“Carol & The End of the World” Teaches Us How to Survive the Apocalypse

This essay contains mild spoilers for Carol & The End of the World

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Carol & The End of the World is an apocalyptic workplace dramedy that asks a single existential question: “Was it worth it?”

The Netflix Animated Limited Series takes place in an alternate reality, where the world is ending not due to the threat of climate crisis or global fascism, but because the planet Keppler 9C is set to crash into the Earth seven months from the first episode. Through the entire series, the cosmic horror hangs omnipresent in the sky, a physical reminder of everyone’s looming mortality. The show’s protagonist Carol, an unconfident, monotone, middle aged woman (voiced by Martha Kelly), tries to continue the mundane operations of her daily life while society fractures around her.

The story starts after the initial wave of societal redistribution and destruction has subsided. Normal day-to-day interactions occur against the backdrop of abandoned parking lots and walls covered in existential graffiti saying Die Free and Death is Just the Beginning. Laws of a centralized government seemingly no longer exist, but order is maintained through their base forms: social contracts and the threat of violence, specifically through the heavily-armed soldiers who have been reassigned to work as clerks at the grocery store. They also defend property, such as the abandoned Applebee’s Carol frequently visits with a wistful yearning for a world that no longer exists.

While using an apocalypse story to critique our own dystopia isn’t a novel concept, Carol & The End of the World is unique due to its radically honest approach. It shows how people whose lives have been made hollow by capitalism find joy, meaning, and authenticity when these central frameworks no longer provide purpose and stability.

From the moment we enter this fictional world, it’s clear many have abandoned the constraints of our heteronormative capitalistic society to focus on joy and pleasure in their final months. Queerness and sexuality at large is so normalized it exists within the world of the show without comment. (A statement unto itself.) While some people, like our protagonist, desperately cling to normalcy, we are consistently reminded that society’s arbitrary rules have lost their value — ie Carol’s casually nudist parents who’ve entered into a consensual throuple with their live-in caretaker. They, like many others who can, travel the world and indulge in bacchanal-esque raves where substances and sex flow freely.

Our protagonist will not allow herself to indulge in any of this hedonistic pleasure-seeking — for no other reason than it will not bring her the joy and comfort that she so desperately craves. Though Carol’s parents are deeply concerned that she is squandering the time she has left by maintaining her mundane routines, the show itself doesn’t frame either option as preferable. They are simply different methods of coping with The Horrors of reality. As the story progresses, and the end times approach, we watch as Carol and the other characters discover the people they could have been in the old world, and who they want to become in this new, fleeting one.

Carol finds solace and purpose through work. In the world’s impending end she becomes an administrative assistant at a company called The Distraction. The Distraction exists as an accounting firm operating on a single floor of an abandoned office building. This dystopian corporate institution has perfectly replicated the cubicle-based lifestyle that has sustained late-stage capitalist society for decades. No one knows each other’s names, no one knows how The Distraction functions, but they go into work Monday through Friday regardless.

Mirroring the systems of our own slow-rolling apocalypse, The Distraction’s HR describes friendship as an “existential threat to the office” and attachment between coworkers as a “virus that threatens to destroy [it].” And those who work there are content to keep it this way. Despite the active alienation The Distraction engenders in its employees, Carol attempts to foster genuine human connection as the series progresses. She has not simply gone to work to find distraction, but to find herself — and for that, she needs community.

Carol bakes banana bread to share in the break room, connecting with two other employees, Luis, a gay man who traveled the world alone and still has not found meaning, and Donna, a middle aged single mother of five who realizes she’s missed the lives of her children by spending her life working. After fostering genuine friendships with the two of them, Carol breaks the rules and learns the names of every person who works in their office.

“When your name is spoken a type of intimacy is created,” The Distractions head HR person describes. “You are no longer a stranger or a coworker, you are an acquaintance, with the possibility of more.” In an explicit satirical critique on how small acts of community care can disrupt the individualistic drive of capitalism, the character goes on to say, “Potlucking is a gateway to comradery. A simple potato frittata could make someone feel more loyal to their coworker than to their duties.” And isn’t that what every company wants? Our loyalty to them over the humans we collaborate with?

While many apocalyptic shows offer the idea that love is salvation, they often focus on romantic love. Carol rejects that idea, discarding a desperately lonely potential love interest in the first episode. The show focuses instead on the love that is all around us: from family, to friendship, to the love we must foster for ourselves.

In Carol’s largest act of defiance, she, Luis, and Donna restore the abandoned Applebee’s and host weekly happy hours, creating a sense of community that leads to the show’s most devastating scene. In the series’ finale, we watch a collective eruption of grief overtake the office, as people realize the bonds they’ve created in the office are doomed by the very apocalyptic nature of its existence. Regardless, they continue to hold dear to them, as the joy their community provides is the only thing that gives their finite lives meaning.

Carol & The End of the World is a hopeful, if melancholy, meditation on finding meaning in being ourselves and loving other people — because at the end of the world, it’s all we have left.

This is where the show diverges from our world. We still have hope. Our planet is not yet doomed, but The Distractions of our world want to convince us it is. The powers of corporation, fascism, and neoliberalism hope to alienate us, to keep us focused on survival and production.

Community isn’t the only thing we have left, but it is the only way forward.

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Carol & The End of the World is now streaming on Netflix. 

Vivienne Medrano (aka VivziePop) on “Hazbin Hotel,” Her Favorite Musicals, and Giving People Second Chances

VivziePop interview feature image by Matt Winkelmeyer via Getty Images

Within the demonic realm known as the internet, one indie animator named Vivienne Medrano (aka ViziePop) spawned onto the scene. Her crowdfunded animated pilot, Hazbin Hotel, instantly became a phenomenon when it dropped and pioneered a new wave for indie animation. 

The 2D, hand-drawn adult musical comedy is about an optimistic queer princess of Hell opening up a hotel to rehabilitate sinners. It was surprising to see how well the plucky little short managed to bring theater geeks and animation nerds together with its naughty tone. (To this day, the video has racked up 96 million views.)

Given its idiosyncrasy and success, it’s no surprise that A24 picked it up to produce as their first animated animated series. An indie internet sensation adopted by undisputed indie production company royalty? Hell yeah.

Upon watching the first five episodes of Hazbin Hotel, I was delighted by the colorful detail in design, the raunchy humor, the worldbuilding, and the expansive range of show tunes brought to life by her Broadway cast — including Erika Henningsen, Stephanie Beatriz, Blake Roman, Amir Talai, and friggin’ Keith David.

Ahead of the show’s premiere, I chatted with VivziePop about bringing her helluva musical series to life.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

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Rendy: First of all, thank you for having Keith David sing “you’re a power bottom at rock bottom.”

VivziePop: Yeah, that’s a good lyric.

Rendy: I’ve been watching the screener for that episode again and again because the “Loser, Baby” number… I need it. It’s such a great song.

VivziePop: That one’s usually the favorite. It’s also the top song for most people behind the scenes.

Rendy: How does it feel to have this phenomenon of a passion project finally unleashed onto the world?

VivziePop: It doesn’t feel real. Production took so long, and then we’ve kind of had it done for a hot minute, so I kind of forget the world hasn’t seen it yet. The fact that it’s finally being released is unreal to me. I’m so excited.

Rendy: Between the pilot and the show, what differences arose having this bigger, larger production and a sort of new animation style?

VivziePop: Well, I learned so much from the making of the pilot because it was such a scrappy project. It grew as it went. It was, for lack of a better word, amateur. Because I was amateur! I was learning so much and I was very, very fresh. I didn’t really understand the pipeline. But it was so fun. We were a group of people working together to make something happen, even if it was a very uphill battle.

It was a completely different process when it came to the series. But I’d made another show called Helluva Boss in the meantime and that one taught me a lot about a more structured pipeline.

Every animated show is different and has different needs. There’s no way to just mimic another show’s pipeline. So it was still a big learning curve to figure out what those needs were for Hazbin. But it was really nice to have that experience making Helluva Boss, especially since it’s a similar show. I’m very thankful for the entire development period.

Rendy: What were some of your biggest influences for the musical numbers? I see you have a little bit of Beetlejuice, a little bit of Chicago, a little bit of Hairspray.

ViziePop: Yeah, the musical styles are all over the place. Sam Haft and Andrew Underberg, our writing team, were so good with any genre I would throw at them. The characters are diverse in their musical styles and their genres. If certain characters are singing, they’re not going to sing something that sounds like Broadway — they’re going to sing a pop song or a more contemporary ballad. It’s going to be different depending on the needs of the character and the scene. They were so good at doing all these different types of music while still having it work together as part of the same soundtrack.

Rendy: What other musicals have influenced you?

VivziePop: Well, definitely Chicago. That’s a show about a lot of villainy people. But also Little Shop of Horrors. That was a huge one for me as well. And then my favorite as a kid was Annie. I actually got to be in it as a kid and it’s just a classic with really good music. I based Alastor’s voice off of the soundtrack.

More recently, I really loved Something Rotten. It was a big influence as well, because its humor is so goofy. Beetlejuice came out after Hazbin, but it’s obviously so similar. That was less an influence and more just like, oh I eat this up. It’s perfect.

Rendy: How did you find the balance between the sincerity and the sinfulness in the show’s overall tone?

VivziePop: I think it was easy because we have characters like Charlie who are just so lovable and warm. She’s a very good person even if her kingdom is a nasty place in many ways.

The main theme of the show is redemption, which will always exist in a grey area. It varies depending on who wants to be redeemed and who needs to forgive and for what. It’s complicated, so I wanted the show to have a lot of heart and a lot of questions and a lot of emotion. I don’t want there to be easy answers. I want it to be kind of the thing the show is always thinking about and grappling with.

Rendy: How was it developing the relationships between your queer characters during the writing process? How did you delve into the complexities of these characters who are very damaged, but still seeking a sliver of hope?

VivziePop: I really love writing romance. It’s actually one of my favorite things to write. Romance and angst and tragedy. I feel like I’m better at that than humor, even though I really like writing comedy.

And I like doing relationships in all different forms. Vaggy and Charlie are a pre-established relationship, so I wanted them to be very domestic and normal and casual. They’re very comfortable with each other. I didn’t want it to be an “in your face kind of
honeymoon stage” because realistically, when you’re with somebody for years, you’re not necessarily doing that all the time. It depends on the kind of person you are, but for them, I felt like they were past that. They’re very comfortable with each other. They’re together and that’s their every day.

And then with characters like Angel and Husk, they start the story kind of at odds with each other. But, over the course of season one, we see their relationships start to develop. I’m really excited for people to see where that goes. It’s definitely one I feel needs a lot more time to see these characters evolve and get even closer to each other.

Rendy: What were some of your favorite sequences to direct?

VivziePop: Oh wow. Well, the easiest answer because it’s out, is the whole of episode four. I co-wrote that one. And it’s an episode that has existed since the earliest development time for the Hazbin series. While we were still making the pilot, I knew that was an episode I wanted to exist. It holds a lot of emotional weight. It’s definitely the most emotional episode this season and I’m very excited for people to see it.

Rendy: What role did music play in developing these characters and showing their relationships to one another?

VivziePop: Music is amazing when it comes to that. I mean, even the score accompanying a scene can create the emotions. The importance of music in any show is the same for musicals. There are so many musicals where the songs just make me sob. I love when music can do that. I was like, “Yeah, we need some moments that try to get people to cry.”

I love that. I live for that. I live for making myself cry. So when it works, I’m so happy.

Rendy: What was one of the biggest takeaways for you creating and developing this show over time?

VivziePop: Learning to let things go. I mean, that’s with both my series. I think every creator has an element of perfectionism. For me, I don’t feel like I’m a perfectionist in the sense that I need everything to be perfect or it won’t move forward. It’s more I don’t like to look back. I have a hard time watching my old work because I’m just like, “no.” I didn’t stop because it wasn’t perfect, but I’m not going to look back.

But I’ve learned to embrace the hard work everyone was doing and accept any kind of imperfection we weren’t able to fix. Ultimately, I’m so proud of what we accomplished and I can feel that pride as I watch it.

Rendy: What do you hope people takeaway from the show?

VivziePop: My big hope? I feel like the show is about redemption and second chances and about supporting and loving people and accepting flaws. That’s a sentiment we need more of in the world right now, especially the climate we have with social media especially.

I just feel like it’s a good thing for people to have in their life: a reminder that characters can be flawed and you can be flawed and you can also change. We can always grow.

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The first four episodes of Hazbin Hotel are now streaming on Prime. 

Presenting the Winners of the 6th Annual Autostraddle TV Awards!

It’s easy to dismiss awards. Mainstream awards, especially, can often feel bought, dismissing the best for what the major networks and streaming services decide to push. But, at their best, awards provide an opportunity to celebrate the work that connects with us and our culture. No, they’re never fair. Yes, they’re often influenced by the bigotries that govern our entire world. They still have a place in our arts landscape to get great work to a wider audience.

For the past six years, Autostraddle has sought to fill in the gaps left by the Emmys. If at their worst awards are bigoted and at their best awards are celebrations, why can’t we look beyond the mainstream and celebrate more of the work ourselves? Well, that’s exactly what we’ve done. The Emmys might acknowledge a fraction of the great queer TV that gets made — we acknowledge that and all the rest.

This is even more important now that our shows are frequently getting canceled and fewer are getting made. Even if these artists deserved more time to tell their stories, we can celebrate the television that was created against all odds.

And with that, here are the winners of the 6th annual Autostraddle TV Awards.

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Outstanding Drama Series

A League of Their Own (Prime Video)

I’ve been waiting a long time to write this tribute.

First, A League of Their Own’s 2022 late summer release meant that it didn’t qualify for that year’s TV Awards. Then the fall 2023 TV Awards landed in the middle of an incredibly necessary, and historic, labor strike in Hollywood. Which means that here we are, in the early weeks of 2024 before I could finally, officially, give A League of Their Own their well-earned and proper due.

It’s almost ironic then that 18 months later, I am still at a loss how to even put A League of Their Own into words. That time we all spent together, that first crack of a bat hitting a ball, the first whiff of fresh cut grass off the dugout? It felt like magic. That confident quirk of a smile when Greta flicked her eyes at Carson? Magic. The soft, steady hands of Uncle Bert on Max’s shoulder before their kitchen haircut? Magic. Jo stepping up the to plate like Babe Ruth? Bev pulling Jess aside to promise, “we have to take care of our own”? Lupe’s… well, everything? Magic magic magic.

Watching Will Graham and Abbi Jacobson’s sublimely queer remounting of A League of Their Own was a television moment unlike any other. And thanks to Prime Video’s decision to unceremoniously cancel the beloved series, we won’t be able to experience it again. But even if the powers at be only let them do it once, I’m so grateful they stole this base. — Carmen

Outstanding Comedy Series

Sort Of (Max)

“It’s what I want, with everybody, not just my romantic relationships but like family and friends, with all the loves I have. Just, I want that uncomplicated Rachel McAdams love. That’s doable, right?” Sabi wonders early in Sort Of‘s second season. But every time that “uncomplicated Rachel McAdams love” feels like it’s within Sabi’s grasp, the ground beneath them shifts and the hope of achieving it slips further aways. Sabi finds comfort and understanding in the arms of Olympia and then, the ground shifts, and they’re introduced to Olympia’s husband. They find a refuge in Bar Buk but then the ground shifts, it closes, and Sabi and their friends are forced to imagine something new. Sabi starts to build an understanding with her mother but then the ground shifts and their abusive father returns. And then, just as Sabi’s building some semblance of a connection with their father, he dies. The ground is always shifting beneath our feet.

Sort Of succeeds in making a very specific story feel relatable and universal. If season one of Sort Of is about discovery, then season two is about confronting a new reality, tethered to the truth and not to expectations or assumptions. Sabi, of course, takes center stage — chasing that “uncomplicated Rachel McAdams love” with a full sense of who they are and what compromises they will and won’t make — but the challenge extends to the entire cast. Paul reunites with his wife — Bessy, who spent most of the first season comatose — and has to nurse her back to health, with a full understanding of their estrangement. Violet grapples with her mother’s return and how to reconcile that with the person she’s grown into in her mother’s absence. Even Sabi’s mother, Raffo, long constrained by beliefs foisted upon her, gets to revel in her newly found independence. Sort Of remains the story about how all of us — cis, trans, queer, straight, young, old — are always evolving in our own way. — Natalie

Outstanding Sci-Fi/Fantasy Series

The Last of Us (HBO)

When I think about The Last of Us, I am often thinking about how much I love it and how much my friends love it. I can sometimes forget how important it is that this sweeping, post-apocalyptic, high-budget, well-advertised, hugely popular, mainstream show stars a non-binary actor who plays a queer teenage girl. And yes, everyone always talk about the Bill and Fred episode, but the “Left Behind” episode was such a beautiful display of first love, and first heartbreak. With both episodes, queer love was centered and celebrated, even in such a dark world. At the end of the day, that’s what the show is about: the humanity and love that can be found, even at the end of the world. We’ve seen so much de-gaying of source material for decades — even as recently as 2020 — so it’s refreshing to see an adaptation lean so confidently into the beautiful queerness of its story. — Valerie

Outstanding Animated Series

Harley Quinn (Max)

Harley Quinn is a great example of why adult animation is so fun and important. Not being directly attached to the DCU, and not having to worry about special effects like a live-action show, this series is able to pull from the most obscure and wacky pages of DC comics. They can really run with it without having to worry as much about the big studio execs demanding ‘universal appeal’ or whatever crap makes it so that in the live-action DCU movies, Harley Quinn’s bisexuality is just briefly a hint. In this show, she is queer and proud and in love with Ivy and their relationship is the emotional arc of the entire show. This season they are solidly in love and trying to find a work/life balance, centering their relationship while trying to girlboss their various organizations. It’s fun, it’s wacky, it’s so, so gay. — Valerie

Outstanding Lead Actor Playing an LGBTQ+ Character in a Drama Series

Jasmin Savoy-Brown, Yellowjackets

Jasmin Savoy Brown really brought the fear factor to season two of Yellowjackets, portraying teen Taissa’s further descent into sleepwalking chaos and instability with chilling details. Tai was really put through the ringer this season, and she also embraced cannibalism with gusto (but apparently has no memory of it), and Brown really sells it all while also bringing dynamics to what could easily be one-note drama. The best horror performances are unsettling and alluring in equal measure, and Brown definitely delivers. — Kayla

Outstanding Supporting or Guest Actor Playing an LGBTQ+ Character in a Drama Series

Lea Robinson, A League of Their Own

For me, it was always Uncle Bert. There is a world where A League of Their Own made a different choice. Where they settled for Greta and Carson’s storyline alone and considered it to be “enough.” People of color, trans people, we hear that a lot: Next time. Your turn will be next. Especially for a series set in the 1940s, it would have been so easy to hide behind the lies of what too many people assume to be “historically accurate,” instead of push for the honesty of what’s more.

But this is not about representation for representation’s sake. In Lea Robinson’s hands Uncle Bertie felt real, warm, loving. The specter of Bertie haunts the first few episodes of A League of Their Own, brought to life only in the hushed whispers of Max’s parents, worried that their daughter might turn out “that way.” When Max leaves her parents house, Bertie’s is the first place she runs.

It’s in Bert that Max finds queer family. And they are already blood relation, yes — but blood isn’t what makes our family our own. It’s Bertie who cuts Max’s hair in the kitchen, who takes her out bowling, who encourages her to flirt with girls, and who sews Max her first suit. When Max shuns Bert in public — it’s Bert who pushes back. This is not, and was not, Max’s story alone. Bert is just as deserving of a family who sees them on their own terms.

In fact, Bertie’s final scene doesn’t include Max at all. Bert confronts their sister, at last allowed to release a specter of their own. You see for some people “playing it safe” suffocates rather than frees. And by living their life out loud, Bertie gets to live in abundance. — Carmen

Outstanding Lead Actor Playing an LGBTQ+ Character in a Comedy Series

Bilal Baig, Sort Of

Because they are also the co-writer and co-creator, Bilal Baig has received more praise as a storyteller than as an actor. This praise is deserved — season two built on the promise of season one and became one of the best shows on TV — but their achievement in their show as an actor should not go unmentioned.

Sabi responds to the world with a defense mechanism of remove. They’re deadpan in their humor, detached in their emotion. Baig showed the cracks in this exterior in the first season and in season two reveals even more as Sabi challenges themself to be more open. Whether in their fraught relationship with their dad or their desires in two very different romances, Sabi is trying to let their walls down while still not getting hurt. Baig plays all of this perfectly, a grounded performance that will have you laughing one moment and crying the next. It’s subtle work and subtle work this accomplished deserves all the recognition. — Drew

Outstanding Supporting or Guest Actor Playing an LGBTQ+ Character in a Drama Series

Amanda Cordner, Sort Of

The “funny friend” is a trope for a reason. While the protagonist is experiencing the dramas of life, the funny friend is there for comic relief. They provide support for the protagonist and provide jokes for the audience. But lighter doesn’t mean easier. For this role to succeed, an actor needs to create a real person even with less time and focus for development.

Since season one, Amanda Cordner has been an absolute joy as 7even. She has quickness and an energy that provides a perfect foil to Bilal Baig’s more deadpan Sabi. But in season two, 7even’s character was deepened as we spent more time with her mom. While still providing comic relief, Cordner was allowed to dig into the complexities behind 7even’s outward persona. It’s the kind of thing that’s possible in a second season, but also the kind of thing only possible when a performer already established a clear and full character. — Drew

Outstanding Lead Actor Playing an LGBTQ+ Character in a Sci-Fi/Fantasy Series

Bella Ramsey, The Last of Us

It’s not easy to carry a show like this on your shoulders, but Bella Ramsey did just that. While there is definitely an amazing ensemble cast in the show, when it comes down to it, the story is about Ellie and Joel. Ramsey had the challenge of making Ellie sarcastic and funny in a way that covers a layer of fear and trauma, in a way that evolves as the show goes on, and they excelled at it. At any given moment, their face is portraying fear, hurt, bravery, hope. And, in addition to being such a talented performer, it’s really special to have the lead of such a huge show openly talk about being non-binary, and being queer (or, as they sometimes put it, “not straight, a little bit wavy.”) — Valerie

Outstanding Supporting or Guest Actor Playing an LGBTQ+ Character in a Drama Series

Storm Reid, The Last of Us

I remember being nervous for the episode, “Left Behind” when the TV adaptation for The Last of Us was announced. Whoever played Riley would need to get us to fall in love with the character over the course of one episode, so that when her fate was revealed, the importance of that relationship to Ellie and how it affects her would be felt. Well, Storm Reid gave all of that and more.

Riley and Ellie’s relationship has long been a fan favorite in part because of the queer undertones between them in the game. Storm managed to give Riley confidence and vulnerability with a dash of playfulness that made it easy to see why Ellie had a crush on her best friend. One of my favorite scenes from the game is when Riley and Ellie take pictures in an old photo booth, and somehow Bella and Storm punched up what was already an adorable scene. For me, the heart of Storm’s performance comes near the end of the episode, after Riley and Ellie have their fun, after they kiss, after they get bit. They’re sitting together deciding what to do now that they’re infected, and Riley says “Whether it’s two minutes or two days, we don’t give that up. I don’t want to give that up,” and she holds her best friend and cries while repeating “I’m sorry” over and over again. As far as she knows, this is the end for the two of them and all she wants to do is hold her best friend.

Not only did Storm give this performance exactly what it needed to give, but she also understands just how special this story is and what it means especially to queer Black women. After her recent Emmy win, she said, “…I think my role in The Last of Us really reinforced my love and passion to be able to tell meaningful stories and to be a representation for young women, young Black women, young, queer Black women.” — Nic

Outstanding Performance by a Straight Actress in a Straight Role

Melanie Lynskey, Yellowjackets

Three months ago, when we were in very early stages of planning this year’s Autostraddle TV Awards, regarding the groundbreaking category of Outstanding Performance by a Straight Actress in a Straight Role, I wrote: My campaign for Melanie Lynskey starts now. Well friends, we did it. Celebrating her brilliant work as Shauna in season two of Yellowjackets, we’re here today because we’re gay — even if she is not.

In all seriousness, Lynskey really is a standout of a very stacked array of performances in this recent season of Yellowjackets. (Her monologue with a gun one of the best moments the series has delivered so far.) I think regardless of how she does or does not identify, we can all agree that Melanie Lynskey is for the gays. — Kayla

Outstanding Cis Male Character

Pedro Pascal as Joel, The Last of Us

No matter how amazing Bella Ramsey was at portraying Ellie, The Last of Us wouldn’t have worked if the Ellie and Joel relationship hadn’t worked. The thing about Ellie and Joel is that it has to be a bit of a slow process; they don’t trust each other at first, and they have to warm up to one another. The chemistry of that can be hard, because Joel can’t be so cruel to Ellie in the beginning that you never forgive him, and the energy must always be paternal. It’s not an easy feat, and yet Bella Ramsey and Pedro Pascal make it look easy. Pedro himself has been a fierce ally, constantly praising Bella in interviews with their correct pronouns. Considering his sister, who is trans, has spoken about how immensely supportive Pedro has always been of her, this isn’t a surprise. But it’s still refreshing to see from a cis man who has amassed such a huge fandom from shows like Game of Thrones, The Mandalorian, and Narcos. — Valerie

Santana Lopez Legacy Award For Outstanding Queer Teen Character

Ari Notartomaso as Cynthia, Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies

When I think about the Santana Lopez Legacy award, I think about characters who affect us queer adults, and, more importantly, characters who can impact actual teens seeing themselves represented for the first time. As a kid, I always struggled to fit in with the girls, because I was considered a “tomboy” and wasn’t into a lot of the things girls were “supposed” to be into. I also didn’t fit in with the boys (nor did I, personally, have any interest in it.) But something I’ve learned as I got older is that gender isn’t as black and white (or blue and pink) as we were raised to believe.

It would have been easy for a show like Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies to do hand wavy “it was the 50s” and not address some of the topics they explore on the show. Surely people in the 50’s were dealing with these things, but media rarely shows it. Not Pink Ladies. Instead they gave us Cynthia, portrayed by the immensely talented nonbinary actor Ari Notartomaso. Cynthia is a teen girl who wants to be one of the boys but who isn’t treated well or accepted by them. And instead of changing herself to fit in with the boys OR the girls, she finds a group of friends who accept her as she is, gender nonconformity, queerness, and all. I don’t know if the series went on if Cynthia would have ended up feeling more trans, but as she stands, she’s a queer girl who presents in “masculine” ways, and I think it’s so important to see teens accepting a butch girl as one of their own. Teens need to see that words like “girl” don’t always have a hard and fast definition. Anyone can be a Pink Lady. Even Cynthia. — Valerie

Best Episode with LGBTQ+ Themes

A League of Their Own, ep. 106: “Stealing Home”

One of my least favorite arguments is that period pieces about people who aren’t white and straight will always be about trauma. It’s used as an explanation from some for their dislike and for others to ask period pieces to disengage from the reality of when they’re set. But this argument itself is ahistorical. It’s disrespectful to our ancestors who not only fought but played, who not only suffered but celebrated, who not only died but lived.

As an entire show, A League of Their Own finds an inspired balance between history and joy. Period pieces and reboots have struggled immensely in recent years in their aspiration for inclusivity — this show does it with grace. And episode six of the show’s single season is its ultimate achievement. I’m in awe of how much queer history is told in this one episode and how well-balanced it is between joy and pain. Contrasting the Peaches’ time at the underground lesbian bar with Max’s time at her uncle’s party is inspired. Even when the former faces the harsh reality of a police raid, the latter is allowed to be a story of happiness and discovery.

