae

LA event planner Morgan’s life has blown up after a work-related scandal, and she’s forced to head home to Fern Falls for the holidays. But Fern Falls isn’t the idyllic holiday haven she wants it to be. Mainly because her former best friend turned crush Rachel is there. Rachel, who has now become a sexy lumberjane thanks to working at her family’s Christmas tree farm.

Soon, Morgan learns that Rachel’s tree farm is the only thing keeping Fern Falls from being sold to a seedy developer. So Morgan decides to put her party planning to good use and create the ultimate holiday experience. But just because she’s helping Rachel’s farm doesn’t mean they’re going to fall in love. Right?

A Gift Guide for Your Favorite Iced Coffee Loving Queer

According to all the memes, no one has a dependency on iced coffee quite like the queers do. Whether it’s December or July, you can pry an iced coffee out of a queer’s cold — VERY COLD — hands. I have been known to don a pair of fingerless gloves just to have a better grip on the freezing cold plastic cup from my favorite coffee place that holds the sweet, cold elixir I consider my emotional support beverage.

Supporting an iced coffee habit gets pricey, so maybe you want to start making your own at home. Honestly, it’s a smart choice to make, and there are plenty of ways to make your favorite cold caffeinated beverage in the privacy of your own home. Of course, you can use a regular coffee maker and just throw ice in the cup to make an iced coffee. But since the drink has grown in popularity, there are coffee makers equipped to make iced coffee more specifically.

While iced coffee is one option, cold brew is also a tasty alternative cold coffee. The biggest difference between the two is that like its name suggests, cold brew is brewed with cold water, so it’s a different process than regular iced coffee. It takes longer and requires a different kind of maker. No matter how you like your cold coffee, there are more ways than ever to make it yourself!

Makers

1. Instant Cold Brew Glass Coffee Maker, 32-Oz ($60)
2. Mr. Coffee® Iced™ Coffee Maker with Reusable Tumbler and Filter ($29)
3. OXO Compact Cold Brew Coffee Maker ($28)
4. Hamilton Beach 12 Cup Programmable Hot & Iced Coffee Maker ($50)

While there are a million different kinds of coffee makers out there, finding an iced coffee/cold brew maker is a little bit more of a process. These things can get pricey (makers from KitchenAid and Keurig are over $100), but there are some solid affordable options out there now that cold coffee has grown in popularity.

Iced coffee is a much faster process than making cold brew. You can have an iced coffee that is ready in less than 10 minutes. The iced coffee makers aren’t that different from a standard coffee maker. In fact, the Hamilton Beach maker does both (and its programmable!).

A standard cold brew maker needs at least 12 hours to properly brew and steep a batch of cold brew. Usually, a cold brew maker is going to hold more than a standard coffee maker, so you don’t have to make a fresh batch every day; depending on how much you drink at a time, you may only have to make it twice a week. The Instant cold brew maker is from the same company that makes the Instant Pot, which means that you’ll get that same cold brew taste in much less time, which is great!

Coffee

1. Kauai Coffee Cold Brew ($18)
2. Grounds & Hounds Coffee Sunny Spot Cold Brew Blend ($16)
3. Stone Street French Vanilla Cold Brew ($17)
4. Bizzy Cold Brew Organic Espresso Blend ($15)

There’s a difference between regular iced coffee and cold brew. If you’re making your own cold brew, one thing that’s important to remember is that cold brew grounds and regular coffee grounds are different. Cold brew grounds are coarser because usually you’re steeping them in cold water. They have to work harder to brew, so they’re rougher. I personally really like the Hawaiian cold brew blends from Kauai Coffee, but you’ll likely have to do some trial and error to see what tastes right to you.

If you’re just going to make regular iced coffee, you technically can use any kind of ground coffee you prefer. The basic bitch in me loves a Dunkin iced coffee, so that’s the kind I’m buying for home use. My wife is slightly fancier than me, so she likes Peet’s coffee. To each their own. But let it be known, brands like Dunkin do make specific iced coffee grounds if you’re so inclined to want them.

Cups

1. “Powered By Iced Coffee” Tumbler ($19+)
2. “Fueled By Iced Coffee and Anxiety” Mug ($24)
3. Hydrapeak Traveler 25oz Stainless Steel Insulated Tumbler With Lid And Straw ($20)
4. Owala 24oz Stainless Steel Straw Tumbler ($28)

Iced coffee tastes best in a cup that keeps up the “iced” in the name. Since I really got into drinking iced coffee and cold brew, I have amassed quite a collection of tumblers with straws and lids. Because I have so many, I have become a bit of a connoisseur; a regular plastic tumbler isn’t going to keep your drink cold for very long. A mug doesn’t have enough room for ice, so I wouldn’t use it unless you’re drinking cold brew out of it.

A double vacuum insulated tumbler is really the best way to keep your iced coffee nice and cold. Usually they come in any size starting at 8 ounces. I tend to get one that’s around 20 ounces — you want to make sure you have room for ice. I have reusable ice cubes because I hate watery drinks. You can also fill an ice cube tray with coffee and make coffee ice cubes to keep your drink extra potent.

Accessories

1. Dreo Electric Milk Frother for Coffee ($40)
2. Milk Frother Electric,4 in 1 ($30)
3. Coffee Lover 50 ml 5-pack Variety Pack ($11)
4. “More Espresso Less Depresso” Sticker ($4)

One of the fun parts of getting your iced coffee somewhere else is that you can make it fun and fancy with things like foams and syrups. But fear not! You can do those things at home thanks to these accessories.

The Dreo milk frother is good for both hot and cold milk foam, but more importantly, it works with dairy based milks and plant based milks. And we all know, you can’t separate a queer from their plant based milk (Shoutout to oatmilk for always having my back!).

If you’re like me, you think the taste of coffee is absolutely disgusting. You can hide that with coffee creamer (many also come in plant based milks now), or if you like using non-flavored milk, or if you’re one of those people who drink black coffee, use a syrup! Torani is arguably one of the most famous syrup makers, and this coffee lover variety pack includes Brown Sugar Cinnamon, White Chocolate, and three classic flavors: Hazelnut, Caramel, and Vanilla.

Looking to jazz up your favorite insulated cup? Might I suggest this funny sticker? When I searched Redbubble for lesbian stickers, this was one of the first things to pop up. Make of that what you will.

New Documentary ‘Our Dad, Danielle’ Didn’t Know How Necessary It Would Become

Since the 2024 election, a lot of conversations have been taking place about the roles “red states” played in its unfortunate outcome. Often, people who live elsewhere are quick to blame those who live in these places for everything that’s wrong, and write them off as unworthy. But what about the queer people in those states? If we write off entire states, then we’re leaving our queer community behind. Their stories deserve to be told too.

Our Dad, Danielle, directed by S.E. King, tells the story of Danielle “DJ” Healey, a white trans woman living in Texas, as well as Healey’s wife Becky, daughter, and other close family and friends. Healey, a patent lawyer, officially transitioned in 2017, the first year of Trump’s first term. The story evolves over several years, showing Healey and those she loves clunkily easing into their new life — and living openly in spite of a state and a country that’s often against them.

I sat down to talk to Healey and King just days before the presidential election. Even though we knew that her story was important even without the context of impending doom, we had no idea how necessary the documentary would become.

Healey and King were neighbors in the town of Sugar Land, Texas. In fact, King admitted that they came out to Danielle and Becky as a lesbian before they even came out to their own parents. And years later, Healey would do something quite similar.

“Danielle initially came out to me,” King shared. “She asked me to keep it a secret, so I did. Then she announced it on Facebook very soon after that.”

In an attempt to normalize her life as a newly out trans woman, Healey started writing short comedic skits, turning them into videos starring herself, Becky, and their daughter Sarah. When she realized she needed a director for the project, King was the only person Healey could imagine filling the role. “I didn’t think twice,” King said.

As much as they may have wanted to be a family of comedians, the Healey family never quite found their footing with the format. But there was something about their story that King found worthy. The fake version of their story wasn’t going to work, but what about the real version? Shortly after the failed film shoot, King sat down with the family to start doing exploratory interviews for the documentary that eventually became Our Dad, Danielle. They all quickly realized that a documentary was the best way forward for the project, and over the next few years, they worked very closely to bring Danielle’s story to those who needed it most.

If you’re queer, there might not be much about Our Dad, Danielle that is revolutionary, but that’s exactly what makes it work. The documentary isn’t trying to make any large statements; it’s merely about the life of one trans woman in a place where many people in her state would rather see her dead than happy.

“I came out as a trans woman in Texas during the age of Trump. For me, there was no stealth coming out,” she said when I asked about her choice to tell her story in such a visible way. “I’m a big, ugly old broad and there’s no hiding it. Coming out may not have been a smart thing to do, but for me to stay alive, it was the only thing for me to do.”

“I wanted to be as honest as I could with her story understanding that, as a community, we have to recognize that we can live in bubbles at times in our cool hip cities like LA or San Francisco or New York or Portland,” King said of the necessity for some queer people to engage with Healey’s story as well.

It was King’s upbringing as a queer person in a red state that made them interested in telling Danielle’s story. They wanted to “take the hand” of the average viewer and give them a slice-of-life type of view of a trans person who could be a member of their community.

“I grew up in a very Christian conservative family where I really struggled to express myself honestly,” they shared. “But what I really wanted to focus on was the beauty that comes once you accept yourself, and once those people around you see you shine.”

King accomplished their mission. Healey’s openness and earnestness is paired with a twinge of matter-of-factness that makes you feel like she’s talking directly to you. In addition to Healey’s wife and daughter, many people in Healey’s life feature heavily in Our Dad, Danielle. Her brother and her sister-in-law both offer insight on the couple over the years. A law colleague and close friend of Healey’s, Cynthia, shares the ways she was there to offer support before she had officially come out as trans. In the latter half of the film, we are introduced to Sasha Simmon and Jeri Ann Young, two trans women to whom Healey has become close.

Young shares that she didn’t come out as a trans woman until she was 66-years-old, and shows the ways she shows up for her community. Simmon is an asylum seeker from Honduras whose life was literally threatened because she’s trans, causing her to flee. Through Ana Andrea Molina, the founder of Organizacion Latina de Trans en Texas, Simmon was connected to Healey for pro bono legal representation. Healey was able to get Simmon out of a men’s detention center, and bring her into the Healey home during the early days of the pandemic.

Healey’s story really transforms when she begins to use her career as a way to show up for her community. She shares that after her transition, she lost a lot of her patent and intellectual law clients, but began doing more pro bono work with asylum seekers, both LGBTQ+ people and others.

