Boob(s On Your) Tube: “Chasing Life” Is the Bisexual Representation You’ve Been Looking For On TV

It’s been exactly one week since the Pretty Little Liars season 6A finale, and I feel like I have lived four TV lifetimes between then and now. It’s exciting that the conversation is still going strong because general pop culture caring about trans representation on TV is a brand new thing, but it’s still disheartening and scary too.

Other shows are drawing near the end of their summer seasons, too. Chasing Life and The Fosters finished up last night. Complications aired its finale last Thursday. We’ve got two more episodes of Defiance and Scream to go, though, and here’s hoping Yewll and Audrey make it out alive.

Next week, I’ll give you a run down of all the queer characters you can expect to see on your teevees this fall. Until then, here’s what the end of summer looks like.

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The Fosters

Mondays on ABC Family at 8:00 p.m.

Stef and Lena are okay! I repeat: STEF AND LENA ARE OKAY! After a very, very tough summer season during which our favorite lesbian moms put each other through some unfair (but true to married life) shit, the truth about Monty kissing Lena finally came out. It happened because Stef’s best friend started dating Monty and walked in on Monty being in love with Lena at a cabin in the woods where the couples agreed to go for a weekend getaway. Monty confessed that yes, any queer person with eyeballs and a functioning brain and heart would be helplessly in love with Lena Adams Foster, and so Stef’s best friend told that to her and also the thing about the kiss.

Last night, Stef had a breast cancer scare! She didn’t even tell Lena about it because she was mad at her and didn’t want to need her and wanted to keep something from her the way Lena kept the Monty thing from Stef — but the truth came out at a backyard party, like it always does. It was an imaging glitch. Stef is okay. But the fact of the scare sent Lena barreling into Stef’s arms, shivering and terrified. They forgave each other. They danced. They pressed their faces together and loved each other in their kitchen, while all their kids (including new Jesus) did their drama around them.

In other stories, Jude continued to prove he is ten times the man Brandon will ever be because he exercised self control and did the best thing for the person he loves, even though he broke his own heart in the process. After Connor’s dad caught them making out and flipped out, Connor decided he wanted to go live with his mom in Los Angeles, and Jude gave him his blessing on account of THEY’RE IN REAL LOVE. They said so out loud with their mouths.

Plus also, you’re not even going to believe what I’m about to tell you: Callie finally got adopted! #OfficiallyAFoster

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Chasing Life

Mondays on ABC Family at 9:00 p.m.

Chasing Life has blown me away with the way it has embraced Brenna’s bisexuality. When she made out with Greer last season, I thought it was just the ABC Family way, and while I was happy being pandered to, as I always am, I didn’t think it would amount to much. Well, ha ha ha! Joke’s on me! Brenna and Greer fell in love and enjoyed a real, organic relationship with each other before Greer moved away. During the Christmas episode, Brenna came out as bi, actually said the word “bisexual” out loud on TV, and made absolutely no apologies for it. She has been into guys on screen and she has been into girls on screen.

Last night, Brenna joined the queer kids at her new school in their Lesbian & Gay Support Group, and it was not what she expected at all. There’s a gay male couple, an asexual teen, a lesbian of color, and all of that seemed fantastic. Like Fosters fantastic. But then everyone started clowning on her for being bisexual.

Mariah: Wait, you’re bi?
Brenna: [Nods]
Gay guy: Yeah, I did that too, but I see it now. That’s sexy.
Mariah: You know, I could never date a bi girl. You’ve got to be pretty secure yourself to be with someone who’s attracted to the entire population.
Brenna: Oh my god, Mariah, it’s not like I’m into everyone I walk by.
Gay guy: Oh, babe, you don’t get it. The bisexual thing is so tricky because if you can change your mind every day about who you’re attracted to, it makes it sound like being gay is a choice.
Other gay guy: So is your guy type really feminine, or…?
Brenna: Okay, I’m not changing my mind. I’m just attracted to the person for who they are; not their gender.
Mariah: That’s exactly what my ex said before leaving me for a dude.
Gay guy: My theory is that bi guys are always actually gay and bi girls are always actually straight.
Brenna: I’m not straight! I mean, the last two people I dated were girls, so.
Mariah: Maybe you’re just gay.