I’m not as attached as some audiences to queer stories that lean toward joy. But I do care about clear perspective and tone and this episode is a masterclass in both. Anyone wanting to tell stories about queer history should study this show and this episode. We don’t have to choose between fun and reality. The reality is queer people have always found fun, have always found community, have always found ourselves. — Drew

Outstanding Performance by an Out LGBTQ+ Actor in a Drama

Devery Jacobs, Reservation Dogs

Early in Reservation Dogs‘ run, Elora and her crew — Bear, Cheese, and Willie Jack — are gathered at their hideout when Bear laments all the crimes they’ve committed and all the people they’ve (however unintentionally) hurt. Elora refuses to feel even a second of regret: They stole that money “fair and fuckin’ square,” she notes. He insists they give the money back but Elora is unmoved.
“This place is shit. Fuck this town, Bear, you don’t owe anyone anything. Fuck the village, fuck the people in it,” she spits. It was this place — this town — that killed their friend, Daniel, and she won’t allow this place to do the same thing to her. She’s getting out, with or without them.

But the first time Elora gets out — when she absconds to California with Jackie — she returns, remembering that she owes at least one person something: her grandmother, the woman that raised her after her mother’s death. Mabel’s sick and Elora returns to watch her community usher her grandmother into the next realm. Elora’s no stranger to loss but this is different. She witnesses a death that feels like its part of the natural order of things…there’s food, there’s community, there’s prayer, there’s singing, there are even jokes. Death doesn’t have to be traumatic, Elora realizes; she’s finally able to let go of the grief she’s been holding.

The beauty of that realization doesn’t happen without Devery Jacobs, who shoulders Elora’s emotional load. It feels like too much for the character but also it feels like too much for an actor…to embody all that hurt, to carry all that pain. Jacobs does it with aplomb. She carries the weight of Elora’s grief and sadness — in her words, her eyes, and her posture — and releases it all when she greets her grandmother as a spirit (“Crazy, ennit?”). In a just world, Jacobs would be among the nominees — for her acting and her writing — at the major awards but no one need tell the Rez Dogs that this world is unjust. — Natalie

Outstanding Performance by an Out LGBTQ+ Actor in a Comedy

Ayo Edebiri, The Bear

Ayo Edebiri’s Sydney Adamu arrives at The Beef with a pedigree that feels inconsistent to the position she’s being offered. She attended the Culinary Institute of America and she’s worked at Chicago hotspots Alinea, Avec, and Smoque. So what, her prospective boss, Carmy, wonders, is she doing here? Or, as he puts it succinctly later, “your resume is excellent and this place is not.” Sydney makes excuses but, ultimately, she’s here to learn and rebuild her confidence. Except instead of easing into a space where Sydney can rebuild her confidence, she’s tossed into a pressure cooker with a staff the resents her presence and a boss who insists on system that won’t work.

“So, like, because I’m the sous, right? Like, I just, uh, follow orders, even if it leads to tension and, uh, chaos and resentment and ultimately doesn’t work,” she tentatively explains after Carmy announces the new system.

Sydney is asked to do too much and Edebiri delivers each and every time. You see the quick wit and dexterity on full display — honed by Edebiri’s years on small comedy stages — when she exchanges quips with Richie. Edibiri volleys from eagerness to impatience to arrogance, sometimes within the space of one episode, and it is a marvel to watch. In less skillful hands, Sydney would feel like too much — too strident for the family atmosphere, too green for her Michelin-star ambitions — but Edebiri imbues her with so much light that it becomes impossible not to cheer for the young sous. — Natalie

Outstanding Performance by an Out LGBTQ+ Actor in a Sci-Fi/Fantasy Show

Bella Ramsey, The Last of Us

What can I say about Bella Ramsey that I haven’t already said on this very website? Welp, challenge: accepted. This tiny dynamo burst onto the scene as Lyanna Mormont on Game of Thrones, and even then it was clear that they were something special. When they were cast in the role of Ellie in The Last of Us, I was cautiously excited. I knew Bella was good, but were they “embody the murder daughter I would protect with my life” good? The joke was on me because they somehow exceeded my expectations!

Ellie Williams might only be 14 years old, but in her short life she’s experienced more than most of us ever will. She was born into a global pandemic (okay I guess we can relate on one thing) caused by a cordyceps virus that turned anyone infected into a walking fungal nightmare. Her mother died after giving birth to her, she was raised in a government-run school, she watched her best friend turn into one of the aforementioned fungal nightmares, and because of that last thing, she learned that she was immune to the virus, having survived the same attack that claimed Riley. It makes sense that she’d have a bit of a chip on her shoulder.

Bella gave Ellie that “take no shit” attitude that we expected, and added in a dose of vulnerability always reminding us that despite all she’s been through, Ellie is still just a kid. A kid who’s been forced to grow up quickly in a violent and unforgiving world, but a kid all the same. So much of TV Ellie’s impact is in what she doesn’t say; it’s the uncertainty in her face after she kisses Riley and the relief when her friend kisses her back; it’s the flicker of understanding in her eyes when Tess gets infected. Bella breathed new life into a character I thought I knew because of Ashley Johnson’s video game portrayal. One of the most heartbreaking lines in the game is when Joel accuses Ellie of not understanding loss and she says “Everyone I have cared for has either died or left me… so don’t tell me I would be safer with someone else, because the truth is I would just be more scared.” It makes me cry every time I play, and when Bella said the same words in the show, they hit differently but just as hard. That’s the beauty of their performance; they made Ellie their own, while maintaining the spirit of a character so many people know and love. Congrats Bella, I can’t wait to see how you manage to emotionally devastate me in season two. — Nic

Outstanding LGBTQ+ Director/Writer/Showrunner

Abbi Jacobson and Will Graham, A League of Their Own

A League of Their Own was a love story. I’m not talking about Greta and Carson, or Max and Esther, or even Jess and Lupe (brothers for life) — I’m talking about the immense love poured into the series, from its very inception, by Will Graham and Abbi Jacobson.

Remounting a 30 year old property was never going to be an “easy” task. We often talk about the deluge of reboots and remakes in Hollywood, but the majority of those are adrenaline pumping, action-based IPs or comedies that long ago went stale — not quiet and emotional stories of sisterhood and sports kept alive for three decades on the backs of (it’s time to finally be honest here) largely queer fans. Those type of brands do not get revived every day.

And even still, Penny Marshall’s A League of Their Own was not a perfect film. It had gaps around race and sexuality, some of which are tied to its 1992 release. Lesser creators would have glazed over those insufficiencies. Instead, Graham and Jacobson faced them head-on.

When A League of Their Own finally aired, there were no greater champions than Abbi Jacobson pushing hard at every red carpet and Will Graham in the trenches with the fans on social. When rumors began that Prime Video was considering cancelling the series after its first time at bat, Will Graham was there once again telling fans to reach for #MoreThanFour. They loved this series. And I mean, really, truly loved it. Right to the very end.

This homage I’m paying is small, but I hope this Thank You is mighty. — Carmen

Most Groundbreaking Representation

A League of Their Own

Our Community’s reaction to the mind-boggling volume of queer characters in A League Of Their Own was so intense that NBC wrote a whole article about it, in which they noted that the conversation around ALOTO “reached a fever pitch” after its debut weekend, with some calling it the greatest queer show of all time. I told NBC and I’m telling you now that in one mere season, ALOTO delivered more lead queer women characters than any other show not explicitly about queer women (e.g., The L Word, Lip Service), and it even gives those shows a run for their money. A League Of Their Own, much to the chagrin of so many haters, broke from its source material by daring to portray the league as it really was: full of lesbians, even though it was indeed the 1940s.

From players exploring the rich underground gay bar culture of the era to the queer Black community Max discovers through her Uncle Bertie to the casual butch fashion sported by Lupe and Jess; A League of Their Own broke ground by daring to say that yes, most of the girls on that field were gay as fuck. — Riese

Outstanding Hairstyling for an LGBTQ+ Character

Max Chapman (played by Chanté Adams, styled by Mary Ann Valdes), A League of Their Own

It’s rare for me to quote… well, myself. Especially during an awards moment like this. But there really is no other way that I can think to talk about this moment:

“Max sits in Bertie and Gracie’s warm yellow kitchen on a stool. Three Black queer people, across two generations, creating a new family other their own, rooted in our oldest traditions. The kitchen hair salon goes back as far as Black folks. It’s on purpose that it’s here. Bertie asks if Max is sure about this.

Max inhales and licks her bottom lip before letting her teeth graze across it. Miss Toni said that Max’s hair was one of the things she liked most about her, so yes, this is the first step to Max figuring out who she is on her own. She’s sure.”

It was in Max’s queer haircut that she first got to be in her own skin, on her own terms. It was in Bert’s kitchen that Max finally gave way from what she once was in order to become who she’ll grow into. I think that when we think of Max, when we think of that haircut, those are all the things we think of first. But I’d like to point out something different.

When Bertie cuts Max’s hair, they begin humming. Max — who until that point has had her shoulders tensed up near her ears — finally takes a stuttered, but deep breath. Her mom used to hum that song. Bert smiles “Well, maybe you came here to find a piece of home.” — Carmen

Outstanding Costume Design for a Show With LGBTQ+ Characters

A League of Their Own (costume design: Nancy Steiner, Trayce Gigi Fields)

Costume designer Trayce Gigi Field’s resume is stacked with sharpy stylized shows and movies like Poker Face, The After Party, Barb & Star Go To Vista Del Mar and Now Apocalypse. Her work on A League of Their Own was remarkable; nailing the specifics of the period and the confines of wartime clothing regulation while also dressing characters who regularly morphed in and out of properly “gendered” apparel depending on context. From factory boilersuits to Max’s self-reflection around wearing her first tailored suit to high femme jock Greta’s elevated house dresses to Jess’s scrappy workwear, Field hit it out of the park every time.

As reported by Fashionista, Field did loads of research on the era to nail every character’s socio-economic statuses and backgrounds, mixing custom pieces with sourced 1940s vintagewear. Even the classic Peaches uniform (and that of their competitors) got a light refresh, one echoed by everybody ever for Halloween 2022. (For a special treat, check out Trayce’s online portfolio from the series, which features behind-the-scenes photos and also her full-color sketches for each baseball team’s unique look and some of the lead character’s most memorable costumes.) — Riese

Fan Favorite Categories

Fan Favorite Couple: Maya and Carina, Station 19

Fan Favorite Character: Sister Beatrice, Warrior Nun

Fan Favorite Out Actor: Bella Ramsey, The Last of Us

Max Abandons Ship and Cancels “Our Flag Means Death,” Wrecks Passionate Queer Fandom

We’re less than two weeks into 2024, and “Cancel Your Gays” has already struck yet again. Yesterday, Max announced that it won’t be renewing its hit pirate comedy, Our Flag Means Death after two very successful and very queer seasons. The show starred Rhys Darby and Taika Waititi as Stede Bonnet and Ed “Blackbeard” Teach, an unlikely couple who meet when Stede leaves his cushy life in favor of adventuring on the high seas as a gentleman pirate. Along the way, they gather the queerest motley crew turned motley family I’ve ever seen.

Over the course of two seasons and 18 episodes, Our Flag Means Death waved its Pride flag as high as its pirate colors, putting queerness front and center without apology. One of my favorite things about this show is that it normalized its queerness by not making sexuality a ThingTM for so many of its characters, while also treating its coming out storylines with the utmost care and respect. Stede starts season one with a whole wife and two kids, and then explores what embracing his queerness later in life looks like. We watched Jim (Vico Ortiz) begin the series by disguising themself as a man, and then becoming fully settled into their non-binary identity in season two. And the gay party didn’t stop with the core cast; we even got a look into what the lives of famed lesbian pirates Anne Bonney (Minnie Driver) and Mary Read (Rachel House) might have looked like once they took a break from piracy. So much of Our Flag Means Death was funny and weird, but it’s the moments of character vulnerability and tenderness sprinkled among the chaos that truly showcased the heart of the show.

A spokesperson for Max told The Hollywood Reporter, “We also thank the dedicated fans who embraced these stories and built a gorgeous, inclusive community surrounding the show.” It’s that very community and fandom surrounding Our Flag that makes this cancellation all the more heart-breaking. I was lucky enough to attend a panel with some of the cast at last year’s New York Comic Con, and despite the fact that the actors were unable to talk about the show due to the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, the fans still showed up in droves. Some were in full pirate cosplay, others were handing out stickers and flyers to other fans, while even more riled up the crowd by singing sea shanties before the panel started.

That’s the thing about queer-centric fandoms: We love our stories, we love them hard, and when networks treat those stories with care we will keep showing up. We show up at conventions, online through fan art and fan fiction, and even create unofficial merch for shows when the networks refuse to invest. I don’t know about y’all, but I’m so tired of watching our shows get canceled even when they’re wildly successful. Now, I’m not here to speculate on the reason for the cancellation, but when a show has Rotten Tomatoes scores of 94% and 93% with critics and fans, respectively, I have to wonder what more we have to do to prove that our stories are worth telling.

If there’s a silver lining on this storm cloud of news, it’s that at the very least, the end of season two felt like a satisfying conclusion for the characters we’ve grown to know and love.

The show’s creator, David Jenkins, said this in an Instagram post about the cancellation: “I’m very sad I won’t set foot on the Revenge again with my friends, some of whom have become close to family. But I couldn’t be more grateful for being allowed to captain the damn thing in the first place.

Our Flag Means Us. Loving one another, pulling off some pretty weird and beautiful shit, and talking it through… as a crew. 🏴‍☠️🦄🐈‍⬛💜”

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A post shared by David Jenkins (@dvidjenkins)

Our Flag Means Us, indeed.

Elise Bauman on Being Queer and Competitive in New Canadian Sitcom “One More Time”

Before I fell in love with Elise Bauman the person, I fell in love with Elise Bauman the actor. Our mutual friend invited us both to participate in gay zoom reads of movie scripts at the start of the pandemic and, even then, her commitment to craft was obvious. And by craft, I mean to play a French maid in Clue she taped a printout of boobs to her shirt and to play Scott Caan’s character in Ocean’s 11 she made chest tufts out of her real hair.

Long story short, those live reads led to becoming Instagram mutuals which led to us now being three years into a relationship. But I’m not here today to talk about Elise Bauman, my girlfriend. I’m here to talk about Elise Bauman, the actor, because tonight on CBC the new sitcom One More Time premieres and she’s one of the leads.

Created by standup comedian DJ Demers, One More Time is about a used sporting goods store and the colorful cast of characters who work there. A workplace comedy with just a dash more hockey. Elise plays Jen Hauser, a gay Olympic javelin thrower who brings the same competitive spirit to her job that she does to her sport.

I’m so excited for Canadian audiences — and patient/crafty international audiences (*cough* stream free on CBC Gem with a VPN blocker *cough*) — to witness Elise’s talent as an actor, a comedian, and a jock. That’s called being a triple threat, baby.

In anticipation of the premiere tonight, I talked to Elise about why Jen Hauser was her dream role, how her own queerness has evolved while playing queer characters, and so much more.

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Elise: It’s so nice to be here… on our living room sofa.

Drew: It’s a lot easier to coordinate an interview when you live with the talent.

Elise: (laughs) The talent? Oh boy.

Drew: That’s what they call you. In… the business.

Elise: That’s also what I make you call me.

Drew: The business?

Elise: (laughs) The talent.

Drew: (laughs) Oh yes.

Elise: On our shared calendar—

Drew: We did just start a shared calendar!

Elise: Yeah and guess what this interview didn’t make it onto? The shared calendar.

Drew: I’m barely adjusting to keeping my Autostraddle calendar up to date. I’ve never kept a calendar like that!

Elise: I can tell.

Drew: (laughs)

Elise: (laughs)

Drew: I’m going to actually interview you. Is that okay? Like I’m going to talk to you about the show.

Elise: And you’re objective because you don’t know me at all.

Drew: No, but this is actually in right now. Lots of celebrity interviews lately are like celebrities interviewing other celebrities or—

Elise: Are you calling yourself a celebrity?

Drew: (laughs) No. Or the chicken shop girl.

Elise: The chicken shop girl?

Drew: Yeah!

Elise: Oh right. Amelia Bedelia.

Drew: Amelia Dimoldenberg. I wish Amelia Bedelia had an interview show.

Anyways, film journalists getting to do interviews is kind of out right now which is a bummer, but now I’m a film journalist getting to do an interview because I’m dating you.

Elise: So it’s like nepotism.

Drew: Yeah exactly.

Elise: Now that that’s been established…

Drew: When you first got the audition for One More Time — I know this because I date you — you were like “this is the one.”

Elise: Yes.

Drew: What was it about the part that made you feel that way?

Elise: As you may have witnessed, this audition sent me on a slow descent into madness. Because I got the breakdown and it just ticked off so many boxes of things I’ve been wanting to do.

Drew: What were those boxes?

Elise: It’s been my big, big dream for a long time to play a queer character on a half hour sitcom. That’s been the goal. And then when you add in that the character was extremely competitive and driven and sporty and not femme. It was very exciting to me. So I said: I MUST HAVE THIS ONE.

Instead of having a nice, healthy relationship to the audition where you do it and then you let it go, I decided to obsess about it for twenty… four hours of the day… seven days a week… which is all of the hours in case you didn’t know.

Drew: And how long was it from when you first got the breakdown to when you got cast?

Elise: I got the breakdown beginning of March. Is that right?

Drew: It was March 1 because I flew into Toronto that day.

Elise: And then we started filming on July 4 and I was cast maybe a couple weeks before we started filming.

Drew: (laughs)

Elise: So it was a really long process and I was so patient throughout the whole thing. I definitely didn’t bring it up constantly and go I HAVE TO GET THIS NOW. And you probably loved every second of it.

Drew: I mean, one thing I did love was I got to see how—

Elise: (laughs) How insane I am?

Drew: Yeah but also how driven you are. We’re both ambitious, but I really respected the fact that you were… not without shame, but—

Elise: (laughs)

Drew: Like we went ax throwing for a friend’s birthday and you got a lot of bullseyes so you sent the casting director a video of you getting bullseyes because your character is a javelin thrower and we don’t have javelin birthday parties.

Elise: But you know what? We should.

Drew: I’m always like, if they want me they want me and if they don’t they don’t, which can be healthy in other ways, but I appreciated you being so direct about this thing you wanted.

Elise: I don’t think that type of approach works all the time. But I think my character is so obsessive and needs to be the best at everything. So I sort of decided to approach the casting process as the character might which I do think helped me because then they saw that within me.

Drew: And you also really weren’t crazy… to them.

Elise: (laughs)

Drew: (laughs) You did go above and beyond. But most of the anxiety was at home.

Elise: Yeah. I did know one of the readers for one of the callbacks and afterward she was like you seemed so cool and confident. And I was like I AM FREAKING OUT.

Drew: But you got the part!

Elise: It sure did work this time! It usually doesn’t!

Drew: It is really exciting to get to see you play a character like this. Obviously you’re not your character, but it’s fun to get to see you a play a character who’s funny and competitive and masc. It’s very you. I think you have a lot of range as an actor but it’s fun when you get to tap into something real.

Elise: It’s great to do something that is so specifically in my wheelhouse. It feels really liberating. But also I don’t think I would have been able to do this role a few years ago. I needed more time to settle into myself.

Drew: Also when you first auditioned we watched DJ’s standup and were like oh it’s really good! That’s nice!

Elise: (laughs) Thank God. A comedian creating a show can really go one of two ways. Luckily, DJ is incredibly kind and supportive and so funny.

That’s another reason I wanted the part so badly. The audition sides were making me laugh out loud.

Drew: So once you got cast, what was the shooting process like? What was the pace?

Elise: We shot July 4 to September 15. What’s the math on that?

Drew: I’ll do it.

Elise: Insert doing math here.

Drew: Like two and a half months.

Elise: And we shot 13 episodes. So it was a lot. And it’s all fast-paced, snappy dialogue and really high energy too. That’s something that was an adjustment. After years of the pandemic, I wasn’t used to being around that many people anymore. I’m a bit of an introvert so figuring out how to maintain my energy while using so much of my energy. Let’s just say I went to bed at eight o’clock most nights.

Drew: You were just filming days then?

Elise: We shot 11 hour days which is pretty unheard of.

Drew: Because usually people shoot 12 hour days.

Elise: Right and then overtime.

Drew: Right I’m just saying that for everyone reading.

Elise: For the plebeians reading this!

Drew: (laughs) Yeah.

Elise: But no exactly. We had really reasonable hours. I know it’s something the producers were passionate about.

Drew: I love that.

Elise: I also love it.

Drew: What was the most fun day on set?

Elise: I really liked the episode when—

Drew: This comes out the day of the premiere so no spoilers.

Elise: Oh!

Drew: You have to be vague.

Elise: Hmm. Do you remember my most fun day?

Drew: (laughs) I guess I’ll just interview myself!

Elise: (laughs) Oh oh there was a day where I actually got to throw — it wasn’t a javelin — but it was something I was throwing as if it was a javelin. And the stunt guy took me across the street to the park and was like let’s practice a few throws. Then I did it and it was perfect my first try. And he was like, well I feel confident in you. That was amazing.

Also a day when my character was working out with a medicine ball. The camera team was going to do a special shot so it looked like I threw the medicine ball and it landed perfectly on the shelf. And I was like pfft I bet I could do that for real and then the camera team was like I bet you can’t and then I did it every single shot.

Drew: So the best part of being an actor is throwing things well in front of men?

Elise: (laughs) Exactly.

Drew: Without spoiling season one, what is something you hope to see for Jen Hauser, your character, if One More Time runs for several seasons?

Elise: As I read more scripts and got to play opposite more characters, I discovered that underneath Jen’s confidence and bravado there’s a lot of insecurity. Part of what’s driving her to be so competitive is she had a parent who was really hard on her and it would be fun to get to meet that parent and explore that relationship. I want us to see more of what turned her into this driven monster and find the cracks in that.

Also there’s an episode where I get to flirt a little bit and one of my friends was cast and it was so fun. I’d love to see Jen flirt with a lot of ladies. And then maybe eventually there’s one person who she can’t seduce and that person—

Drew: That’s the couple all the fans will ship. A little slow burn.

Elise: Exactly.

Drew: Well, speaking of queerness, you’ve played a lot of queer characters throughout your career. And queer-coded characters.

Elise: (laughs)

Drew: What’s it been like growing up in your own queerness alongside portraying queerness on-screen?

Elise: One thing I’ll say is it’s a lot more fun playing queer characters when I’m more comfortable in my own queerness. (laughs) Early days it was a lot about discovery and that’s tumultuous and exciting. But there’s something more gratifying about getting to exist within the thing that’s found.

That’s part of why I felt so ready for this role and so excited for this role. I feel like I’ve gone through so much discovery about myself and now I get to live in it. Especially since — not to get gushy — but since being with you I feel like I’ve really deepened parts of myself. So getting to be on-screen and be seen on-screen when I feel more seen in my real life is exciting.

Drew: That’s really nice.

Elise: Ewww gross! Feelings! I take it back, I take it back.

Drew: (laughs)

Elise: (laughs)

Drew: What other kinds of projects do you want to work on? Obviously more seasons of this…

Elise: Well, having just semi-moved to New York with you — side note to the Canadian government that I’m still spending six plus months of the year in Canada… Ontario specifically — I want more financial security. And stability in general. One thing that was really nice about One More Time is this was the longest I’ve ever been on a shoot and I really loved the consistency of going to work and seeing the same people every day.

But right now I’m rewatching Suits. (laughs)

Drew: (laughs) Go on.

Elise: And there is something so appealing to me about being the funny guy at the office.

Drew: In like a legal drama?

Elise: Not necessarily a legal drama…

Drew: But like something more dramatic where you’re funny. You want to be the comedic relief in a drama.

Elise: Exactly.

Drew: Right now you’re comedy in comedy. Next you want to be comedy in drama.

Elise: Yes. I would love to be the goofy little guy who is like, “Oh no the briefs have been breached!”

Drew: What’s the actor’s name? The guy who was in the Hanukkah movie?

Elise: The guy who plays Louis Litt? Yeah I kind of want to be the Louis Litt of a non-cop procedural.

Drew: I was going to ask what other shows and movies you’re watching and loving right now but Suits clearly.

Elise: Okay I don’t want to be known as the person who’s watching Suits. That’s really embarrassing for me. What else have we been watching?

Drew: We’re finally watching Normal People.

Elise: Yeah that one is brutal. God I need those straight people to communicate better.

Drew: The Curse.

Elise: Also brutal. A different kind of brutal.

Drew: We’re watching Ingmar Bergman movies. Those are light.

Elise: (laughs) We have been watching Ingmar Bergman movies. What are you watching? Fanny and Alexander!

Drew: We also watched The Apartment.

Elise: Oh that was great.

Drew: When we first started dating, I showed you Clueless and you thought that was an old movie.

Elise: It is an old movie.

Drew: But the fact that I’ve gotten you to love a lot of older movies brings me a lot of joy.

Elise: And I show you gems like…

Drew: High School Musical was the first movie you showed me.

Elise: Yes, it was.

Drew: Okay but also Center Stage!

Elise: Oh yeah!

Drew: That’s a great movie.

Elise: One of those actors is in Suits.

Drew: (laughs)

Elise: But I really do love movies. That’s another dream of mine. So if anyone wants to make that happen.

Drew: Look I’m trying.

Elise: (laughs)

Drew: I’m also excited for you to direct more. I think you have such a good eye.

Elise: Thanks.

Drew: And that’s my best shot at acting in an indie film. (laughs)

Elise: (laughs) I’d cast you.

Drew: Thanks.

Elise: Nepotism strikes again!

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One More Time premieres on CBC and CBC Gem tonight at 9 pm. 

F*ck It, I’m Starting Riverdale: A Year-Long Live Tweet

This piece contains spoilers for Riverdale… obviously. 

On March 12, 2020, my second day in quarantine, I tweeted: Fuck it I’m starting Glee. Over the next two months, I watched six seasons of that delightful and horrifying show as I struggled through those early days of Covid.

Well, it’s time I start another long-running teen show. But a lot has changed since March 2020. For one, Twitter is pretty much dead. That’s why I’m going to try something new as I make my way through Greg Berlanti’s spin on the Archie comics. I’m going to be posting thoughts, jokes, and screenshots in this article. My very own Riverdale-specific Twitter.

Something else has changed since March 2020: I have a full time job and an IRL social life. That’s why I’m giving myself until the end of 2024. That feels like a reasonable amount of time to make it through seven seasons and 137 episodes.

I started with season one but now I’m just updating this piece whenever I watch. Hop into the jalopy! It’s gonna be a fun ride!

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Okay so everything I know about Riverdale I gleaned from Riverdale superfan and Autostraddle managing editor Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya plus a brief love of the Archie comics as a child.

1. Archie is a redhead, Jughead has a hat, Betty is blonde, and Veronica is brunette.
2. I think Archie and Jughead can never decide whether they’re more into Betty or Veronica.
3. Archie drives a jalopy.
4. Betty is bisexual. (But also maybe every character is bisexual?)
5. Josie and the Pussycats
6. Charles Melton doesn’t show up until season two.
7. The show has multiple timelines maybe in a multiverse sort of way?
8. At some point, there is magic and various fantasy elements.
9. At some point, Archie goes to prison.
10. During the final season, Archie, Jughead, Betty, and Veronica form a polycule.

And with that… let’s start episode 1.

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I just shouted MILLENNIAL?? Definitely assumed this was going to take place in the 50’s.

Every year in my shitty suburb, I waited for a hot new person to show up and it never happened. Imagine CAMILA MENDES walks into your little diner. I get it Arch.

Oh okay Camila Mendes is going to be a problem for me. (The good kind.) Now I understand why you all liked that terrible Netflix movie with her.

I AM HOOKED !

This observation is going to be for like six people but Cole Sprous’ narrator voice has the exact same cadence as the narrator of Magnolia.

POOR BETTY !! A boy with an acoustic guitar is so dangerous for a girl that age.

Are Betty and Cheryl gonna kiss?

No okay not today.

I am loving this Betty/Jughead investigative journalism angle.

Cheryl might be my favorite character so far.

Wow Riverdale doing a Me Too storyline before Weinstein. Good for them even if it does involve something called a “Sticky Maple.”

The Josie and the Pussycats facing racism in Riverdale storyline at the start of the episode just a tad undermined by the deeply uncomfortable racial politics of the revenge plot storyline at the end !!

I’m sorry but Jughead would not call Tarantino “the godfather of indie cinema.” I don’t think he’s supposed to be cool, but he’s cooler than THAT.

