No Filter: Hey Samira Wiley, Where’d You Get That Shirt?
Welcome back to No Filter, in which we survey the week in ~celesbian Instagram and declare that it is good. It’s mostly good. This week, Ruby Rose broke up with her person (more on that later), Kristen Stewart got coffee with her person and Samira Wiley took a lot of scrunch-faced selfies. Let’s get to work.
.@JanelleMonae is onto something special. Proud to support. #FemTheFuture. pic.twitter.com/pwOr33duCR
— Lupita Nyong'o (@Lupita_Nyongo) August 27, 2016
What if I turned this column into nothing but pictures of Janelle Monáe with other otherworldy beautiful humans? What would that be like?
https://www.instagram.com/p/BJZiNg8g2H5/
Tegan and Sara have finally figured out how to communicate with Holiday.
I really appreciate how Samira waited until like 10 minutes after last week’s No Filter was published to post a picture of herself wearing an actual Autostraddle exclusive Gal Pal shirt designed by our own Alex Vega.
Laura Jane Grace’s autobiography isn’t even out yet and I guess it already needed a vacation.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BJtMmAYjfO9/
If I have to deal with this picture, you do too.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BJvKdFQAN3J/
St. Vincent is casually perfect; it’s almost obnoxious.
Ruby Rose’s acting career is uh, still happening as far as I know, but in case it should suddenly fall through for some reason she’s trying to pick up some backup gigs. Oh, also she apparently broke up with Harley Gusman. Love’s still a lie, might as well repaint your living room. She also signed on to do a giant shark movie, which is my favorite genre of movie because there is only one available plot and Jaws already exists (I see all of these movies anyway).
https://www.instagram.com/p/BJnreqyAPpi/
This picture of very famous millennial Gaby Dunn yearning for jerky feels poignant somehow.
Your girlfriend Lena Waithe hasn’t really been posting selfies too much lately
You know who doesn’t ever update their Insta but I check it every week just in case?!?!?! JENNY SHIMIZU. It’s your lucky day because sports are happening and I love sports!
OH HEY GUYS DIDN’T SEE YOU THERE. I like to imagine that all of their interactions are just like the movie Spice World, and probably they spent this entire evening assigning personalities to fish in the fish tank.
Join us next week, when Holiday creates a keyboard to communicate back.
No Filter: Bette And Shane Celebrate Dana Being Miraculously Alive
Welcome back to No Filter, a weekly collection of Instagram posts by queers of note, tirelessly sifted through by yours truly. In an ideal world, we would mix it up every week and have different stories to tell, but if we’re getting real I want to know what Samira Wiley is up to every week, and I think you do too. That said, if anybody has suggestions for more nonbinary or trans women, particularly people of color, that we could follow for this column I would love you forever.
Also this week in Evan Rachel Wood Watch, our lady of Dubsmash posted this super cute video of herself with Alia Shawkat and Angela Trimbur lip syncing Miley Cyrus, so let’s not act like the internet hasn’t been generous. I just need this one thing.
https://twitter.com/evanrachelwood/status/694365077655302144
We’re going to take the time to appreciate Samira and Lauren looking incredible on the red carpet, while lamenting the perfect photo Samira posted and then deleted of herself luxuriating over a pile of fast food french fries post-award show. I like these two. I like their award show traditions.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BBK9RpaRxxz/
Heather Hogan, this one’s for you.
This is what your girlfriend Lena Waithe looks like when you guys just kick back and relax on a Sunday afternoon.
Dana is ALIVE and hugging Shane and Bette is curiously undeterred by this visit from the undead.
One day I dream of a love so true that my person will celebrate my birth by posting pictures of cats, sandwiches and donuts. This tribute to Ingrid Nilsen from Hannah Hart is very sweet.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BBNzGeCrmis/
Keep it classy, Angel Haze.
Jenny Owen Youngs’ hands perfectly capture how it feels to hear a story about Sex and the City from Carly.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BBStOiFQqTk/
I don’t know, you guys, we haven’t checked in with Kreayshawn in a while – maybe it’s been too long (this is a video, worth watching).
Jenny Shimizu discovered the true spirit of Christmas.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BBTU0DwJTvj/
Really into making new friends with this person at A-Camp, looks like we have a lot in common.