“In every one of my cases involving asylum, whether it’s for a gay person, a trans person, or even a cisgender person, every one of those cases involves someone fleeing from potentially being murdered or otherwise being harmed in a very terrible way,” she revealed. “They just come here because they got to get away from where they are. They got to get somewhere safe and the U.S. is perceived as safe.”

Seeing moments like this, where Healey uses her skills as a means to advocate for herself and others, is where she shines the most. During the years-long process of making Our Dad, Danielle, Healey “retroactively or retrospectively” began to confront the amount of privilege she had as a white, upper-class, educated person with a good career who presented as a cis man. She admits that her career and finances still allow her some privilege, but moving through the world as a woman is a wholly different experience.

“I’ve suffered the same kind of indignities other women have from unwanted sexual contact, to being patronized, being ignored, and being marginalized,” she shared. “I’m not necessarily shocked, but I was very surprised about the differences, even professional women suffer compared to professional men and the credibility hits that professional women suffer and how difficult it is for professional women.”

“To actually live full time as a woman has really woken me up to the fact that women are not, by any means, on a level playing field with men.”

There was something important that the cameras didn’t really capture — during their time with Healey and those close to her, King finally began to sit with their own gender and gender expression.

“I was interviewing Jeri, and Jeri was like, ‘oh, so you’re one of us.’ And I was like, wow,” King said. “I was starting to really. understand more and be honest about who I am and how I wanted to be perceived. I always felt almost like a little bit of shame around or didn’t have the confidence to ask for it.”

They added that one of their biggest lessons while making the film was simple: “We have to have empathy for everybody’s process and timeline with this. Because you just don’t know where someone’s coming from. I think that the biggest thing that we try to do is to really have grace and humanity.”

Our Dad, Danielle is now available to rent.

Don’t Leave Joy Oladokun Out of the Conversation About the Queer Musician Boom

feature image photo by Lexander Bryant

“I got back from South Africa like a few days ago and I’m still jet lagged, but I finally feel like I’m not hallucinating anymore,” Joy Oladokun tells me. We’re talking via Zoom on a Thursday; the late morning sun shining behind Oladokun as she sits in her living room in Nashville.

They were in South Africa to perform two shows for the “Rocking the Daisies” festival in Cape Town. Even though the festival was only two days, they spent nine days touring the country, splitting their time between Cape Town and Johannesburg, where they got to tour Nelson Mandela’s house. “It was good to marry my understanding of what it’s like to spend time in Africa with South Africa’s history,” they said, sharing with me that they had only spent time in Nigeria previously, since that’s where their family is from.

But now, Oladokun is in “Music City” as they prepare to release their latest album Observations From a Crowded Room. The album was largely performed, written and produced by Oladokun herself. And I had to know the choice behind that. Was it economical? Artistic? Existential? For them, it was all of the above. “Being in the music industry is so strange because people are so eager to spend your money all the time,” she says. We joke about the fact that when you’re signed to a record label, you’re given an advance — money the label loans you that is then expected to be paid back over time.

photo by Rachel Deeb

“There is this economic responsibility that I’m given when I signed to a label which I was aware of,” they say. “I think that the natural course of things, the next step is ‘let’s add to that loan number by hiring the most expensive producers and using the most expensive gear and making expensive music videos in an age where people don’t even watch music videos.”

She shares that the economical aspect wasn’t so much about “not recouping” the amount invested or being worried about their future financially. “It was economical in the sense that when they signed me, I was making music by myself in the attic of this house. And that’s the music that they like,” she explains. “So why would we not just do that again with a little more budget?”

When you listen to Observations From a Crowded Room, you will not miss the slick production of a mega producer like a Jack Antonoff (who Oladokun teamed up with earlier this year for the song “I Wished On The Moon.”) The album being a largely self-contained project gives it an intimate quality that isn’t replicable when you have a lot of hands in the pot. What you get is a raw, unflinchingly honest account of what it is to be a Black, queer artist in a world and an industry that is rife with both micro and macro aggressions.

Oladokun wrote the album’s first track “Letters From a Blackbird” while they were on mushrooms “on the last day of a tour that I had a really hard time being on.” They were “emotionally going through this thing where as a marginalized artist, as a Black queer artist that people made a lot of promises to, I feel so alone and so unsupported.”

“I just felt as an artist, if I perpetuate this system of working with another white guy that makes Black music and filtering my pain and my feelings and my frustrations through that, the messaging is going to get lost. And I also might get lost within that.”

“Letters From a Blackbird” is a striking way to open the album, drawing you into the emotional territory you’re going to navigate for the next 14 tracks. Ahead of the album’s release, there were four singles. The lead single, “I’d Miss the Birds,” is a melodic and melancholy rumination on what a life outside of Nashville could possibly look like. “The Proud Boys and their women make me feel out of place,” she sings along with an acoustic guitar. Despite the fact that Nashville is 30% Black, its mainstream culture is overwhelmingly white.

photo by Rachel Deeb

The track “Drugs” contains a line that really sticks out: “I’m just over trying to smoke away the rage,” a sentiment that echoes in the other singles “No Country” and “Questions, Chaos & Faith.” Since announcing this album, Oladokun has been incredibly candid about the ways her experiences as a Black woman in a white dominated industry have caused her to have a bit of a mental breakdown. In the album’s “Observation,” they quote James Baldwin where he talked about the things that progress has stolen from him. It was a quote that felt particularly resonant due to the season of life she was in.

“Being a Black woman, a queer artist in this moment; it cost me my time. It cost me my hair, moments with family. It took from me and people wanted me to keep going without acknowledging or grieving what was lost.” She points out there has been such a rush to return to life before lockdown, to pretend that 2020 didn’t exist, and she found herself doing that. But with this record, it was a way to give testament to where they’re really at. “As fun as it would be to hang out with Jack Antonoff in a basement somewhere and make music, it felt important for me to throw a wrench in the star-maker machine and be like, ‘what is the honest experience of this person that you’re trying to sell to everybody?’”

With that knowledge, it feels unsurprising that despite being a largely solitary experience, the album is called Observations From a Crowded Room. After touring extensively for the past two years (they’re not even done yet; they will be touring Australia and New Zealand for most of November with Hozier before kicking off their own “The Blackbird Tour” in 2025), things felt different for the self-professed introvert.

“When I reflect, when I regain energy, all of that happens alone,” they admit. “I think that part of me doing this record alone was — I genuinely actually need to be alone, whether you understand that about me or not.”

But it wasn’t just her need to be alone that led to this choice. She has spent a lot of time being the only Black artist opening for a white artist, and wanted to be “honest about how that feels and how some of those people treated me, some of them friends, some of them colleagues, and some of them just random fans — the good and the bad.”

“The only way to do it, or to take all those observations was by stepping back, which feels a little contradictory, but all those experiences and those voices and the influences, were still in the room with me as I was making the record,” she says.

We joked that Oladokun was “collecting cool white men like infinity stones,” including the aforementioned Antonoff and Hozier, as well as Chris Stapleton and John Mayer. But still, she carries her identities onto the stage. “Just because Hozier invites me to his tour doesn’t mean that the people that work for Hozier or that Hozier’s fans, or the security at the venue, care,” they point out. “It’s my responsibility to show up, but it’s not my fault if your security guard, while I’m carrying a guitar about to open an arena, asks me what I’m doing here.”

“John Mayer did such an incredible job of saying to his fans, to his crew, to everyone around him, like, this is a person that I chose to be here and respect their time,” Oladokun adds.

photo by Brian Higbee

“We live in an age where white men are trying to absolve their sins by having a Black or a queer artist that they’re close to,” Oladokun says. “Bonus points if it’s both,” they add. (Amen to that). “I’ve been marked over this past year by my desperate refusal to be that person for people.” They point out that because of the melodic nature of their music and “how high pitched” their voice is, people think they will go along with anything. But at the end of the day, their safety and mental health is paramount.

“I had these bum ass little white boys in Iowa shouting, ‘try that in a small town,’ while my band and I were playing during a festival,” they share. “It’s an interesting thing to be Black and queer, and people think that your invite is enough. And I think the conversation that I’m having is no, it’s also how you treat me when I get there.”

Talking to Oladokun was an absolute joy (no pun intended). Her level of candor was refreshing at a time when people might not want to say those quiet parts out loud. I had to ask her about the current moment queer women artists are having in the mainstream and how that moment seems to be…lacking something. After a fit of giggles on both our part, she was, again, refreshingly honest about being on the sidelines of that conversation, despite her songs being featured on Grey’s Anatomy.

“Not to take away from the success of other queer artists in the mainstream, but I’m a Black, queer, masc presenting, folk pop star,” they say. “If those identities are too at the forefront of any choice I make, all I’m going to get is backlash. People aren’t going to hear anything that I have to say. If I was six percent less confident, I would feel like my work doesn’t matter.” And they have an impressive list of accomplishments that should be acknowledged, like being in the Country Music Hall of Fame.

“I don’t think I’m a perfect person. I don’t think I’m the prototype for a Black, queer masc presenting person that should be elevated to the forefront. But I also recognize when I’m being ignored in a way that doesn’t feel consistent with what I’ve accomplished.”

Observations From a Crowded Room is out now.

Remember When Russian Pop Duo t.A.T.u Pretended To Be Lesbians?

Welcome to Remember When, a series in which we want to make sure you remembered a thing that happened pretty recently, in the grand scheme of things.

A couple months ago, I was working on one of my many Spotify playlists, going through songs from the early aughts, when “All the Things She Said” by Russian pop duo t.A.T.u. came up as a suggested track. I immediately hit “add to playlist.” 21 years after the song’s initial release, it’s still a bop. (Let’s not talk about the 21 years ago part, I am simply not in the mood to hurt my own feelings right now.)

Lena Katina and Julia Volkova, otherwise known as t.A.T.u, were packaged as a pair of pixie-like schoolgirl lesbians — what every man imagines lesbians look like — by managers Ivan Shapovalov and Alexander Voitinskiy. The name t.A.T.u. is a shortened version of the Russian phrase “Та любит ту,” which means “This [girl] loves that [girl].” The two men were inspired by the Swedish teen film Show Me Love, which is about two girls in a small town who realize they like each other.

“All the Things She Said” came out my junior year of high school, the same year I began my very own sapphic journey, and Show Me Love was the first sapphic film I’d ever seen, shown to me by the first girl I’d ever kissed. t.A.T.u. also has a song called “Show Me Love” on their debut album, and I remember illegally downloading it and burning it onto a mix CD. I listened to it so much it made up for the possible viruses I put onto our family computer.