Well… choices are certainly being made with this Ms. Grundy storyline.

Polly is suicidal? That’s the big secret? In my hometown, that was called being a teenager!

If I was Hermione Lodge, I’d be so annoyed that my daughter is seemingly around every corner when I’m just trying to hookup/make shady money deals.

I’m trying not to comment upon every film reference (or every exciting guest star) but this next episode is called “In a Lonely Place” and I do need to say that Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place is one of the best movies of all time.

Everyone is being so chill about Polly going from missing to having a baby shower.

Veronica has such Emma Woodhouse/Cher Horowitz energy.

Now THAT is how you do an episode of television.

Do we think it was always the plan for Cheryl’s dad to have a creepy red wig collection or was that in response to people online asking why he was wearing such a bad wig?

Unfortunately, I understand Archie because as a youth I also fell in love with every girl except the one who fell in love with me.

Betty and Cheryl are related?? I’m so glad they didn’t make out!

WAIT

Oh no… Polly. Oh God.

Why didn’t Betty’s dad say that was why Polly and Jason couldn’t date?? He knew, right??

Accurate representation of the legal system that the mayor and sheriff are busy worrying about smalltime drug dealers after discovering the kingpin killed his own son and then himself.

Not to sound surprised, but this episode is actually really sharp about moral panics around crime and how our society reacts to violence??

And now the show is taking on the broken foster system? Who knew Riverdale was political!

I need these girls to stop calling their actually fathers daddy.

Sorry but Betty going full righteous journalist is making her very hot to me.

Wow okay I don’t know how it took me so long to realize this but Riverdale premiered in 2017 which makes it a total Trump era show. I’ll wait until I watch more seasons to say anything declarative but Glee was the quintessential Obama era teen show premiering in 2009 and it makes total sense Riverdale would be the quintessential Trump era teen show premiering in 2017.

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Cheryl’s monologue to her mom… this episode really walking that line between violent and horny.

Not the return of Ms. Grundy !

NOT THE DEATH OF MS. GRUNDY !!!

The repeated trauma faced by Archie and the kids of Riverdale is meant to represent the trauma of today’s youth amidst political violence and mass shootings. In this essay I will…

Is the Josie and the Pussycats cover of “Milkshake” on Spotify?

It is!

Riverdale is turning into Zodiac, meanwhile Archie thinks he’s in The Avengers and Veronica thinks she’s in Gilmore Girls.

Betty is anti-cruising so actually NOT ally.

Vote Now in the 6th Annual Autostraddle TV Awards!

It has not been a normal year for television. For one, the Emmys are happening in January. With dual SAG/WGA strikes lasting from May to October, release dates, production schedules, and awards seasons were shifted as creatives fought for just a small portion of what they deserve.

The strikes might be over but the reckoning in Hollywood continues. Studios and tech companies that own studios continue to chase profits to appease boards with little attention to the television itself. The streaming bubble is bursting and the boom of queer television we’ve witnessed over the last decade has started to subside. But while these trends occur, the artists themselves continue to make incredible work. When the Autostraddle TV Awards were first started as the “Gay Emmys,” the intention was to honor the queer media that the mainstream often ignores. That’s more important than ever as we fight not to lose the progress we’ve gained.

Even though many of these shows have been canceled and not given the proper recognition from the people who financed them, they deserve recognition from us. Queer TV will never be about the shareholders — it will always be about the artists and the audiences who connect with their work.

How it Works: For the past few weeks, the knowledgeable and passionate queer critics who make up our TV Team have collaborated on a lengthy process to determine the year’s nominees in each of our Autostraddle TV Awards categories. We have 21 whole categories, and while there is some overlap with the Emmys, we also feature our own original categories that celebrate LGBTQ+ achievements — including awards specifically for out performers — as well as awards for other parts of the television landscape that don’t often get love from mainstream awards systems, like genre television. We took a massive list of potential nominees and voted to narrow that down to just six nominees per category — except in cases where there were ties and there are seven nominees… and, in one case, eight.

Now, it’s your turn to help us pick the winners. Individual Autostraddle readers can vote once in each category. Your votes will be combined with the TV Team’s final votes to choose the winners.

There are also three fan-favorite categories that YOU get to decide completely yourselves! Those categories are Fan Favorite Couples, Fan Favorite Character, and Fan Favorite Out Queer Actor.

We follow the same rules as the Emmys as far as timeline, which means the shows must have aired between June 1, 2022 and May 31, 2023 in order to be eligible. While the show’s full season does not need to have aired during that range, most of its episodes must have aired. We also follow Emmy submissions in determining what counts as a drama vs. a comedy.

Here is your official ballot!

Voting is now open and will close on Monday, January 8 at 5p.m. EST. The winners will be announced on January 12.

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AND THE NOMINEES FOR THE 6TH ANNUAL AUTOSTRADDLE TV AWARDS ARE…

Outstanding Drama Series

A League of Their Own (Prime Video)
High School (Freevee)
P-Valley, Season 2 (Starz)
Yellowjackets, Season 2 (Showtime)
Dead Ringers (Prime Video)
Bad Sisters (Apple TV+)

Outstanding Comedy Series

Sort Of, Season 2 (HBO Max)
Poker Face (Peacock)
XO Kitty (Netflix)
A Black Lady Sketch Show, Season 4 (HBO Max)
Reservation Dogs, Season 2 (FX)
Heartbreak High (Netflix)
Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies (Paramount+)

Outstanding Sci-Fi/Fantasy Series

The Last of Us (HBO Max)
Paper Girls (Prime Video)
Willow (Disney+)
Motherland: Fort Salem, Season 3 (Freeform)
First Kill (Netflix)
Warrior Nun (Netflix)

Outstanding Animated Series

The Owl House, Season 3 (Disney Channel)
Pinecone & Pony, Season 2 (Apple TV)
Harley Quinn, Season 3 (Max)
Star Trek: Lower Decks, Season 3 (Paramount+)
Big Mouth, Season 6 (Netflix)
The Legend of Vox Machina, Season 2 (Prime Video)

Outstanding Lead Actor Playing an LGBTQ+ Character in a Drama Series

Jasmin Savoy Brown as Taissa Turner, Yellowjackets
Rachel Weisz as Beverly, Dead Ringers
Abbi Jacobson as Carson Shaw, A League of Their Own
Chante Adams as Max Chapman, A League of Their Own
D’Arcy Carden as Greta Gill, A League of Their Own
Rosanny Zayas as Sophie Suarez, The L Word: Generation Q
Jesse James Keitel as Ruthie, Queer as Folk
Dominique Fishback as Dre, Swarm

Outstanding Supporting or Guest Actor Playing an LGBTQ+ Character in a Drama Series

Lea Robinson as Bertie, A League of Their Own
E.R. Fightmaster as Kai, Grey’s Anatomy
Nabiyah Be as Simone Jackson, Daisy Jones and the Six
Roberta Colindrez as Lupe, A League of Their Own
Sabrina Impacciatore as Valentina, The White Lotus
Rosie O’Donnell as Carrie, The L Word: Generation Q

Outstanding Lead Actor Playing an LGBTQ+ Character in a Comedy Series

Anna Cathcart as Kitty Song Covey, XO Kitty
Renee Rapp as Leighton, The Sex Lives of College Girls
Ari Notartomaso as Cynthia, Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies
Bilal Baig as Sabi, Sort Of
Juno Temple as Keeley Jones, Ted Lasso
Jerrie Johnson as Tye, Harlem

Outstanding Supporting or Guest Actor Playing an LGBTQ+ Character in a Comedy Series

Amanda Cordner as 7even, Sort Of
Ashley Park as Naomi, Beef
Jodi Balfour as Jack, Ted Lasso
Gia Kim as Yuri Han, XO Kitty
Maria Bello as Jordan, Beef
Sherry-Lee Watson as Missy, Heartbreak High

Outstanding Lead Actor Playing an LGBTQ+ Character in a Sci-Fi Series

Bella Ramsey as Ellie, The Last of Us
Imani Lewis as Calliope, First Kill
Sarah Catherine Hook as Juliette, First Kill
Erin Kellyman as Jade Claymore, Willow
Ruby Cruz as Princess Kit Tanthalos, Willow
Elliot Page as Viktor Hargreeves, The Umbrella Academy

Outstanding Supporting or Guest Actor Playing an LGBTQ+ Character in a Sci-Fi Series

Storm Reid as Riley, The Last of Us
Amalia Holm as Scylla Ramshorn, Motherland: Fort Salem
Mia McKenna-Bruce as Mia Karp, Vampire Academy
Rhian Blundell as Meredith Beckham, Vampire Academy
Daisy Head as Judy Talbot, The Sandman
Madeline Zima as Casey, Doom Patrol
Celina Martin as Hannah Moore, The Imperfects

Outstanding Performance by a Straight Actress in a Straight Role

Sarah Snook as Shiv Roy, Succession
Melanie Lynskey as Shauna, Yellowjackets
Natasha Lyonne as Charlie, Poker Face
Quinta Brunson as Janine Teagues, Abbott Elementary
Sharon Horgan as Eva Garvey, Bad Sisters
Sheryl Lee Ralph as Barbara Howard, Abbott Elementary

Outstanding Cis Male Character

Pedro Pascal as Joel, The Last of Us
Jeremy Allen White as Carmy, The Bear
Tyler James Williams as Gregory, Abbott Elementary
Lionel Boyce as Marcus, The Bear
Nick Offerman as Bill, The Last of Us
James Marsden as James Marsden, Jury Duty

Santana Lopez Legacy Award For Outstanding Queer Teen Character

Jordan Hull as Angelica Porter-Kennard, The L Word: Generation Q
Anna Cathcart as Kitty Song Covey, XO Kitty
Bella Ramsey as Ellie, The Last of Us
Ari Notartomaso as Cynthia, Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies
Gia Kim as Turi Han, XO Kitty
Akira Akbar as Ashley Banks, Bel-Air

Best Episode with LGBTQ+ Themes

The Last of Us, episode 107: ”Left Behind”
Queer as Folk, episode 106: ”Bleep”
A League of Their Own, episode 106: “Stealing Home”
A League of Their Own, episode 105: ”Back Footed”
High School, episode 105: “Freedom”
Daisy Jones & The Six, episode 107: ”Track 7: She’s Gone”

Outstanding Performance by an Out LGBTQ+ Actor in a Comedy

Ayo Edebiri as Sydney, The Bear
Jonica Blu Booth as Duke, Rap Sh!t
Renee Rapp as Leighton, The Sex Lives of College Girls
Bilal Baig as Sabi, Sort Of
Wanda Sykes as Lucretia Turner, The Upshaws
Caitlin Stasey as Saskia, Class of ’07

Outstanding Performance by an LGBTQ+ Actor in a Drama

Devery Jacobs as Elora Danan, Reservation Dogs
Jasmin Savoy Brown as Taissa Turner, Yellowjackets
Tawny Cypress as Taissa Turner, Yellowjackets
Aubrey Plaza as Harper, The White Lotus
Roberta Colindrez as Lupe, A League of Their Own
Liv Hewson as Van, Yellowjackets

Outstanding LGBTQ+ Actor in a Sci-Fi/Fantasy Show

Bella Ramsey as Ellie, The Last of Us
Elliot Page as Viktor Hargreeves, The Umbrella Academy
Diane Guerrero as Kay/Jane, Doom Patrol
Rutina Wesley as Maria, The Last of Us
Erin Kellyman as Jade Claymore, Willow
Ruby Cruz as Princess Kit Tanthalos, Willow

Outstanding LGBTQ+ Director / Writer / Showrunner

Abbi Jacobson and Will Graham, A League of Their Own
Devery Jacobs, Reservation Dogs
Brittani Nichols, Abbott Elementary
Annabel Oakes, Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies
Clea DuVall and Laura Kittrell, High School
Bilal Baig, Sort Of

Most Groundbreaking Representation

XO, Kitty (Netflix)
Sort Of (Max)
Queer as Folk (Peacock)
P-Valley (Starz)
Reservation Dogs (FX)
A League of Their Own (Prime Video)

Outstanding Hairstyling for an LGBTQ+ Character

E.R. Fightmaster as Dr. Kai Bartley, Grey’s Anatomy (hair department head: Desiree Dizard)
Chanté Adams as Max Chapman, A League of Their Own (hair department head: Mary Ann Valdes)
D’Arcy Carden as Greta Gill, A League of Their Own (hair department head: Mary Ann Valdes)
Diane Guerrero as Kay/Jane, Doom Patrol (hair department head: Melizah Anguiano Wheat)
Carmen LoBue as Dre, The L Word: Generation Q (hair department head: Christine Tagatac)
Roberta Colindrez as Lupe, A League of Their Own (hair department head: Mary Ann Valdes)

Outstanding Costume Design for a Show With LGBTQ+ Characters

The Last of Us (HBO Max) (costume design: Cynthia Ann Summers)
The White Lotus (HBO Max) (costume design: Alex Bovaird)
Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies (Paramount+) (costume design: Samantha Hawkins, Angelina Kekich)
Acapulco (Apple TV+) (costume design: Leticia Palacios)
A League of Their Own(Prime Video) (costume design: Nancy Steiner, Trayce Gigi Fields)
A Black Lady Sketch Show (HBO Max) (costume design: Michelle Page Collins)

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To vote in the above categories as well as the THREE SPECIAL FAN FAVORITE CATEGORIES*, go forth and:

VOTE IN THE AUTOSTRADDLE TV AWARDS!!!

*When voting in the fan favorite categories, please keep the eligibility guidelines in mind and only nominate couples/characters/actors who appeared in shows that aired between June 1, 2022 and May 31, 2023. Otherwise your vote will be wasted!

The Best Queer TV Scenes of 2023

What makes a great TV scene? Is it the payoff of seasons-long romantic tension? Is it the perfect needle drop in a climactic moment? Or is it just a quiet moment where great acting and great writing achieve a rare alchemy? The answer, of course, is all three — and so much more.

This year, in lieu of best episodes, the Autostraddle TV Team has gathered to share what we think are the best queer TV scenes of 2023. There’s a wide range of genres, shows, and moments, together showing the vast possibilities of queer television.

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The Deadloch Choir, Deadloch

I can’t really get into any details of these scenes without spoiling the entirety of the series, but there is a cover of “All The Things She Said” and a cover of “We Belong” by the legendary local Deadloch choir (a town of lesbians) in the final episode of Deadloch that were just so fucking perfect. — Riese

Doom Duet, Doom Patrol

I am a sucker for a musical episode, and the Doom Patrol musical episode did not disappoint. The whole episode was so fun, but I was especially excited to see that I was not misreading the vibes and that Jane and Casey were actually into each other, as revealed by a sweet duet. Casey sings about feeling butterflies – a new sensation for someone who just popped off a comic book page – and Jane sings about feeling conflicted but feeling the same way. They even make what I have to assume is a Carol reference and say they were “flung from the timestream” and it’s all very cute and gay. — Valerie Anne

Victorine’s Death Scene, The Fall of the House of Usher

There are so many scenes I love from The Fall of the House of Usher, but of all the over-the-top death scenes, Victorine has the best, largely in part due to queer actor T’Nia Miller’s performance, which takes on an almost stage-like quality here. The red light, her pleading delusions, and her father’s rare display of genuine pain makes it all so urgent and gutting even as we know exactly what is about to happen. That’s often the fun of this show, which uses aesthetics and a mixture of humor and horror to thrill without over-relying on a puzzlebox structure. It doesn’t matter that you know what’s going to happen; it’s still a delight to watch. — Kayla

Yasuda Asks Helm Out (Finally), Grey’s Anatomy

If there’s one thing ya girl loves, it’s a nerdy and awkward queer who finally musters up the courage to ask their crush out after seemingly ENDLESS flirting. Bonus points if that same queer isn’t exactly sure if what’s happening is actually flirting. I’ve been Team Yasuda since she joined the latest crop of Lexie Grey Memorial Hospital of Every Malady and Disaster Ever interns. And Taryn Helm? She has somehow managed to get the shit end of the stick until she took a page out of the Simone Biles book of mental health and gave herself a break. I wish we got more Yasuda and Helm nuggets this season, but at least what we did get included the most adorable flirting, culminating in Yasuda finally ambling into the bar and word vomiting an invite to fellow intern Simone’s wedding. All while Helm just stood there, smirking, waiting for her girl to finish so she could say yes. Ugh! The cutest! I loved it. — Nic

Alice and Tasha’s Last Dance, The L Word: Generation Q

On the list of things so exciting to me that I will forgive all of said thing’s surrounding circumstances is Alice and Tasha having, at last, a sweet and romantic moment on the dance floor at Bette and Tina’s wedding. As a person who spent a lot of time in walk-in fridges at my various serving jobs, “call a firefighter” wouldn’t be my first move upon finding my pals locked into a walk-in fridge, but again — anything for Talice. ANYTHING. They had a sweet little moment about grief and Alice apologized and Tasha laughed TASHA LAUGHED and I cried and laughed too. — Riese

There is a lot that I will go down arguing that The L Word: Generation Q got wrong, especially in the wind down episodes of its final season. But this is not one of them. Tasha and Alice are magic. That was true when I was 20 years old, and Tasha laughed in her husky way when Alice asked if she liked “girly girls.” It was true when I watched “I’m a soldier for love” countless times on my laptop (if you were there, you get it, what’s known does not have to be said). That remains true now.

I just do not know what my imaginations of queer romance on television would look like without them. It’s that simple. For better or for worse, Tasha and Alice will always exist in the simplest and purest part of my heart. And if Gen Q was going to end in a tribute to nostalgic romances of the original series, I’m glad that this one scene — seemingly picked right from my own brain cells or the discarded drafts of my fan fiction — I’m glad that this one made the cut. — Carmen

“I Got You Babe”, The Last of Us

Surprise, surprise, I’m back with more TLOU feelings. After Riley spent who knows how long setting up one last adventure for her best friend before leaving on a Firefly mission, she introduces Ellie to the final Wonder of the Mall: a Halloween store. Ellie’s still reeling from the news that her bestie is leaving, and even after Riley shares that part of the reason is because she hasn’t felt chosen until the Fireflies, Ellie still puts on a brave face and tries to enjoy their last moments together. They don a pair of full Halloween masks and awkwardly dance and laugh to “I Got You Babe.”

Maybe it’s the silly dancing, maybe it’s the heightened emotions, but when Ellie takes off her mask and asks Riley to stay, she says “yes.” And Ellie is so surprised and relieved that she kisses Riley because maybe, just maybe everything will be okay. She apologizes immediately, and when Riley confirms her feelings with a “for what?” the two laugh in that way where you can’t believe how long you’ve held something in for fear of rejection, and then find out that your crush feels the exact same way. It’s innocent and sweet and heartbreaking, especially considering what comes next. — Nic

Losing Our Minds Together, The Last of Us

It was actually very hard to narrow down this episode to one scene, because “Left Behind” is easily my favorite episode of the season (sorry to everyone else’s favorite episode, “Long, Long Time,” I like you fine too) and it’s just all so, so good. The way they seamlessly wove what was extra content in the video games into the main story was brilliant, and I loved every second. But this is about scenes not episodes so since Nic has the happy stuff covered, I’m here to talk about one of the last scenes of the episode, and the most heartbreaking one.

After the best date ever has turned into the worst date ever, Ellie and Riley find themselves both bitten after a fight with an Infected. At first, Ellie is mad, smashing things and screaming. But eventually she slumps next to Riley and they realize they have to decide what to do next: they could take the easy way out, or they could lose their minds together…it’ll be poetic. Riley decides they shouldn’t quit, and that she doesn’t want to give up what little time they have left together, whether it’s minutes, hours, or days. It reminds me of a baby gay version of Dani and Jamie from Bly Manor. Enjoying every moment in case it’s the inevitable last. Riley and Ellie hold hands and cry and hold each other and love each other as much as they can for as long as they can. Bella Ramsey and Storm Reid acted the hell out of this episode, and especially this scene. — Valerie Anne

The Pantry Scene, Minx

Bambi and Shelly are having tea at Shelly’s house, and they’re speaking in heavy-handed metaphors, Shelly worrying at the placemat to avoid reaching out for Bambi. Using her coded language, she essentially tells Bambi that they can never be together again, and Bambi is bummed, but is willing to respect Shelly’s wishes…and then Shelly can’t resist anymore and kisses her anyway. Bambi checks in and makes sure that Shelly is sure, but Shelly is done denying herself this, at least for now. They kiss and kiss and end up in the pantry, which is convenient both for privacy and for post-coital snacking. It’s all very sweet and sexy. — Valerie Anne

The Bathtub, A Murder at the End of the World

A Murder at the End of the World begins with its main character, queer hacker Darby Hart, reading from her true crime book. Its early episodes suggest a show like any number of other crime shows where a detective — amateur or law enforcement — uses clues to catch a serial killer or two. But throughout the series, the genre itself is questioned and subverted. This is stated most explicitly in a scene during the penultimate episode during a flashback between Darby and her boyfriend Bill as they take a bath together after a traumatic experience. Darby wants to discuss the minutiae of the killer, but Bill pushes back. Who cares about the killer? He’s not interesting. He’s just the product of a broken world.

Emma Corrin and Harris Dickinson are both so good in this scene and the dynamic between Darby and Bill is a great example of realistically portraying queer people in “straight” relationships. Darby’s queerness is a part of her no matter who she’s dating and here that manifests in her being the more traditionally male partner — analytical, unemotional — and her cis male partner being more traditionally female — tender, emotional.

In terms of character and in terms of politics this is an excellent moment that encapsulates the great achievement of this unique mystery. — Drew

End of Year Wrap-Up, Riverdale

“Admittedly my allegiance to this program has wavered over the years, but when Kayla tipped us off to its even-more-overwhelmingly-gay vibe, I hopped right back on the train and rode it through a delightful gay fever dream. I didn’t even care about the absolutely bananas premise (in part because I already knew it’d give us gay returns before I started watching it). Because at the end of the series we were given a little montage about how all the whackadoodle storylines of their time warp season wrapped up with Kevin saying to Betty, “don’t tell me you suddenly forgotten that you, Archie, Veronica and Jughead have been in a quad this entire last year.’ I FOR ONE WILL NEVER FORGET” — Riese

Kiss Test, Scott Pilgrim Takes Off

I really love what this show did with Roxie, giving her more character and depth than the movie. We get to see exactly what happened between Roxie and Ramona, and we get some real vulnerable moments between them amidst the cartoony chaos. But my favorite scene between them is in episode 103, after they make up, when Roxie asks her if they should kiss. Ramona politely declines but says she wants to be friends (no benefits), so Roxie decides to shoot her shot with Kim instead. Kim decides to give it a go, but after a kiss complete with Cruel-Intentions-esque spittle, they decide there are no sparks. It’s a funny, endearing scene between the three girls, and a lovely little queer moment. — Valerie Anne

First Queer Party, Sex Education

One of the best parts of the new season of Sex Education was its celebration of queer community. Of course, the show was very queer from the beginning, but, like many queer teens, our main characters were isolated by themselves or in small groups. This season, at a new progressive school, queerness was collective. Eric is excited to go to his first queer party — not counting his dalliance in Nigeria — and it’s a treat to witness his exuberance among his new friends. But the best part of this sequence is the scene between Cal and Roman. Their conversation about surgery and other gender health treatment is proof that trans characters can discuss transness without it being tropey. A less experienced trans person learning from a more experienced trans person is much different than a trans character explaining their medical history to a cis character. Especially during a time when trans youth are under attack, this moment states the necessity for them to access healthcare and shows the importance of community — Drew

Black Lady Therapy Scene (Purposefully Sung in the Tune A Black Lady Sketch Show’s “Black Lady Courtroom“), Survival of the Thickest

When we decided to gently move away from honoring “Best Episodes” to “Best Scenes” as a part of this year’s End Of Year Culture Lists package, I should have thought of Survival of the Thickest earlier. As a television show, Thickest was one of my favorite watches last year, but its queer plots did not quite stick the landing. Even as a singular episode, “Are You Crying, B…?” is not necessarily a standout its queer beats. But this one scene? This captured moment in time?

It is spectacular.

As Marley, bisexual sidekick to the series protagonist Mavis (Mavis Beaumont), Tasha Smith is a model of business suits, power, and control. There is not a moment in her life that is not accounted and planned for, filed away, and placed into a neat box (you know the type). She’s the kind of friend who always thinks that she knows best, especially in comparison to Beaumont’s Mavis, whose life is currently in shambles. But then a fling with her trainer leads to Marley hooking up with that trainer’s girlfriend and Marley realizes that — for the first time in her life — she’s had sex with a woman without a man present to “make it OK.” Her next stop? Her therapist’s office.

We realize that Marley isn’t scared of her bisexuality. She’s had decades of history sleeping with women. But this time felt different, Marley reflects, “it felt good, like free in a way that I didn’t expect.”

Her therapist, who’s also a Black woman, listens closely to what’s not said in between. Marley is a Black woman in her forties, “there may be aspects of your identity worth exploring that were out of reach to you because you weren’t given the vocabulary to access them.”

At that Marley, who shares Tasha Smith’s comic timing and has never met a joke she couldn’t knock out the park, sits quiet. Her therapist presses on, “what does your queerness look like when men are removed from the equation?”

Notably, there’s no judgment in her challenge. The light wraps both women in warmth, there’s a crinkle of kindness in their eyes as they meet each other. I’ve said it before, there are rarely “neat” coming out stories for Black women over a certain age. Compulsory heterosexuality, Black family values, and politics of respectability have not left a lot of room for Black women to find ourselves on our own terms. But Marley is safe here. Here she can breathe. She can be pushed, not be asked to make herself smaller, and find comfort in the gentleness of a Black woman who looks like her, understands her.

Do you see what I mean? A perfect scene, in an otherwise imperfect series. And so worthy of this list. — Carmen

One Last Kiss, Yellowjackets

I was genuinely torn between this scene and the scene from later in this same episode (207, “Burial”) when the Adult Yellowjackets are dancing and laughing together around the campfire but it’s intercut with Teen Shauna beating the shit out of Teen Lottie, so instead I’ll go with the gayer scene.

After a day of playing along with Lottie’s cult chores, Adult Van is hiding out with a bottle of Tequila, where Adult Taissa finds her. They talk for a moment, and then the chemistry they’ve both been resisting since the moment they were reunited reaches its breaking point and they smash together like two magnets that got too close. They kiss with such want, such need, such hunger that it threatens to consume them both. Taissa is the one to pull away first, apologizing and saying she wants this, she does, but she needs time. And time is something Van doesn’t have. She drops the C word on Tai and they both sit there with the years of lost time trailing behind them with no path back and before they can express regret or fear or really much at all besides Taissa’s shocked exclamations and Van’s resigned sighs, they’re interrupted. It’s a beautiful scene, acted brilliantly by Tawny Cypress and Lauren Ambrose, and you can see them channel Jasmin Savoy-Brown and Liv Hewson’s teen versions of their characters as they do. It’s a moment that makes me feel 900 different feelings in a short burst of time and I love it very much. — Valerie Anne

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What are your picks for the best queer TV scenes of 2023?

Autostraddle’s Favorite Lesbian, Bisexual, and Queer TV Couples of 2023

Every year the TV Team lists our favorite queer TV couples and every year we reveal a little about ourselves. Because to announce what fictional love we’re shipping says as much about each of us as it does the state of queer TV. Some of us swoon over an “enemies to lovers,” some of us crave a fleeting one-night stand, and some of us long for the exuberance of young love.

This list has all that and more! And, yes, by more, I mean the four-person polycule from Riverdale.

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Simone and Bernie, Daisy Jones and the Six

This almost feels like a cheat. Daisy Jones and the Six, adapted from the bestselling book of the same name, was a one-off series that’s spawned its own fandom despite mixed-reviews from critics. Within an already limited miniseries, Simone and Bernie’s love story largely takes place in a single standalone episode. Can one hour of television really hold its own against couples that have years to build nuances of their intimacy?