Join us next week, when Kreayshawn uses her time machine to figure out whose hair Jenny Shimizu found in the snow, among other mysteries.
15 Lesbian Couples Time Forgot
Sure, everybody knows about Portia and Ellen. But there are likely many other fantastic pairings you never knew about or totally forgot about or vaguely remember but not really anymore! THIS IS IMPORTANT HERSTORY.
15 Lesbian Couples Time Forgot
*indicates that one member of the couple has refused to confirm the relationship
1. Tracy Chapman & Alice Walker
Alice Walker (© Roger Ressmeyer/CORBIS) & Tracy Chapman (© Lynn Goldsmith/Corbis)
The brilliant shy musician Tracy Chapman, who drove a fast car into all of our souls forever, and the legendary Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple, dated in the mid-1990s. Walker spoke to The Guardian about the relationship in 2006:
“Why was it kept so quiet at the time? “It was quiet to you maybe but that’s because you didn’t live in our area,” she answers with a throaty laugh. She has written about the relationship in her journals, which she plans to publish one day.
So why did they decide against using their relationship to make a big social impact like other celebrity lesbian couples, such as Ellen DeGeneres and Anne Heche, have in the past? The idea seems to amuse her. “I would never do that. My life is not to be somebody else’s impact – you know what I mean? And it was delicious and lovely and wonderful and I totally enjoyed it and I was completely in love with her but it was not anybody’s business but ours.”
In 1967, Alice Walker married Melvyn Roseman Leventhal, becoming the first legally married interracial couple in Mississippi, but the two divorced in 1976. Walker told The Globe and Mail in May that she is not heterosexual or gay, just “curious.”
2. Ellen Degeneres & Alexandra Hedison
Before she began engaging in knife-play with Helena Peabody, Alexandra Hedison engaged in loveplay with Ellen DeGeneres, who she met via mutual friends in 2000 after Ellen and Anne Heche broke up. Although she was a cast member of The L Word and played bit parts in Lois & Clark, Melrose Place, Nash Bridges and L.A. Firefighters; Hedison’s primary occupation is photography. She’s also directed an animated film, In the Dog House, and a documentary, The Making of Suit Yourself. They lived together in Ellen’s Hollywood Hills home until December 2004, when the two split up, Heddison moved out, and a “source close to the couple” told The New York Daily News that “it’s difficult for both of them and very sad. They were a private couple, and they hope they can separate privately.” Recently rumors began swirling that Hedison has hooked up with another major lesbian power player – Jodie Foster.
3. Ione Skye & Jenny Shimizu
Bisexual actress Ione Skye (best known for her role in Say Anything) fell for legendary model/actress Jenny Shimizu when they met on the set of Quentin Tarantino’s movie Four Rooms, around the time that Skye’s seven-year marriage with Beastie Boy Adam Horowitz was crumbling into a million little pieces. Skye reportedly admitted, “I guess I was just looking for love. I was reeling, I didn’t know what I wanted. When Adam and I split up, I was making Four Rooms with Madonna. She had this gay entourage. She introduced me to them. And I have to admit, I dallied.” She described Shimizu as “kind of boylike, kind of dykey” with “a great figure.” Clearly, Jenny Shimizu has mad game. I mean she also dated Angelina Jolie. So.
4. Amy Ray & Jennifer Baumgardener
Jennifer Baumgardner, esteemed third-wave feminist activist, former editor of Ms., prolific journalist and author of Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism and the Future, Grassroots: A Field Guide for Feminist Activism and Look Both Ways: Bisexual Politics, dated The Indigo Girls‘ Amy Ray from 1997 to 2002! Now Baumgardner lives in New York with her husband Michael and their two sons, and Amy Ray has been dating a lady in Seattle for the last ten years.
5. Patricia Velásquez & Sandra Bernhard*
Venezuelan model and actress Patricia Velásquez is best known for her print and runway work (she’s also been in several Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Editions) and her role as Anck-Su-Namun in The Mummy and The Mummy Returns. You may recognize her from Arrested Development (she was the second actress to play Colombian soap opera star Marta Estrella) and The L Word (she played Begoña, the actress playing Marina/Karina in Lez Girls). But did you know that she dated outspoken lesbian comedienne Sandra Bernhard in 1992? The two met at a fashion show in Paris. In her memoir Straight Walk, Velásquez confirmed that relationship and her lesbian identity, revealing that Sandra Bernhard was actually the first girl she kissed. “I was deeply in love with Sandra,” she wrote in her book, “in a way I’d never experienced before.”