What’s excellent about this is that Brenna is the sympathetic character here (and always), and is so beloved by fans of the show, so these people throwing all this trite bigoted bullshit at her are presented as jerks. None of these stereotypes are played for laughs. It looks like Brenna is going to abandon the group altogether, and who could blame her? But she goes back and trades shade-for-shade, defending bisexuality in a way that’s never been done on ABC Family and has only very, very rarely been done on TV in general.

Gay guy: I didn’t think you were coming back.
Brenna: I didn’t either, but I changed my mind! Just like I change my mind every day about who I’m attracted to! Hey, Mariah, I was wondering: What made you a lesbian?
Mariah: I was born this way.
Brenna: So when you’re with a girl, who’s the boy in the relationship?
Mariah: No one. There is no boy.
Brenna: [To the gay guys] But Andrew’s the girl between the two of you, right?
Andrew: No! There’s not a heteronormative dynamic in all relationships.
Brenna: Oh, there’s not? That’s just a stereotype?

They get it. And they’re sorry. Brenna is right now and always.

Legit bisexual representation on a teenage TV show? What a time to be alive!

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Scream

Tuesdays on MTV at 10:00 p.m.

Welp, Audrey got one step closer to getting Emma to be in a Big Gay Relationship with her her due to the competition being eliminated. Emma’s boyfriend, Will, got chopped in literal half after Emma found him in a field attached to a saw and went running for him and tripped a wire and watched as he was sawed in actual half. Emma herself was almost killed to death when she was investigating an abandoned bowling alley with her friends earlier in the episode, but she survived to accidentally maul her boyfriend. Audrey’s alibi? She was taking a makeup test the whole entire time.

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Complications

Thursdays on USA at 9:00 p.m.

Complications exceeded my expectations so much, y’all. I know it’s because White Collar promised that CIA Junior Agent Diana Barrigan would be who Gretchen actually is and didn’t deliver, and so the bar was pretty low, but still! A lesbian character of color is the main hero of the show because of her hard-assness but also her compassion? Check. Her queerness is an important part of who she is, but it’s not the main thing about her? Check. She makes it out alive despite the fact that everyone is getting shot all the time? Check. She actually threw herself on top of a guy this week to keep the a bad cop from shooting him and lived to tell the tale! I can’t explain the finale to you if you didn’t watch the show. Gretchen won, is all you really need to know.

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Rookie Blue

Thursdays on ABC at 10:00 p.m.

Gail busted a dirty cop named Santana on this week’s Rookie Blue. It was pretty boring police procedural stuff. I wish she’d been making out with Santana Lopez instead. Just kidding! Those two would kill each other!

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Defiance

Fridays on Syfy at 8:00 p.m.

Sigh. This season of Defiance continues to disappoint me. It’s not offensive. I mean, it’s not offensive in terms of queer content. It’s offensive to me, personally, because it’s boring. This week, Doc Yewll helped Kindzi round up all the dudes in town and stick them in cages to prepare for the coming Omec invasion. This included Yewll’s BFF, Datak Tarr, who, along with Stahma, have been wholly underused this summer, which is a large part of the reason this season kinda sucks. Also, Yewll helped Kindzi literally eat her dad to death. It wasn’t as gross as Will getting chopped in half on Scream, but it was disgusting.

On the upside, Berlin returned from her brief hiatus in 90210, and thank the gods because I was starting to believe she and Irisa weren’t in real true forever love. Now I remember that they totally are.

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Hannibal

Saturdays on NBC at 10:00 p.m.