When Simone (Nabiyah Be), a closeted singer trying to break into the music industry in the early 1970s, first meets Bernie (Ayesha Harris) at a party in Los Angeles, she blushes. Bernie flirts, “did I read you wrong?” Simone inhales, surprised to have been seen so clearly in her desire. The space between them is charged, cackling with unspoken heat that doesn’t have an outlet. Bernie hands Simone a card, an address and phone number in New York. A club scene, an entire country away, that is more accepting of people like them.

What happens when Simone finds her way to New York is wrapped up in Black queer histories of disco and dance floors that remains one of my favorite parts from this television year. An ephemeral, perfect bubble — so delicate that breathing the wrong way might risk it to pop or float away — of Black love and afros and soft lighting cascading across uptown apartments. I loved watching Simone become a fictional queer Donna Summer of her own making, I loved watching Bernie lead the crowd from her turntables as if they were the New York Philharmonic Orchestra.

To me, they were the story. — Carmen

Cynthia and Lydia, Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies

I know I’ve talked a big game about liking mature, long-standing romances but the teenage dream trope is so prevalent for a reason; it’s a good one! Plus, I’m a sucker for a musical, and specifically was obsessed with Grease at arguably far too young an age, this show felt like someone was pandering directly to me and I loved it. Cynthia went from wanting to be one of the T-Birds to finding her place in the Pink Ladies and realizing that she didn’t have to change who she was to fit into either group. As she settled into realizing who she was she also realized she was head over heels for bratty thespian Lydia. Ice Queen Melts is another one of my favorite tropes, and watching these two find (and sing to) each other was a showstopper to me. I am hopelessly devoted to these musical teens. (Also, bonus, both Ari Notartomaso and Niamh Wilson are queer IRL!) — Valerie Anne

Frankly, I’m shocked “Merely Players” didn’t make the top of my Spotify Wrapped, because I listened to it A LOT this year. Maybe it’s because I mostly listened while watching the clip itself on YouTube, unable to miss out on the choreography, the outfits, and Ari Notartomaso and Niamh Wilson’s chemistry. In a show filled with stellar musical numbers, this was one of its best. And there must be something about musicals because I hadn’t shipped a couple this hard since Brittana. I love the way Cynthia and Lydia evoke butch/femme dynamics of the 50’s while still bringing their unique experiences of sexuality, gender, and presentation to each other. I also think the show does a great job honoring the reality of the time period without getting tropey or losing its joy. I’m so sad we didn’t get several more seasons of these two!! — Drew

Shira and Hannah, Harlan Corben’s Shelter

I didn’t realize how badly I was craving adult queer new romances until I watched this show. We see so many teen new romances and so many adult established romances but it’s been a long time since I’ve seen two adults start up something so… charming. The L Word: Gen Q showed plenty of older women being sexy as hell, but there was a… sweetness and realism to Shira and Hannah that the Gen Q babes didn’t quite nail for me. And don’t get me wrong, I loved Ema’s baby gay storyline, but something about Shira and Hannah really did it for me. The miscommunication of their high school fling, the rekindling of their very much still alive chemistry, the general humor and heart Constance Zimmer and Missy Pyle brought to their scenes… I’m normally team Love is a Lie but something about watching these two 50-year-old women flirt and make out like teenagers set my heart aflutter. They gave me a little kernel of hope I didn’t know I was looking for. — Valerie Anne

Harley and Ivy, Harley Quinn

So often in shows, we see the flirting and lead up and finally, finally, our favorite couple gets together. But far too often either they immediately die, their show gets cancelled, or they run into relationship-threatening drama and we don’t actually get to enjoy them as a couple. But not Harley and Ivy! Their drama isn’t about them fighting with each other, it’s about two booked and busy ladies trying to balance their high-power jobs and also their relationship at the same time. Especially in the context of a comic book show where things are quite literally blowing up left and right, it’s nice to see two women who love each other just being girlfriends amidst the chaos. — Valerie Anne

Anne Bonny & Mary Read, Our Flag Means Death

I did not have “Minnie Fucking Driver” as Anne Bonny on my 2023 TV bingo card, and honestly, I’m glad I didn’t because what an incredible surprise when she and Rachel House appeared as Anne Bonny and her gal pal Mary Read. These two oozed chaotic energy, selling antiques by day and engaging in some light poisoning of each other by night. They’ve been together for a long time and when you’re used to a life at sea, retiring to the ‘burbs can get mundane; so naturally they stab each other for funsies sometimes. And somehow, in spite of (or maybe because of) their chaos, they managed to help Stede and Ed begin to repair their own relationship. Anne and Mary are IRL pirate royalty and — besides even more screen time — their portrayal was everything I could have asked for. — Nic

Luz & Amity, The Owl House

Not to be all “back in my day”, but sometimes I wonder if my coming out journey would have been different if I had seen couples like Luz and Amity in the cartoons I watched growing up. Or if I had a show like The Owl House that never hid its queerness and instead thrust it front and center. Throughout the show’s run, we got to see an actual fleshed out enemies-to-lovers relationship between two main animated characters; and it was sweet and innocent and perfectly captured the uncertain feelings of a crush. I miss those two crazy kids so much! — Nic

Betty and Veronica and Archie and Jughead, Riverdale

Whomst among us could have ever predicted the core four characters of television’s most unruly show Riverdale would end up in a four-way relationship with each other at series’ end? Certainly not I, and I consider myself one of the world’s preeminent Riverdale scholars. Much like Betty Cooper was one of my favorite television characters this year, this quad managed to thwart my expectations and delight me in the most wondrous ways, a thing Riverdale accomplished intermittently throughout its chaotic run. Why make specific hetero pairings endgame when you can just make everyone date each other all at once? — Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya

Abbi and Roman, Sex Education

Throughout its four season run, Sex Education was always pushing the boundaries of how sex was discussed and what sex we saw on-screen. It’s fitting that the final sex scene on the show was between a transmasc/transfemme couple. But Abbi and Roman were more than a late-series addition for inclusivity. While they start out as the popular perfect couple at the progressive new school, their complexities are revealed through the season. I love that they’re framed as sweet and aspirational while still having the imperfections of any teen couple. At a time when trans youth are under attack, seeing a teen t4t couple handled with such a casual touch was a gift. I’m really going to miss this show and I’m so happy it expanded its cast to include these two complicated trans characters. — Drew

Carina DeLuca and Maya Bishop, Station 19

I’ve always loved Carina and Maya. I loved them when they first met in Joe’s Bar, back when Carina was still a recurring guest star on Station 19, still looking to find her footing post-break up with Shondaland gay legend Dr. Arizona Robbins and Maya and Station 19 were looking to find their footing at all. That was nearly four years ago. I couldn’t have known how time would fly.

As Carina DeLuca and Maya Bishop, Stefania Spampinato and Danielle Savre have never lacked for chemistry. I once joked that their early relationship could be defined as “a lot of sex, and lasagna.” Equally impressive, Spampinato and Savre are natural screen partners, and in their hands the dramatic moments of Maya and Carina’s relationship have soared. There have been times when I’ve admittedly worried about the writing behind Maya and Carina’s ups-and-downs, but I’ve never doubted the actors at the helm of their portrayal. That faith was deeply rewarded in Station 19’s seventh season, which saw Maya and Carina through depths of darkness that I never expected and through to the other side, finding their light once again in each other.

Maya has always strived for perfection, a drive that leads to a mental break that felt both impossible to watch and look away from. After begging her wife to get help, Carina ultimately has to protect Maya from herself, something that risked ripping them both apart for good. But instead, we watched as they sewed themselves back together — each individually at first, and then as once again as wives. It’s sticky, messy, and real. It’s far from a classic soap opera fairy tale, full of swooping kisses and swelling music. But doesn’t that make it all worthwhile?

(Plus, as the shower scene can attest, they eventually find their way back to that very Hot Sex.) — Carmen

Kit & Jade, Willow

A knight and her princess! A KNIGHT AND HER PRINCESS. And what’s more, a princess who wants to be a knight! Sword-fighting, adventuring, stolen kisses in the night! Willow as a show is everything I love about fantasy, and Princess Kit and Jade are the kind of story I want to see play out over and over and over. We’ve got best friends to lovers, we’ve got (sort of) forbidden romance, we’ve got adventuring party, and protection and gosh I just wish we got to see more of their story, but instead I’ll just have to imagine their happily ever after. (Bonus: Ruby Cruz is queer and Erin Kellyman is a lesbian; I don’t need my queer characters played by queer actors but it sure is extra nice.) — Valerie Anne

There are few things I love more than a pair of queer sword-wielding dummies who refuse to see that they’re in love with each other. Especially when Such is the case with Kit and Jade. They are stubborn in their own ways, both choosing to focus on their respective missions rather than address the very large feelings in the room. The whole thing screamed “fan fiction.” I mean, Boorman literally says, “you two have the hots for each other!” and they couldn’t deny the accusation fast enough. So when they (okay, let’s be real, Kit) finally admit their feelings for each other, both Kit and Jade feel a massive weight lifted. They saved themselves, they saved each other, they saved the kingdom, and they even smooched in between sword fights. — Nic

Taissa and Van (Teen and Adult), Yellowjackets

I could have listed Teen Taissa, Teen Van, Adult Taissa, and Adult Van as four separate characters in our list of best characters of the year, but instead I decided to smoosh them all together, because while I do love both characters as portrayed by all four actors, the truth is that I love Taissa and Van together. Whether they’re teen gal pals finding love in a hopeless place, going on dates with wolves and foregoing romantic dinners for a dash of cannibalism, or two adults who have drifted away from each other over time but collide again when the past they were running away from catches up to them. I love the dynamics of both pairings; I say both because even though they’re the same people, they’re also really not. Time and tragedy changed them, for better or worse, but what’s really fun is that when Adult Tai and Adult Van finally reconnect after a long separation, you can feel the comfort under the layer of awkwardness. You can tell Taissa is more comfortable with Van than she is in most other parts of her life, and you can watch in real time as they both start to devolve into their teen selves, down to the mannerisms. It’s a wonder to behold. Also I don’t care how ill-advised it is and I am sorry to Taissa’s wife but I still ship them, and hope those crazy kids work it out in the end. — Valerie Anne

Obviously my good sis Adult Tai and her perfect curls were going through it during this last season of Yellowjackets. The attempted vehicular manslaughter of HER OWN WIFE was barely scratching the surface of her drama. And while I won’t forget Yellowjackets for leaving Simone on an ICU bed with no updates on her whereabouts (or who is watching Simone and Tai’s son, Sammy? Was this explained? Have I just forgotten it in the fog of the last year?) — it is hard to deny the heat of Tai and Van, even all of these years later.

I cannot tell you why I loved them. On paper, I am a Tai and Simone type of woman. I love power dykes in power suits and Black love and raising an adorable sweet Black child. In fact it was a GIF of Simone and Tai that got me to watch Yellowjackets in the first place! And I hope against hope that Tai gets the help she’s clearly begging for and is able to make it work out with Simone in her future. But for now? Tai needs Van. She needed her when they were sixteen and alone in the woods. The part of her that is still sixteen, that is still lost in those same woods, she needs her now. I keep trying to intellectualize it, to rationalize something that is probably just feral at its core. But when Tai walked into Van’s video store, my heart skipped a beat. And it hasn’t come back down yet. — Carmen

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Who were your favorite queer couples on TV in 2023?

Autostraddle’s Favorite Lesbian, Bisexual, and Trans TV Characters of 2023

This is the first year in half a decade where the landscape of queer TV felt less like an embarrassment of riches and started to just feel like an embarrassment. Streaming sites that promised a changed industry canceled show after show after show. But since 2016, our TV Team has compiled a list of our favorite TV characters — see: 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016 — and this year is no different. Now more than ever it’s worth celebrating what still does exist! There is still so much excellent queer TV that is getting made and so many great queer TV characters to celebrate — even if some of the shows below have since been canceled.

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Hannah, The Afterparty

Hannah’s episode of The Afterparty is told like she’s the “heroine of a twee indie film” but we all know that it’s actually quite specifically a parody of a Wes Anderson film and wow, she is so weird, and so delightfully deranged. She’s like a Lorrie Moore or a Mary Gaitskill character, existing in the same world as everybody else but with an inner monologue so strong she may as well be somewhere else entirely. – Riese

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Beverly and Elliot Mantle, Dead Ringers

I almost put these sinister twins played by Rachel Weisz in our upcoming Best Couple list. After all, when Beverly begins dating someone, Elliot does respond like a jealous lover from an 80s movie. But the more I thought about it the less these sisters felt like lovers and the more they felt like the same person. Their differences are distinct and yet as they swap places and fall deeper into codependence, they begin to feel like two sides of the same fucked up coin. David Cronenberg’s original film is one of my favorites so I went into this series with a healthy skepticism. It quickly vanished, in large part, due to Weisz’s delicious dual performance. She finds such nuance in their differences and, more frighteningly, the ways they’re exactly the same. — Drew

I’m here to double up the love for our demented doubled dead ringers. I do, unfortunately, agree with Drew’s initial instinct to consider them one of the Best Couples on television this year. Their twisted chemistry and toxic co-dependence is unlike anything else I watched this year. I’ve long been drawn to stories of fucked-up sisterhood, and the Mantle twins epitomize that dynamic. — Kayla

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Mia Polanco, Everything Now

While deeply flawed and often frustrating, Everything Now’s protagonist Mia is such a realistic and familiar character to me. We meet her right as she’s getting out of a treatment facility for her anorexia, and her wobbly and complicated journey toward recovery is the backbone of the series. Mia’s anger issues are striking to encounter. She often pushes away characters who are only trying to help her. But this is all done with immense thought and care about eating disorder recovery, mental health, and just rendering nuanced and complex characters on screen. When thinking of best characters, I often think of characters on their worst behavior. — Kayla

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Camille L’Espanaye, The Fall of the House of Usher

I admittedly have a Kate Siegel bias, but Camille demanded attention every time she was on screen and I gave it willingly. She wasn’t around for a long time but she made every second memorable with her eye-catching look and snappy lines. Case in point: “Please don’t talk to me until I’ve come at least twice.” I simply could not get enough of that bisexual bitch. We deserve queer villains, and she may have been “unlikable” but I sure loved her. — Valerie Anne

Verna, The Fall of the House of Usher

Why yes I am double dipping on The Fall of the House of Usher but everyone in the Flanaverse is gay so it was bound to happen. Also in my opinion Kate Siegel and Carla Gugino go hand in hand, two sides of a sexy coin. Joking aside, I’ve always known Carla Gugino was beyond talented, and she is always one of the most soothing and entrancing parts of any given Flanagan project, but what she brought to Verna was next level. So many layers, so much depth. She shifted and molded herself to be what each character needed her to be while never losing the throughline of what makes Verna Verna. I couldn’t pick a favorite version of her without ripping my hair out but I will say that Bartender Verna is high up there. — Valerie Anne

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Ryan Wilder/Red Death, The Flash

Okay so is this cheating? MAYBE! But Ryan was on The Flash in 2023 and y’all know I’m not missing a chance to talk about my girl again! When Ryan first shows up, it’s as a villainous alternate version of Ryan known as Red Death. There are a bunch of shenanigans but honestly, none of that is as important as the moment when OUR Ryan swooped in to fight her own self and save the day. Not a day goes by where I don’t think about the batarang-sized hole Batwoman’s cancellation left in my heart. I’m not grateful to The Flash for much, but giving Ryan Wilder and us some closure is at the top of that list. Ryan represents a lot of things to a lot of people; a lot of firsts for Black people and queer women (in Gotham and IRL). But more than the symbol, Ryan is a Black woman who loves and wants to be loved. She stood in HQ, smiled, and told us that she’s Good. She has her Gotham family and her extended DCTV universe family, and I choose to believe that somewhere out there she’s getting the love she deserves. — Nic

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Ellie Williams, The Last of Us

Oh my sweet sweet complicated murder daughter. The Last of Us is one of my favorite stories, period. I’ve played the video games multiple times; I’ve watched the show multiple times (and recapped it with Valerie Anne on this very website). With every playthrough and rewatch the one thing that remains the same, whether it’s Ashley Johnson or Bella Ramsey: Ellie Williams is a force. When we first meet her, she’s a foul-mouthed scrappy teenager with a chip on her shoulder, a heart that’s been through the wringer, and a desire for her life and her immunity to matter. And at the end of season one, she’s still all of those things; but she’s also learned just how messy her post-apocalyptic world truly is.

One of my favorite things about Ellie is that yeah, she can twirl her butterfly knife and shoot infected before they attack her, but she’s still just a kid. And I don’t mean “just” in a “she can’t do shit” way. I mean it in the way she can find joy in a silly joke book at the end of the world; or the way she tries to save Sam with her blood even though she knows deep down it won’t work. She’s a kid who has experienced immense loss and still keeps fighting even though a kid shouldn’t have to. One scene in particular that stands out to me both in the game and the show is when they have to get through an old hotel, and Ellie is delighted by pretending to act how she imagines a disgruntled hotel guest to act. There’s such an innocence to her reaction, but as soon as we share in Ellie’s delight, we’re snapped back to the reality that they’re in this place to avoid quite literally getting killed.

Throughout the season, we also get to watch Ellie’s effect on Joel. I mean, who else could manage to make Joel “Do I Even Have Teeth Because I Never Smile So Who Knows?” Miller go from seeing Ellie as mere cargo, to someone he imagines his daughter Sarah would have gotten along with?! Ellie manages to crack through Joel’s many many many walls with her sincerity, her humor, and frankly, her persistence.

Because we’re talking specifically about the show, I have to mention Bella Ramsey’s STELLAR performance here. They are the PERFECT Ellie. So much of Ellie’s character is in her physicality and what she doesn’t say; a nervous smile, a flicker of understanding in her eyes, a relieved sigh when her crush likes her back (don’t worry, I talk more about this in an upcoming Best TV Scenes list). And Bella delivers every line and expression in a way that breathes life into such a dynamic character. — Nic

My precious little murder bb, I love her so much. I was emotionally attached to the video games so Bella Ramsey had big chucks to fill but they absolutely embodied Ellie in every way. They walked the line between the hard-earned cynicism of a child of the apocalypse and the playful innocence of someone finally in the care of someone she trusts enough to let herself be a kid for a little while. Ellie is funny and strong and sad and scared and learning and growing right before our very eyes. She’s cynical but hopeful, she’s lost so much but she hasn’t fully closed off her heart, she is deeply traumatized but she still finds ways to laugh, and I admire all that about her. — Valerie Anne

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Bambi, Minx

During Minx‘s first season, plucky blonde Bambi was a character built on subverting expectations. She was a former nude model — but she was ambitious! She talked in a high pitch voice — but she was smart! She was high femme — but she falls for suburban mom Shelly! While Jessica Lowe did a lot to flesh out Bambi in season one, she’s supported by the writing in season two. The thing about all those subversions is they aren’t that subversive. They’re better than flat stereotypes but they’re still flattening. Now, Bambi is allowed to just be human — to just be. She’s trying to find her place within the infrastructure of the now successful magazine and is ready to move beyond the fake title of CFO (Chief Fun Officer).

This is a show about characters who are underestimated and Bambi is underestimated by the rest. She is at once self-confident, hardworking, and passive. It’s a combination that rings true to a character who first and foremost is compassionate and empathetic to those around her. It makes her continued relationship with Shelly even deeper — and occasionally — heartbreaking. When Shelly is trying to squash her feelings to remain loyal to her husband, Bambi doesn’t push back. She respects Shelly’s communicated desires even when they’re so obviously false. It’s a slow-burn without the chase and a sign of Bambi’s kindness and experience. It makes the lesbian longing even more angst-filled and the payoff even sweeter. — Drew

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Mich, La flor más bella (The Most Beautiful Flower)

Mich, the protagonist at the center of La flor más bella (The Most Beautiful Flower), is convinced she’s on the precipice of greatness. She’ll finally go from being a high school nobody who’s never been invited to a single party to joining the most popular kids — all skinny, all white passing, all very unlike Mich — at her school’s fountain. All she needs is for the popular boy that she’s been secretly seeing to tell everyone about their relationship.

But, as Mich approaches the fountain, preparing for the big reveal, she slips on a skateboard and falls on her face. Everyone pretends not to know her, including the school’s dean, her cousin, and her boyfriend. Mich begs him to acknowledge her, to confess their love, but he refuses. Later, he tries to explain — “this is just how things work in our school,” he says — but she refuses to be his secret any longer.

“I’m the baddest freakin’ girl in the world,” she replies. “The whole world’s gonna see me like I do!”

The rest of the show is about how Mich gets the world to see her like she does but, along the way, she discovers that maybe she doesn’t know herself as well as she thought she did. It’s Majo, a transfer student who shows up in Xochimilco and immediately wins over everyone, that challenges Mich the most. At first, Mich longs to discover how Majo — the newcomer, exiled from her hometown because of her sexuality — finds a place at the fountain among the school’s elite. But then, Mich just longs for Majo…and it’s beautiful to watch her come to grips with her sexuality. — Natalie

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Malaika, The Other Black Girl

From the moment Malaika name-dropped Rihanna as the only person she would share clothes with ON THEIR HONEYMOON, I was hooked. I would watch an entire season of Malaika just sleuthing her way through the city, helping unsuspecting potential cult prey see the truth, and tossing out quips left and right. While The Other Black Girl obviously spent most of its time on Nella and Hazel, its heart lay in Malaika. She’s the best friend who will read you for filth because she loves you and you need to hear it; become best friends with your white boyfriend because he treats you right and makes you happy; and help you start to dismantle the racist publishing industry. It would have been so easy for Malaika to fall into the classic “sassy Black bestie” stereotype, but I think that a big reason why her humor hits is because there’s so much heart behind it. Give Malaika her flowers! — Nic

I love horror, LOVE it, but I also love comedy. Happy Death Day, Get Out, The Blackening, Totally Killer, Yellowjackets; I love the combination of horror and humor. Because life is scary, but it’s also hilarious, and funny people don’t stop being funny just because scary or hard things are happening. That’s where Malaika comes in. Sure, something sketchy is going on at Nella’s work, something shady is up with Hazel, and Malaika isn’t about to ignore that fact, but she’s also not going to stop being hilarious because of it. She is Nella’s #1 hype girl, and is always ready to do a tight five about any situation, and I love that about her. She was such a great addition to this show, and the show would have suffered greatly without her. — Valerie Anne

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Betty Cooper, Riverdale

I wrote about this several times throughout the season, but canonically bisexual Betty Cooper was easily the best part of Riverdale’s final season. I loved watching her character arc about young desire and sexuality unfold, especially because despite its 1950s setting, a lot of what she pushed up against regarding sexism and attempts to control teenager’s sexualities was oddly relevant and poignant for our current cultural moment. Betty’s fantasies were in some way the realest expressions of queer desire I encountered in the series. — Kayla

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Quiet, Twisted Metal

I did not expect to like Twisted Metal as much as I did, but I really did, and it was largely due to Stephanie Beatriz’s Quiet. Her and John Doe had hilarious banter, we got to watch her open up as the series went on, we delved into her backstory and watched her character arc, each stage of her story portrayed so expertly by the range of Stephanie Beatriz. She was tough and funny and she just really delighted me at every turn. — Valerie Anne

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Katherine “Kitty” Song-Covey, XO, Kitty

There’s just something about Katherine Song Covey — Kitty to her friends — from the first moment she’s introduced in Netflix’s To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before. She is brash and sassy, confident and witty, loyal and fiercely protective of her family. It is impossible not to be charmed by her. In XO, Kitty, she’s given more room to be independent, to develop an identity beyond being Lara Jean’s little sister. She ventures off to in Korea, in hopes of learning more about the mother she never really knew…by walking the grounds of the same international school that her mother had attended decades prior.

Oh, and there’s a boy. Of course, there’s a boy.

It’s a bit like Felicity but younger and Asian and with a touch more depth. Kitty remains just as charming as she was in the films. But the certainty with which she walks through the world — and in particular, the certainty with which she approaches love — is quickly challenged upon her arrival in Korea and teenage chaos ensues. Among the chaos? An unexpected crush on a girl who starts out as her nemesis.

“I thought I knew everything there was to know about love, but then I met you,” Kitty tells Yuri when they cross paths at the airport.

I did not expect XO, Kitty to take this turn. The show had its gay stories — Yuri and her girlfriend, Juliana, and Q and Florian — that I wasn’t expecting more from it. Plus, so much of the narrative of the To All The Boys trilogy and the start of this series had been about boys that I didn’t see the queering of Kitty Song-Covey coming. I don’t get to be surprised often and so getting to go on this wholly unanticipated journey with a character I already loved…well, it was a delight.

Perhaps in a different year, Kitty wouldn’t rise to the level of “best,” but in a year when the right has fomented this war on LGBT media, these characters and their stories feel worth celebrating. Kitty Song Covey is just a teenage girl trying to find her way in the world…and her story is beautifully wholesome, no matter who she ends up with (though I really want it to be Yuri). — Natalie

This is a little bit behind-the-scenes (is the “inside baseball” work of how this website gets made interesting to anyone else but me? probably not), so please stay with me on the journey. I promise we are getting somewhere good.

In April, the PR team for Netflix started showing up in our emails trying to promote their new series, a spin-off of the beloved Gen Z romcom trilogy To All the Boys I Loved Before, centering on Kitty Convey. Riese of course asked immediately, “But is it gay?” And she was promised that there was a “beautiful coming out story,” fundamental to the core of the series, that even though we could not see in the previews or the trailer, most assuredly would happen. The thing is, PR people often exaggerate. That’s part of their job — no judgement at all! They have to sell the shows, so that we will in turn cover the shows. Riese knew that I was a a TALTBILB stan, so she asked me what I thought.

I studied the trailer from every angle. I read the casting notices. I read interviews with the crew. And I emphatically swore, and I mean up and down swore, that there was simply no way that XO Kitty would land on the Autostraddle beat. There was only one central character who could possibly fit the bill, and certainly… certainly… they were not going to make the fan favorite, scene-stealing, kid sister of the original trilogy queer now that she had grown up and her own protagonist. It would break the unspoken laws of everything I knew to be true about TV.

I have never been so happy to get something so spectacularly wrong.

Kitty Convey’s queerness isn’t apparent at first blush. Yuri, Kitty’s eventual crush, is introduced to the audience almost right away in the context of her girlfriend, Juliana, and her desire to keep her queerness away from her mother’s scalding eye. But Kitty, as fans of the original trilogy already know, is boy crazy — a character thread that’s picked up right away in XO Kitty’s first episodes. When she realizes her attraction to Yuri, it’s layered and unexpected. It’s as new for the audience as it is for Kitty, and handled with a gentleness to match its surprise. I cannot think of a better executed teenage coming of age executed last year, or a “plot twist” better handled by its production team from top-to-bottom.

XO Kitty was everything I’d hoped would come from a sequel to To All the Boys I Loved Before, a love story to the very softness of puppy love itself. Its saccharine and young, which either will be what you love or don’t. But it also was so so much more, and for that I’m forever grateful.— Carmen

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Sophie Suarez, The L Word: Generation Q

This is a lifetime achievement award because, in my opinion, it’s hard to make an argument for Gen Q’s third season by any metric on its own. But this is my last chance to write a dedication to Sophie Suarez, who for me will always be a North Star, a symbol of myself on screen that is fleeting and rare, so I have to stop and pay my due respect.

Over the course of three seasons, Rosanny Zayas crafted a queer person who felt lived in and wholly relatable. It’s even more notable feat in a cast created to be full of queer characters, that Sophie was and remained a stand out until the end. Sure, Gen Q’s swerved more than it had any logical reason to and admittedly a good chunk of audience did not always agree with Sophie’s decisions, but I’d argue it was impossible not to watch Zayas on screen and go “oh yeah, I know someone like that.” Or at least, it was impossible for me.

An Afro-Latina who wasn’t a size zero, who had big heavy boobs that reminded me of my own (sorry, it had to be said), a workaholic who loved her family more than anything. Yeah, I saw myself in Sophie. A lifelong femme, I learned to love how I look in suits watching Sophie. And more than anything, I was so proud of where she ended up. In the final episodes of what we now know will be its final ever season, Sophie realizes that if she’s going to be working as hard as she is — with immense sacrifice — she might as well be doing so in service of her own dream, and not Alice’s (her boss). In the series finale, Sophie ends her reign in a flirtatious romp with who is, in my opinion, one of The L Word’s greatest love interest, Pippa Pascal.