6. Meshell Ndegeocello & Rebecca Walker
photo of Rebecca Walker via © Brian Velenchenko/Corbis
Alice Walker’s oft-estranged daughter, the writer and activist Rebecca Walker (Black, White and Jewish, Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence, BLACK COOL), was in a long term relationship with crush-worthy bisexual singer Meshell Ndegeocello once upon a time, a pairing which AfterEllen says was “for years… the most out couple in the black lesbian community.”
Ndegeocello and Walker co-parented Ndgeocello’s son, Soloman, born in 1989. Ndegeocello now lives in upstate New York with her partner of eight years, Alison, who had a baby in 2009. Ndegeocello spoke openly about her family to OUT Magazine in 2010, noting that “it’s kind of important to get it out into society about people who are gay or different, that they can have a family.”
Walker now lives in Maui with her partner, Buddhist teacher Choyin Rangdrol (or “Glen,” as Walker calls him) and her 11-year-old son, Tenzin. In 2012, she wrote about her first girlfriend and discovering her attraction to women for Marie Claire Magazine.
7. Portia De Rossi & Francesca Gregorini
If you’re anything like me, you’ve been asking yourself “What happened before Ellen?” pretty much constantly for at least ten years. Well, now we all know. It was Francesca Gregorini, an Italian writer and directer and the daughter or Bond Girl Barbara Bach and businessman Augusto Gregorini and the stepdaughter of Ringo Starr. Gregorini has also been rumored to have dated director Kimberly Pierce and actress Amber Heard.
8. Rosie O’Donnell & Sophie B Hawkins*
I’ve been hearing about this one for what feels like a decade, but although Rosie’s open about it, Sophie isn’t. Damn, I wish I could hear about her being her lover.
9. Leisha Hailey & KD Lang
These two are like the ultimate “omg remember when ____” couple. Crooner k.d. Lang and actress/musician Leisha Hailey, then a singer in The Murmurs, met at a friend’s birthday party in 1996 and broke up in 2000. Hailey has never talked much about their relationship, telling The Advocate, “It’s a very private matter for me. I learned a tremendous amount from that relationship, and I’m very sentimental about it and look back on it with beautiful memories.” She says their lifestyle “was about being at home and being with our dog.”
10. Camilla Grey & Clea Duvall
If you’re following along at home on your Chart then you will see that Leisha Hailey connects the prior couple to this couple! The exact timeline of this relationship is unclear, but it was definitely in full bloom circa Uh Huh Her‘s 2007 debut, during which time Clea was doing photography for the band. After their split, Grey hooked up with bandmate Leisha Hailey and Duvall kissed a girl in the park and also got all of our hopes up about Ellen Page.
11. Susan Powter & Jessica Kirson
Susan Powter, ’90s fitness icon (author of Stop the Insanity!) and current fitness/lifestyle/yoga guru, dated lesbian comedian Jessica Kirson circa 2008-2009-ish. Prior to dating Jessica, Powter had dated Animal of the band Bitch & Animal. Powter had divorced twice and had two sons by the time she came out in Curve magazine in 2004, describing herself a a “radical feminist lesbian woman.” She adopted a third son and presently lives in a self-described “earth ship” in New Mexico. Kirson, the stepsister of Zach Braff, has appeared on Last Comic Standing, Last Call With Carson Daily, The Tonight Show With Jay Leno and Comedy Central’s Premium Blend. The internet offers no recent updates regarding her relationship status.