It looks like Alana has finally pushed Hannibal to the point of murdering her (but only because he pushed her first!). She threatened to take away all his nice shit if he didn’t cooperate with her and the police, and this week she discovered that he’d been having long, leisurely phone conversations with a serial killer called the Red Dragon. She told him he was going to help them catch this fucker, or else. He chose: or else! And so Alana removed all his nice things like his smoking jacket and books and record player and also apparently his toilet. And then had him wrapped up to look like the movie. Good night, sweet princess!

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I Am Cait

Sundays on E! at 8:00 p.m.

This week on I Am Cait, I was exposed to the fullness of the Kardashians for the first time. (This is the only Kardashian show I’ve ever watched.) It was kind of jarring.

Kim Kardashian shows up to talk to Caitlyn about how everyone in the family is pissed off at her for some things she said in her Vanity Fair interview, most notably Kris Jenner because of how Caitlyn said if Kris had been more supportive they’d still be together. Also Khloe is upset, I think, because Caitlyn said something disparaging about her husband? I don’t know the family tree; it was hard for me to follow. Kim’s suggestion for making up with Kris was to tweet an apology. Khloe’s suggestion for Caitlyn feeling less isolated from her family — because, as Caitlyn repeatedly says, none of her children have come to visit her since she came out and began her transition — was group texting.

I’ll tell you what really got to me, though: Number one) Kim dropped Caitlyn’s birth name like NBD, all, “You still have some of [birth name] in you; I thought Caitlyn would be a little nicer.” And when Caitlyn went to visit Chloe, she talked about all the stuff she’s learning.

Caitlyn: So much of it is so scary. Homelessness, people on the street—
Khloe: Aw, that’s not good.

Aw, that’s not good?! It’s a tiny bit more than “not good,” Khloe Kardashian.

And then Khloe just wanted to talk about herself.

I’m not cut out for actual reality TV. I liked the parts of the episode where Caitlyn had dinner with Jen Richards, Kate Bornstein, and Candis Cayne and talked about how more mainstream portions of the queer community often prioritize the political and social needs of the trans community way way way behind the needs of rich white gay guys. It’s an important conversation and particularly interesting as we consider how much trans erasure we’re seeing in the new Stonewall movie.

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I know I promised to fold Carmilla into this column, and I will start that next week!

Boob(s On Your) Tube: Are Stef And Lena Going to Be Okay On “The Fosters”?

This time tomorrow, we will finally know who A is on Pretty Little Liars and I can hardly concentrate on anything else. Here are some other queer things that are happening on TV, though!

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The Fosters

Mondays on ABC Family at 8:00 p.m.

Stef and Lena are scaring me, y’all. They’re supposed to be the steady sun around which all these dramatic little teenage planets orbit, but they are falling apart! Stef can’t go to therapy until Callie gets adopted, and the chances of that happening are about as likely as me getting a pet Hippogriff. This week, after Stef shelved therapy, Lena made the HORRIFIC mistake of talking to Monty about how unhappy she is in her marriage. You do not talk to the woman who kissed you because she’s in love with you about the problems in your marriage! You do not do that, not now or ever! And when Lena went home to try to tell Stef her worries, Stef was busy accidentally flirting with the new lesbian plumber and watching and rewatching the surveillance footage from Jesus and Mariana’s car accident. Lena wanted to process, but Stef squeezed her shoulder and told her everything is okay.

It is not okay. :(

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Chasing Life

Mondays on ABC Family at 9:00 p.m.

Remember how I told you Brenna met a boy named Finn at her new school, and he has cancer, and she doesn’t know it but he’s totally going to be getting saved from her anonymous bone marrow and they’re going to fall in love? That’s still happening, but in the meantime, Ford and Brenna kissed right on the lips. They did it because they were hanging out with Finn and he can’t kiss either of them because he can’t risk getting their germs on him, so they kissed each other instead. Ford says she’s not into women sexualizing themselves for the male gaze, but you know she’s always wondered what it would be like to smooch on Brenna. And now she knows!