Will I always wish that The L Word: Generation Q had given Black characters the full weight and respect they deserved, of course. And I think the way the show treated characters of color, especially Black characters, will always be a bitter pill to swallow. But I am glad that at least, in my imagination, Sophie and Pippa found each other. That Pippa showed Sophie a light out of the madness and towards her own peace. And maybe in turn, that’s a final lesson Sophie gave me as well. Given everything else, I don’t know that I could have asked for more. — Carmen

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Jaqueline “Jaq” Lawrence, Top Boy

I was late to discover Top Boy. In fact, the only reason I watched it was because this fall Riese asked if any of us knew it was gay. We try to cover all the gays on television that we can find, but sometimes something slips through the cracks. That’s particularly true with international shows (though we are always striving to be better at it! I promise we are!) that can have different release structures or require a VPN to track down. Top Boy, a British drama that sits somewhere between The Wire and Power in terms of comparisons for American audiences, was available on Netflix. It’s endorsed by Drake. I cannot believe that we missed it.

There is a little bit of confusion around how to watch Top Boy, the first two seasons aired on Channel 4 in the UK and then it was brought back to life on Netflix years later. That means that what in the United States we call Top Boy is actually the third season of the show in the UK. Conversely, what the UK calls the first two seasons were actually released as a separate “prequel” series over here. If I’ve started to lose you, please come back! Jaq, the stoic Black masc lieutenant of a rival drug gang who loves and protects her family over everyone and everything else, is absolutely worth shifting through any confusion.

Technically, the third and final season of Top Boy aired this fall, which is what I should be focusing this writing on. But since I binged the entire series this year, please allow me to take a long view. What I love most about Jaq is that in the first season of the Netflix reboot (note: You can start at the reboot to follow the show, without returning to the prequel series) — she is a small character. It’s fun to have a masc lesbian in the crew of one of the two rival drug gangs, and its interesting to watch how the crew deploys Jaq’s maternal femininity to recruit young corner boys into the operation, but she mostly lays low. In the second season, however, we begin to pull back Jaq’s layers as her sister becomes a central character and also Jaq herself is given a love interest. By the third season Jaq is at the center of everything that ultimately falls apart. She becomes the bleeding, bloody heartbeat of Top Boy’s core, right when you least expect it. And watching her slowly move from the margin to the center? It’s delicious. It’s impeccable. It very well might be the best thing I watched last year. — Carmen

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Adult Van, Yellowjackets

No offense to the wonderful Liv Hewson, but Van wasn’t one of my favorite characters during the first season. She’s not meant to be! She’s the stable foil, torn between the big personalities of Taissa and Lottie. But, as a former Six Feet Under superfan, I was thrilled when Lauren Ambrose was cast as her adult version. And My God did she not disappoint. Not only has Van grown into a harsher, more confident person — more appealing to me personally — she also owns a video store?? A dyke who owns a video store?? This character was made for me. In some ways, Van is the most different teen to adult and it’s fascinating to see echoes of her teen self in a totally new package. Like a VHS transfer to Blu-Ray if you will. — Drew

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Who were your favorite queer TV characters of 2023? Let us know in the comments!

“Total Eclipse of the Heart” Is the Queer Film and TV Song of the Year

Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart” has been a staple on-screen and at gay karaoke bars for years.

It’s never reached “Holding Out for a Hero” levels of ubiquity but since opening the 1998 slasher Urban Legend it’s been used in many movies and TV shows. It’s in Party Monster, it’s in Nip/Tuck, it’s in Austenland and Gloria Bell and countless procedurals. It even inspired the title of Eliza Hittmann’s breakout short. Then, of course, who can forget the Glee cover where Lea Michele and Jonathan Groff roll around on the floor doing ballet together?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbQh4nTArHM&ab_channel=MusicOfGlee

But something has shifted this year. For some reason, four different works of queer media have used the song. Four! It seems like maybe once upon a time the gays were falling in love but now? They’re only falling apart.

Much like children’s animated films come in Shark Tale/Finding Nemo pairs, it’s not unusual for multiple music supervisors to select the same song. Sharon Van Etten’s “Seventeen” was notably used in Sex Education, The Half Of It, and Yellowjackets, each one an emotional attack on me personally. But that song came out in 2019. It makes sense a bunch of queer stuff would use it in the years to follow. “Total Eclipse of the Heart” came out in 1983. Why is it so relevant now?

I don’t have an answer to that question, but I do relish the opportunity to look at the many different ways a single piece of music can be used on-screen. So let’s dive in shall we? Forever’s gonna start TONIGHT! (Or whatever time of day you’re reading this.)

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The Five Devils (dir. Léa Mysius)

This unique movie about a little girl with such a strong sense of smell she can time travel back to when her mom (Adèle Exarchopolous) and aunt (dad’s sister) (Swala Emati) were teen lesbian lovers uses “Total Eclipse of the Heart” in two pivotal moments. Both instances are diegetic — meaning the song is playing in the world of the film. First, it’s on the car radio in a flashback when the two women are kissing as teens. This establishes it as “their song” adding weight to a scene in the present when the mom chooses it at karaoke. She drunkenly calls up her sister-in-law/former lover and what begins as an awkward duet gives way to a brazen moment of beautiful connection.

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Bottoms (dir. Emma Seligman)

Falling somewhere between diegetic and non-diegetic, its use in this comedy about an all-female (gay) fight club is also pivotal. It fills the soundtrack as our girl group drives over to football star Jeff’s house with plans for revenge. We see him jamming out to music — presumably this song — unaware of the bomb about to go off. Literally. As most of the girls are teepeeing and egging, and Josie (Ayo Edebiri) and Isabel (Havan Rose Liu) are flirting, Hazel (Ruby Cruz) is planting a bomb. Josie and Isabel lean in for a kiss, the music swells, and BAM. Jeff keeps dancing to the melodic song unaware as the girls scream and scramble, Jeff’s car ablaze.

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Rotting in the Sun (dir. Sebastián Silva)

Speaking of gay chaos and violence, let’s go to another karaoke scene, this time in Sebastián Silva’s meta dark comedy. There’s no way to talk about this moment in detail without spoiling one of the film’s most delicious twists, but let’s just say “Total Eclipse of the Heart” is being sung — very badly — at a quinceanera after one of the main characters has been involved in the death of someone. The stress of the moment for them is contrasted with the comic mundanity of this bad performance. It’s such a memorable moment that this same rendition is used over the credits!

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The Fall of the House of Usher (dir. Mike Flannagan, Michael Fimognari)

Actually, this has just been a year for gay chaos and violence. The most recent use of the song was in episode five of Mike Flanagan’s Edgar Allen Poe riff The Fall of the House of Usher. While the other examples center the song in their soundtracks, Usher lets it haunt the background. Here the lyrics are quite literal since Victorine (T’Nia Miller) is working on an artificial heart. The song is heard in the background as her partner — in medicine and life — is confronting her about her unethical practices. I won’t spoil this one either, but let’s just say Victorine doesn’t listen.

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These are all great uses of the song, but for me its definitive use occurred more than a decade ago. Like The Five Devils, Maryam Keshavarz‘s debut Circumstance features the song as a moment of karaoke bonding between its two lovers. It’s a beautiful pocket of joy in a devastating romance. And I’ve found it impossible not to think about this moment any time I belt the song during karaoke — or in a car or in the shower. A well-placed song can have that power. It enhances the movie or TV show and it forever shifts our association with the song itself.

I hope this trend continues! As long as there is dyke drama, queer chaos, and big gay feelings, “Total Eclipse of the Heart” is a worthy soundtrack.

Turn around, bright eyes.

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The Five Devils and Rotting in the Sun are now streaming on MUBI. Bottoms is available to rent. The Fall of the House of Usher is now streaming on Netflix. 

Holigay Gift Guide: What Each Adult Yellowjacket Probably Wants

Season two of Yellowjackets may have ended a while ago, but if you think I’ve gone a single day without thinking about my favorite cannibals (should I rank fictional cannibals by lesbianism btw), then you’d be sorely wrong! This is my Roman Empire!!!! So here we are with a Yellowjackets gift guide.

I thought it might be fun to put together a little list of what I imagine each of the adult main Yellowjackets might wish for this holiday season. Perhaps it’s one of your goals to channel Adult Tai. Or perhaps you, like Adult Van, can’t let go of the 90s. But in a fun and nostalgic and not so tragic way. Or maybe you fancy yourself an Adult Shauna. Just a bored, hot, unpredictable, slightly scary suburban mom with a knack for knife skills. Relatable! Here’s what the Yellowjackets are surely wishing for this holiday season.

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Taissa’s Gift Guide

Taissa obviously wants a trench to add to her extensive collection. The woman simply wears the hell out of a trench. If she’s going to spend her evening sleep walking and potentially eating dirt, then a nighttime lip mask seems appropriate. A nice leather tote seems like the ideal place to store a bevy of secrets. And perhaps sleep gummies could be a way to gently bring up to her that you think her sleeping issues should be more directly addressed. 🚨By NO means should you encourage her dog ownership by purchasing any pet-related gifts.🚨  For more Taissa shopping ideas, check out the Taissa Style Guide.

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Van’s Gift Guide

Van would have had a chance to see and lesbian-imprint onto The Mighty Ducks before losing her innocence by being stranded in the wilderness, and I think that’s nice. Listen, she probably already owns The Watermelon Woman on DVD, but what about the Criterion Collection edition that includes a special interview with Cheryl Dunye? Well, better sneak into her personal vault of physical media to look just in case she does indeed already own it. Retro movie magnets would make a cute stocking stuffer for queer cinephiles. And so would this But I’m a Cheerleader tarot card sticker!

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Shauna’s Gift Guide

Can’t explain it, but Shauna seems like a monogram girly. I’m sure her knives could use an upgrade, and I’d love for her to get back to her journaling roots! I know there’s no book club, but wouldn’t a personalized wine bag be such a cute thing to roll up to book club with? And finally, I feel like Adult Shauna is always rocking the hell out of a nice flannel.

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Nat’s Gift Guide

Yes we are living in denial here!!!!!!!!!!

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Misty’s Gift Guide

1. I’d Help You Bury the Body Bracelet ($11)
2. Music of the Night Candle ($19)
3. Welcome Mat ($45+)
4. Parrot Felted Ornament ($29)

I mean, this does seem like Misty’s idea of a friendship bracelet! But also, let’s remember that above all else, she’s a musical theater freak. And, of course, she has to rep her love for Caligula. I’m also now realizing it would be very fun to do a Yellowjackets themed mini Christmas tree…

How Chrishell Stause Queered Selling Sunset

I started watching Selling Sunset in 2019 because my coworkers were talking about it, and I wanted to be friends with them. My boss at the time was a culturista before I’d even heard the word culturista. He always knew the best restaurant to eat at, the best gay parties I was too shy to go to, what movies were actually worth watching. And he was raving about this new show, Selling Sunset, that was so utterly ridiculous it simply could not be ignored. So I started watching.

I never really watched reality TV before that, not seriously. I’d seen a few episodes of Fear Factor growing up (tbt) and watched obligatory episodes of Keeping Up With the Kardashians in group settings, but I’d never really been hooked. I hadn’t understood the appeal, to be honest.

This was different. I was immediately invested. What drew me in was the way these people — I always want to say characters, but they are people — embodied womanhood and femininity, in ways that I found compellingly contradictory. On one hand, they embody the stereotype of the LA bimbo — she’s white, thin, rich, cis, she’s wearing full-face 24/7, and her biggest goal is to make buckets and buckets of money.

But on the other hand, these women seemed to understand gender performance without even realizing it. They didn’t quote Judith Butler; they openly joked about and discussed their plastic surgery. They didn’t discuss the artificiality of “beauty”; they gave out Botox injections at their real estate open houses. They wear some of the most outlandish, impractical outfits I’ve ever seen, and they know it! The body looks ornamental when covered in the pieces they wear!

These women were rejecting any perceived “naturalness” of femininity, while still very much functioning (nay, thriving) in mainstream heterosexual culture. That was (and still is) wild and compelling to me!

So then, what happened when one of the titular characters — I mean, people! — of Selling Sunset falls in love with a nonbinary person and fully steps into her queerness?

Well, simply put, the show gets better.

Four years (and somehow seven seasons??) after I first started watching Selling Sunset, I almost feel like I’m watching a different show. The main conceit of the show remains unchanged: It’s about a group of women who want to make a lot of money by selling luxury real estate in Los Angeles. But watching the reunion, I was struck by the wide array of womanhood and femininity at play. All in one show, we have:

• A queer woman married to and very much head-over-heels in love with a nonbinary musician (this is Chrishell Stause, of course)
• A single mother of two, who grew up in what sounds like a dysfunctional family (Amanza Smith)
• A woman who had her first child at 15, raised him, then 26 years later decided to try for kids again, and then experienced a miscarriage (Mary Fitzgerald)
• A daughter of immigrants who has made gobs of money literally before she turned 30 (Chelsea Lakzhani)
• A mother of an infant in an extremely unconventional relationship (Bre Tiesi, whose child’s father is Nick Cannon)
• A woman who won’t reveal if she’s seeing someone or not, which I can only interpret as she’s dating a woman (okay I’m filling in some gaps here myself, but this is of course Emma Hernan)
• And then there’s Nicole Young who’s just Nicole lol

So it begs the question: What exactly is the heterosexual mainstream anyway? Don’t get me wrong. I know what I’m watching. It’s a straight show. It is, right? RIGHT???

And yet. In a twist in the reunion I won’t reveal, Chrishell discusses whether or not she and Emma have hooked up. Emma discusses whether or not she’s in love with Chrishell (reader, I… you just have to watch). All’s to say, this reunion places queer people and queerness firmly in the mainstream zeitgeist (and look at the choice of host! Tan France!).

The reunion centered mostly on fan-favorite Chrishell, her relationship with G Flip, and the various beefs she had with other ladies throughout this season. Perhaps the most charged part of the reunion comes when host Tan France brings up the homophobic comment Nicole Young made on Instagram, which she… doesn’t see as homophobic! It’s wild to watch a group of people — including the straights! — explain to Nicole why her actions are hurtful. I mean this is wild! This is the show unpacking homophobia?! How the hell did we get here (in a good way!)?

When Selling Sunset started, Chrishell (now married to G Flip) was married to actor Justin Hartley. It seems like a lifetime ago, perhaps because in so many ways, it was. Their marriage ended very publicly and painfully in season one of Selling Sunset, which was wild and brutal to watch.

But it’s not just Chrishell’s sexuality that has expanded. It’s her whole personhood, which she and the other women of Selling Sunset discuss in the reunion. She’s changed — she knows it, and she’s proud of herself. It’s very easy to see she loves his iteration of herself. And frankly? So do I.

Chrishell is still the same optimistic, big-hearted romantic she was back in 2019, but now, also, she has an edge. She has boundaries. She says them out loud. She says them repeatedly, without a hint of hesitation in her voice. She won’t let anyone speak for her, and she won’t let anyone insult her partner. She is a far cry from the demure real estate agent we met four years ago.

Selling Sunset is a chronicle of the women it portrays; Chrishell’s queerness has queered Selling Sunset. I know that’s a crazy sentence! I know! And yet! In Chrishell, the show explores just how happy a woman who has embraced her queerness can be, even if she never fucking saw it coming. In Emma, the show explores what it can be like to be best friends with a queer woman (and I’ll leave it at that!). In Amanza, Chelsea, Bre, and Mary, the show explores a wide range of motherhood, from a two-parent household, to a single mother, to something in between, to a teen mom who is now all grown up and considering beginning again.

Discovering my queerness blew my world wide open, upended my expectations and left me with a clean slate to fill in as I pleased, holding on to the parts I wanted to keep, and discarding the ones I didn’t.

And somehow, against all odds, I think that’s exactly what’s happened with Selling Sunset.

Beyond Gender Identity: A History of Trans Actors in Cis Roles

Feature image of trans actors in cis roles: Michaela Jae Rodriguez in Loot, Sandra Caldwell in The Cheetah Girls, Morgan Davies in Evil Dead Rise, Holly Woodlawn in Women in Revolt, and Patti Harrison in Together Together

It’s Transgender Awareness Week, which means for seven days and seven days only, trans folks like myself will be visible to the world. We’ll be featured as models in fashion campaigns (given a ton of visibility with zero protection), people will read our books (read a 3 page excerpt PDF), corporations will honor and celebrate us (temporarily add a trans flag to their LinkedIn banner), and our loved ones will uplift us to demonstrate their allyship (let us know when we’re misgendered in their presence).

It’s a special time to be trans and I’m certainly not one to complain about getting a little extra attention, but sometimes it’s nice to take a break from constantly being aware of my own trauma or the trauma of my trans siblings. You see, when I say I want trans representation in TV and film, I’m not always talking about stories that focus on a character being disowned by their family or being denied healthcare or experiencing a hate crime. No, I’m talking about stories where the trans character’s transness isn’t the focus — where they’re allowed to be the worst behaved one or simply hot and getting laid or just really fucking good at their job.

For this reason, I went on a deep dive to investigate the history of these kinds of roles for trans actors, how they’ve evolved in modern media, and where we’re still missing opportunities for complex trans characters.

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Andy Warhol and Paul Morrisey’s 1971 film Women in Revolt is an excellent satire of the Women’s Liberation Movement and a “fuck you” to Valerie Solanas, a sex essentialist who also happened to be the person who SHOT WARHOL IN THE STOMACH. The reality behind the making of this movie makes watching transfeminine actresses Candy Darling, Holly Woodlawn, and Jackie Curtis deliver absurd lines coated in privileged white feminism all the more delicious. Rather than playing characters rooted in the trauma of being trans, the three play over-the-top characters rooted in the trauma of being cis white women during second wave feminism. It highlights the absurdity of the time in all the right places. I mean come on, trans actresses playing over the top cis characters? What a concept.

Another 20th century film with surprisingly gender fluid casting is Law of Desire (1987), which tells the story of a filmmaker, his boyfriend, and his lover. Gay! But also… Trans! He has a trans sister, played by cis actress Carmen Maura, who has a cis ex-girlfriend played by trans actress Bibi Fernández. Dykes! Man, this movie just keeps getting better. Not only does Fernández play a cis woman, but she also gets to be the selfish, slutty type. She abandoned her own daughter to take up a new lover in Italy because she’s really, really hot… more of this please.

During this time period, there were also trans performers who made careers by being stealth. And as someone who is incredibly invested in seeing a trans James Bond in my lifetime, I’d be remiss to not discuss Caroline Cossey, the first trans model to pose for Playboy. Cossey played the role of “Girl at Pool” in For Your Eyes Only (1981), making her arguably the first trans Bond Girl. Cossey was egregiously outed following the film’s release and, like many other trans performers, was thrust into a life of advocacy thereafter. She took a truly horrid experience and turned it into something beautiful: tangible, positive change for trans folks to come. I think it’s rad that she’ll be known in history as a Bond Girl and fierce advocate for trans and human rights.

The most notable example of an actor working while stealth is Sandra Caldwell, a trans actress who, until 2017, spent her 35 year-long career playing cis roles. Considering what happened to Cossey and other out trans people, who could blame Caldwell for not wanting the attention of a largely transphobic public eye? Given the limits of Hollywood’s imagination, Caldwell would not have been cast in the roles she played had the industry known she was trans. It actually wasn’t until Caldwell played a trans character for the first time in the stage production of Charm that she came out publicly.

Caldwell belongs to the Baby Boomer generation, whose out trans population is only .1%. She says herself that trans folks now have much more freedom and don’t have to hide as much. Perhaps this is true in part because of the growing number of young, out trans folks, now reported to be 2.3% of Gen Z. I’m not sure what came first, the chicken or the egg (no pun intended). Did the rise in self-reporting create more complex roles for trans folks in media or did the increase in media representation for trans folks help more people come out? I have to imagine both are and will continue to be true. That’s kind of like… the whole argument for representation, right?

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To that point, it was much easier for me to find modern examples of trans actors in complex roles than it was to find the ones mentioned above. Many trans actors in the 20th century and through the 2010s did not just play roles on-screen — they also played a role in social justice and advocacy spaces that made the introduction of a new generation possible. This new generation of trans actors are more and more getting to act in complex roles — cis, trans, and unspecified — and I am eating them up every chance I get.

Patti Harrison, for one, has a number of roles in her filmography that are complex outside of her transness. For example, in Together Together (2021), Harrison plays a gestational surrogate named Anna, which is about as overtly cis a role a trans woman could play.

But my favorite Harrison role — and one of my all-time favorite television roles period — is Ruthie on Shrill (2019 – 2021), the NSFW coworker of my dreams. I live for the harmless drama she brought to every episode and the way in which her transness was explicit, yet not the most interesting thing about her. Sure, Ruthie is trans, but did you know she’s also a veteran?! There’s one scene in particular that stuck with me after multiple rewatches which is in the episode “Salon” when Amadi (Ian Owens) thinks he’s having this tender ally moment with Ruthie, just for her to reveal that she lives with her boss and his partner not because her birth family disowned her, but because her chosen family is rich and she doesn’t have to pay rent. This was a moment Harrison constructed herself with the hopes to give Ruthie a story free of trauma porn and pity, yet rich in humor and depravity.

Michaela Jaé Rodriguez made history when she became the first trans woman to be nominated for a lead acting Emmy for Pose in 2021. Her performance, and the show itself, are wildly important to trans storytelling in media, especially because it centers the Black trans femme perspective. Contrastly, in Loot (2022–), Rodriguez plays the role of Sofia: a hardworking, confident, take-no-bullshit, nonprofit Executive Director who’s reluctantly tasked with making sure her rich, incapable boss (Maya Rudolph) doesn’t fuck everything up. It was sweet to watch Sofia grow throughout the first season without her transness being mentioned once, and instead focus on her efforts to let her guard down a bit and have a little more fun than she typically allows. I’m glad the strikes are over and production on Season 2 can resume so we can see more!

I can only hope that Zoe Terakes performance as Hayley in Talk to Me (2023) will inspire filmmakers to create more on-screen trans bullies who have beef with the female lead. Okay… I’m begging. Hayley’s 90’s lover boy haircut and cunty attitude make them the perfect troublemaker to instigate the plot of one of my favorite movies of the year. When the character is first introduced, it’s through gossip about a party they’re throwing, making Hayley out to be the popular girl in school with an exclusive invite list. Boy were we wrong. Upon entering the party, we’re greeted by a menace in a short-sleeve-over-long-sleeve look that we transmascs know all too well. To say I was delighted would be an understatement.

Another favorite of mine is the absolute treat that is Nicole Maines as Lisa in Yellowjackets (2023). I know what you’re thinking, “Motti, Yellowjackets is literally a show all about trauma, how are you gonna tell me Lisa doesn’t have trauma?” Listen here, punk, Lisa does have trauma. In fact, she has mommy issues! But the issue is her mom is controlling, not that she’s transphobic. In fact, her trans identity doesn’t even get brought up! I’m hungry for more Yellowjackets for many reasons, most of them being gay, and Lisa is definitely one of them!

It’s never explicitly said that Danny in Evil Dead Rise (2023) is trans, but between the bleach blonde mullet, singular earring, chain, and LITERAL DJ SET IN HIS BEDROOM… Morgan Davies gave a performance that screams transmasc 20-something year-old in Bushwick. This was my first introduction to Davies, but I’m told with excitement that he’s in the new live action One Piece as a character named — get this — Koby, so I’ll definitely be checking that out.

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Complex roles for trans folks are much more abundant now than they were five, ten, and sixty years ago. And while I’m psyched to see that many of these parts allow actors to dig into something other than their transness and trans trauma, there remains a secret, more complex third option: explicitly trans characters who are just as complex as the ones whose transness is barely — or never — mentioned.

Look at me, trying to find a middle ground. Who am I, Dax Sheperd? All I’m saying is that we’ve seen the characters whose transness make up their entire personality, and as a result, their entire value (Che Diaz in And Just Like That, Max in The L Word, Sophia Burset in Orange is the New Black). We’re also now seeing characters played by trans actors whose transness is not so much a part of their characterization, if at all (Viktor in Umbrella Academy, Ellie in The Last of Us, Dr. Barbie in Barbie).

What about a character who’s loud about their transness but their entire thing is that they suck and fuck or that they’re annoying as hell or they’re a futuristic alien hunter? Could you imagine if McLovin from Superbad (2007) was a trans woman played by a trans actress?

You thought girl Superbad (Booksmart) was good? Wait until you see trans Superbad.

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This piece about trans actors in cis roles is part of our 2023 Trans Awareness Week coverage. Our Senior Editor, Drew Burnett Gregory, felt like cis people were plenty aware of trans people in 2023 thank you very much, so this week trans writers will be taking us back into recent history — specially post-Stonewall (1970) to pre-Tipping Point (2013).

Syd Colson and TP Are Laughing All the Way To Becoming the Faces of the WNBA

Feature image of Syd Colson & TP of the Syd + Tp Show via Togethxr

It started out as a joke. The Syd + TP Show, a sketch comedy which will air its season finale Monday on the Maximum Effort Channel and is available for streaming on Fubo, has a simple premise: Syd Colson and Theresa Plaisance (TP), both career bench warmers in the WNBA, are setting out to become “The Faces of the League.”

When I say “bench warmer,” I don’t take it lightly. Statistically speaking, the WNBA is one of the most exclusive professional sports leagues in the world. The talent pool of women basketball players, even at an elite level, outpaces the size of the league by almost every measure. Nearly half of the first round draft picks often don’t make it out of training camp and onto final rosters.

That’s a heavily talked about topic among fans, how to better grow the league to support player talent, and one that’s handled with surprisingly serious heart in this season of Syd + TP when it turns out that TP was unexpectedly cut from her team this year. Syd Colson and TP have a combined 20 years of WNBA experience. Both are previous WNBA champions. To stay in this league for this long, including contributing from the bench: that’s no laughing matter, it takes hard work and grit.

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And yet, laugh Syd and TP do. Syd in particular has built a beloved fanbase across her TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter with her quick wit, memes, and gay jokes a plenty. She saw a kindred spirit (someone to always laugh at her fart jokes) in TP when both played for the Las Vegas Aces in 2022. She knew right away that fire chemistry needed to be caught like lightning in a bottle, and so The Syd + TP Show was born. The quest to become “the faces of the league” is a light framework that takes them everywhere from interviewing WNBA G.O.A.T. Sheryl Swoops, to a gay bar to pick up girls with queer heartthrob E.R. Fightmaster, even running their own basketball clinic for kids!

Directed by the incredibly talented and longtime Autostraddle favorite Carly Usdin — The Syd + TP Show makes excellent use of Syd and TP’s natural timing. Following a loose script that leaves plenty of room for improv, Syd + TP is funny in the same way as when your friends told you “get in loser, we’re going shopping,” so you hopped in the car, but you don’t quite know where we’re going or what will happen. Still the next thing you know, you’re the kind of giddy where your laughter is coming out more like wheezes and even the smallest thing (someone pronounces a word a certain way, you all see the same sign) has you doubled over. Because what always matters in those moments is who you’re with, that’s how the memories are made. That’s the The Syd + TP Show. (I haven’t tried it yet, but I bet it would go great with an edible, just saying if that’s your thing.)

And so yes, it started out as a joke. Syd Colson and TP — not Candace Parker, Breanna Stewart, A’ja Wilson, Sue Bird, iconic WNBA players with national commercials, sponsorships, and shoe exclusives — they were going to be the next faces of the league.

Then last month, the Las Vegas Aces were staring down the barrel of their back-to-back championship, a feat that had not been pulled off in the league in over 20 years. They were up 2-1 in the finals series against the New York Liberty. If they could pull off one more win, they’d be written into history. And then between games three and four, two of the five Las Vegas Aces starters were injured (another first in league history). The mood sombered. Coach Becky Hammon said she wasn’t worried, she knew who was in her locker room. WNBA teams don’t have deep benches, and suddenly it felt like the whole world was watching Syd Colson.