“All the Things She Said” really made its impact in 2003. You couldn’t escape it — my local radio station played it all the time and I recorded it every single time. It was the first song I’d ever heard on the radio that was explicitly a girl singing a song about another girl. Listening to it in the privacy of my room felt like an open secret — I couldn’t believe that it was allowed on the radio! Even at 17, I understood a lot of their branding and imagery was created for the male gaze, and it didn’t matter much to me. Music was such an important part of my life at that age; just being able to sing along with a song on the radio that used female pronouns was life changing.

t.A.T.u wasn’t just known for their music, though — they also stirred up a lot of controversy.

From the minute “All the Things She Said” hit the airwaves, there had been rumblings that the girls in t.A.T.u. weren’t actually lesbians. I mean, it makes sense; they were too stereotypical. The schoolgirl outfits, Julia’s spiky short hair, Lena’s long curls. It just feels like what two older straight men think lesbians look like. They certainly didn’t look like any of the lesbians I knew at the time. They didn’t even look like teenage girls, even though they were.

Julia Volkova and Lena Katina of t.A.T.u. during 2003 MTV Movie Awards – Arrivals at The Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, California, United States. (Photo by Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic)

In early 2003, prior to an appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, the network told management that they didn’t want the girls to kiss or wear their shirts that said “Khuy Voyne!” (Fuck the war!). There’s no footage of the appearance on YouTube, but a clip from Jimmy Kimmel Live! the night after shows that the network cut away from the kiss to show their guitar player shredding the instrumental break. At the kiss point in the performance, Julia puts her hand in front of their faces, and it looks like she’s just whispering in Lena’s ear based on the faces they’re making when they pull away. Instead of the shirts with the Russian phrase, they’re wearing shirts that say “Censored.” The Kimmel interview is expectedly awkward, due to only Lena really being able to speak English and Jimmy Kimmel being a total creep.

But the t.A.Tu moment that is imprinted most dramatically on the millennial mind is their performance of “Not Gonna Get Us” at the 2003 MTV Movie Awards.

The performance begins with an introduction by Hilary Duff and Amanda Bynes, who do their best teenage starlet impressions as they list a bunch of 2003’s hottest men like Ashton Kutcher and Hugh Jackman before Bynes chirps, “These next two performers want nothing to do with any of them!” She’s saying the thing without saying the thing.

Julia and Lena appear in the audience in white tank tops and patterned handkerchief skirts, where they sing the opening chorus of “All the Things She Said.” They’re then joined by a literal horde of young women in the schoolgirl uniforms — complete with ties (very 2003) — who begin storming down the aisles towards the stage singing “Not Gonna Get Us.”

Lena and Julia walk back and forth across the stage singing while the “dancers” bop around chanting “not gonna get us!” — the choreography for these dancers is mostly just “shaking their butts in the audience’s faces.” As the song crescendos, the dancers begin ripping off their button-down shirts and skirts, leaving them in only tank tops and white briefs as statements like “Hide Your Daughters” flash on the screens behind them. The performance ends with everyone on stage except the alleged lesbian duo of t.A.T.u kissing.

(I feel like it’s also important to mention that throughout the performance, alleged rapist Diddy, convicted rapist Danny Masterson, and rape apologist Kutcher can be seen whooping and hollering in excitement. At the end of the performance, the three can be seen holding the discarded clothes of the dancers. 2003, everybody!)

If there was ever any doubt about them actually being lesbians in my mind, and there certainly were, that performance confirmed that maybe this was all an act. While U.S. late night might have been against them kissing on-screen, MTV would definitely be the place to do it. When it comes to MTV award shows, all bets were always off. I’d been watching MTV award shows for years; I saw Diana Ross jiggling Lil’ Kim’s right breast ON LIVE TELEVISION. Two women kissing wouldn’t have been a big deal. (And it wasn’t — two months after t..A.T.u. didn’t kiss, Britney Spears and Madonna did at the MTV VMAs.) The whole thing seemed in service of creating controversy, but all it did was titillate the male audience.

The MTV Movie Awards performance was the final live performance by the duo in the United States. It seems that their novelty had worn off already. Watching the videos back now, it looks clear to me that Lena would rather be anywhere but on stage pretending to be romantically interested in Julia. To her credit, Julia plays into the bit, caressing Lena’s face, and reaching for her hand as they sing. But Lena just never fully commits.

“I looked at it as my role … like a movie. We play in a role in a movie. That was my role. I never was a lesbian. I never was attracted to a girl. I never had that,” Lena told The Daily Beast in 2013. “I had some thoughts, because I was pretending to be who I wasn’t. And then, I was thinking about it a lot, ‘Why am I concerned?’ There are so many actors playing different roles in movies. I will just look at it as a movie. If I am helping people with this role, then why not.”

And they did help people. Even though I knew that the girls weren’t lesbians, the group had a profound impact on a lot of us. Seeing Julia and Lena kissing made a whole generation of girls realize that it’s okay to kiss girls. Of course it was too good to be true.

But the revelation that they weren’t lesbians did damage too. Julia and Lena were only accepted because they were white, thin and conventionally pretty. Queer women were able to accept them so easily because we were desperate for lesbian representation. All we had was Ellen, whose daytime talk show would premiere that fall, and Melissa Etheridge. It would be a year before The L Word would premiere on Showtime. In the spring of 2003, there were no lesbian pop stars. Real lesbians were still being ostracized, which made it easy for the fake ones to slip in.

Things got weird with t.A.T.u. when Julia got pregnant in 2004 by her boyfriend, fully shattering any pretense that the members were lesbians. She had her second child in 2007, and in a 2012 interview, she confirmed that she was still bisexual. “I still like boys and girls. Even my current husband, Volodya, sitting in front of me, would confirm that he knows about my stories with girls. For me, this is a current issue. Quite recently, I had a girlfriend that I liked … This is not even the echoes of the past, this is what I now live in,” she said.

Later, the duo were featured in a movie called You and I, adapted from a book called t.A.T.u. Come Back. Starring Mischa Barton doing a truly laughable Russian accent, it’s about two girls who meet on a t.A.T.u. fansite and fall for each other, which causes a string of adventures around Moscow. You can buy or rent it on YouTube. I found the trailer, and holy wow.

t.A.T.u. officially broke up in 2011, and Lena and Julia spent many years not speaking and taking swipes at each other. They have reunited for one-off performances over the last ten years or so, including a performance of “Not Gonna Get Us” that features the same chaotic dancer energy, but no lesbian kissing. Look, t.A.T.u. may not have been lesbians, but they still gave us a certified bop that hits just as hard today as it did 20 years ago. And isn’t that the most important thing?

Rachael Lippincott and Alyson Derrick Are Co-Authoring Sapphic YA Romances While Balancing Motherhood

feature image photo of Rachael Lippincott and Alyson Derrick via Instagram

Rachael Lippincott and Alyson Derrick are busy. They’re moms to a toddler, which would be enough, but Rachael is weeks away from giving birth to the couple’s second daughter. Oh, and they’re about to release their second co-authored book, the holiday YA rom com Make My Wish Come True.

I was able to catch up with the couple on Zoom, and we chatted about working together, motherhood, being a dual-creative household, and of course, the need for sapphic young adult stories.

Rachael Lippincott is the New York Times bestselling author of multiple young adult titles, including Five Feet Apart and most recently Pride and Prejudice and Pittsburgh. Alyson Derrick is the author of the great second-chance romance YA novel Forget Me Not. The two authors, who met while studying at the University of Pittsburgh, married in 2020. They released their first co-authored book, She Gets the Girl, in 2022. Things have changed since the last time they wrote a book together, so I just had to know how they keep it all together.

Alyson admits it’s “been a lot,” trying to manage their writing careers and raising their daughter Poppy. Their daughter isn’t in daycare, but Alyson’s brother will come over a few days a week to give them more time to work when they’re on deadline. “We’ve both learned to work much more efficiently,” Alyson says.

Rachael shares that she’s “pretty Type A” when it comes to working. “I would make a very strict schedule and kind of stick to it,” she says. But that changed when Poppy was born. She was about to begin revisions for Pride and Prejudice and Pittsburgh, and she started working at night. And since babies generally sleep on and off all day, even at night it was a lot of “holding and typing.”

When it came time to write Make My Wish Come True, Alyson says her brain was not working “in that way” after having a baby and raising an infant. In fact, Rachael wrote much of the book’s first draft. “I saw that she was struggling,” Rachael says. “I can write like the first draft, build the foundation,” allowing Alyson to “go into these chapters and make them 10 times better.”

Make My Wish Come True is the story of Arden James and Caroline Beckett who were childhood best friends. But now Arden is a Hollywood teen actor with a party-girl image that is getting in the way of her working with a big deal director. So she and her publicist concoct a lie to make her look good. They say she’s from a small town, which isn’t actually a lie, but they also decide to say her old friend Caroline is her girlfriend (a massive lie) and she’s going to prove it when she goes home for Christmas. Caroline, an aspiring journalist, only agrees to fake date her former bestie when Arden agrees to get her an article in Cosmopolitan magazine. After 12 days in an idyllic winter scene, it’s hard for the girls to tell if they’re acting anymore.

The process to write Make My Wish Come True was significantly different from when they wrote their first book together. Back then, they had the luxury of time, which is definitely not something you have with a baby who turns quickly into a toddler.

“I feel like back in the day, I had so much time to think and maybe spend a couple extra hours really dwelling on a chapter,” Alyson says. “And now it’s like you have like two hours, you better sit down and get started.”

“I think we also understand we both write differently,” Rachael explains. “I spend a lot of time thinking about it but then a lot of time I feel that to Alyson or, it seems like all of a sudden I’ll be like, ‘Well, I’m gonna write this story.’”

The December holidays and rom-coms go together like peppermint and chocolate. In the last few years, there’s been an uptick in sapphic rom-coms, so it’s no surprise that Alyson and Rachael would want to get in on that sweet holiday love action. If you ask Rachael, she claims Alyson came up with the idea with Make My Wish Come True, but apparently, Alyson doesn’t remember!

“It’s a great genre,” Rachael says. “I feel like every holiday season I always love watching the Hallmark Christmas movies or whatever Netflix Christmas movie.” The pair “wanted to run with that idea,” and of course, being in love with your best friend is a very specific kind of story we all know and love. The two were able to infuse parts of their own holiday traditions into the story. Rachael, who grew up with a Jewish mom, was able to include that in the book. “It was my first experience writing a character with a very similar upbringing to me,” she says. “There’s a family Hanukkah party in the book that’s very much based on my family Hanukkah party every year.”