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Clipped

Tuesdays on TBS at 10:00 p.m.

Only two episodes left and still no queer storylines for Charmaine. #Dang

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Scream

Tuesdays on MTV at 10:00 p.m.

Audrey was called in for questioning by the police on this week’s Scream. They’re working with a theory that she and Rachel killed Nina and Tyler because they’re the worst (Nina and Tyler, not Audrey and Rachel), and then Audrey killed Rachel (after making out with her face on camera) to make sure she didn’t dime Audrey out. One small problem is that there’s this video of Audrey raging out and threatening to murder Nina and chop her into tiny pieces and feed her to some ducks or something. So Audrey calls her pre-girlfriend, Emma, and asks her to please break into her house and find the SD card from the night Nina died and smash it with a hammer.

Emma does this. Well, she breaks into the house. She does not smash the SD card. She watches it and then thinks about how it’s terrifying that A hasn’t called her since Audrey’s been in jail. But then she realizes she loves Emma like lesbians do and there’s no way all this evidence means anything this early in the season, so she gives Audrey and alibi and a hug and promises her everything’s going to be okay — until they probably also die.

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Complications

Thursdays on USA at 9:00 p.m.

There’s only one more episode of Complications left before the season finale, and Gretchen has firmly taken root as my favorite new lesbian TV character of the summer. This week, her sister — Ingrid, the one from rehab — gets kicked out of rehab because she let a recovering buddy crash on her couch. Gretchen can’t be mad about it because Jed is strung out on her couch while she’s on the phone with her sister. Ingrid comes on over and agrees to take care of Jed and not take any of the pills Gretchen leaves behind, and she follows through on her promise. Sister stories. I love sister stories.

In her work life, Gretchen accompanies John to prison to talk to the gang leader who’s been keeping his thumb on John all season. On the way there, Gretchen opens up to John a little and explains that she grew up in the rougher part of town with some shitty foster parents, so that’s how come she knows you have to work outside the system sometimes to be a real hero, and also why she can’t stop saving everyone and everything.

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Rookie Blue

Thursdays on ABC at 10:00 p.m.

Not much Gail to report on this week’s Rookie Blue, just normal police procedural stuff and no lesbianing.

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Defiance

Fridays on Syfy at 8:00 p.m.

Blarg, the queerness on this show has almost disappeared completely, and without it, Defiance just isn’t worth it anymore. Queerness was so woven into the fabric of the town in the first season it felt revolutionary watching it. Now it’s just another low budget sci-fi first-person shooter tie-in. Brainwashed Doc Yewll helped Kindzi beat up her dad and begin her own personal mission for global domination this week. It should have been awesome. It was just whatever.

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I Am Cait

Sundays on E! at 8:00 p.m.

This show continues to blow my mind in the best way. This week’s episode picks up where last week’s left off, with Caitlyn talking to a group of trans women at the San Francisco Human Rights Campaign’s office. She is shocked and visibly shaken to hear stories about so much violence and discrimination perpetrated against these women. In an overwhelmed monologue, she cries and says she had no idea how much privilege she enjoyed. She also asked a producer to please help her get on Ellen to give a scholarship to one of the trans women she met, Blossom, who cannot get into nursing school because she’s trans.

She goes skating with her new friends and motorcycle-riding, where Candis Cayne teaches everyone the perfect hair flip. Over dinner, the women talk about who they’re attracted to. Caitlyn says she’s never been with a man, but is interested in it. She says she has bigger problems to worry about right now than an orgasm. Just a gentle reminder on E! that gender identity and sexuality are two separate things, NBD.

Last week, Jenny asked her if she’d gone swimming in her own bathing suit yet, and she said no. So this week, she decides to join her friends in the pool. She says she’s as nervous as she can be, but ultimately finds it very freeing.