SYD COLSON with the PUMP FAKE, DRIVE, and BUCKET #WNBAFinals pic.twitter.com/Q0nmyUJUjs

— drble (@drbleHQ) October 19, 2023

Syd, a previous national college champ with Texas A&M, in addition to her previous ring with the Aces, knew what she had to do. The Aces were down by 10 when Coach Hammon called her to the floor. Syd gets the ball on a pass from Jackie Young, pump fakes Sabrina Ionescu, then runs right past her into the lane as if it was made for her and floats in the basket. The crowd goes wild (the crowd was me, at home, I went wild). For every minute she played, Syd’s defense smothered Ionescu. On offense, a behind the back pass from Syd to Alicia Clarke makes every highlight reel.

The next morning Sydney Colson woke up a back-to-back champ. And do you know who every basketball fan was talking about?

The face of the league.

After her celebration tour wrapped (including a sit down on The Daily Show for Syd and a segment on the Tamron Hall Show with special guest lesbian legend Robin Roberts for Syd and TP both), I was lucky enough to get a few minutes with Syd and TP to talk about their primed-to-be cult classic sketch show. I was not prepared to laugh this much.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Carmen: Sorry, just to slightly geek out for a second, it’s really just… I’m a HUGE Aces fan … I’m actually a new WNBA fan, which is going to be part of the interview, but I’ve been on the road for both of the championships and feeling really proud and excited for you guys.

TP: You joined at a good time!

Carmen: I won’t lie, I really picked a great moment. In Autostraddle’s office, we decided to build a WNBA Fantasy League after BG got detained last year, and just got really serious about being like, “We should be putting our money where our mouth is and actively supporting the league.”

We have two or three people on our team who are women’s sports fanatics and they were like, “We will teach the rest of y’all how to do this, join this league, it’ll be fun. Do whatever.” And I got really into it. The first year in the fantasy league I finished almost in last place, but this year I came in third.

TP: Oh nice.

Syd: Look at you. Come on progress.

Carmen: My growth was very real!

Syd: It was!

Carmen: So I picked a good time. Okay. But I can use that to pivot! Syd, TP, what’s really great is your show is… first of all, hilarious.

Syd: Thank you.

Carmen: It makes our team laugh weekly! But the premise of it, for our readers who are going to be catching on, is that both of you want to learn how to be the face of the league, right?

You both have had very long WNBA careers. A lot of times, not necessarily.. in any way that is… I don’t mean anything by this… but you’re not necessarily getting a lot of starter time, right? You spend a lot of time sitting on the bench, but —

Syd: How rude Carmen.

TP: What? I didn’t see my career going that way.

Carmen: Okay! I’ve never done a sports interview before. I don’t know the protocols of —

Syd: We’re kidding.

TP: We have a TV show about self-proclaimed bench warmers.

Carmen: Yeah, but I didn’t want to be the one to say it! It’s all a kind of thing like, “You can say it, but I can’t say it.”

Syd: No, we literally do not care.

Carmen: What does it mean to both of you to be the face of the league? Let’s start there. You were like, “I’m going to make the show. We’re going to become the face of the league.” What does it mean to be the face of the league?

Syd: For us, it’s just really funny because our director for the show had to come up with an idea.

Carly had to figure out a way to put all these ideas we had for things that we wanted to do on the show and make all of those parodies or sketches, or whatever we wanted to do, make it make sense and for there to be an overarching goal. Give it a frame.

And so, Carly, they were like, “What about … ” This is how the conversation went with Togethxr, apparently, and Carly, before we were even in on it. It was just what about if we have them try to become the faces of the league and they’re two bench warmers? That could be hilarious.

And then we move the episodes in a direction of either they’re working toward it and they’re doing well or they hit some bumps in the roads, yada yada yada. And so, for us, when Carly got on the first call with us and had to pitch to us this idea, we laughed immediately. We were like, “This is hilarious and this is right up our alley.”

TP: And like you, they were also very delicate in coming out about what that was. They were like, “I think the world of you guys.” They’re also a big W fan for years and years and years. Loves sports, loves women’s sports.

So they pitched us, they said, “We think the world of you guys, we think y’all are great basketball players, so please don’t think anything of it.” And then when they said, “Y’all are going to be the faces of the league, self-proclaimed.” We thought it was great. We were like, “We couldn’t have planned this out better ourselves.”

Carmen: What I loved about this is that in one of your more recent episodes, you were like, “We’re going to manifest it.” But it really did become manifestation! By the end of the WNBA season we weren’t just making the joke on our website or in our group chat. We were like, “Everyone’s talking about lesbian legend, Syd Colson. Syd Colson’s the face of the league.”

I think that that’s been really amazing. So I wondered… were you, as you’re building this little sketch show, were you like, “You know what’s going to be great? In the end, this is exactly what’s going to happen. The morning after the championship, you know who everyone’s going to be talking about? Syd Colson.”

TP: The face of the league.

Carmen: The face of the league!

Syd: In the most modest way or the most humble way, and not just about myself but about us, I knew last season that TP was hilarious. Once I became teammates with her, I [originally] only knew her in passing or through other people or about her. We had never had a real conversation. Once I met her and just got to know her for real, once I could tell how funny she was and how talented I felt like she was, I was like… it’s funny, once Carly pitched the premise, but I was like, “it’s going to be funny because we are actually funny people.”

I don’t know, neither one of us have ever met a stranger, a lot of people just gravitate toward our energy. And so I thought the combination of us having a fan base in the WNBA already, especially people from Las Vegas who saw us on social media, their social media platform, because Chris, our social media guy, is just outstanding.

TP: Incredible.

Syd: He helped me in 2019 get my social media bigger. He propelled so much for me. But the joke was that I saw it forming. [I knew] that we would be talked about because the show is going to be good. Our writer, Sheeds, is wonderful. Our producers Kwani —

TP: Top notch.

Syd: …Renie, Kayla, Togethxr, who was the one who even got this stuff rolling with me. There were so many people, our agent, Gina, that saw the vision and we all were like, “It’s going to actually come to fruition. People are going to laugh at the log line.” But yeah, I think for me I was like, “Yeah, this —”

Carmen: This is a hit.

TP: And it all happened so quickly!

Syd: We shot 10 episodes in 12 days. We did a week before training camp this past season, and then during the All Star break in Vegas.

Carmen: That also speaks to the quality of your natural chemistry, right? Watching it, I thought y’all spent the whole off season doing this. I was like, “Oh, they’ve been working on this.” I just watched the most recent episode where you guys get to interview Sheryl Swoops.

I was falling off the couch. It is so good!! And I think part of that is watching you, obviously you guys already feed off each other well, but watching you feed off of each other and then also be in front of a great and go: “So, I want to be the face of the league.”

She’s like, “Of what?” And TP goes, “The W.”

It killed. It’s so good. And then later when, and Sheryl lists her accomplishments and gets to “four-time, back to back to back to back champion of the Houston Rockets,” and Syd’s like, “I’m from Houston.”

Not to quote you guys back to you guys, but for our readers.

TP: We love it.

Carmen: Part of what I’ve really been drawn to about your show is what also brought me to the W to begin with. There are so many personalities. I think that’s what The Syd + TP Show does well.

What’s great about the W is the basketball’s amazing. But also around the sport, y’all have such big personalities on and off the court. You’re really warm people and the league feels like that throughout. You guys bring that energy all the time. And I think the show does a good job of representing that.

Syd: Thank you.

Carmen: I wondered if that was part of what you were hoping for. What is the hope? Were you like, “I’m hoping to bring more people into the W. I’m hoping to … ” I know Syd has joked about wanting to get on Insecure before. “I’m hoping to springboard this into something.”

Syd: No, yeah, that wasn’t a joke. I dead ass wanted to be on Insecure.

TP: She wasn’t joking.

Carmen: That’s not a joke at all. Dead serious. Issa, you have to call Syd. That’s not a —

Syd: Dead serious.

Carmen: It could work! I think that you should be on the next Issa Rae project. I could see you on Rap Sh!t. I can see this for you.

Syd: Well, I got to meet her after game four [of the 2023 WNBA finals] in New York. I caught a side profile and I thought it was Issa but then she had turned. I’m like, “Is this Issa?”

And I don’t get excited about celebrities! I’m just that kind of person. I’m like, “We all just people. I don’t care.” But I respect and admire her so much because of how she went about her business. And that she started on Misadventures of an Awkward Black Girl and did it with her friends and brought people up with her. I respect people who do stuff like that. They don’t just go aim for the biggest stars. They bring their friends who are talented and want to work and have ambition. And so for me, I was like, “I’ve got to get a picture with her.”

Carmen: Okay, but did you shoot your shot? Were you like, “Issa, I’m really funny. Have you seen my TikTok?”

Syd: No, no, no. I told her what I just told you. I told her that I admire her and I watched her for a long time. And I was —

Carmen: Well, I’m going to say, it in case one day this interview ever gets read by her people, that you’re hilarious online and on TikTok and maybe Issa should hit you up. Just throwing that out there.

Syd: Thank you, Carmen.

Carmen: No problem. This is, I think in basketball they call that an assist.

TP: Not you dropping lingo!

Carmen: Listen, you don’t move from number eight to number three in the fantasy league by faking it!

TP: All right. You did your homework.

Syd: Not playing with us.

Carmen: Right?

Syd: She said Big Carmen, not the Little One.

Carmen: Not the Little One!! That’s what I’m talking about.

Fast forward & I’m still not employed by @IssaRae , BUT… https://t.co/ZFDvuPbcPb pic.twitter.com/4qXDxdAJWV

— Sydney Colson (@SydJColson) October 19, 2023

Carmen: I think this is actually a great pivot to something else that I wanted to hit up, which is this: a lot of our readers… We have some readers that are really hardcore, they love sports. And we have other readers where, I won’t lie, we kind of baited the lesbian audience. We were like, “Here are, 35 WNBA players you could be thirsting after on Instagram. And while you’re reading that, by the way, we’re going to start doing a weekly column and start building the conversation because the league is amazing and you should all be paying attention.”

If you were to try and sell someone who maybe is gay and really enjoys watching, I don’t know, hot women sweat on each other… but hadn’t built their way into sports yet, what would you say?

Syd: For queers.

Carmen: Yeah.

Syd: I think that… Did you have something you were about to say?

TP: Yeah. Grab a power tool.

Carmen: Grab a power tool??

TP: Grab a power tool. Grab any kind of ball sport, take a picture, see how you feel about it. If it’s your vibe, drop that power tool. Stick to sports. Do your heritage justice.

That’s right. Embrace what’s ours. Women’s sport, power tools.

Syd: It belongs to us.

TP: It’s ours. We don’t embrace it enough.

Syd: We don’t. But yeah, I think I would do something along those lines. It’s like on, not even a funny note it’s like, yeah… come and support people who are like you, you relate to them in some way. You all have something. Just the way, Issa Rae, “I’m rooting for everybody black.”

You have this connection with people from afar that even though you don’t necessarily know them, you might know something about their plight or about a struggle they’ve gone through or just what it’s like to be in their shoes a little bit, from one vantage point. And so, I don’t know, I think it would just be cool to have a way to have an in with the sport through this connection that we share.

And I think it helps, too, that you get to know some people off the court. You start seeing some people’s personalities, or like what we’re doing [on the show]. Or if you see somebody who models, or you see somebody who, I don’t know, is pursuing something else because so many of us in the W are so multifaceted and we’re multi-hyphenates.

So, if you see them elsewhere and you know that they play, it’s a perfect opportunity to be like, “All right, let me go check this person out in real life.”

TP: That sounds great, yeah.

Syd: And then when you get to a WNBA game, a lot of the time, especially depending on the city, people love it so much that they want to come back. You’re like, “Dang, I did not know that end game experience would be like that.” Then you’re drawn in, and hopefully that’s how we keep building.

Carmen: I love that. And I think that’s the thing, right? Once you start watching it, you’re like, “Oh, I did not know the game would be this exciting.” In the Autostraddle office it became infectious. It was the finals this year, and we were leaving work early to watch. We were like, “All right, we are done. It is time we wrapped here.”

Syd: Right?

Oh, here’s a better pitch for it. Come to a W game… There are always a lot of gay people, there are always a lot of people in the stands. You can meet your man, your woman, your nonbinary person, come to a WNBA game. It could be the love of your life. The love of your life is sitting next to you.

TP: You can meet your stud.

Carmen: They could be sitting next to you, or they could be on the court. Some of us have a goal of being a WNBA Wife.

TP: Your stud muffin.

Carmen: Some of us are aspirational, okay?

TP: You got to manifest it. Show up to a WNBA game. Manifest it.

Syd: Manifest. Yeah. You can have your life good. Come to a W game. Do your, what’s it called?

Carmen: Sageing?

Syd: Sage the room. Sage the arena.

TP: Find the stud muffin of your dreams.

Carmen: Listen, you guys manifested being the face of the league. So I can manifest being a WNBA wife.

Syd: You absolutely can.

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The Syd + TP Show will air its season finale this Monday on the Maximum Effort Channel and is available for streaming on Fubo.

Top 15 Gayest Moments in Selling Sunset Season Seven

One thing I’ve learned about life is anything can become extremely gay.

I’m humbled and thrilled to share that Selling Sunset, a show started back in 2019 when we were all different people, is one of those things that started out straight and is now extremely gay. I originally intended for this list to only have the top ten gayest moments, but there were truly SO MANY GAY MOMENTS that I struggled to limit the list even to 15 moments.

Some people might claim this is a show about luxury real estate in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, but we know better, don’t we?

Without further ado, I present to you the top ten gayest moments of Selling Sunset season seven.

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15. When Bre and Emma are trying out these interesting exercise machines

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14. When Amanza asks Bre who’s in charge of her these days and Bre says, “No one! Take care of me!”

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13. When Chelsea and Emma make dil-doughs (sorry I had to)

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12. When Emma puts a dog leash on Chrishell and they both love it

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11. When Emma randomly has pliers in her bag and fixes Mary’s shoe

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10. When Amanza asks Emma if she’d go on a date with a female and Emma reacts totally normally and calmly

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9. “I love hard nipples”

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8. Nikki Glazer showing up and telling Chrishell, “You’re switching me over!”

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7. Emma describing her ideal partner as someone that’s “my best friend, but also I’m in love with”

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6. Chrishell correcting Marie-Lou when she misgenders G Flip

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5. Emma’s letter to Chrishell

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4. This entire conversation purportedly about “tacos” that takes place while Chrishell is wearing a dress literally made of rainbow sequins

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3. All of G Flip’s cameos

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2. Chrishell’s extremely adorable use of this term that I will immediately incorporate into my vocabulary*

*This also includes all of the discussion of Chrishell and G Flip getting married in Vegas.

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1. Chrishell and G kissing, followed by G screaming, “THIS IS MY WIFE!”

What Makes a Sexy Lesbian Screenshot

The TV/Film editors at Autostraddle have gathered to answer one of life’s most important questions: What makes a sexy lesbian screenshot?

One of the least difficult parts of our jobs as editors of film and TV coverage is how often we have to labor over images of hot queers embracing. A recent revamp of our iconic lesbian sex scenes list required Drew and Riese to spend hours scrubbing through these moments taking sexy lesbian screenshot after sexy lesbian screenshot. You’re welcome.

But finding the perfect sexy lesbian screenshot isn’t all fun and horny games. It’s an art! There’s a strategy! And we don’t always agree on what strategy appeals most to our preferences and the preferences of our readers.

That’s why Carmen, Riese, Kayla, and Drew are here to discuss what we think makes the perfect sexy lesbian screenshot. And, don’t worry, we’ve included pictures.

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Drew: Okay so this started because Carmen asked us which image she should use for her Neon review and there were some… disagreements.

Option 1:

Option 2:

Basically we were split on whether we preferred a sexy lesbian screenshot of a kiss or a sexy lesbian screenshot of the lead up to the kiss.

Personally, I love the lead up. The “almost kiss” so to speak.

Kayla: And I love the kiss!!!!!!! Gimme full contact.

Carmen: Yes, I think Kayla and I are team full kiss, and Riese and Drew are team “it’s hotter in the millisecond before the kiss.”

Drew: I feel like this HAS to say something about who we are as people. I think maybe I also sometimes prefer right before the kiss in life?? Obviously depends who I’m kissing and how good the kissing/sex is, but right before is SO ELECTRIC. Right before is still fun even if the kiss disappoints.

Riese: I also prefer right before the kiss in life! That is when we are most alive.

Kayla: I love kissing!!!!!! lol

Riese: I mean, I also love kissing

Drew: For the record, I also love kissing.

Kayla: But yeah I do think a lot of times in life, the lead up is great. The tension is great.

Riese: Yes it’s a moment of intense focus and like concentrated desire.

Carmen: But I don’t think that tension is always captured in a screenshot.

Kayla: I actually do enjoy watching the exposition part of porn.

Carmen: Kayla… you what!?!?

Drew: I also watch the exposition in porn!!

Riese: That’s funny because I skip the exposition part of porn. I’m like, let’s get this show on the road.

Drew: I literally will watch 15 minutes of porn exposition and then like three minutes of sex. That is usual for me.

Riese: I fast forward. 🙂

I just watch like 30 seconds of exposition to get the basic scenario established.

Kayla: Lol see, it’s interesting that we’re all kind of self-contradictory in some of these preferences.

Drew: I do think this is why I’ve always struggled to be as slutty as I want in life because part of the experience for me is good build up, not just the sex itself. And good build up is harder to find.

Riese: I think this is addressed in my pinned tweet:

Sure lesbian sex is great but have you tried sitting next to your crush while every nerve in your body is tightly attuned to exactly how much of their thigh is touching your thigh at any given moment and how much more of their thigh could touch your thigh perhaps soon maybe

— riese (@autowin) February 16, 2020

Kayla: I do think — not to be boring about it — but I do think there’s genuine appeal to me from an archival perspective. I HATE when I am trying to find a screenshot of a particular kiss from something and it’s like nowhere online. I’m like okay if I want there to be a kissing photo, I’m going to have to be the one to grab it and put it online for the freaks like me who are looking for it.

Riese: Hahahaha. Sometimes the kissing scenes are so poorly lit!

Drew: I guess I think of an almost kiss as a sufficient archive of that kiss.

Kiss scenes are so poorly lit! I struggled with that for The Buccaneers.

Riese: Once they smash their heads together, it’s game over. Everybody is literally in the dark.

The blackout sex montage in The L Word season five. Absolute cruelty how hard that is to screenshot.

Carmen: Ok but poor lighting can be fixed by us as editors.

Drew: That is true

Riese: Not entirely though! It’s hard.

Drew: I bumped up the exposure majorly on The Buccaneers

Riese: Yeah I am always bumping up the exposure.

Drew: I think when it comes to a sexy lesbian screenshot, I like the almost kiss because I can still see both of their lips fully and so it’s easier to imagine myself in the kiss.

Riese: I just like seeing both of their lips and faces fully.

Drew: I mean, I think what would do it for me most is if they were touching tongues but their lips weren’t smashed together.

Kayla: I think I want proof of kiss because what if like in the January 6 episode of The Morning Show season 3, the two characters never actually do kiss and ONLY near-kiss.

Drew: That’s a good point.

Carmen: As a reader, I’d rather know that some gay shit happened. Give me the kiss.

Riese: I did, I suppose, once create this sexy lesbian screenshot collection.

Carmen: That’s also reflected in the click habits of our readers. We often lead with a kiss because it gets 100% more click throughs, every single time.

Which yes, some readers get upset if it’s too close to the episode airing and could be seen as a spoiler (we try to be judicious about that), but they should take it up with their peers. We are simply a publication that factually speaking needs traffic to survive, and people like seeing the kiss.

Kayla: I think I probably have that habit, too. I think I’m more likely to click on a review if I see a gay kiss in the photo. Because it’s pretty rare to see that lead a review!

Riese: I guess looking at this gallery, a lot of them you can see faces even during the kiss. But also sometimes they have their eyes closed and then we can’t see their eyes

Drew: I do like eyes.

Kayla: I don’t need to see their eyes just like I don’t need to see anyone’s eyes when I’m kissing them in real life.

Carmen: Correct, Kayla.

Kayla: Kristen is an open eye kisser (not all the time but sometimes) and I’m always like why are you looking at me! lol

I wrote it into Helen House that the main character always opened her eyes while making out because I was like this is funny and off-putting.

Drew: The one season of The Bachelor I watched in full he was an open eye kisser and it was very funny.

Riese: But then there are kisses like this where I feel like the moment before was probably better:

Drew: This is why more kissing needs to be like Disobedience. Spit is getting transferred but we get full faces.

Carmen: I can live my entire life and never see the Disobedience spit again and still I would have seen it too much.

Riese: This is iconic:

Drew: The Cruel Intentions kiss is perfect.

Kayla: Oh yeah wow the Cruel Intentions kiss really is so iconic.

Drew: I want to amend my answer and say I prefer the kiss itself if it’s open mouth and the almost kiss if it’s just going to be two chaste actors smashing faces.

Riese: Yes, if they’re doing open mouth then usually you can see more and it’s not just two faces with their lips closed pressing into each other.

Carmen: I think Riese is onto something. What are our favorite kiss screenshots? (Or the minute right before kiss, for those of you who are boring?)

Drew: Immediately thought of this:

Kayla: When I was compiling the gayest moments in Riverdale list, I realized how infrequently Cheryl and Toni actually kissed on the show, and it annoyed me! They were in a serious relationship for SO long and there’s SO much kissing on that show!

Carmen: I’m scrolling back through my phone. (Don’t judge me, I keep an archive.)

Riese: Also if it’s zoomed out that’s good, like if you can see full torso than you get enough body language then it’s ok to lose partial face.

Like this is good:

Kayla: Omggggg that Saving Face kiss is framed so well. I suppose it does indeed depend on the direction of the kiss.

Drew: Yeah some of this comes down to like… cinema. Good framing does a lot.

Kayla: That’s cinema baby!

Carmen: Yes, I think about framing often.

Riese: Also sometimes you can see people smiling a little bit and that’s cute too.

Carmen: Like this is a “before the kiss” but the framing is gorgeous? There’s so much story told here:

Drew: Let’s also talk about kissing when it’s not lip to lip:

Riese: Faces are hidden but you can still tell that Graham is smiling.

Carmen: P-Valley! The color work? THE COLOR WORK!?!

Riese: Oh yeah that’s great.

Drew: Yes I love all of these because the actors are still ACTING during the kisses.

Riese: Right!

Drew: They communicate so much with just fractions of their faces.

Riese: It’s wild how many of these kiss screenshots are people pressing their lips together with their mouths closed, but with the body language of a full open mouth kiss.

Drew: Fascinating

Riese: 

Drew: Sometimes Elise and I like to do joke Old Hollywood kisses which is basically a very passionate kiss but with mouths closed. That’s how we greet each other sometimes.

Carmen: This kiss is giving The Notebook. It’s giving swoon-worthy Nicholas Sparks. It’s a classic Shondaland romance, but make it gay. And again a lot of that comes from the framing. The use of negative space here, to make Kai and Amelia look epic? And not that they are just smashing faces in a hospital parking lot on a soap opera? That’s talent.

Kayla: I do sometimes like an almost-kiss when there’s a height difference because I feel like the almost moment emphasizes that more than the kiss does and I love a height difference.

Riese: I DO WISH IT WAS LIT BETTER THOUGH CARMEN.

Carmen: Hahaha, and that was after I edited it.

Drew: Carmen, that’s a great point about negative space. It does make it feel epic.

Kayla: That’s a really good kiss.

Drew: Nudity goes a long way in making up for hidden faces I will say:

Riese: True, true.

Kayla: Wow yes.

Drew: This lip bite !

Riese: Wow. That is incredibly hot.

Drew: I do wish it was brighter but I understand why it’s not in the context of the scene.

Riese: Yeah, I love everything about that.

I think like… the other thing is we have trauma of all the times that lesbian kisses were literally CROPPED OUT of television shows.

Drew: Yeah I did not live through that. Well, I was alive. But at the time I was watching weird European movies with graphic gay sex.

Riese: This was the first lesbian kiss on American TV:

Carmen: Does this count as a kiss? Because a neck bite mid-sex really helps take care of the lighting issue.

Drew: I absolutely think a neck bite counts as a kiss. Or a finger suck.

Finger suck might be my favorite.

Riese: Oh that reminds me of the deeply beloved Gen Q threesome.

Drew: I need to pull up a picture from the Gen Q threesome.

YES

Riese: Which also could’ve used better lighting!

Drew: Yes.

Riese: Sometimes when I am screenshotting for a recap? I am like, none of these can really capture the whole thing you know?

Drew: I do think sometimes lighting that works for a moving image doesn’t translate to a still. And that’s okay since film and TV are famously about moving images.

Kayla: Totally

Drew: But it does make our jobs tricky.

Carmen: This is why I always advocate for our editors to relight. It’s key.

Riese: When thinking about a feature image, to get really technical here, lighting is just so key.

Riese: I feel like I probably made a collage for that one while thinking to myself “this is why I never go to bed on time.”

Carmen: I think a great example of that is the collage of Pippa and Bette having sex.

Riese: Yes, I made a collage for that, too!

Kayla: Yeah the collage was crucial.

Carmen: This is really a great example of when a whole is bigger than the sum of its parts:

Riese: I also sometimes would make collages for Glee musical numbers. Similar spirit of “whole > sum of its parts.”

Drew: What is a sex scene if not a musical number of lust.

Riese: Here’s the Gen Q threesome scene:

The lighting is better than I remembered now that I’m looking at it, although I imagine I edited it.

Drew: Glad we can include the elusive boob kiss.

Kayla: I famously hate lightening photos but also at the same time I do hate when shows are too dark (YELLOWJACKETS).

Riese: Yellowjackets is so dark.

Carmen: I also think, there are moments where in sex scenes, capturing something in motion via a set still can really stick the landing.

Riese: Yes.

Carmen: Like I still can’t believe the CW aired this:

Drew: The CW has had some erotique moments. Or at least old CW did. Not sure about their new rebrand.

Carmen: It goes back to what I mean about motion being captured in a still though, because for sure one of the reasons they got away with it is because it was a split second. But now it’s captured forever in gay fandoms.

Riese: I am looking at my best L Word sex scenes list and wow a lot of these are moment-before-the-kiss shots. I think the absolute ideal is something well lit and someone is about to bite or suck on someone’s lower lip. You get full faces, you get physical contact, the whole enchilada.

Drew: Yes. I’m very mouthy IRL though so…

"why suck the strap" why look at a sunset. why listen to your favourite song. why stop to smell the flowers. come on now

— Queen Stacey (@_staceybarnes) November 5, 2023

Carmen: DREW THAT TWEET I JUST FELL OUT OF MY CHAIR

Black Lightning really did put in that work to be such an underrated show, now that I’m looking back. Both of these are from one of the first episodes. Excellent pre-kiss work being done here.

Drew: I like when you can really see the actors looking at each other!!! Like if we’re going to see eyes I should get a sense of why. But also in that second one we can’t even see eyes but we can still see their eyes doing something in relation to each other.

Carmen: Drew, such a romantic.

Kayla: lol

Drew: Can I bring Roland Barthes into the chat and say that with sexy stills I’m always thinking about the punctum? It doesn’t matter what it is but I need the stills to have SOMETHING for my eye to latch onto that captures the moment.

Kayla: Omg hahaha

Riese: I just had to google “punctum.”

Kayla: Yes lfg A Lover’s Discourse.

Drew: I didn’t take years of art history classes not to put them to good use in analyzing L Word sex scene stills!

In that one Black Lightning still for me the punctum is the woman’s eyes clearly looking right at the other woman’s lips. And in the other one it’s the bare clavicle/shoulder? Especially with the other woman’s head resting on it.

Carmen: Ok and now I’m going to be a cliché, but it’s impossible to talk about lesbian sex on screen and not talk more about Vida. Tanya Saracho’s impact. Her legacy.

Kayla: Truly. Just pure art.

Carmen: What I love here is that both of these images are off center.

Drew: If you’re doing more than just smashing faces you can have so much more variety in actor visibility and framing! Feet kissing gives us Mishel Prada’s entire outstretched body and I for one am grateful.