12 & 13. Rita Mae Brown & Fannie Flagg // Rita Mae Brown & Martina Navratilova
Rita Mae Brown was quite the romancer back in the day. She lived with Martina Navratilova from 1979-1981, a relationship which likely inspired her novel Sudden Death, about a lesbian tennis player. Martina went on to famously and publicly date beauty queen and mother-of-two Judy Nelson, starting in 1983, and when the couple suffered a messy breakup in 1991, it was Rita Mae who mediated their palimony dispute — and who then moved in with Judy. Rita Mae wrote the intro to Judy’s book Love Match, which was about her affair with Martina. Much later, Rita would meet Fannie Flagg at a party thrown by Marlo Thomas, but Rita has said that her relationship with Fannie ended up not working out because of generational differences: “It doesn’t mean we don’t love each other, [it just means] we will never see the world quite the same because of our tremendous losses and disillusionment and then the realization that ‘Oh my god, we gotta fight back.'”
14. Amanda Moore & Kate Young
Model Amanda Moore and ex-Vogue writer Kate Young were featured in New York Magazine’s Sexiest Couples of 2003 with the following tidbit: “Now, that’s lesbian chic. Kate’s an ex–Vogue-ette with Marilyn-blonde hair and a pixie face. Amanda’s a tall, dark runway regular. They recently posed, making out, for iD magazine. And why not?”
15. Lindsay Lohan & Courtenay Semel
On the cover of Curve magazine in 2009, Courtenay Semel, daughter of former Yahoo! CEO Terry Semel, described herself as the “lesbian Don Juan,” having been linked romantically to Lindsay Lohan, Tila Tequlia and the now-deceased heiress Casey Johnson. Lohan and Semel were linked shortly prior to Lohan’s relationship with Samantha Ronson. Semel also appeared in Curve magazine again this month because she painted a large colorful mural in her garage.
It was difficult to determine exactly the proper level of forgotteness for these couples and thus the following couples almost made the list, but then did not: Rose Troche & Guinevere Turner, Corin Tucker & Carrie Brownstein, Linda Perry & Clementine Ford, Romi Klinger & Dani Campbell, Cherry Jones & Sarah Paulson. But perhaps you remember all these fine feathered felines like it was just yesterday! Keep the memory alive, friends!
Laurent Cantet’s Foxfire Adaptation Looks Great (Even Without Angelina Jolie)
On the comprehensive list of gay rites of passage, “watch Foxfire” is listed somewhere between “fall for a straight girl” and “run a seven-season marathon of Buffy.” The film adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’ novel has a big cult following among queers, and for good reason.
The ’96 indie film centers around drifter Margaret “Legs” Sadovsky (a then-unknown Angelina Jolie) and her band of quasi-feminist thieves. Among the gang’s members are Rita (rocker Jenny Lewis), Goldie (model Jenny Shimizu), Violet (Sarah Rosenberg), and Maddy (Hedy Burress)–a silent, stoic-type becomes Legs’ closest confidant. As the girls rail against suburban patriarchy to the sounds of The Cramps and L7, lesbian subtext abounds! Maddy and Legs have enough eye sex to fuel one space shuttle or 20 Faberry fanfics. There also is a seven-minute topless tattoo’ing montage set to Mazzy Star’s “Into Dust.”
But realtalk: Aside from casting, Foxfire is sort of…terrible. While I bawled as the final credits rolled, I quickly realized that I wasn’t weeping because of the plot. I was mourning the loss of Angelina Jolie’s tomboy swagger (RIP). The dialogue is cringe-worthy at worst and dated at best. Also, the intermittently-spersed electric guitar solos make the movie a little less Revolution Grrrl Style Now and a lot more ABC After-School Special. If your friends give you shit for digging this gem out of the $5 DVD bargain bin, the only excuse worth making is that you’re doing “herstorical research” on Jenny Lee Lewis’ transformation from doll-faced teen into indie rock goddess and Jolie’s off-screen romance with Shimizu.
Jenny Shimizu and Angelina Jolie. Foxfire set, 1995.