Are you watching this yet? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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Boob(s On Your) Tube: Alice Pieszecki Arrives On “Chasing Life,” Alana Enjoys A Finger Wagging On “Hannibal”

If you spend most of your life with your eyeballs glued to GayBC Family like I do, you probably feel like summer is coming to a close. Why, this very night the Pretty Little Liars are going to prom! They’re going to graduate! And next week, the Big A Reveal. (No, for real this time.) (FOR REAL.) As ABC Family winds down, though, some summer TV shows are just gearing up!

Here’s the full trailer for Faking It‘s second season, which returns on August 31. Paige McCullers is definitely naked in this trailer, so.

Here’s the full trailer for the second season of Survivor’s Remorse. It’s back in all it’s M-Chuck glory on August 22nd.

https://youtu.be/KdL_1m5uzuA

This week’s queer TV roundup is a little more brief (and late) than usual. There was no new episode of The Fosters, and I’m working on a kitten-saving project that took up my whole weekend. We’ll be back to normal next Monday.

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Chasing Life

Mondays on ABC Family at 9:00 p.m.

At long last, Alice Pieszecki arrived on Chasing Life, as Brenna’s new girlfriend’s ex-girlfriend. “Wait,” I hear you saying, “a high school senior is dating someone old enough to date Alice Pieszecki?” Ah, yes. And that is the rub. See, Margo is Brenna’s fresh-from-college film club sponsor, but now that Brenna has changed schools, they’re in the clear to see each other romantically. Brenna is a mature 17, and she’s feeling it — until she meets Alice Pieszecki, who crashes her date with Margo, wine in hand, even though Margo told Brenna she’s an alcoholic. So Margo has to abandon their date to take Alice Pieszecki home.

On their next date, Brenna discovers that Margo took Alice Pieszecki home to her home, because they still live together and share a dog. Brenna’s probably too young to have ever even seen The L Word, if we’re being honest, and this amount of drama is both surprising and unnerving to her, so she bounces up out of there without even looking back over her shoulder.

At her new school, she meets a guy with cancer. I’ll bet six hundred million dollars he is the person she anonymously gave her bone marrow to and they’re gonna fall in love like John Greene wrote it.

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Clipped

Tuesdays on TBS at 10:00 p.m.

Coach Beiste arrived on Clipped this week, playing Mo’s mom, Dottie. (Get it? ‘Cause her name is Dot Marie Jones, IRL.) (Dot Marie Jones is an angel, by the way.) Anyway, so Dottie seems like a stereotypical lesbian and Mo’s dad seems like stereotypical gay man, and they’re getting divorced, but then they don’t because they’re actually straight, and Charmaine still hasn’t done any queer thing.

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Scream

Tuesdays on MTV at 10:00 p.m.

Audrey consoles her future girlfriend, Emma, this week as she dealt with the fallout from her own sex tape getting leaked onto the internet. Will spends the episode trying to convince Emma he didn’t film their first time together, and also he spends the episode getting his ass beaten down. In gym class, it’s self-defense day, and Audrey pins him to the ground before the instructor even says go. Emma and Audrey get even more gal pal-y at a memorial service for Nina, Tyler, and Riley — which means they’re totally going to fall in love, and then it’s going to come to light that Audrey’s the one who released Emma’s sex tape! Or one of them is going to die! Or they’re both going to die! Or one of them is the killer!

Don’t get your heart involved, is what I am saying.

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Complications

Thursdays on USA at 9:00 p.m.

Gretchen is my summer hero, y’all. No one else is going to be able to come close. This week, she saved Jed’s life by forcing him to get sober and by taking him to the hospital for vigilante treatment during one of his benders when he fell right on his face and busted it up. Gretchen also saved John’s life by smashing his car window and pulling his gun from his doctor bag(!) and getting into a high noon showdown with the gang members who were beating the shit out of him to keep him from explaining the plot of this show to anyone in authority.