Riese: Perfect.

Kayla: I do love when other things besides mouths are kissed.

Riese: Yes

Drew: I need to pull the still from the All Over Me sex scene of pink hair Leisha Hailey licking up the other girl’s back. It was my phone background all of 2019.

Carmen: That Vida shot is also a great use of a voyeur camera, which I’m not always into. But the sneak of looking at Emma from behind the blurry foreground object (the plant?) is so good.

Drew: YES

Kayla: Yeah that really makes that moment even hornier, which is impressive.

Drew: It especially works for Emma because she’s so closed off and sex for her is about pleasure not intimacy

Carmen: Extremely yes!!! And it again shows how the best stills are also telling the story of what’s happening beyond that one image.

Riese: Yes.

Drew: I know it’s like a few years late, but can we rank Vida’s sex scenes at some point?

Riese: Yes!

Drew: We don’t have enough sexy Vida stills on the site.

This reminds me that Kayla and I need to start our sex scene deep dives series. That got derailed because we both got sick. Frankly getting sick derailed my IRL sex life as well.

Riese: Hahaha

Drew: The first time Elise and I got Covid we still were having sex and it nearly killed us so we learned our lesson.

The gross internet sites that feature nude actors have really let me down when it comes to the All Over Me sex scene. Good thing I have an mp4 of that movie on my laptop.

Riese: RIP the encyclopedia of lesbian movie scenes. Some man made this whole website that I think is gone now.

Kayla: See this is why WE have to be the sexy lesbian screenshot archive.

Riese: Oh wow someone has taken up his torch and made a Twitter account for it.

Carmen: This one is why I will never fully break up with Queen Sugar:

Drew: That show could be SEXY. Makes me even sadder they prioritized the heteros so much.

This is an example of low lighting in a sexy lesbian screenshot that actually works. God I need to rewatch All Over Me:

Carmen: I love those Queen Sugar and All Over Me stills in conversation with each other. Completely opposite approaches to how to best use your light and completely effective results for both.

Drew: Yes!

I am sad that with Twitter dying, and Tumblr PG, and TikTok being so restrictive, we’re losing a social media platform that’s horny. I mean, TikTok can still be horny, I have lots of crushes. (Shoutout makeup artist Brynne.) But it’s not the same as like… collecting lesbian sex scenes for the community.

Riese: Right.

Kayla: Tumblr was sooooo important for that.

Riese: It was!

Kayla: A gif for every kiss.

Carmen: I’m also realizing that I have a type of kiss shot that I always go weak for, and it’s when you can feel the grandness of the romance? In this scene from Twenties, they were playing around with The Graduate as a parallel — and it shows:

Riese: When we started this website there were like 10 pics of lesbian kisses widely available online. One of them was The Kiss poster

Carmen: Every lesbian at my college had The Kiss poster. It was our version of flagging.

Drew: I love that The Kiss poster is still up at Ginger’s in Brooklyn.

Riese: In my day, the kiss poster was mostly just flagging: “I’ll make out with a girl in front of a boy at a party.”

Drew: The Kiss poster is so effective because the one girl is kissing the other girl’s bottom lip exclusively. So it frames their faces together nicely. I think the punctum in The Kiss is the way short hair’s lips are pursed around highlights’ lower lip. Or it’s short hair’s raised shoulder. It’s not so much nose smashing.

Riese: So iconic.

Drew: I will at least be reading and linking this history of The Kiss.

Kayla: I was about to be like we should do an oral history of The Kiss, but it appears it has been done.

Riese: Yes I was so mad someone besides us wrote that piece.

Carmen: As was I, as of 2 minutes ago.

Drew: If I’m ever a properly rich celesbian I’m going to hunt down an original print and hang it in my living room. How many decades before a dorm room staple becomes a unique, important work of art?

Carmen: I do think The Kiss poster actually became its own archetype. I’ve seen that set up in a lot of places now.

Not to return to Twenties, but I literally just saw this one while scrolling my phone:

Drew: Ooo the pillow is a nice touch!

Kayla: Whomst among us have kissing screenshots readily available on our phones? I get the sense Carmen and Drew do lol but I do not! I did used to save them in folders on my laptop during my closeted/on Tumblr days.

Riese: I do not!

Drew: I have some on my phone because I don’t clean out my phone pictures. But I have a lot more on my computer.

On my old computer I was collecting screenshots any time I watched a lesbian movie where two women were in bed looking at each other pre or post kiss taken from above. That’s in so many lesbian movies. I wonder how much The Kiss played into that, because you’re right, Carmen, it’s the same archetype.

Riese: I once tried to make the entire movies to stream on Hulu list with that exact screenshot for every movie.

Carmen: I have a lot of random kisses saved to my phone, but I wish they were better organized! I just have them mixed into my photos because of work and (again, beating the drum here) — I am ALWAYS relighting every photo on our website.

But it does make it awkward if I ever pass my phone to a friend. It’s like the “don’t swipe left!!” panic, but instead of nude selfies, I don’t want to come across as an obsessive for sex scenes.

(Not that I’m… not that.)

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Help us out readers. What kind of sexy lesbian screenshot is your favorite?

Edgar Allan Poe’s Wildest Story Inspired Fall of the House of Usher’s Scariest Moment

I’ve always been drawn to mouth horror. Which is to say, I’ve always been very scared of mouth horror. I hate going to the dentist. Iconic TV teeth extraction moments from Alias and The Americans have made a permanent impression on me. When I sent an early draft of my horror novelette Helen House to my editor, he pointed out there were a lot of images about mouths in it. I decided to heighten it in the next draft and gave it a name: mouth horror. I’m often drawn to the things that disturb me most.

October is over, but many of us revel in the horror genre year-round. I find myself still contemplating the brilliant series The Fall of the House of Usher, which I recapped in depth for Autostraddle before becoming sick and passing the reins to my coworker Valerie Anne, who did a fantastic job writing about the final two episodes of the Flanaverse series. In the weeks since I finished watching the show, I’ve been immersing myself in some of the Edgar Allan Poe stories I was previously unfamiliar with, many of which are available for free online. While many have sufficiently haunted, only one has been capable of giving me actual nightmares. And it happens to be the story that likely inspired what was, for me, the most disturbing part of the series.

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“Misery is manifold,” muses the narrator of the Edgar Allan Poe short story “Berenice” in its opening line. Poe published the story originally in the Southern Literary Messenger, a periodical produced in my hometown of Richmond, Virginia in the mid 19th century. The story was published in 1835 and was so upsetting and violent that many readers wrote into the publisher to complain. Poe wasn’t exactly known for happy, soft stories, but there was something about “Berenice” that was especially brutal, especially off-putting.

In it, that misery-dwelling narrator Egaeus retells the tale of his own wickedness, following the typical first-person confessional format of a lot of Poe’s work. Egaeus grew up in a gothic mansion with his cousin Berenice, and he becomes obsessed with her teeth. Egaeus has a tendency toward monomania, a focused obsession on objects. After Berenice smiles at him one day, her teeth become that latest source of obsession:

The shutting of a door disturbed me, and, looking up, I found that my cousin had departed from the chamber. But from the disordered chamber of my brain, had not, alas! departed, and would not be driven away, the white and ghastly spectrum of the teeth.

Egaeus and Berenice are to be married, and his obsession with her teeth only deepens, especially when she contracts a mysterious disease that impacts everything but. Berenice dies and is buried. Egaeus awakes from a disorienting trance (“It seemed that I had newly awakened from a confused and exciting dream”) to discover a small box beside him. Though inconspicuous, the box fills him with dread: “Why then, as I perused them, did the hairs of my head erect themselves on end, and the blood of my body become congealed within my veins?”

A servant enters to inform him there’s been a huge mistake. Berenice was not actually dead (Poe does love a live burial). Her body has been found, still alive but brutalized. Her teeth are missing. Egaeus gradually realizes blood and mud on his clothes. When he opens the box, we already know what will be in it, but the reveal shocks nonetheless. There are Berenice’s teeth, all 32 of them.

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In The Fall of the House of Usher, Frederick Usher — eldest of the six demonic Usher children — develops his own form of monomania not for his wife Morrie’s teeth but for her phone. It isn’t her primary phone, the one he’s used to. It’s a phone he has never seen before. It was found at the crime scene where Morrie was the sole survivor of a tragic “accident” where hundreds were killed at a sex party due to toxic, flesh-burning water pouring out of the sprinkler system, though we come to understand this event wasn’t an accident but rather fate, part of the comeuppance for a deal with the devil made by Usher patriarch Roderick many years before. Morrie lived because the “devil” — Carla Gugino’s shapeshifting Verna, who sometimes takes the form of a crow — spared her.

She survives, but she is covered in head-to-toe serious burns and spends the rest of the series in critical condition. When Frederick is presented with this phone, this burner phone he insists is not, cannot be his wife’s, he begins obsessing over it. The phone becomes a symbol of secrets, of what he sees as a huge betrayal. He thinks Morrie was cheating on him with his younger brother Perry, who he despised and who despised him. The locked phone, which he never does break into, becomes a weapon, something for him to use against Morrie for proof she can’t be trusted.

Against the doctor’s advice, Frederick brings Morrie home and claims to be able to care for her himself. His version of “care” is actually control. Frederick becomes increasingly abusive toward Morrie. He does a lot of cocaine, rarely sleeping, always watching her. Her injuries make it so she has limited movement and speech ability, and when some of those abilities begin to come back, Frederick squashes them by using an experimental paralytic on her — one developed by his family’s evil pharmaceutical empire. She can’t advocate for herself, can’t even signal to their daughter that she’s suffering under the abusive anti-care of Frederick.

In a cocaine- and paranoia-induced trance, Frederick says everything that comes out of Morrie’s mouth is a lie. He doesn’t want explanations from her. He wants to punish her. And so, while she’s under the effects of the paralytic (but not, it should be noted, given any Ligodone, the opioid the Usher family built its legacy on), Frederick extracts Morrie’s teeth. As punishment. As trophies. As reminders he has complete and total control over her. The Ushers all approach their intimate relationships this way — from a place of complete and sadistic authority over their lovers.

The kills in The Fall of House of Usher are bold, violent, and memorable. But none of them are as haunting or horrifying as this violation of Morrie’s mouth. She might live, but her ending almost feels more brutal than those of the dead Usher siblings.

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What is it that made “Berenice” especially disturbing within Poe’s canon of horrors?

As a modern reader, I know some of my discomfort with the story comes from a projection of my knowledge of Poe’s own life onto it. He, too, married his younger cousin (he was 27, and she was 13), and while their relationship is often described quaintly in biographies and history books, it’s hard not to see those numbers and feel immediate unease. Of course, I’m not saying I wonder if Poe ever thought about extracting her teeth. As a horror writer myself, I’d never assume a horror writer shares the same depravities as their characters, but this narrator’s fixation on his cousin is difficult to extract from this context. In a peculiar choice of language, Egaeus regards his proposal of marriage to Berenice as an “evil moment.” It is hard, indeed, not to think of the inherent wickedness of Poe taking on a child bride.

Though, of course, Poe’s contemporary readers wouldn’t have necessarily had an issue with that as these kind of marriages were common. What then made all those readers write into the paper to complain about “Berenice,” eventually leading Poe to publish a censored version even though he stood by the original and liked to point out how many of copies of the issue sold. Many of the themes present in the story can be found elsewhere in Poe’s work: premature burials, the death of a beautiful woman, obsessive men with withering mental health, intimate partner violence.

But there’s something about the teeth of it all. It is slow, laborious work to rip someone’s teeth out. To do it 32 times is incomprehensible.

Egaeus’s life, as he renders it in his own narration, is gloomy. But Berenice is a bright spot. In The Fall of the House of Usher, Frederick’s family members remark that Morrie is the only thing he got right. These women are like gems for these men to collect, and we’re never really let into either of their psyches. Both stories expose the hideous whims of patriarchy. Morrie and Berenice both undergo significant physical transformations that are seen as an affront to their physical beauty by the men in their lives. But it’s not illness nor tragic accident that undoes these women; it’s the violent acts these men do to them that truly leads to their undoing.

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In “Berenice,” there’s a peculiar undercurrent to Egaeus’ obsession with his wife that hints at the possibility of repressed or otherwise questioning sexuality. “During the brightest days of her unparalleled beauty, most surely I had never loved her,” Egaeus reflects. While a lot of Poe’s stories do seem straightforward in their metaphorical renderings, I think multiple readings are possible for just about all of them, and that’s especially true of “Berenice,” where Egaeus’s fear of Berenice could be seen as a fear of his own latent desires or of hers. The most common interpretation of the story suggests it is Egaeus’s patriarchal anxieties about female sexuality that leads to his violence (in fact, the story is sometimes described as an iteration of “vagina dentata” lore, his act seen as a way of literally removing her power). I do think there’s room, too, for a reading of the story in which Egaeus’s obsession and fear blur because he can’t quite understand what it is he desires. Egaeus seems repressed throughout the story, and though I do see his act of violence toward Berenice as a form of patriarchal violence, I think his need for control is more complicated than just wanting to punish her for her beauty and sexuality.

In The Fall of the House of Usher, Frederick’s desire to punish Morrie undoubtedly stems from the fact that he thinks she has been sexually promiscuous behind his back. He’s convinced she cheated on him with his brother. But his paranoia runs so much deeper. All of the Ushers seem incapable, like Egaeus, of genuine love. All they know is control and repression. The drug they made their billions on, Ligodone, is a painkiller. It’s meant to control, to numb. Frederick does not grant Morrie this numbness though when he does this unspeakable act of violence to her mouth. He wants her to feel the very sensation his generational wealth is built on erasing.

Frederick is more overtly sadistic than Egaeus, but both characters are terrifying in the extremes they’ll go to in order to exert control over women. They’re both men with fragile or incomplete senses of self, and they take that out on these women. And there’s just something so scary about that kind of deeply embedded patriarchal violence at the core of these two tales. The Fall of the House of Usher takes a lot of liberties in its adaptations of Poe’s work. But those changes don’t work against or obscure the original works but rather deepen the experience of reading them. I can’t extract my experience of watching the series from my experience of reading “Berenice,” and nor do I want to. And those are often the types of adaptations that excite me most.

Work and Class in “The Haunting of Bly Manor”

It was October 2020. The first pandemic Halloween arrived during a year characterized by isolation and death and struggle, by uprising and sickness and endless permutations of violence and grief. By that time of the year, the small respite summer allowed in temperate climates was fading. It was time to return indoors, to our screens. Anticipating there would be queerness and knowing that there would at least be a scary story, I tuned into The Haunting of Bly Manor, along with so many folks on the Autostraddle team.

I wanted to love it. Some horror fans might complain it’s not scary, and it certainly isn’t in any traditional jumpscare sense. It’s much more interested in the emotional landscapes and interpersonal relationships affected by the haunting, including those of the ghosts. Then, there was the queer storyline, Dani and Jamie’s love story. Who wouldn’t be bowled over by Jamie’s swagger? Who could resist becoming endeared to the way Dani’s stiff backbone belied her adorable exterior? But that ending. It had me reeling. She sacrificed herself and her gay happiness for who? A couple of kids she knew for a few weeks? I left it at that, at the time, but over the years, this ending has relentlessly haunted me. I’ve returned to it, again and again, reliving it, rethinking it, looking for the inconsistencies, the cracks like Hannah Grose does in her plot line where she needs to realize she is dead. I needed to see everything going on in Bly Manor that could possibly lead up to that, yet another Bury Your Gays moment, however delayed, being the ending.

In the text that inspired The Haunting of Bly Manor — The Turn of the Screw by Henry James — we see a young, 21-year-old governess take a job at Bly. Very similarly, she is asked by the childrens’ uncle to take care of everything and not disturb him. Dissimilarly, she’s motivated to take the job in part due to her attraction to the uncle.

Class was extremely important to the plot of The Turn of the Screw, and at the time, its readers would have read plenty in terms of class between the lines, as well. The children are upper class, the servants lower. Governesses, however, land somewhere in the middle, a position even contemporaries recognized as isolating. An unmarried young woman who was educated and of a high enough (at least middle class, but perhaps from a family of more noble lineage that lost their fortune due to economic turmoil) background to be considered worthy of raising upper class or wealthy middle class children outranked the servants but did not have a family or any friends of her own particular social status who resided in the same home as she did. Housekeepers like Mrs. Grose, valets like Peter Quint, they would have been positioned below the governess in the household, which means they’re not necessarily going to get comfortable with her because she’s linked to their employer by class, and the governess can’t trust she’s receiving any kind of honest answers or upward feedback from people like Mrs. Grose, because Mrs. Grose is motivated mostly only to remain on the governess’ good side and to avoid conflict. The relationship between Miss Jessel and Peter Quint in the The Turn of the Screw is therefore inappropriate — not just because of Quint’s rumored nefarious actions, but also because it’s a transgression across class (and a transgression, at the time, of the expected purity of women, especially upper class women). The governess in The Turn of the Screw is an infamous unreliable narrator. At this point, so much has been written, adaptations have been made, and you are entirely allowed to decide whether or not you believe the ghosts in the original text to be real, or the children to be possessed or evil, or the governess to be experiencing mental distress and hallucinations. However, one argument in favor of the interpretation where the haunting of Bly is all in the governess’ head is the known psychological burdens governesses faced at the time.

“Life was full of social and emotional tensions for the governess since she didn’t quite fit anywhere. She was a surrogate mother who had no children of her own, a family member who was sometimes mistaken for a servant. Was she socially equal or inferior to her employers? If the family had only recently stepped up the social scale, perhaps she’d consider herself superior. She was rarely invited to sit down to dinner with her employers, even if they were kind. The servants disliked the governess because they were expected to be deferential towards her, despite the fact that she had to go out to work, just like them. One governess, known only as SSH, recalled how, sitting down to dinner for the first time in a new job, she was overwhelmed by a ‘sense of friendlessness and isolation’ when she noticed herself pointedly served after the ladies of the house.

The governess often spent the evenings alone and she was sometimes expected to use the schoolroom as her sitting room. Life could feel very lonely: 19 year old Edith Gates, a governess in Reading in the 1870s, confides to her diary how homesick she feels. 30 years earlier Charlotte Brontë tried to avoid going into her employers’ sitting room in the evenings because she found it awkward to make conversation with people she didn’t know very well.” – Kathryn Hughes, author of The Victorian Governess

In “Letters to a Young Governess on the Principles of Education and Other Subjects Connected with Her Duties” (1840) by Susan Rideout, governesses are given the following advice:

“Consider therefore, before you enter a family, how far you are able to support the solitude into which you must be thrown, in such a situation. It is not now a separation merely from friends and relations to which you are called; it is a seclusion from society altogether, at least from any which sympathizes with you.” – source

The governess in The Turn of the Screw is isolated, alone, in a vulnerable position, paid very little, and left with more responsibility than she’s likely ever faced in her life. She has inappropriate ambitions (her attraction to the uncle) and very little experience with actually taking care of children. She doesn’t treat Mrs. Grose as an equal, but instead often overwhelms her and positions herself above her. And Mrs. Grose doesn’t see the Governess as a friend, either, but rather someone to defer to. The children are certainly company, but they’re also children. The governess also has no prospects beyond this kind of work being what the rest of her life looks like, as many governesses held positions for some years until they were no longer needed, and then they moved onto other employment, a new home, more solitude, low pay, new employers to adjust to, more children who weren’t actually their own, servants who they either wouldn’t or couldn’t befriend. If the stress of her reality led to a breakdown, it wouldn’t exactly be a surprise.

So, then, we take the source text, which in many ways is a study of the specific positioning of a somewhat privileged (educated) but also extremely vulnerable person, and we drag it forward to set it in the modern world, the 1980s, and present this to a 2020s audience. While Dani certainly has more freedom and more options than her Victorian counterparts, there’s something that has stuck with me about the way her queerness factors into her narrative and the way that The Haunting of Bly Manor treats and talks about class and skirts around the ways these things intersect, whether intentionally or accidentally.

Rewatching Victoria Pedretti’s performance in Bly Manor is a distinct pleasure. The first time I watched it, I don’t think I was quite yet spoiled on her lesbian relationship with Jamie, and so I wasn’t looking for the sprinkles of queerness the actor worked into her performance from the get. Upon rewatch, Dani’s queer swagger runs through her performance. She’s femme in a gay way; she strides around with purpose and the self-assurance of someone who knows she has to rely on herself; and she ultimately gets the au pair job because she decides to bro down with the uncle, Henry Wingrave, at a pub and talk to him one-on-one, like an equal. They appear to drop their polite masks and communicate directly (though we’ll learn later that neither of them were entirely honest), and Dani goes off to Bly, successfully hired.

Dani’s an “au pair,” a job title reserved for a young woman who is not from the country of her employment, who provides childcare for a family in a live-in capacity. It’s a sort of update to the governess. Sure, an au pair is maybe someone who wants to work on herself in some way or experience a new country, but much like a Victorian governess is plucked out of any context of family or peers or support, Dani is also isolated from her country, her ex’s family, even if it is by choice.

Henry Wingrave points this out, the fact that to take this job, especially at her age, is unexpected, a giving up of herself.

“What’s the catch?” Henry interrupts Dani.

“I’m sorry.” Dani looks at him, surprised.

“The catch, you’re what? Thirty? Mid-twenties? I wonder… What’s the catch? You’re younger than most who’d apply for this sort of thing. What makes a woman of your age want to give up her life to take care of someone else’s children? A life in America, at that. Full-time as well. It seems odd…to me, to be frank.”

But to Dani, this job holds so much more freedom than the other ways she’s been asked to give up her life. Dani broke up with her now deceased ex-fiancé, a man who was her best friend, because she reached a conclusion many queer women reach — that she loved him as a friend and that to pretend at romantic connection for a lifetime would be a kind of death. He doesn’t understand. He haunts her until her romance begins with Jamie, and Dani finally has the strength to banish him. But I think, too, part of his haunting was that he didn’t understand why it couldn’t be him. Her gayness is perhaps part of the explanation as much as it’s what makes her braver, fuels her ability to stand up for herself and the life she wants to build.

Woven throughout the series are thoughts on care and caretaking and who does that care and caretaking as well as domestic work. Episode four takes us through a heavy exploration of what it looks like to care for someone with dementia. Owen applied for the job at Bly Manor so he could move in with and care for his mother in town. The characters in the series describe the experience of witnessing a loved one progress into dementia as losing someone, bit by bit. This sentiment is echoed again and again throughout descriptions of illness experienced by loved ones in the series, whether it’s dementia or the tuberculosis experienced by the manor’s original matriarch, Viola. When Owen’s mother comes up, Jamie says she hopes someone will just shoot her if she gets dementia, rather than watching her fade away bit by bit. After she says this, Dani locks eyes with Jamie. Her expression is unreadable. Here, the show seems to be acknowledging the labor of caretaking, holding up the work that happens behind closed doors, within homes, up to a more public light.

The characters we spend the most time with all labor in the space of caregiving and the maintenance of a domestic space. Dani cares for the children. Hannah cares for the house and fills in where needed to care for its other inhabitants and owners. Owen labors in a kitchen, feeding the children and the workers. Jamie cares for the grounds of the house. The only “living” people at Bly who aren’t required to labor domestically are the children. Dani makes a point of highlighting this to them by making both Miles and Flora do Hannah and Jamie’s work as punishment. Henry Wingrave, notably, employs Dani, Hannah, Jamie and Owen all so that they can share what would otherwise be his domestic and caregiving labor to do. The setup for this series revolves around the decision to make the labor of raising children, of preparing food and of maintaining a home the labor of paid help, who all each have their own obligations to themselves and to others. It’s not like Henry needs the help because he’s too busy. We see, again and again, that he spends most of his free time drinking or recovering from said drinks. There’s a vacuum in his life left by the labor he doesn’t engage in, that he can pay for, by the fact that he doesn’t interact with the children. Even when work outside of the domestic comes up in conversation between the employees of Bly — as with Jamie’s father, a coal miner — it’s to discuss the consequences faced by workers for undertaking labor that endangers them. Jamie’s father died of lung disease from working in mines.

It’s tempting to see the bonds between the workers at Bly and the care they have for the children as healthy, and in some ways that’s true. Owen, Hannah, Dani, Jamie all care about each other — and the kids, even when Miles is literally not himself, is possessed by the spirit of Henry Wingrave’s former assistant. Of course it’s healthy to care about kids, to care about each other, but as the childrens’ surrogate family, the workers are put in an unfair position where more physical care, more emotional labor, and more exposure to danger is asked of them than their employer has any right to ask. In episode five, we learn more about this assistant, Peter Quint, an updated version of the valet from The Turn of the Screw. In a flashback, when Hannah catches Peter stealing, he responds, “It’s a mistake, isn’t it. Thinking that they’re your family. That this is your house. There’s them, and then there’s us. We’re the help.” We know there’s a reason Hannah feels like the house is hers, like the Wingraves are family, but while Peter’s presented as the villain here, I’m pretty certain he’s not wrong. They are the help, but the show is positioning the only person to call things out as such as this selfish, abusive thief. And he is! But he’s also calling out a very real power dynamic, one that Hannah seems determined to ignore because she feels personally secure in and content with her position and the quiet nobility in a job well done.

Soon, we learn the origin of the haunting of Bly. A wealthy woman, Viola, who once owned the estate, an ancestor of the Wingraves presumably, died there and refuses to let go, drags others, including her own sister, into her web. After a series of events where Peter Quint tries to devise a way to leave the manor in the body of Miles along with Miss Jessel in the body of Flora, Henry Wingrave arrives to attempt to rescue Flora and is incapacitated by the ghost of Viola, who proceeds to attempt to take Flora into the lake, to kill her and trap her at the manor forever.

Dani grew up without a dad and with a neglectful mom, became a teacher, broke up with her fiancė, moved to a new country across an ocean, survived her boyfriend haunting her and got rid of his ghost, met and began to fall in love with a woman, and had the whole rest of her life ahead of her for what might be the first time ever in her thirties — and she gives that up for a rich kid whose estranged father who is much older and who has already lost the love of his life, who could presumably sacrifice himself, is Right There. But he’s rich and a man, you know?

There is a subsuming of the self assumed by our society when it comes to caretaking and the people who are expected to do that caretaking work. That is, if you’re not in a position where you can hire other people to do the caretaking for you, or where you can put it on someone else via some kind of social structure (heterosexual marriage), then you do have to give up some of your autonomy to care for others. To a certain extent, this is a normal aspect of life that anyone with ties to anyone else will experience from both ends. We all care and receive care if we’re doing things right. That’s not a bad thing at all, and it’s what mutual aid practices are built off of. But, due to social and economic positioning, some people — women, people of color and women of color especially, working class people — take on more than their fair share, which leaves less time and energy for themselves, the relationships they want to prioritize, and their health and wellbeing.

Dani is poised to live life as a childfree queer woman, but the show yanks that future of balanced obligations and labor out of her hands by facing her with an impossible choice: sacrifice herself for an objectively cute and helpless little girl who doesn’t deserve to be killed, or, you know, don’t. She makes a choice many, many people would make in that situation. As the narrator (Jamie) says, notably calling Dani by her position and not her name for the entire story, “The au pair invited Viola into herself…” breaking the spell. It’s like the show can’t just let a young queer femme with a uterus get away with having true autonomy. The narrative puts Dani in a position where she must offer up her body, her life, her world to a kind of possession by a wealthy heiress, the ancestor of the man who employs her, of the girl she saves. Her body and soul are consumed, used, harnessed by this straight, wealthy, British family.

It’s not an exchange. It’s a sacrifice. Still, we get it. It’s heartfelt. Dani cares about kids — but here’s the thing, Henry never acknowledges what she did. There’s never a single scene where he apologizes for putting his workers in that situation, or where he thanks Dani or even attempts to understand what happened. Dani’s sacrifice is never framed as something that shouldn’t be expected of her.