Rachael and Alyson are already working on another holiday story: a holiday novella starring Alex and Molly from She Gets the Girl that releases in fall 2025.

Right now, the publishing world is kind of a dumpster fire, especially when it comes to stories for teens and young adults. Selling sapphic stories is hard, and both women feel the pressure to perform in an industry that is sink or swim. Rachael was very honest about the stress. “I need to have something new,” she says. “We wrote a book together, and it did hit the New York Times Bestseller List and a lot of people really enjoyed it, but there’s just such a thing in publishing where I’m already thinking about Make My Wish Come True marketing.”

“I’m not doing enough because I’m pregnant and I’m tired,” Rachael says. “It’s not necessarily an easy thing to do, come up with a TikTok, especially when it’s Saturday. We know we have to post a TikTok. We don’t know what we’re going to do.” She admits that promo is more her thing (if you’re not following her on social media, you should be. Her commitment to the story when creating content is truly inspired. And Alyson is a very good sport about it), but it’s still a matter of “what is going to hook people? Is the algorithm going to be in your favor? Did we not make the video long enough by accident?”

The amount of additional work that goes into being a published author is enough to make a lot of people not want to do it at all. But becoming beholden to the algorithm is unfortunately a crucial way of keeping relevant, especially when you’re writing for a younger audience. Teens don’t always just walk into a bookstore and browse to find their next read. They need the books to come to them.

At a time when a lot of young adult authors are jumping ship to write adult sapphic romances, I had to ask if Rachael and Alyson have ever considered doing the same. “I feel like I never really felt capable of it up until maybe having Poppy for some reason,” Rachael says.

Being a mom definitely makes you feel like more of an adult. If they do ever decide to move into the adult space, I’ll be reading.

Make My Wish Come True by Rachael Lippincott and Alyson Derrick is out now.

A Cozy Queer Romance for Lovers of Tarot With Mommy Issues

There’s a slight chill in the air, and all the pumpkin drinks are back, which means fall is right around the corner. I find myself turning away from the light, frothy beach reads and looking for something a little thicker and cozier. Enter Rebekah Faubion’s debut queer romcom, The Lovers.

The Lovers features Kit Larson, a woman on the precipice of change. As the book opens, Kit has been dumped by her latest boyfriend and left without a place to live. She plans to break the news to her parents during her mother’s birthday brunch, but they have a bombshell of their own: Her mother has left her father…for a woman. For Kit’s whole life, her parents’ marriage has been her ideal — her romcom-obsessed father taught her to accept nothing less than a Nancy Meyers movie romance.

Kit’s world is rocked for another reason: Her mother’s sexuality has forced her to confront her own. Even though she’s always dated men, she has known that she wasn’t straight for a long time. But there was only one woman she ever allowed herself to get close enough to, and that was her high school best friend. They had an intense friendship that abruptly ended when they allowed themselves to cross the line into more than friends. The shock of her latest breakup and her mom’s coming out spur her to accept a job reading tarot cards at the wedding of a majorly popular influencer in Joshua Tree.

Julia Kelley is also on the precipice of change. After spending years working for the same event company, she’s coordinating the wedding of the same influencer that Kit is working for. If everything with the wedding goes well, Julia will be able to finally say farewell to the company and strike out on her own. Everything has to be perfect — so when Julia finds out that her closeted ex-girlfriend Piper is replacing an injured bridesmaid, she is understandably freaking out. But she’s determined not to let it get in her way. She’s a professional damnit, she can handle a vicious ex-girlfriend bridesmaid.

Both Julia and Kit’s worlds are rocked when they see each other at the wedding. Julia was Kit’s high school best friend, the same one whose heart she broke. Can they make it through the weekend in one piece, or will the close proximity and Kit’s fear of her sexuality force them to confront their past? Only the cards will tell.

Tarot is a big part of The Lovers which feels like an incredibly LA thing to make a third main character in your book. Kit is a tarot social media influencer, and she has quite a following. She explains that her obsession with tarot began in college as a way to deal with her anxiety. The cards gave her tangible reasoning for the things she was spiraling over. Kit uses the cards to explain things that don’t make sense; that’s why she always keeps a deck on hand. She’ll pull them out at any time she needs them, even while she’s driving.

Not only is tarot a big part of Kit’s life, but it’s an integral component of her relationship with Julia. When they were in middle school, a tarot deck read by a local mystic revealed the two were twin flames. The girls may not have understood what that meant in the moment, but as she learned more, Kit made an important realization: You can’t outrun your twin flame. Sure, you may put them aside or run from them, but sooner or later, they will come back and burn everything you thought you knew to the ground. That is Kit and Julia’s relationship — a smoldering collection of embers that is waiting for the littlest puff of wind to completely explode. Faubion does a great job of creating the most delicious balance of caution and burn it to the ground chemistry between the two characters. They are a powder keg just waiting for the spark, and when it happens, oh buddy, it’s beautiful.

While they’re all fire, the romance between the two is a slow burn. The bulk of the story spreads over a wedding weekend, but the action is packed. As much as Kit and Julia are constantly drawn to each other, they can only steal steamy moments in tents and behind locked doors. It’s all a build up to the most delicious sex scene. Full of longing, desire and lust, Faubion is a master with her words. She expertly captures Kit’s nerves about having sex with a woman for the first time and the absolutely heady experience that is oral sex. She sets the scene up perfectly, creating a near cinematic descriptions. It’s exactly what you’d expect for someone who loves romcoms.

Faubion has a very cinematic eye, which is clear from the beginning of the story. Many authors give their readers a lot of runway to build the story’s world in their heads. But with The Lovers, she creates a richly detailed version of Los Angeles and Joshua Tree. I’m from LA, so I’m familiar with the areas she describes, but even if you’ve never been there, you will feel like you have been by the end of the book. Her descriptions are full of color, texture, smell. In another story it might come off as heavy-handed, but in this story, it feels as lush as the Joshua Tree desert. It’s easy to get sucked into this world and these characters.

As lush as her world building is, Faubion relies a lot on pop culture references in The Lovers, and if I’m being totally honest, it’s a little overwhelming. Sometimes, it feels like Faubion is trying to prove her knowledge of queer culture. Full disclosure: I don’t really like a lot of current pop culture references in books, even though I’m someone who’s very into pop culture. It dates the book a little, and feels a little too close to the real world, which isn’t always something I want out of a book. And as much as I love Taylor Swift, there were way too many references to her and her music in the book. I absolutely understand the urge, but it doesn’t come off as hip or cute — it’s actually quite cringe. Truly though, this was my only complaint with the book.

If you’re looking for a good book to curl up with by the campfire and toast some s’mores, or to read while you sip your favorite seasonal beverage, The Lovers is absolutely the best choice. The cards say so.

The Lovers by Rebekah Faubion is out now.

‘A Bánh Mì for Two’ Is a Swoony Sapphic Romance Between Two Foodies

I’m not a foodie, but I love food, and I love stories that revolve around food even more. That’s why I couldn’t wait to read A Bánh Mì for Two by Trinity Nguyen. The story combines two of my favorite things: girls falling in love, and finding connection through food!

A Bánh Mì for Two is about Vivi, a Vietnamese-American girl who lies to her immigrant parents and spends her summer studying abroad in Sài Gòn, even though they think she’s in Singapore. Told in dual perspectives, the other half of the pair is Lan, a young woman still mourning the loss of her father four years after his death. She and her mother run a bánh mì stall, but Lan’s real passion is her popular blog and Instagram account, A Bánh Mì for Two. Vivi is a loyal follower of Lan’s work, though she has no idea the young woman from the bánh mì stall across from her dorm is the same person who inspired her to travel all the way to Vietnam in the first place.

An encounter away from the stall leads Vivi to learn Lan’s true identity, and a chance meeting leads the girls to make a deal: Lan will help Vivi find out more about her mother’s life in Vietnam before she immigrated to America, and in return, Vivi will help Lan overcome her “writer’s block,” and enter a food writing contest. Food and the magic of the city of Sài Gòn create the perfect backdrop for the two girls to fall in love.

It has been a long time since a book made me so hungry! The way Nguyen describes food in A Bánh Mì for Two makes your mouth water. It has made me want to drag my wife to Little Saigon and have a feast. It’s clear from the way she writes that Nguyen has a love for food, but it’s seen not only in the way Lan describes food for her Instagram account, but the way Vivi describes eating as well.

In recent years, I’ve taken more of an interest in the ways food and culture intersect. Food is a great connector — think about how many of the best experiences revolve around a meal. Though Vivi is first bonded to Lan through Lan’s Instagram and blog, food becomes the thing that connects them IRL. Whether it’s at Lan’s family bánh mì stall or the egg coffee shop where they make their deal to help each other, food is their commonality.

As the American-born child of Vietnamese immigrants, food is the one thing that Vivi has to connect her to the country she knows nothing about. Her mother, who immigrated as a young adult, refuses to tell Vivi stories of her home country. And while she will shut down any talk of home, she finds another key way to share it with her daughter: food. Vietnamese food is as common to Vivi as a hamburger, but experiencing it in the place where it comes from, where her mother learned to cook it through time-honored tradition, just makes it taste different. However, there are some foods she refuses to eat simply because her mother’s version is so good. Something about that felt so real.

While food is the way Lan and Vivi first connect and the thing that drives the story forward, their sense of familial obligation is also a big part of their bond. Since Lan’s beloved Ba died, she has felt the weight of obligation: to her mother, to her family’s bánh mì stall, to the city of Sài Gòn itself. These burdens drag her down every day. But she’s afraid to remove any of those weights. As her parents’ only child, she knows that if she doesn’t pick up the slack, no one else will. But really, the obligation is a mask for fear: fear of the unknown, fear of living, of losing her memories of Ba.

It’s a different kind of only child obligation for Vivi. Her parents have taught her nothing about their homeland, and she knows that she’ll never learn about her heritage if she doesn’t do it herself. Knowing more about the place her mother fled from will answer every question Vivi has — she believes that spending time in Sài Gòn will give her the sense of belonging she desperately wishes for. But that desire constantly rubs up against the obligation she has to not break her mother’s broken heart more. Clearly, the pull to “disobey” her mother’s wishes wins, and while she certainly feels guilty, she knows that her trip is the thing to heal their relationship.

As an only child myself, I felt those parts of the book the deepest. Nguyen absolutely nails that constant internal fight we have between being our own person and being a “good” daughter. So often, society talks about the oldest daughter and her obligations to her family — it was really nice to see only daughters and their struggles highlighted.