When I picked up the novel on which the film was based several years ago, I was hooked by page three. Oates’ writing is so neurotic–heavy on detail and light on punctuation–that it deceives you into reading more, page after page after page:
Among the men though there’s a girl, it turns out, a young girl possibly fourteen or fifteen years old, so there’s a brief noisy debate about whether she should be ‘allowed’ to compete and she’s ‘allowed’ at least provisionally, a tomboy sort of girl in a T-shirt, jeans, sneakers, ashy-blond hair in a ponytail hanging halfway down her back…
While Oates’ Foxfire:Confessions of a Girl Gang has a “group of girls take on The Man” premise that’s similar to its cinematic adaptation, the setting is worlds away. Instead of taking place in the Portland, Oregon during the 90s, Foxfire was originally set in 50s Upstate New York. The gang is living in a more intolerable place and time, immediately upping their stakes. In the novel, Legs, Goldie, Maddy, Violet and Rita aren’t even suburbanites; they’re working class kids with absent parents who Oates describes as hailing “from the wrong side of the tracks.” They aren’t watered-down riot grrrls. They’re the female answer to The Outsiders, but with better hair and high-waisted denim.
I loved the book so much that I immediately felt like I’d been cheated out of a damned good adaptation of a solid American novel. But 16 years after the first adaptation, the novel is actually getting a do-over at the hands of Laurent Cantet! Meet the new and improved Foxfire gang:
L to R: Not sure, Not sure, Rita, Maddy, Legs, Goldie
If production stills are any indication, Cantet’s Confessions seems to honor the original work. The only thing I love more than a blue collar is an orange scarf–those play an important role in the book.
I absolutely love the meticulousness of the classic automobiles, the Foxfire gang’s dog, and even the casting in the newer adaptation. Just by looking at the production stills, I know who has been cast as “Legs” Sadovsky and Maddy Wirtz. Filmed in 2011, Cantet’s Confessions–like the original–consists of a cast of relative unknowns.
When Confessions premiered at TIFF several months back, it received so-so reviews, including one from The Hollywood Reporter:
Foxfire remains a potent and occasionally touching depiction of feminism avant la lettre, and even if this gang is not always credible, there is at least one standout performance from Admanson as the uncompromising and crafty Legs (a part originally played by Angelina Jolie in a little-known 1996 adaptation). The actress’s scraggly frame, large eyes and Joan of Arc haircut are in sharp contrast to her character’s commanding persona, but she remains someone you’d gladly follow.
If you skip ahead to 2:05, you can watch a clip from the film here:
It remains to be seen whether Cantet’s Confessions will go down in girl-girl history like its predecessor, but its young actors are going to give Jolie and Shimizu quite the run for their money. Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang is set for wide-release in January.
Queering Fashion Week: Tasha Tilberg’s Gay-Married & Freja Beha’s Busy
FASHION WEEK: Hey it’s Fashion Week! You know, that time of the year when gaunt, desperately slim-hipped women with devastatingly luminous angular faces and wild glamorous/terrifying hair clomp down narrow elevated platforms, showing off confusing/expensive clothing to swarms of movie stars, journalists, photographers and rich people. What fun!
Because of this grand celebration, we were inspired to check out New York Magazine’s insanely awesome Fashion Week database, where we found some stuff you might like.
But first; once you’re done looking at the fashion week hoo-ha, you should read Fire in the Belly: Self-Love and Navel Gazing: “How do I love my belly, when billions of dollars every year is spent teaching me (and others) to hate it/me? Just remembering: This is my body, not their billboard. I live here. I love here. I feel what’s right “in my gut”…My history and the history of every big-bellied woman in my bloodline back to the big, fat dawn of time. My body remembers all that; it stretches with what I fill it with. My ample hip remembers the lips that lovers pressed there while their kisses traveled the generous road of belly.” (@edenfantasys)
Lesbian Tasha Tilberg is in the big fashion show… and she just tied the knot with her girlfriend! At Fashion for Relief Haiti NYC 2010, The New York Times reported:
…alongside the duchess sat the Covergirl model Tasha Tilberg, wearing her customary nose ring and chatting about her recent wedding in Canada.
“Yeah, we did it in Canada,” said Ms. Tilberg, who is Canadian but only married there, to her long time girlfriend, because same-sex unions are not legal in California, where they live. “Now we’re working on kids,” she said.
Tilberg walked in Rad Hourani’s show. Hourani says all his clothing is “unisex”: “Unisex is my main focus,” Hourani told us. “All my pieces are unisex so you can wear it feminine, masculine, a guy can wear it, a girl can wear it, at any age, anytime, anywhere.” Mmhmm. As long as you never grow any lady-parts or eat a sandwich! Regardless, we appreciate the intent/gender-expansive view of the world.