The ratings are pretty solid. They’ve held strong this summer. USA will probably cast its renewal net around it really soon.

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Rookie Blue

Thursdays on ABC at 10:00 p.m.

I only started watching Rookie Blue for Gail and Holly’s storyline last season, but I have fallen in forever love with Gail Peck. She’s trying to adopt Sophie, as you know, so this week she meets with the family services person who is evaluating her. She decides to help out with a community softball game to show the social worker how good she is with kids, but it kind of backfires because she turns out to be super awkward with the kids — until there’s a drive-by shooting and she flips the switch to hero mode and saves some lives! At the end of the day, she gets to hang out with Sophie for a little while. Sophie who knows and loves her for the true hero she is. I prefer puppies to children (and dogs to adult humans), but Sophie is wonderful. I hope we get to keep her.

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Defiance

Fridays on Syfy at 8:00 p.m.

Doc Yewll died on Defiance this week! Ripped to shreds! But actually it was only a clone of Doc Yewll! Kindzi is making clones of her and hunting them for sport. Weirdly, when Yewll finds out, it kind of turns her on? I mean, her wife also was a hardcore Slytherin, so at least her type is consistent, but YIKES. T’evgin finds Kindzi in her evil lair and yells at her about blah blah whatever I’m The King And We’re Good Aliens Now, but before he does that, Kindzi manages to stick some kind of mind-controlling device into Yewll’s head, so that’s going to end in a bloodbath for sure.

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Hannibal

Saturdays on NBC at 10:00 p.m.

Remember last week when I told you that Hannibal time-jumped three years? Well, it turns out Margot and Alana have been together the whole time, and they have a baby! Alana carried the baby — due to Margot’s ovaries being cut out by her brother last season, I think, before she fed him to the eels who lived in his floor — and it’s from Margot’s brother’s sperm. Now, they have an air to their pig farm! (I think.)

So Alana is working at the psychiatric facility where Hannibal is being held because she says there’s only five keys separating Hannibal from the outside world, and she’s got all of them in her pocket. She tells Hannibal this while also threatening to take away all his nice things if he doesn’t stop being a jerk to his boyfriend, Will.

“Did you come to wag your finger at me?” is what he says.

“I love a good finger-wagging,” is what she says.

“Yes, you do.” he says, “How is Margot?”

That’s the story as told to me by Stacy and also by Stef. #FingerWagging

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I Am Cait

Sundays on E! at 8:00 p.m.

I expected the second episode of I Am Cait to be much more Kardashian-y than first one, just sort of lighthearted and focused on fashion and living life in Malibu, so I was shocked when it dove right into the dissonance caused by someone as privileged as Caitlyn Jenner being thrust into the spotlight by much of the mainstream media as the face and voice of the trans movement. In an op-ed in People this week, Caitlyn said: “To those of you who have asked me for my opinion or expertise, I want to remind you that while I’ve know that I was trans since I was a small child, learning about the trans community is still very new to me, and I don’t have all the answers.”

And that’s the theme of the second episode of the show. Jenner takes a luxury RV ride up to the San Francisco Human Rights Campaign’s office with a group of trans women, including GLAAD’s Jenny Boylan, and it only takes a few minutes of discussion before Jenner’s conservative politics and privilege enter the conversation and highlight how living in a rich, white bubble has colored her view of the tough reality so many trans people face. Like so many Conservatives, Jenner has bought into the lie that people only need welfare if they’re not willing to work. That’s categorically untrue, and a belief that is hugely damaging because trans people suffer a disproportionate amount of unemployment and homelessness.

This exchange was the crux of the conversation.

Caitlyn: A lot of times, they can make more not working with social programs than they actually can with an entry-level job.
Jenny: I’d say the great majority of people who are getting help are getting help because they need help.
Caitlyn: But you don’t want people to get totally dependent on it. That’s when they get into trouble. ‘Why should I work? You know, I’ve got a few bucks, I’ve got my room paid for.