Another thing I absolutely love in fiction is when the setting is a character, and A Bánh Mì for Two absolutely has that in spades. I will admit that my knowledge of Vietnam, and more specifically Sài Gòn, is extremely limited. But the way Nguyen writes about it, it’s clear that Sài Gòn has a big part of her heart. This book would never work anywhere but in the city; she expertly puts you directly there from the first page. It’s easy to see why Vivi is instantly smitten despite knowing next to nothing about it. The city has a pulse, and you can feel its heart beating with every page you turn. I could feel the heat of the crowded night markets, the characters pushing through a throng of people to get the next delicious dish. The smells of the street food wafted right out of Nguyen’s words and straight into my nostrils. When the girls get caught in a monsoon, I felt like I needed a poncho. I could perfectly see the waterlogged streets, Lan’s motorbike floating down the road. The city hums and thrums, and it creates a rhythm you feel from start to finish.

If you’re looking for a story that will make you hungry, swoony, and full of wanderlust, look no further than A Bánh Mì for Two. It is a great summer read; throw it in your beach bag, or enjoy it on a sunny day under a tree. Just make sure you have a snack on hand while you read!

A Bánh Mì for Two by Trinity Nguyen is out now.

Queer Moms Discuss What It Means To Come Out to Our Kids

At the beginning of this month, Tig Notaro appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, admitting things were “weird” after Colbert wished her a happy Pride.

During the conversation, Tig admitted that her and Stephanie Allynne’s almost eight-year-old twins didn’t know their moms were gay. She recalled coming out to them during their car ride to school. “I was so stunned, because we’ve lived together almost eight years and I’ve been gay the whole time ― even prior!” she said. She went on to give a basic explanation of gay meaning “girls like girls and boys like boys,” since they were pressed for time.

“What do you think about what I just told you?” she asked. “Oh, I love my family,” her son said.

What was most interesting about the story was when she admitted she was “insecure” about how her sons would react to finding out their moms were gay. She used the word “insecure” more than once, which also fascinated me. But she made a good point: Her sons only know her and Stephanie as their moms, not as the lesbian icons they are. Despite seeing wedding pictures around the house and knowing they only have moms, the boys didn’t necessarily know what “being gay” meant. This is the only life they’ve ever known.

Hearing Tig’s words made me think about my own kid. He’s a little bit older than Tig’s boys, and he definitely understands what being gay means. But I thought back to when he was younger, and I definitely had similar feelings to Tig when it came to being worried he would feel differently about me once he knew I’m a lesbian.

Unlike Tig’s boys, my son has a dad. But we split up when my son was a baby, so he never saw us as a couple. I started dating women when my son was almost five. There’s one woman I dated who he actually got to meet, and after they met, I had to explain that mom liked her and we were more than just friends. One night, he and I laid in bed and I explained to him that girls can like girls and boys can like boys. At first, he didn’t believe me, but I Googled some pictures of same-sex couples and showed him.

After I told him I was queer, he was worried I would marry the woman I was dating and leave him behind, but once I explained that no one was more important to me than he was, he was like, “yeah okay, so you kiss girls. Big whoop.”

To this day, I’m grateful my son was still little when I told him. He wasn’t in school full time, and there was less of a chance he would hear anything derogatory about queer people in preschool. Having a kid who is school aged is incredibly stressful when you’re a queer parent — you don’t have control of what other kids tell them about queerness. And if you haven’t talked to them before they start school, it’s easy to understand why there would be some fear about their reaction. You don’t know if someone’s beat you to it and told them all the wrong things.

However, kids always have the ability to surprise you with their insight. My kid was cool with having a lesbian mom. Tig’s sons were cool with having gay moms. I’d wager to bet that most kids don’t feel differently about their parents after they come out. But to be sure and to get some other experiences and perspectives, I asked some other queer moms about their experiences coming out to their own kids.

Emily Withnall, who is a mom to kids aged 17 and 20, came out to her kids over a decade ago, so the details are hazy, but she shared a conversation she had with her oldest child before she came out that has stuck with her.

“My oldest, at age 6 or 7, was brushing their teeth one night and asked me how two women have a baby together. I was surprised because I was planning to come out to my kids when they asked this question but hadn’t yet. Also, I didn’t have any clue how this question had come up for them! I proceeded to explain the various ways that two women can have a baby, but I started with a man and woman (which I’d never talked about with them before this) so they’d understand the differences and different challenges. I remember being surprised and maybe a little nervous, because I wondered if I had waited too long to come out,” she said. “For the record, I came out to myself about 6-12 months prior to this conversation at age 28.”

My friend Ren is mom to three young kids and told me that because she’s known she’s queer for a long time, “I always tried to raise my kiddos with the view that not every family or relationship looks the same.”

She recalled an instance when her now five-year-old “was laughing at a particular episode of a television show he was watching when two men were dancing with one another because ‘that’s silly’ and ‘boys don’t dance together.’ I used that opportunity to say boys dance together and girls dance together and pointed out my female partner, saying ‘We dance together all the time.’”

His response? “Oh. Okay.”

Ren’s youngest child was born after she came out and started dating women exclusively. During her pregnancy, she talked to her big kids “about boys who have a uterus and families with two moms and no dads, and two dads and no moms.” She said that both of them “follow along just fine and are incredibly accepting of everything.”

For Kristen Mae, a mom of two teens, the coming out process was extremely emotional. She and her ex-husband told their kids together, and she told me she cried “so hard” during the conversation. But her kids were incredibly supportive; they told her “We love you no matter what.” The thing that made it hard for them was the news that she and her husband would be divorcing. “It was the most heartbreaking thing, kind of shattering their innocence like that,” she recalled.

“I was actually more worried about divorce than coming out,” Kristen admitted. “My biggest fear was damaging them or traumatizing them beyond repair. And it hasn’t been without hardship, and I don’t think I’ll ever be at peace with upsetting their lives the way I did, but I can honestly say, I really think that going through what they did has made them deep thinkers and more empathetic people.”

I believe that kids of queer parents have a different level of empathy because they know that their families aren’t like other families. Even if they don’t know exactly why, they understand that much. But even though we know how much our babies love us, it’s still really scary to think about them not accepting something that is such an important part of who we are. So if you are a queer parent who has yet to come out to your kids, your fears and insecurities are relatable and valid. But hopefully hearing these stories assures you it may be uncomfortable and hard, but it’ll all be okay.

‘I Resent My Best Friend for Moving Away and Having Kids’

Q:

A few years back, my best friend got married, moved to the suburbs, and had kids. My partner and I stayed in the city, about two hours away from her place on public transit. I was sad when she moved that I couldn’t just drop in for an afternoon to hang out. But it happens, people change and want different things in life.

She is keen to host us in her guest room on weekends, whenever we’re able to come over. But she and her husband fight all the time, and he spends most of his free time playing video games in the basement while she does all (ALL) of the housework and childcare duties.

The problem is, I don’t want to visit her anymore and I kind of resent that it’s been literal years since she’s come into the city to see me. I know being pregnant and breastfeeding, as she’s been cycling in and out of for a while, makes getting away from home difficult. But when I visit, we can’t get more than a few words in before a kid needs her attention, and her husband is someone I’ve never really liked, even before his transition into fatherhood (or lack thereof). Every time we visit, my partner and I spend the bus ride home dissecting what ruined the weekend for us.

I don’t think there is any way to address any of this with her directly without ending the friendship. She won’t discuss her husband’s failings with me, and I’ve tried! (Last time I saw her, I said outright that it pissed me off he was playing video games while she was doing everything else. She just said he had a busy job and deserved his leisure time, and then changed the subject when I asked if she didn’t deserve the same.) She seems pretty lonely and is always so thrilled when we come to visit because I’m really her only friend. I want to be there for her, but I don’t want to stay at her house or give up any more of my weekends to play Auntie to her kids while she runs herself ragged and her husband plays Call of Duty.

Is there anything to be done? Or should I just make excuses until the kids are older and she can travel to see me for a day trip instead?

A:

I’ve been on both sides of this dilemma. It’s hard to be in a different season of life than our bestie, but that’s what happens when you become an adult. Before I get into it, I will say I personally still regret abandoning my friends when they were knee deep in the trappings of domesticity. That’s not to sway you in any direction, but it’s something I’ve been grappling with in the last handful of years.

Based on what I’m reading, it sounds like you’re more than a little resentful of your friend’s life choices, which, okay fine. She moved to the suburbs and popped out a bunch of kids, and now you can’t just call her up and veg on the couch or grab dinner or go to a movie without a ton of planning. That sucks! It’s hard to lose that kind of connection, especially if the life she has isn’t one you want (even if you might in the future, I don’t know!) The simple fact is: This is the life she’s chosen. If she’s your friend and you really care about her, you’ll figure out how to show up for her in a way that fits where you’re both at. You say she’s your best friend, but you didn’t say how long you’ve been friends, so I can’t really properly assess how deep the roots of your friendship are.

If you don’t think you can be the friend your friend needs because you have too many issues with her life choices, then you need to end or change the friendship, not make excuses for why you can’t see her and hope that things get better in a few years. From what you’ve written, you don’t seem particularly fond of her kids and don’t have much interest in creating a relationship with them. If that’s how you feel now, I can’t imagine that your feelings are going to change as they get older.

As for the husband issue, if there is one thing I’ve learned, it’s that you cannot get in the middle of that relationship. I hated my best friend’s now ex-husband, but when they were married, I kept that shit to myself and played nice because that’s what you have to do sometimes for your best friend. The more you make clear that you don’t like him or the choices they make in their relationship, the more she is going to be defensive and unreceptive. She’ll be less likely to open up to you, which she might start doing if she doesn’t feel like she has to defend him to you. Then, you can talk about it on her terms. You will get nowhere by airing out all of your grievances with him to her face. You can bitch about him all you want with your partner though.

It sounds like your best friend really cares about you and values the relationship you two have. When I had a kid, I cherished my relationships with my childfree friends even more than when I didn’t have kids. They reminded me that underneath all of the mom stuff, I was still a person. Your friend probably feels that way about you, too.

Honestly, I think you wrote this to ask for permission to end your friendship with her, and if I’m being totally truthful, I think you should if this is where you’re truly at. It doesn’t sound like you’re willing to be the kind of friend she needs right now, and she deserves someone who wants to be there for her. Maybe one day, you two will be able to come back to each other and have a different friendship, but at the end of the day, her family will always be an important part of her life. If you don’t want to deal with a husband you don’t like or kids, there are plenty of people out there who don’t have those things that you can be friends with.