Really-most-likely queer and really-definitely smokin’ hot Freja Beha, is a star at this year’s fashion week — NY Mag crowned her “Tuesday’s Top Model” — but lately really she’s an overall star. Like, in general.
Our boyfriend Adam Lambert attended The Blondes show along with a plethora of other homosexuals (both Jays from America’s Next Top Model) where he was sitting in the front row with a friend. Clearly Adam is a close talker.
Look, it’s Amanda Moore in the model database. Moore is “mostly retired” and also categorized as a “bad girl” (this is a theme with the rumored gays, it’d seem– almost all the gay/bi girls are “bad girls” according to the database). Although Amanda is not in Fashion Weeek, she is still hot and gay.
Amanda says, “I never wanted to be a model—I was a basketball player. ”
Career higlights include: 24 JUL, 2004 – “Named a de facto lesbian style icon by The New York Times, who characterizes her as “uncommonly open about her sexuality.”
Lesbian model Jenny Shimizu walked for John Bartlett’s “return to womenswear.” I like a womenswear designer who still is kinda designing menswear. See there she is in the black suit:
Samantha Ronson DJ’ed at Fashion Week at her sister Charlotte Ronson’s show:
Meanwhile Lohan is way too busy for this nonsense, reports Gossip Cop:
“Actress Lindsay Lohan was reportedly not invited to Jill Stuart’s Fashion Week show because she was considered a ‘brand damager,’” claims the New York Daily News… well, not only did Stuart deny the ban to the Daily News, but the story is also way off base when it further declares Lohan’s “absence from NYC is a little personal, too: Her ex-girlfriend, deejay Samantha Ronson, and Sam’s twin sis, designer Charlotte, practically run Fashion Week.”
Uh, Lohan’s absence in New York has nothing to do with any ban… or even with Fashion Week. Lohan was in London at a Haiti relief benefit called, “iRock4Haiti,” held at Altitude 360 London.
The actress even said, “I’d rather be raising money for those that need it in Haiti” than attend Fashion Week. Like the saying goes: “No good deed goes unpunished.”
GAWKER: Nick Denton has fired editor-in-chief Gabriel Snyder, and made its first purchase; Cityfile. (@gawker)
WEIRD: Rolling Stone has playlists from our favorite Olympians. Johnny Weir is spinning a lot of Lady Gaga, as well as queermo Brandi Carlile, Edith Piaf, Roberta Flack and Sam Cooke. (@rollingstone)
TEGAN & SARA: “The majority (of women, at least) in the audience can be presumed gay. Maybe, just maybe, that’s one of the reasons they’re all so excited: for once, we — the LGBT crowd — are the majority. We are the general public. Or it could very well be because the moment we’ve all been waiting for is almost here. The Quinn twins are about to take the stage.” (new england bay windows)
TALLULAH: New York Magazine interviews Valerie Harper about playing notorious lady-lover Tallulah Bankhead in LOOPED. When discussing Bankhead’s avoidance of the “Hollywood train wreck” path, she quotes Tallulah: :“Daddy always told me about men and alcohol. He never said a word about women and cocaine.” (@nymag)
LADY GAGA: Lady Gaga wins three Brit Awards: best international female, breakthrough act and best international album. The last international act to walk away with three Brits was the Scissor Sisters in 2005. (@bbc)
VANITY UNFAIR: Hey someone actually decided to ask Gabourey Sidibe how she felt about not being on the whitest magazine cover of all time:
“Was I satisfied? Yeah, well… I mean, I come from a world where I’m not on covers and I’m not in magazines at all, and so I was happy to be in the magazine,” she said. “At first I thought, ‘Hmm, should I be there? Then I very quickly got over it. I think if I were a part of that shoot I would have felt a little left out anyway. I would have felt a little like… whether or not I should have been there… [It] doesn’t matter, because I wasn’t on it and I’m excited to be mentioned anywhere, and it doesn’t matter to me where I’m not mentioned.”
(@access hollywood)
NICKI: Check out Mariah Carey’s new video for “Up Out My Face,” featuring bisexual rapper Nicki Minaj. It’s kinda awesome and super-cute/fun, and also, at times, felt like a Target commercial due to the color scheme. What has the man done to me!