Another reality show would have cut away to commercial with some dramatic music, but E! actually cut to a confessional with Jenny Boylan, who said:

“Now I’m worried. Caitlyn has every right to be just as conservative as she chooses, but many transgender men and women need social programs to survive and that’s nothing to be ashamed of. Living in the bubble is an impediment to understanding other people. If Cait’s going to be a spokesperson for our community, this is something she’s going to have to understand.”

I really appreciate the lengths the show is going to to highlight how Caitlyn’s life is a big exception to the experiences of most trans people. I also appreciate how far it’s going to show members of the trans community lovingly but firmly helping Caitlyn examine the huge gulf between her politics/lived experiences and the needs of the trans community/goals of trans community activists.

In another confessional, one of the trans women Caitlyn is meeting with says:

“Cait thinks that because she read a couple of pages in [Janet Mock’s] book that she’s in the know, but she doesn’t get it. She doesn’t realize how common sex work stories are. She could never understand how it would feel to walk in those shoes. If she’s going to be our representative, Cait needs to learn the struggle we all face.”

By showing Caitlyn’s missteps and allowing trans folks to correct them, E! is also correcting a lot of common misconceptions held by their audience, most of whom probably wouldn’t have taken the time to educate themselves about the needs and struggles of the trans community otherwise. It’s pretty surprising to me that they’ve taken this route, but I’m glad.

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Starting next week, I’ll be covering Carmilla in this column, and thanks to your input last week, I’ll add Steven Universe to the line-up!

Boob(s On Your) Tube: Welcome To The Queerest Week In TV History

Last week was a revolutionary week for queer women on TV! We saw more queer women in a seven-day span than any other week in television history, including The L Word‘s run on Showtime — and all of the women were on broadcast networks and basic cable. Caitlyn Jenner‘s new docu-series, I Am Cait, premiered last night to stellar ratings and became the number one trending topic on Twitter within just a few minutes its start time. I Am Jazz landed on TLC with really good feedback from the internet. Janet Mock tag-teamed with Melissa Harris-Perry yesterday to center the discussion of I Am Cait around the epidemic of violence against trans women of color. And the co-executive producer of Steven Universe confirmed what Mey’s been telling you all along.

@xavfucker by human standards & terminology that would be a fair assessment!

— ianjq (@ianjq) July 20, 2015

What a time to be alive! Let’s talk out the week in queer television.

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The Fosters

Mondays on ABC Family at 8:00 p.m.

The Fosters got back to what it does best last week: Making Stef and Lena the unshakable sun that all the hyper-dramatic little teenage planets in their house orbit around.

It starts with the revelation that Mariana is going to be Ana’s baby’s godmother. Everyone’s pretty psyched about that — until they realize Mariana is also going to be baptized in the Catholic church. Stef has a long, troubled history with the church because of how her dad’s religious-based homophobia kept him from even attending her and Lena’s wedding. So, about three nanoseconds after Mariana says the thing about the baptism, Stef straight up tells her no. Absolutely not. Not even a little bit.

Mariana asks them what they believe, God-wise, and they say they believe in a higher power that exists in all things and coaxes us toward enlightenment and love and doing good. And then they march on over to the Gutierrez’s bakery and ask them to please stop brainwashing their daughter with all this talk of hell. Grandpa Gutierrez says he’s not trying to scare her with hell or anything like that; he just wants to make sure she’s baptized so she doesn’t end up in endless purgatory, separated from God and her family after she’s dead. Which is different because one is like just a bedroom and the other is Bowser’s Castle, I think.

Stef and Lena decide to let Mariana go through with getting baptized — they even get her and her new goddaughter matching necklaces — but after Mariana talks to the priest, she decides she doesn’t want to do it after all. It’s because the priest says the church will accept her moms the way they accept all sinners. She’s not into that tolerance doublespeak; she’s into full acceptance.