If you end your friendship, be honest and tell her you can’t be the friend she needs or deserves because the differences in your life are just too much. If you love her, tell her that, too. She’ll need to hear it.

You can chime in with your advice in the comments and submit your own questions any time.

‘Unsuitable’ Looks at the Dynamic History of Lesbian Fashion

As individuals, we take fashion and use it as a way to express ourselves: who we are, who we want to be, and who we want other people to perceive us as. For queer people, and more specifically queer women, fashion and clothing has been a way to say “I’m here.” Clothes are our way of setting ourselves apart while also bringing us together.

From Sappho’s violets to monocles to bandanas in your back pocket, queer women have long used fashion as a signal to find their community. And even if they didn’t start that way, certain items are now associated with queer women like overalls, flannels, and cargo shorts. Fashion historian Eleanor Medhurst explores all this and more in her new book Unsuitable: A History of Lesbian Fashion.

Medhurst runs the popular blog and Instagram page Dressing Dykes, which highlights lesbian fashion throughout history. Fashion is something I’ve always had an interest in, and I immediately fell in love with Dressing Dykes because it is so rare that queer women are centered in conversations about women’s fashion.

I had the pleasure of talking with Eleanor Medhurst, who lives in the UK, on Zoom. We talked all things lesbian fashion. Medhurst wore pink, which is her signature color, and true to form, I had on my Autostraddle “Gal Pal” t-shirt. We dykes seem to really love a slogan tee.

Medhurst studied fashion history in college and has a master’s degree in history of design. During her studies, she observed the “gaps” in the history of lesbian fashion and wanted to learn more. While she was getting her degree, she began doing more research on subjects like 19th century lesbian icon Anne Lister and lesbian activist slogan t-shirts. She also worked on the Queer Looks exhibition at the Brighton Museum. Medhurst graduated with her master’s in 2020, and Dressing Dykes was a product of her inability to get a museum job. A year after launching Dressing Dykes, she began putting together the book proposal for Unsuitable.

“At the root of fashion history is a social history,” Medhurst says. “It’s looking at the lives that people led in their social context through the clothes that they wore.” She adds that studying lesbian fashion history clues us into queer history at large.

“Often, those histories are obscured, or they’ve been covered over and they can be quite hard to find or sometimes even outright denied,” Medhurst continues. “So to be able to look at queer histories through the lens of clothes and make connections based on what clothes were there, based on how they relate to other parts of queer history, or even queer culture today, gives more evidence of everyday queer lives in the past. It’s not ‘oh, this one great moment that happened,’ it’s more ‘how did people actually interact with the world and present themselves?’”

Unsuitable is broken into five parts, exploring the ways queer women have expressed themselves through fashion and accessories from Sappho to today. It pays special attention to the 1920s, exploring lesbian fashion from Paris to Harlem. In the time between the end of World War I and the start of World War II, lesbians were thriving in a way they hadn’t before, and fashion was a reflection of that. We all view the 1920s as a time of modern hedonism — speakeasies, short haircuts, fringe, dropped waists, bathtub gin and Gatsby. And all of that was happening in the bustling lesbian underground. Medhurst specifically highlights lesbian fashion in Paris, Harlem, Britain, and Berlin as examples of the kind of thriving life lesbians were experiencing at the time. Berlin gets a thoughtful examination in this section, especially the community of trans lesbians who lived in the city at that time.

“There were apparently 50 lesbian bars in Berlin in 1928 or 29, and multiple lesbian magazines” she tells me. “I really enjoyed looking through them and seeing the everyday aspects of life in this context, particularly in the form of adverts, because in these magazines, there would be adverts for club nights at these clubs in Berlin in the twenties.”

She explains her “favorite” of these nights was at “Ladies Club Violetta, and the night was called Monocle Fest, where every lady gets a monocle for free. And I just thought that’s so fun, because monocles kind of link to other contexts in that time period, especially around Europe.”

Queer life in pre-Nazi Germany is a particularly fascinating time to study because of how robust it was. Personally, I didn’t know anything about that time period until I watched the documentary about the Eldorado on Netflix. It’s fascinating to see a thriving underground of queer life and to be able to point at something concrete to show what life was like almost 100 years ago.

Medhurst shares that if she had to choose a favorite time period that she wrote about, she’d choose the “long 1920s.” She highlights the “fantastic creative endeavors that were coming out of that period, and the people, especially the lesbians and the queer women who were spearheading them.”

“There were fantastic things going on at the time in the UK,” she adds. “British Vogue was edited by a lesbian couple.” I had no idea!

She also points to the 1950s and 60s as another highlight, thanks to the “butch and femme subculture that really came to life” at the time. Those dynamics also get their own space in Unsuitable as they were “a vibrant kind of area in lesbian history.” The book calls the pivot an “interlude” as it takes a deep dive. Medhurst initially explains the butch/femme dynamic in its most basic terms, but then digs more into each identity in its own chapter.

As long as lesbians have existed, they’ve used fashion as a manner of expression and community. But at the same time, the way we dress informs the way society at large views us as well. In the 20th century, there has been more of a blurring between the lines of specifically lesbian clothing and the trends of the mainstream. Some people choose to follow fashion trends, while others hold firmly to the clothing that makes them feel their most queer. In the last few decades, there have been more of those oppositional viewpoints.

“So many different strands of lesbian fashion didn’t actually really gel with each other,” Medhurst explains. “Lesbians were really passionate about the clothes they were wearing and the way they were presenting themselves through clothes.”

She also credits the rise in social media as a way that lesbians are carving out specific fashion identities. “We can take pictures of ourselves all the time — there’s such an intentionality behind what people are wearing in order to express who they are.” But of course, this isn’t a new concept, it’s just far more visible than it had been in the past.

Since fashion is a visual medium, sharing pictures when possible is a huge part of Medhurst’s work. Obviously on social media and her blog, having pictures of the fashion and the people wearing it is crucial to the experience. But using images in a book is expensive, which caused her to be more discerning about images. Unsuitable includes paintings of Sappho and Anne Lister, as well as photographs of the trans lesbians in Germany, Black performer Gladys Bentley, and photos of lesbians at various demonstrations and rallies in the 1970s and 80s. But Medhurst felt relieved that she could create the story without solely using visuals.

“Lesbian history, when it comes to history in general, sometimes you don’t have a photo that says what you’re describing. Sometimes you’ve just got like, someone wrote a letter talking about this outfit, and I don’t have a visual for it,” she explains.

While fashion is deeply personal, none of it exists in a vacuum, and if you read Unsuitable, you’ll realize that we’ve always been here, and our clothing choices aren’t as new as they feel.

Disco Was Always for the Gays

When you hear the word disco, what do you think of?

For me, the answer to that question is mirrorballs, bright lights, glitter, bell bottom pants, afros, and bodies that never seemed to stop moving. The parade of celebrities partying at Studio 54. My mom teaching me how to do “the hustle” in our kitchen when I was a teenager. But there’s so much about genre that many of us probably don’t know.

Just in time for Pride, PBS is releasing the three-part documentary series Disco: Soundtrack of a Revolution over the next three weeks. The series tracks the rise and fall of disco over the course of the 1970s. In a matter of several years, it went from an underground art form to a global phenomenon. And while many of us remember it merely as a relic of a time long time, the hearts of the people who lived it still beat in its syncopated rhythm.

I love music, and I realized that even though I knew the most popular disco songs, I knew next to nothing about disco as a genre. Everything has to start somewhere, but it feels like disco was like a comet — it came out of nowhere, burned brightly for a little while and then exploded and disappeared. That is kind of the truth, but it’s because the origins of disco came from marginalized communities: mainly, Black folks and gay men. For both of these communities, music and dancing are a fundamental part of their identity. It’s how they find community and connection. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that they would be the creators and tastemakers of a cultural movement like disco.

The late 1960s are important periods of transition for both the Black community and the LGBTQ community. After spending most of the decade fighting for civil rights, we were on the precipice of a new Black renaissance. Gone were the respectability politics — Black Power and Black is beautiful were in, and Black musicians were making music to reflect that. The queer community was on a similar path. In 1969, the Stonewall Riots were a turning point in the destruction of the closet we had been forced into, and we weren’t going back in. By the early 1970s, these paths converged in underground dance clubs, also known as discotheques. But that was a mouthful to say, so these spots were then called discos. At discos, people were free to be whoever they wanted to be — all that mattered was their ability to follow the beat.

Disco at its heart was and still is about community. In those clubs, there was an intermingling of people and cultures that didn’t always happen on the other side of its doors. When it was still dangerous to be Black or Latinx or queer, those dance floors provided a safe space. No one had an agenda, they just wanted to have a good time and dance. Dance floors were one of the spaces where community organizing happened. The Gay Activist Alliance had dance parties in their office, an old firehouse, to fund the activist work they were doing, like zaps of Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News. Dancing, and venues where you could dance, offered freedom and hope to the queer community, which they used to fuel the fight for equality.

There are so many details I can give from this series. It was incredibly informative and did a really great job exploring the intersections of the cultures that contributed to disco. What’s more, they really made an effort to talk to the people who were integral to disco, from DJs like Nicky Siano to artists like Gloria Gaynor and Candi Staton. But they also made a point to talk to queer activists like Allen Roskoff and music critics and writers as well. As a whole, I would have liked to see more Black queers, but it didn’t ruin the experience for me. Black queer people were integral to the popularity of disco, as Black queers are often the trendsetters for things like clothing, speech, and music and dance. It would have been interesting to see how disco influenced the underground ball culture of the 1980s and 90s, but honestly, that could be its own documentary.

One thing Disco: Soundtrack of a Revolution did that I especially appreciated was giving credit to the Black women who made disco what it was. Much of the show’s second episode focuses on the Black women who defined the genre. So many genres of music were male dominated back in the 70s, but disco was led by Black divas. Women like Gloria Gaynor, Donna Summer, Thelma Houston, and Anita Ward wailed, bringing their church choir backgrounds to the dance floor. As one white male former critic explained, “Gay men were ostracized from the church. Black women became our preachers.”

Along with the aforementioned women, the show did dedicate time talking about disco icon Sylvester. He was one of the few men who have a space in the disco parthenon, but he was also called a “disco diva.” Sylvester was a Black, androgynous out gay man, and likely one of the earliest out gay singers. Because he sang disco, he could be visibly gay in a way that many of his listeners envied. Disco was a safe space for gay men and queer artists — they were able to put it front and center on album covers. Unlike The Village People, Sylvester’s queerness wasn’t a costume or a trope, and that’s what made him so lovable. The outsider had become the insider.