We follow this scene up with yet another insult to the workers at Bly. We know Hannah’s body has been at the bottom of the well this entire time. Who gets the housekeeper’s body out of the well? It’s Owen, the man who was in love with her, and “five men from the village.” If it’s a “man’s job” to get a body out of a well, then Henry certainly wasn’t disqualified. But no, this work isn’t something he needs to participate in, even though it would have shown care for both a woman who considered Bly her home and the children — including his child — her family as well as for Owen, someone who Henry would apparently continue to foster a kind of relationship with (Owen does seem to continue to see Henry and the kids, after all). Henry’s assistant, a man he kept around because he was an enabler, killed Hannah. Henry can’t know it, but it stings to see him take no responsibility whatsoever.

And Dani? This bright, vivacious queer woman who’s already overcome so much and who is incredibly brave, what happens to her? She describes the feeling of having this evil rich bitch inside of her in haunting terms to her lover, Jamie:

“There’s this thing, hidden. This angry, empty, lonely beast. It’s watching me. Matching my movements. It’s just out of sight, but I can feel it. I know it’s there. And it’s waiting. She’s waiting. At some point, she’s gonna take me.”

Jamie, a woman who would rather be shot than fade away bit by bit, who already had to watch her dad die from an occupational hazard, who just found love only to know there’s now a ticking clock, asks Dani if she wants company while she waits, and they embark on the rest of their lives together.

But how much time do they have? By my calculation, they have nine years. At some point in the 1990s, Dani and Jamie visit Owen at his restaurant for a meal. Flora was eight years old when Dani took the job, and Owen reports she’s 17 now and dating. The following sequence in this final episode broke my heart. Dani’s taken up smoking, a subtle nod to the fact she knows she doesn’t have long, however much time she has left.

“So they’re all happy?” Dani asks of Owen, unsmiling.

“Yeah,” Owen says.

Dani responds with just, “Mm.”

“It’s interesting though. The way they talk about Bly.” Owen continues.

“You talked about what happened?” Dani’s eyes light up for a second.

“No, I mean, that’s what’s interesting. They don’t remember anything about it.”

“What?” Jamie interrupts.

“Nothing.” Dani echoes.

Owen goes on, “No. Well, just the kids. Henry still…remembers all of it. But I mentioned Hannah, and Flora asked me who I was talking about.” And as Owen is saying this, Dani’s face is inscrutable, pained, perhaps.

He continues, “It’s been this way a while, turns out.”

Dani speaks: “So…Well, if they don’t remember Hannah, they don’t remember…” and here Dani looks around, confused, like she hadn’t expected this, of all the outcomes. The little girl she sacrificed herself for doesn’t even remember who she is.

Jamie asks: “So, they’ve just forgotten it all?”

Owen goes on to explain how mild the children’s memories of Bly are, how they recognize Hannah’s picture but don’t really know her, how none of the pain or the fear of that time lives in their memories. It’s not said out loud, but it’s presumed they have no memory whatsoever of Dani, that they don’t know anything about the woman who gave up everything to save them.

Dani, looking like she desperately wants to be remembered, asks, “Do you think Henry will tell them?”

Owen responds, “Would you? I mean, by the signs of it, they’re thriving. I’d say, just let them be.”

Owen says to Jamie and Dani that they all deserve to live their lives with nothing hanging over them, and Dani and Jamie share a look.

Later, at home, Dani is silent. She breaks a dish after seeing Viola’s reflection in the water. It’s happening. The working class queers in this show got nine years before the black lung, the dementia, the cancer, the wasting away from what is, essentially, a workplace injury or an occupational hazard that no one signed up for sets in.

We never learn how Dani feels about the news that the kids don’t remember her, but we can guess. She’s used up and discarded and left to disappear, bit by bit, in Jamie’s care.

“Everyday I feel myself fading away, but I’m still here…”

Then, Dani has a scare. She almost kills Jamie, takes her by the throat in a dream state — or Viola does — so Dani goes back to Bly, to the lake, to be taken. Jamie follows, swims into the lake, and there, down at the bottom, finds that the new lady of the lake is Dani, the only one left inhabiting the abandoned sprawling estate. Dani’s wife is left alone to mourn Dani at the side of the lake, in the wet and the cold.

Now, we understand why Jamie has decided to tell this story at Flora’s wedding rehearsal, to hold a room captive, to make them look at what her wife did. Jamie, in the telling of Dani’s story, slips in an acknowledgment of something she knew Dani wanted, to be known to Flora and Miles, who the camera shows us watching Jamie narrate with rapt attention.

The tell? Jamie wraps up by saying “I’m sorry. I told you [pause] the story wasn’t exactly short.” Hidden in here is the acknowledgment. “I’m sorry. I told you.” Owen sends the party to bed, then gives Jamie a meaningful look. He knows what she did, that she told. And through this “ghost story,” she told Owen the truth, too.

Flora stays behind with Jamie for a moment. Flora seems like she suspects something, a bait and a switch because it doesn’t ultimately appear that way. She’s just afraid of losing her own love, and leans on this elder lesbian to cry about her fears around losing her man. Then, through the show’s gaze, the camera treats us to Jamie watching Flora and an aged Henry Wingrave dance at the wedding. She toasts Owen and a grown Miles from across the room while she stands all alone. She returns to what looks like a hotel room where the sink is full, and she fills the bathtub, hoping to see Dani in the reflections, then settles down into a chair, facing the door, which she cracks, clearly hoping Dani will walk back on through. As the camera pans out, we see a ringed hand on Jamie’s shoulder she doesn’t know is there, a ghostly Dani who she can’t perceive as Sheryl Crow sings “I Shall Believe.” I think the ending is supposed to be romantic, but is it?

Is it?

Is it romantic, not just to bury a gay but to bury a working class gay in a lake so that a wealthy cishet man and his heirs can forget about her sacrifice entirely, so that her widow can spend the rest of her life alone and in mourning?

If class had never been brought up, if it wasn’t bleeding in through the source material and into lines spoken throughout the series, then this choice might be more romantic, might be less glaring, but it’s not played as such, and I can’t decide if the show entirely knows what it did.

The timing is ODD AS SHIT when we consider what was happening at the time, the first year of the pandemic and the ways in which the rich were and would continue to sacrifice the bodies of working and middle class people while they fled the crisis, took care of their own families, let other people dispose of the bodies, carry the trauma, tend to the sick. In October of 2020, we were watching Dani and Hannah and Owen and Jamie suffer for the actions of their employers, the ruling class, forced to deal with and make impossible choices due to circumstances beyond their control. If the ending had been louder about the injustice, then of course you can tell a story about a queer au pair in the 1980s who, due to a convergence of marginalization due to trauma and queerness and class, cannot live a long happy life. That’s certainly a real story. My issue is that it’s romanticized in a way that washes the Wingraves’ hands, that doesn’t hold them to account. And damn it. This show has ghosts in it. They could have found a way.

Still, it’s in those slips, in those subconscious biases in the media that’s allowed to make it to our screens that we can look at the stories we’re being asked to swallow, what we’re asked to be content with and accept in our lives, and what we’re asked to sacrifice for people who will never thank us.

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Our Lady J on “Transparent,” “Pose,” and Returning To Live Performance

Before Our Lady J was writing on the groundbreaking trans television shows Transparent and Pose, she was breaking ground at Carnegie Hall. She’s a pianist, a songwriter, a storyteller, and after years of focusing on screenwriting, she’s returned to live performance with two shows at Joe’s Pub in New York.

We’re in a challenging moment right now for trans television. Many of the issues that spurred the dual Hollywood strikes have been especially difficult for trans artists and trans stories. A decade since Laverne Cox appeared on Orange is the New Black, the promise of inclusive storytelling on streaming has faded. That this is coinciding with a rise in anti-trans legislation and public hate is doubly alarming.

But Our Lady J isn’t going anywhere. She’s already back to work even as she finds a different possibility of self-expression through music and theatre. Throughout our conversation I felt hope.

Being a trans artist isn’t getting easier — especially in Hollywood — but she reminded me that it’s never been easy. And yet, we keep pushing. And yet, we keep creating.

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Drew: I like to start most of my first-time interviews from the beginning. Where’d you grow up and what was that experience like for you?

Our Lady J: I grew up in a very loving family of evangelical Christian hillbillies. The culture of Appalachia is rich with soulful music and a yearning to express. And that’s really where I found my footing as an artist. I was playing piano for the worship services and every time I played people would say, “Give the glory to God,” and shake my hand real firm.

It was all so loaded because this was during the time of the AIDS crisis and the sermons were filled with homophobia. There wasn’t really a recognition of trans people at the time but I identified with the queer community from a young age without even realizing it. I felt like I was living between two worlds at that moment, but music gave me the ability to transcend. I was a very feminine child and I was horribly bullied in school, but the moment I played the piano everyone was quiet. I knew I could create this space through art.

I started playing piano when I was four but I didn’t start taking it seriously until I was six.

Drew: (laughs) Oh yes at the late age of six you finally decided to really dedicate yourself.

Our Lady J: It’s time to learn about Bach now. (laughs)

There was this piano teacher in the town next to mine who taught me for $4 a lesson. My parents bought a piano at an auction for $100. My grandfather went to auctions any time — it sounds dark and twisted but I swear he had the best intentions — any time a piano teacher in the area passed away to buy all the sheet music. And that’s how I was able to create. Given my financial restraints, it really was a community effort to take care of me and to take care of my artistry.

When I see communities that have such a bias about some things and so much love about other things, I try to hold space for both. I think it’s important to acknowledge the depth and dimension of our existence within community. If I only focused on the negative I would be ignoring the gift of music and the gift of art that I have today. That was the beginning of my artistry and the beginning of me finding a voice within music, television, film, and media.

Drew: Did you move directly to New York from Appalachia?

Our Lady J: I did not. Among the many people who helped me with music was my piano teacher. I grew up in southern Pennsylvania right near the border of Maryland and it’s also really close to West Virginia. This piano teacher lived in West Virginia and he would come up to a community school in the town next to my town to teach. He helped me apply to get a scholarship at this boarding school for the arts called Interlochen Academy in Michigan. Thank God for that.

I left the week I turned sixteen and suddenly I was surrounded by queers and hippies and rainbows and mohawks. It was the 90s so it was a great time culturally. Alanis Morrisette was our Olivia Rodrigo. It was cool to rebel. And I desperately needed to rebel. So Interlochen gave me the space to find a whole other palette to play within my music and my art.

Drew: Did you continue to visit home a lot or did you create a deeper separation between those worlds?

Our Lady J: Financially it was difficult to visit home. I had never flown on a plane before then and most people in my family hadn’t flown at that time. Those plane tickets were very valued and they were used sparsely. But I tried to get home as much as I could and that continued in my further studies.

I went to college in Texas because of a scholarship. Unfortunately, discovered a lot of homophobia and ended up dropping out and moving to New York.

Drew: What was it like when you first moved to New York?

Our Lady J: It was the summer of 2000. I moved the day before I turned 22 because I thought 22 was way too old to not be living in New York City. (laughs)

Drew: (laughs)

Our Lady J: I had saved up for a deposit on an apartment and my room was a closet of a studio in the East Village. It was literally a loft in a closet where the bed was on top and my clothes were underneath. The East Village was not what it is today. It was still a bit dangerous in Alphabet City at night but it was filled with art and seekers and folks who were anti-establishment. The punk scene had died by then but there was still this excitement about New York pre-9/11. It felt like it was a great place to express myself and be living as an artist.

Drew: I feel like for any 22 year old it feels that way no matter how much some people will be like, ugh New York is dead.

Our Lady J: (laughs)

Drew: I remember when I first moved there at 18, I was reading the Patti Smith book Just Kids and was romanticizing that era. And then there’s this section where they’re like, ugh we missed it, Warhol’s Factory is dying out, New York is over.

Our Lady J: It is what you make it, right? Those folks created the scene that they were in. And we were creating our scene as well. I’ll never forget I performed a Chopin piece at CBGB. And on the bill was Lisa Jackson, Jayne County, and Justin Tranter. It ended up being this incredibly queer, trans night. We didn’t know how special it really was until many years later. Lisa is an incredible singer-songwriter and is writing a musical right now. Justin has obviously written every hit pop song in the world. Jayne County has gone down in history as an iconic trans trailblazer in the music scene. So it’s always there but we have to make it for ourselves.

Drew: Yeah, I love that.

Can you talk about Jean Genet? What was it about his work and specifically Our Lady of the Flowers that led you to choose it as your namesake?

Our Lady J: So 9/11 happened and it traumatized me more than I was willing to admit I was rehearsing in Times Square at the time for a national tour of a Broadway musical. Being so young and only a year and two months into living in New York, I didn’t want the dream of New York to die. But it did wound New York and it wounded me in ways that I wasn’t willing to acknowledge. Instead I started drinking a lot more and started partying a lot more. I was dissociating a lot. I’d done these things in college to dissociate, but now it got worse. It came to a point where I was living in an abandoned building in Brooklyn on a mattress on the floor. Playing Carnegie Hall by the way.

Drew: Wow.

Our Lady J: I looked around and I thought, oh my God what happened to my life? And so I got sober. I did it through the help of a lot of other sober folks who walked me through what it would be like to live a life of being present.

When you first get sober you read a lot. (laughs) Reading is very good when you’re sober! And someone else who was sober gave me the book Our Lady of the Flowers. To be honest, I haven’t read it since then, but I remember it opening up a world in literature that I hadn’t seen before. It’s about a group of queer folks from the 1940s in France who were struggling to survive much in the way that I felt I was struggling to survive. You know, it’s a 400-hundred page poem that Genet wrote in prison. He was a serial criminal. He didn’t know how to survive in the outside world so he found comfort in committing petty crimes and going to prison. And I felt that queerness had been criminalized in so many ways.

When I was living in Texas, sodomy was illegal and there was a case about a couple who was arrested for having sex. Consensual adult sex between two men was illegal.

Drew: Was that Lawrence v. Texas?

Our Lady J: I remember reading about it in the local newspapers and being very afraid. The same thing is happening right now with transness. There’s this stigma being attached and it’s being used by politicians to gain power while hurting a lot of people. I read that in Genet’s work at the time. It spoke to me. These characters were very messy and often downright terrible. They weren’t rootable. But they were there. And it was more than I had ever seen before. It allowed me to find a sense of freedom that there was community out there. And then I came out as trans. The book itself wasn’t an awakening for me, but it was an acknowledgment of an existence. And I found my awakening through reading many other books — Hiding My Candy by The Lady Chablis, She’s Not There by Jenny Boylan. I began to discover my own transness through literature.

Drew: Well, when I was first coming out your album Picture of a Man was a real comfort to me. For people who know you primarily from your screenwriting work, I’d love for you to talk about the experience making that album and how it came to be.

Our Lady J: When I moved to New York, I was a rehearsal pianist for a theatre. I was also a class accompanist for ballet schools and a rehearsal pianist for ballet companies. And as I began to transition, I noticed, especially in theatre, there was a real confusion about what I was doing. There wasn’t an acknowledgment of transness in the public consciousness. A lot of people had never heard of it and they certainly didn’t have the language.

I would show up to class or rehearsal wearing what I felt was me just being free, and people thought it was performance. They thought it was drag. I remember people saying, you don’t have to wear that. I believed they were good people but they just didn’t understand what I was doing. I found myself having to educate a lot. I was tired, they were tired, everyone was tired, and then the phones stopped ringing. You don’t get fired as a freelance musician — you just don’t get called back. The same with Hollywood, really. You rarely get fired but the phone stops ringing. And I knew I had to do something to support myself because I hadn’t equipped myself with any other life skills except art. (laughs)

Drew: (laughs)

Our Lady J: The calls that did come through were from other queer artists who needed a music director or an accompanist. They never paid well — if they paid at all — but it was a community. And that was when I started putting on shows. I realized that I could do two things at once: I could continue making music and I could educate the folks who wanted to understand me. The goal all along was to do those two things. Through that I ended up touring the world quite a bit and having some success.

Picture of a Man was a manifestation of everything I could put together. I look at it now and it seems like such a small piece of work because of the jobs I had to do at the same time. I still managed to play for ballet companies and I had to show up at 8:30 in the morning at Marymount University and I would finish my class at 9:00pm at Ballet Academy East. I didn’t have much time to make the art I wanted to make but eventually I did and that’s what the album became.

Drew: I’d love to talk about your screenwriting work. When you got hired on Transparent, what was your relationship to screenwriting?

Our Lady J: I stopped watching television when I got sober. I felt like there was so much homophobia on TV at that time and I just couldn’t stomach it. But then around 2012/2013, I started watching TV again. I had never really considered that as an avenue. I was very interested in making film, but I hadn’t considered TV.

And then right before I met Joey Soloway, I noticed people were responding to the dialogue between the music in my shows even more than the music itself. I was talking to Whitney Cummings actually about what it would look like if I did a standup routine and tried something new. I was writing all this material for my shows and also memoir material when I met Joey. They asked me if I had anything they could see, so I put it all into a short story and sent it to them.

Actually, that’s an inaccurate way of saying it. When the Transparent pilot came out, I said to Joey, “I will do whatever it takes to work on this show.” And then Joey said, “Do you have any work I can see?” I just thought the pilot was so brilliant!

They were making the first season and talking to other writers. There was this very public search for trans screenwriters. It wasn’t a contest exactly, but a hundred trans folks submitted short stories. That made it a mixed bag. To get the news that I was going to be hired was incredible and life-changing, but to know that it was just one show and I was just one writer felt a little bit isolating. The competition of Hollywood is not baked into what we aspire to as a community. Community is about taking care of each other and bringing other people in and Hollywood tends to be the opposite. It’s me first and how am I going to make it to the finish line. There were a lot of emotions I was having at the time, but mostly I was just happy to be employed and to be around such a great group of incredible writers in that room. I learned so much.

Drew: What was the best experience you had working on that show?

Our Lady J: Oh there were so many things. There was the glitz and the glam! That certainly was fun for a femme like me. The flashes of the photography. Everything you hear about Hollywood. We were decorated with a lot of awards. And that was intoxicating. It didn’t fill my soul but it was intoxicating.

The things that filled my soul were the conversations we got to have in the writers room. Really connecting with other writers. I realized how similar television writing is to playing in an orchestra.

Drew: Oh interesting.

Our Lady J: It’s chamber music. You seek out harmony and if something is off you pause and investigate and then you begin again. There has to be a reduction of ego to work in episodic television both in writing and directing. You have to learn to follow the showrunner. You have to mimic the voice of the showrunner and not just mimic but really fit in and inhabit their voice so it all feels cohesive. With Transparent, it was really important for us all to have the same voice. And there was a real concerted effort to make sure we were all heard. That was the highlight.

Drew: Now I want to ask the opposite question.

Our Lady J: Oh lord.

Drew: Not getting into the scrapped season five, but during seasons two through four, what was the biggest challenge? Was it that isolation of being the only trans person in the writers room?

Our Lady J: I don’t think so, because there were so many trans people on set. We had trans producers, Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst who are incredible human beings and very good at what they do. We had Silas Howard directing. Rhys also directed. So there were other trans folks around. And the cast, of course, as well. Alexandra Billings, Trace, so many. So I didn’t feel isolated. But I certainly felt pressured. From the outside community.

That was the most difficult part for me. It was being able to hear criticism, to not take it personally, and to also do my best to be open to that criticism. To say, what can I do to make this better for the show and the community? And to also know when I’ve given it my all and to say, okay that’s as good as it’s going to get.

Perfectionism is such a little demon for any writer and any artist. And in our community there’s this idea that we have to all be perfect activists. Or that we even have to be activists period! I had never considered myself to be an activist. I considered myself to be an artist and if that changed the world then great. If not, I hope I’ve made something beautiful, and at the end of the day something beautiful does change the world. I feel like in our community we talk about activism more than art and there’s a focus on perfectionism that holds us back. It makes us feel like everything we say has to be perfect and immutable and cemented throughout time. Rather than navigating an ever-changing world and an ever-changing conversation. So that was the hard part: navigating the perfectionism from within our community, which I later realized was about navigating my own perfectionism.

Drew: That balance you’re talking about is so tricky. I think it’s easy to do one of two extremes. Either to try and achieve that perfectionism which isn’t possible. Or to shut all the critique out completely and that’s also not great.

Our Lady J: Yes.

Drew: I think that balance is hard for any artist but especially an artist with a marginalized identity that has expectations from their community or communities that range from understandable to unfair.

Our Lady J: It can be very stressful.

Drew: I’d love to ask the same two questions about Pose. What was the best part about working on it and what was the biggest challenge?

Our Lady J: The best part was knowing that we could go even further than Transparent was able to go. Everything that we see in art and media has been built on something else. Transparent was built on Queer as Folk and The L Word and I felt like Pose was the next stepping stone from that. To go into a place with even more trans folks involved and an awareness that we were going to try and do the right thing in all ways possible. It felt like I could breathe even more. I could see my words on the page changing. I had already written two HIV positive trans women on Transparent and being positive myself I was eager and excited to put all of this into Pose. Yes, my life experience but also the experience of so many others who hadn’t had that voice yet. Being able to write about HIV/AIDS within the trans experience on a show that was allowing me to be — and encouraging me to be — honest was incredible.

Drew: And the biggest challenge?

Our Lady J: Hmm. Well, one challenge that I found when writing about characters living with HIV/AIDS in the 80s was that our audience didn’t understand that life. Our audience was much younger and they didn’t come up with the same stigma. That’s good, obviously, but they also weren’t raised with the same toughening of skin.

When people died from complications from AIDS, it wasn’t talked about or it was only whispered about and all of those things that were unsaid created this immense grief on everyone who survived. It was a scar that we all live with. And that scar allowed us a toughening in the face of death, in the face of violence and discrimination. The tools that we acquired from facing that day to day are quite different from the tools that this current generation has. I don’t feel like we were able to be as honest about how terrible it was and how much loss there was, because people didn’t like it when the characters died. They felt like we were punishing the audience rather than historically showing what happened. There’s this sense that queer art has to always be uplifting and always positive and we tried to do that with Pose. I’m glad we had it as our north star to give people something to aspire to. But knowing that the younger generation isn’t as interested in understanding what that grief was like was hard on a personal level.

But they shouldn’t have to know. Nobody should have to know that kind of grief. And I’m glad that they don’t know that kind of grief. Unfortunately, it’s coming and it’s coming from this new direction, this wave of anti-trans legislation, and so they’re going to have to learn that type of grief in order to survive this. And I want to remind anyone who is reading this that it is possible to survive. There is a richness in our history that we can call upon to learn how to survive.

Drew: I think about that a lot. For me, my queerness is so tied to history and so tied to understanding who came before. I think that has to do with my interest in the arts and if you’re interested in not just contemporary art but where that contemporary art was born from you inherently learn history.

But it also depends on what kind of media people are watching. There was obviously so much great queer art being made during the AIDS crisis but it wasn’t the stuff that was winning Oscars. It’s not Philadelphia. It’s Marlon Riggs and Derek Jarman. It’s much better and much more real. I just saw Chocolate Babies for the first time because it was restored and at Outfest this year. I hadn’t seen it before and was blown away.

Our Lady J: Chocolate Babies by Stephen Winter absolutely. There was also Diamanda Galas, David Wojnarowicz. There was so much great art to come out of it. And I think that’s the thing that’s going to save us now. I don’t think social media is going to save us. Even activism I think can be hijacked by other players who do not always mean us well. Activism can just be a series of words that are said and repeated. We need to really listen to those who have the soul in their message, because otherwise it becomes corporate activism. It’s just reposting and there’s no meaning behind it. And that encourages complacency. You feel like you’ve done something when you haven’t done anything at all. Don’t get me started, I could go on about this all day. (laughs)

Drew: (laughs) Okay well then instead let’s talk about the shows you’re doing right now at Joe’s Pub. Do you see them as a return to a different kind of creative expression? What are you able to do in these shows that you’re not able to do in screenwriting?

Our Lady J: I have to thank the strike for allowing me to create all this material. I had four projects that I was working on and I had to put them on pause. Thank God the strike is now over for the writers and I’m back to work as we’re still advocating SAG-AFTRA. We’re walking right alongside them in the pickets hoping that they reach an agreement soon.

In those months I wasn’t allowed to work on my film and TV projects but I had my music. It’s always been something I’ve done in the breaks between seasons. But the more I get into TV and the more work I have there, the less music I create. So this really allowed me the chance to reunite with music. I wrote a musical — or at least the first act of a musical, the second act is partially written — and I’m talking to some theatre companies about that. And I wrote all these little songs.

They’re kind of like diary entries or entries into a Mean Girls burn book. I think metaphor gets us so much further than anything literal because that’s how we find the soul in what we’re doing. That’s how we detect whether something is honest or not. In art, if something speaks to you and you don’t understand why, that’s an honesty you’re detecting. To be able to remove myself from something as literal as two characters speaking in a scene, I was able to go back to metaphor and really explore what I wanted to say. And a lot of it ended up being very light and comedic. These shows I’m doing at Joe’s Pub — and also I have a show on December 7th at the Wallace Theatre in Los Angeles — are a mixture of the original songs that I wrote during the strike and also me doing sit-down comedy at a piano bench. It’s Sandra Bernhard-inspired, surreal comedy. It’s absurd, it’s dry, it’s sarcastic.

I feel like there’s a lot of trans comedy coming up that’s a result of us losing so much. Respectability politics are becoming less of a tool and our anger and our frustration and our joy is coming out through absurdity and being completely irreverent. I’m leaning into all of that. All the terrible jokes that I tell my friends in private, I’m now telling in public.

Drew: That’s a thrilling little tease.

Our Lady J: (laughs)

Drew: You mentioned writing a musical. What are your biggest dreams in terms of music and performing work specifically?

Our Lady J: If someone would just say here’s a ticket to write Broadway musicals for the rest of your life, I would say, absolutely sign me up. I would be so happy. I love working in theatre. Theatre folks are a whole other breed of artist. The community is amazing. In March I moved back to New York and I’m now doing the bicoastal thing. I’ll be in LA when I’m working in production there but I’ll be in New York otherwise. The theatre community here is just so incredible. Because there’s not that much money in theatre, you really have to love it. But I also need to make a living! So it’s the balance of figuring out how I can bring what I love about theatre into film and television. How can I bring that honesty and that boldness? The dream is to marry them all together.

I’d love to do more live performance as well. I’m doing a couple guest spots at Caleb Hearon’s shows in Brooklyn. I love him. We’re working on a TV project together. Collaborating with other live performers is the dream always. It’s a muscle that I have to keep in shape. This was the first show I’d done in four years and I slept for three days after. I was so tired.

Drew: Wow that’s a long gap.

Our Lady J: It is. But I want to keep it going. So that’s the goal right now: to keep it going and to follow the openings that the world has for me. That’s always been the plan as an artist. If one door is not opening and you’ve tried everything you can do, you have to look around and see what other doors are open.

Drew: I do think we’re in a moment right now where more doors are closing in film and TV for trans people. There was this really exciting boom for queer and trans TV, but now a lot of those shows have been canceled and new ones aren’t getting produced at the same rate. Do you feel disillusioned by Hollywood? What’s bringing you back?

Our Lady J: Well, I look at the things that I’ve survived in my life. Surviving an HIV diagnosis, immediately followed with an AIDS diagnosis. Being told that my body is not going to make it. Having to get sober. Having to build my life from nothing. Coming from a small rural village and having to make my way as an artist. Being harassed to the point where I couldn’t study and had to go out in the world without a degree. All these things combined. Hollywood is nothing compared to that. It’s a walk in the park and I have to remind myself of that. Those life experiences prepared me for the difficulties that lie within Hollywood.

It’s easy to get lost in the madness of it all, but I have to remind myself what I’m here for. I remember that I am here to be an artist, to create, to not get caught up in the drama. There will always be drama in every workplace that we’re in if we focus on that. But I learned survival from being face to face with death. That’s not something you can learn in a course and it’s not something that you can read in a book. And so I listen to that more than I listen to anything else. I stay close to my humanity by staying close with people in my community.

It can be disillusioning but only if I take my eye off of the goal and the goal for me is to stay in the room and to survive and to get these stories out there. I know it’s going to be better for me to be in these rooms than for me to not be in these rooms. So I just stay focused on the work.

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Our Lady J is performing at Joe’s Pub in NYC tomorrow night and at The Wallis Theater in LA on December 7th.