But as we all know, when marginalized people become too mainstream, it’s only a matter of time before the straight white majority comes in to shut it all down. By the early 80s, disco was queen, and the white cishet men who were not part of the community were resentful as hell. They believed that rock music was the only acceptable thing, and so they began to form the “Disco Sucks” movement to create backlash. It’s a tale as old as time. On July 12, 1979 at Comiskey Park in Chicago, approximately 50,000 people, mostly white men, gathered to demolish disco records in an effort to declare disco “dead.”

While many involved would deny that racism or homophobia played a part in their decision to initiate backlash against disco, what else could it be? It’s clear that the white men who loved rock music were threatened by the Black and queer artists who were dominating the Billboard charts.

I could go on and on about all of the things I learned watching Disco: Soundtrack of a Revolution, but I do want to highlight some fun facts I learned.

• “I Will Survive” by Gloria Gaynor was a B-side, which means it was not intended to be the huge hit it became.
• In 1971, New York City legalized same-sex couples dancing together, and a group of gay men and lesbians went to the famed Rainbow Room to see if the law would be upheld. An article about the incident was published by the New York Post with the headline “Gays Win A Waltz.”
• One major component to the Stonewall Riots was a desire by its patrons to be able to dance freely. It was one of the only gay bars at the time to have a jukebox.
• Disco was a precursor for house music, which was started in Chicago at famed night spot The Warehouse

If you’re curious about disco, or you just want to have a good time, I made you a playlist!

Disco: Soundtrack of a Revolution premieres this Tuesday on PBS. It can now be streamed in full on PBS.com. 

‘Everyone I Kissed Since You Got Famous’ Is a Perfect Sapphic Second-Chance Summer Romance

When I saw the title of the book Everyone I Kissed Since You Got Famous by cowriters Annie Mare and Ruthie Knox who go by the pen name Mae Marvel, I was instantly hooked. Celebrity romance stories are something I’ve always been interested in — both in the fictional and real world. This has only become more true as sapphic romances have been expanding their subject matter. There’s something really fun about mixing the chaos of celebrity with the messiness of falling in love. And this book is such a solid mix of those two things.

Everyone I Kissed Since You Got Famous technically fits the trope of “regular person falls for famous person” books, but that doesn’t capture the whole story. “Regular” character Wil is not as famous as her old friend Katie Price. But also, Katie isn’t a stranger. Wil is falling in love with the real Katie — not Katie Price the movie star, the Katie Price she drove around in her dad’s Bronco senior year of high school. It can be argued Wil fell in love with Katie in high school when she was also just a regular person.

The book is packaged as a story “for everyone who almost kissed their best friend and then did.” While Katie’s career as an award-winning actress and director certainly informs the story’s plot, it feels like she works incredibly hard to not be “A-list Katie” when Wil’s around. The women come back into each other’s lives at a time where they both want to be more than who people know them as.

Wil Greene is a bit of a TikTok sensation. The premise of her account is simple: Twice a week, every week, she kisses a new person. It seems innocent enough, but people are definitely starting to notice, and not just her mom’s co-workers. What started out as a dare has now become a major part of Wil’s persona. It also provides a good distraction from the parts of her life that aren’t going the way she wants them to, like her failed law career and her father’s death.

Katie Price is at a crossroads. In the last 13 years, she has taken the world by storm — first as an actress, and then as a director. She has worked incredibly hard to get to where she is, and she doesn’t take any of it for granted. But she knows that because of her level of fame, people are going to pay closer attention to everything she does professionally. And it’s that pressure that fuels and terrifies her. Katie is about to start her own production company and write her first screenplay, but she can’t escape the much older Hollywood actor who helped her get her career started when she was 18. The fear of failing epically sends her back home to Wisconsin.

The reunion between Wil and Katie is absolutely delicious. It simmers with the frisson of tension that comes from two adult women who meant everything to each other and then didn’t talk for 13 years. These two women have known each other their whole lives. While they went different ways, at their core, they haven’t changed. From the first time Wil speaks to Katie, it’s like no time has passed. The pair are quickly transported right back to the roles they filled senior year of high school, and we readers are transported back with them. Mae Marvel know how to create tension and use it to underscore the characters’ chemistry. I immediately wanted Wil and Katie to kiss — being patient isn’t something I was particularly interested in when it came to these two.

The sexy stuff is well worth the wait though. These are two women who know each other intimately from an emotional standpoint coming together to know each other intimately in a physical way. Even though they’re best friends, sex is the one way they don’t know each other. The Mae Marvel team does a beautiful job of showing us the wonder and excitement of Wil and Katie taking their relationship to the next level. They spend so much time getting to know the women they are as adults, and when they finally do have sex with each other, it feels just as exhilarating for the reader as it does for the characters.

Everyone I Kissed Since You Got Famous takes on a close third person point of view and is told from both Wil and Katie’s point of view. It’s important, because it gives you the necessary space you need to understand the characters and the people and things close to them, but it also gives you a good amount of distance. Some people have trouble attaching to third person povs, but for this book, I found myself really enjoying the distance. It’s necessary sometimes to see your characters through multiple people’s eyes rather than just one.

I’m finding myself opening more to second-chance romance as a trope, and books like Everyone I Kissed Since You Got Famous are definitely pushing me to seek more stories out. I’m drawn to the ambiguous feelings when the characters are teens that blur the line between friends and something more. Can you consider something a second-chance romance if it didn’t really take off in the first place? Or do we call it second-chance romance because the two women have been thrust into each other’s lives at a very specific time that will give them the space they need to finally be ready for the romance they wouldn’t have been able to handle as kids?

Summer has unofficially begun, and I can’t think of a better book to take outside and enjoy, even though it takes place in the winter. It works sitting by the pool, laying on the beach, or just on a blanket at the park.

Everyone I Kissed Since You Got Famous by Mae Marvel is out now.

This Month, We Get Two Sapphic Romances Featuring Black Main Characters

Spring has definitely sprung, and one of my favorite things to do is spend time outside reading. This month, there are two new sapphic romances featuring Black women as the main characters. I have been reading sapphic romance for awhile, and I’ve been reviewing them for Autostraddle for a minute, and this is the first time that I’ve gotten the opportunity to review Black sapphic stories. I know there are more out there, but it’s rare that there is an opportunity to review them or find them if you’re not looking for them specifically.

This year, I’ve gotten into sports romances, especially sports that aren’t common to find in romances. I can safely say that I have never read a sports romance book about bowling. So when I learned about Karmen Lee’s The 7-10 Split, a bowling romance, I immediately had to read it. Bowling is a sport largely known for being something accessible to amateurs — you don’t have to have any real skill to play and have a good time. I love going bowling, even though I suck at it. Sucking is half the fun, if you ask me. To see a romance novel about bowlers would have been enough, but a romance about two Black women who bowl? Say less.

The 7-10 Split is the story of Ava Williams, a teacher at the same small-town Georgia high school she attended as a teen. Ava has been trying for years to get the school’s principal to let her start a bowling team, and he has always given her some sort of excuse for why he couldn’t. Everything changes when the school hires a new science teacher, Grace Jones. Grace is a bowling pro, former college professor, and oh yeah, she’s Ava’s former best friend and bowling rival. Ava and Grace lived and breathed bowling; then they kissed, and everything fell apart. That would be enough reason for Ava to be thrown by Grace’s return, but then the principal okays the bowling team — only if Grace and Ava both agree to be coaches.

It’s hard for me to decide if I want to classify this story as a second chance romance or enemies-to-lovers. Since there’s history between Ava and Grace, it feels more fitting to call it a second chance romance. But there is that delicious fissure of friction that comes with enemies-to-lovers simmering underneath the interactions between the two women. Ava still has unresolved issues with the way Grace pulled away and disappeared when they were teens, which makes a lot of sense. Suddenly losing your best friend in high school would be emotionally devastating for sure. But I think for the sake of classification, I’m going to align with Grace’s handling of their relationship and say that it’s a second chance romance.

Lee does a great job balancing the characters’ past and present. Their history is always lingering in the background, and when it comes to the foreground, it’s that much more powerful, because it never feels like it’s coming out of nowhere. It’s clear that Lee created their backstory to exist as both a plot and a reference point for her writing. Their past, together and apart, is such a huge source of motivation for both Ava and Grace as individuals and as a couple. There’s a scene with Grace’s mom that feels like the culmination of the ways their pasts have been running towards each other. The interaction with Grace’s mother forces both Grace and Ava to take stock of who they are, who they were and what they want now.

While the relationship between Ava and Grace is harder to classify, the relationship between the main characters in A Little Kissing Between Friends by Chencia C. Higgins is firmly friends to lovers. Admittedly, this is not my favorite trope, but reading Higgins’ book made me rethink my feelings about that.

A Little Kissing Between Friends is the story of Cyndi “Cyn Tha Starr” Thomas, a Houston music producer and stripper Juleesa “Jucee” Jones. The two women become best friends after Jucee starts using Cyn’s music during her performances. There are so many things about their dynamic that feels so rare in romance, but it spoke to me. Cyn is a stud, and Jucee is a femme bisexual who has a son from her previous relationship with a man. As a femme who formerly identified as bisexual who has a son from a previous relationship and is now married to a butch, I really enjoyed seeing their dynamic on the page.

It feels rare that you get butch/femme representation anywhere, but especially not in romance novels. (If there are any out there that y’all recommend, I’m all ears). It becomes even more when you add in the fact that we have two Black women as the main characters. Butches and studs deserve more love than they currently get from publishing. If I saw this book on a table at a bookstore, I would pick it up immediately because it feels like something familiar.

The relationship between Cyn and Jucee has easily become one of my favorites. Higgins does such a great job establishing their friendship from the first time Cyn talks about Jucee, that there’s no way they won’t be a couple by the end. They both display a lot of love for each other and their friendship — there’s a deep sense of care and comfort from the very beginning. Cyn talks about folding Jucee and her son Amari into her circle as if it was the most natural thing in the world. And when you’re best friends, it is that easy to do. When they finally do act on their feelings for each other, it doesn’t feel like a shock for the reader, even if it does for the characters. That’s one of the most fun parts about this book in particular. You can tell that Cyn especially is so thrown by her feelings — she’s a player after all. But it’s not just that she caught real feelings for someone, it’s that she caught them for her homie.

Being friends doesn’t stop Cyn and Jucee from going through the same kind of early relationship challenges. If anything, it makes it more obvious that they have more hurdles to jump. Jucee knows the way Cyn plays games and doesn’t commit. She knows the kind of women that Cyn usually entangles herself with. That means she has to work that much harder to push past the complicated feelings she’s having about her bestie. For Cyn, it’s hard to see her homie in a new light. It’s not that she doesn’t want to, but you can tell that for Cyn, who is used to being the top in a romantic situation, being romantic with Jucee will push her so far out of her comfort zone. And that’s not always easy. But as each woman starts to let their guard down and embrace what’s happening, it’s so delightful. I love reading about people getting out of their own way for the sake of love.

One thing that both books share is the HAWT sex scenes. Both Lee and Higgins create such strong visuals when describing their characters fucking that you don’t have to use your imagination at all. Every touch, kiss, caress, feels incredibly real and deliciously sexy. There is something extra sensual about the way Black women love on each other sexually, and I think both authors captured that sensuality so perfectly. I was absolutely fanning myself after each sex scene.

A Little Kissing Between Friends and The 7-10 Split couldn’t be more different books, but that’s what I loved about reading them back-to-back. They serve as a reminder that romance is a smorgasbord of options — there is something out there for everyone. I hope that this means there will be more trad pubs looking to publish Black sapphic stories, because my bookshelf is ready.

‘Queen of the Deuce’ Tells the Story of a Queer Woman Who Created a Porn Empire

When I was a kid, my dad told me stories about The Deuce. For those who don’t know, that was the name for New York City’s famed Times Square area prior to the 90s. The Deuce was seedy — full of porn theaters, strip shows, and dancing women. It had little in common with the place where my friends and I would hang out until all hours, enjoying dinner at Applebee’s and then loitering at the Virgin Megastore. By my teenage years, there were traces of The Deuce that had been left behind, but I always wanted to know more. That’s why I was immediately intrigued by the new documentary Queen of the Deuce.

Queen of the Deuce is the story of Chelly Wilson, “a Greek-born, Christmas-celebrating, Jewish grandma, who married men but was openly gay.” During the 60s and 70s, Wilson created a porn cinema empire and in this doc Wilson’s story is told by her children, grandchildren, business associates, and at times Chelly herself.

Wilson’s origin story is fascinating. The documentary never states her birth year, but she was born to a Spanish-Greek, Sephardic Jewish family. Her first language was Ladino, a Jewish dialect, and she eventually learned French and Greek. When she was a young woman, her father arranged for her to marry a man who she openly despised. In old audio footage, she explains to her daughter that she found him “repulsive” and would recoil whenever he tried to kiss or touch her. Her daughter claimed that the only reason Wilson married this man was because she respected her father, and he arranged the marriage. She then had a son with this man, but when their son was young, she left them behind and went to Paris. Wilson only returned to Greece because her father was dying.

Her husband tried to withhold their son unless she stayed with him, which resulted in her getting pregnant with her oldest daughter. She again left her husband, this time getting a Jewish divorce that allowed him to remarry. He got their son, and she got their daughter. But Wilson quickly realized that she didn’t want to be a mother, she wanted to be a business woman. So she left her daughter behind with a woman named Julia and set sail for America. This was 1939, just as World War II was spreading across Europe. Wilson lost her parents and siblings in the Holocaust, but thankfully her children survived.

The documentary doesn’t say this explicitly, but based on commentary from her daughter, you can draw conclusions that when Wilson moved to the States, she also shed her Jewish identity. Her daughter who was born in the U.S. said she didn’t even know she was Jewish for some indeterminate amount of time. Given the time she emigrated, it’s certainly not a surprise that she put that life behind her for safety reasons. No one ever says if she reclaimed her Jewish identity at any time in her life, but she was always very proudly Greek. After the war was over, she brought her two kids to the States, even though she had started a whole new family. She was financially successful, so she knew she could care for everyone. And care for them she did.

Wilson then went on to create her porn empire on 8th Avenue in Times Square. She owned five or six theaters in the neighborhood that showed pornographic films, many of which were produced by Wilson’s production company.

After watching Queen of the Deuce I feel like I had a lot more questions about Chelly Wilson than I did when I started watching. Many of the things that made her the most interesting were either passed over quickly, or not as deeply examined as one would hope. The film is short — it has a runtime of 75 minutes — and there were some pivots they could have avoided to give more time to the more fantastical parts of her life.

Wilson bought a failing movie theater on 8th Ave and 44th St., the Tivoli. She renamed it the Adonis and began showing pornographic films. But she would also show Greek cinema on the weekends. No one talks about how she came to buy any of her theaters, or what made her want to own one. Porn theaters were plentiful around The Deuce, but how would a middle aged Greek woman get involved in such an industry? Everyone said the business was lucrative and she got off on making shrewd business deals, but you don’t just wake up one morning and decide, Hey, I’m going to own a porno theater!

Everything is casually mentioned: sexuality, feminism, and the way tastes towards porn and sex were changing in the 60s and 70s. People mention these important topics that would certainly color how Wilson did business, but they’re never examined. There’s a clip from a gay male porn movie, but no one talks about how gay male porn shaped her business, or how attitudes changed before and after Stonewall. They barely mention the 80s, and there’s no mention of the way AIDS ravaged the city and began shifting attitudes around gay sex for men.

Queerness is barely touched, despite the logline selling Wilson as a woman who was “openly gay.” It’s almost treated as unimportant to those closest to her (her daughters and grandchildren). Everyone approaches it as “oh yeah, Chelly was gay. She had women who lived with her. Whatever, we just didn’t talk about it!” There is a lot of “it was a different time” when it came to talking about Wilson’s sexuality. Really, it just felt like no one wanted to talk about it.

A queer woman owning a string of porn movie theaters is absolutely fascinating. I would have liked to know how her sexuality impacted her business. As she dealt mostly with men, did they know she was gay? Did it change how they treated her? How did she move through the world as an openly gay woman in the 60s and 70s? If she always had a gaggle of lovers around her, was she ever in love with any of them? What kind of relationships did they have? Her younger daughter said they sat down for a talk in the 80s to record Wilson’s story while she could still tell it, and yet, there is nothing in her own words about her sexuality. Did her daughter not ask, or did the filmmakers feel it was unimportant?

The story ends quite abruptly. Business started to wane in the 80s, and then in the early 90s, The Deuce changed drastically. When Rudy Giuliani became mayor, one of his first orders of business was to clean up Times Square and make it more family friendly. Disney was ready to expand to Broadway, and they certainly couldn’t convince families to take their children to a place where there was porn everywhere. Many of the theaters Wilson owned are now restaurants or stores, but there is no word on how that happened. There is barely even a mention of how or when Wilson died.

Queen of the Deuce feels like a first attempt at telling the story of a woman who was almost too fantastical to be real. At times, it feels like it’s more about the people who knew her and their feelings than it is about her. It’s so rare that we get to hear stories about our queer elders, and I wish I knew more about Chelly Wilson. Instead I’m just left with more questions.

Queen of the Deuce is now available to rent. 

15 Thoughts My Dog Has When My Wife and I Have Sex

My dog Stanley is a level 10 clinger. Part of this is by design. He’s a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel/Poodle mix, and Cavaliers are cuddle monsters. I wanted a dog that would be down to lay on the couch and watch TV or curl up at the foot of the bed at night, and my wife wanted a dog that wasn’t going to require a lot of maintenance. I admit our boy is spoiled as hell — it’s my wife’s and my fault. We got him at only 13 weeks. He was barely five pounds, and we were so worried he’d get lost or stuck somewhere in our apartment. Those first few weeks, we took him with us every time we left the house because we were worried that our asshole cats would try to gang up on him while we were gone. I got a sling carrier and carried him around while we ran errands. He was also so small we were worried we’d lose him in the blankets of our queen sized bed, so we encouraged him to sleep up by our pillows.

As he got bigger, we figured he would naturally want his own space. Well, I was fucking wrong about that.

If anything, he gets more clingy as he gets older. If your lap is open, it won’t be for long — there will be a baby dog (yes, he’s almost three but we call him the baby dog) curled up before you can even get comfortable. Again, we know this is a monster of our own making, and he’s so cute we generally don’t mind. Sometimes he decides he wants to sleep among the laundry or on a chair. He still sleeps in our bed. Most of the time, it’s fine, except for when he decides my wife’s pillow is now his pillow or puts his whole very warm body against mine.

Generally, we love having him for snuggles, but there is one time when it’s more than an annoyance — it’s a downright inconvenience. Sex.

My wife and I have as active of a sex life as two women with full-time jobs and a family to take care of can have. So when we do have the time and energy to enjoy each other, we’d like to do it without interruptions. But there’s one little 12 pound hurdle to get past. Since Stanley is used to being the center of attention, he doesn’t always seem to understand that sexy time is momma time. As soon as he realizes we’re in bed and not going to sleep, he has to remind us of his presence. Sometimes he thinks sex is play time, and instead of relaxing, he will romp across our bed, snorting and barking at us to chase him. Other times, he’ll squirm his long body right between ours and roll on his back, daring one of us to give him his favorite belly rubs.

Other times, he decides to be strategic about his approach. He might chill out and lay on one of our pillows and then decide he’s had enough and jump into the action. There’s nothing quite like kissing your wife and having your face licked, or feeling a wet nose against your bare thigh. We don’t get mad; that’s what happens when you don’t create boundaries. And besides, we get a huge kick out of him romping around. If we really want solo time, we will distract him with a rawhide bone, but then we realized how many of them are scattered around our apartment. We counted once, and there were at least five bones in various degrees of chewed. It was hilarious, but we decided to cool it with the bones.

I don’t actually know what goes through his tiny brain while we’re in the middle of the act, but if he actually had thoughts, this is what I imagine it would sound like in his head.

1. “Oooh, is time for snuggies!”
2. “Why we no going to sleep mommas? I ready for night night.”
3. “I’m in my spot, why we no cuddles?”
4. “Oh I know what’s happening, mommas play!”
5. “Can Stanley play? I wanna play!”
6. “Why can’t Stanley do lickies on momma faces but mommas can lick each other’s faces? No fair!”
7. “Momma lickies mean Stanley gets a new bone!”
8. “What you mean no bone? Momma lickies mean bone!”
9. “Maybe I should go lay down somewhere else, dis bed too shaky.”
10. “I back mommies! Did you miss me?”
11. “Can Stanley get a tummy rub? Please? Should I boop your snoot with my snoot?”
12. “Are we done?”
13. “Oh yes, my favorite sniffs.”
14. “Why no Stanley under the blankie? Want cuddles.”
15. “Night night mommies!”