When Ana reveals at the end of the episode that she doesn’t feel a connection with her new baby, the same way she didn’t feel connected to Mariana or Jesus, Grandpa and Grandma Gutierrez are super annoyed, but Lena’s like, “Um, hello, that is postpartum depression, judgey judgers! She needs therapy and meds!” (And, in fact, self-medicating is maybe why Ana became an addict in the first place.) After which conversation Lena realizes that she’s probably been suffering from the same thing ever since she lost her baby, and she just hasn’t known how to talk about it. Stef pulls her close and kisses her face and tells her she’s going to be with her though this thing and everything always, no matter what.

Also, Callie is maybe not getting adopted again.

And, after getting his former pianist exiled to the sea, another composer steals Brandon’s idea at music camp. He tries to drop some sick burns on the music thief, but it is the most embarrassing thing I have ever seen and I can’t even talk about it.

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Chasing Life

Mondays on ABC Family at 9:00 p.m.

Brenna made her move on her new film club instructor, Margo, this week. It was her last day at her old school — she’s moving to a different district so April can get better treatment at a different place — and so she took a moment to lean on in and smooch her smoochies right on Margo’s smoocher. Unlike a Rosewood adult, Margo’s response was to launch herself backwards out of the situation and explain that even though she’s not Brenna’s authority figure, she’s definitely 22 while Brenna is only 17.

Brenna goes home and broods about it and thinks about returning an email from Greer, but has to do wedding hijinks and stuff with her sisters first. And then she has to break into the school to steal back the wedding invitations she left there. After some deep bonding with April and Natalie, which includes hearing their stories of chasing after older lifeguards and TAs, she decides she can weather the embarrassment of having made a move on Margo. She asks for her help finishing her film project before she leaves.

During which Margo kisses her!

Next week, Margo’s alcoholic ex-girlfriend comes to town and she is Leisha Hailey.

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Clipped

Tuesdays on TBS at 10:00 p.m.

CHARMAINE, WHERE IS YOUR QUEERNESS? WHEN WILL IT BE EXPLORED?

Besides this, I mean.

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Scream

Tuesdays on MTV at 10:00 p.m.

Noah’s having a really hard time with Riley getting killed, so Audrey tries to comfort him by visiting him in the video game store where he spends all his time and suggesting they tag-team for some vigilante justice. Code names: Bi-curious and the Virgin. This doesn’t cheer him up at all, so Emma decides to start crime-fighting with a new partner, her former best friend(/lover?), Emma, who has her dad’s old year book, which used to include a photo of Brandon James’s victims. (He’s the serial killer who murdered everyone before this show started.) Emma’s dad used to be one of the guys pictured, but now there’s just a scribble that says, “The truth lies where the mask was made.”

Apparently that place is in an abandoned hospital where Brandon James had all the surgeries for his disfigured face, and he used the mask to hide the sutures. So Audrey and Emma go crawling around in there, like it’s any old Radley basement. Inside, they find a whole lot of gross shit like this pig that is missing all the body parts the new killer is chopping off its victims. Also, they find dead Tyler’s literal head. And they find some encrypted files on a laptop, one of which Audrey and Noah accidentally upload to the internet. It’s definitely a video of Emma having sex.

Whoops!

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I Am Jazz

Wednesdays on TLC at 10:00 p.m.

Mey told you about this show back in March, and now it’s here. It’s a really lovely departure from TLC’s more titillating concepts, and it is edited with a lot more care and a lot less DUN-DUN-DUNs. Which is correct because Jazz Jennings is a marvel. She’s a YouTube star; she’s written a book; she’s been in an OWN documentary; she’s a celebrated activist; and now she’s got her own show!

The first episode focuses on Jazz’s apprehension about starting high school. Her parents are both really articulate about trans issues and the show doesn’t center on their experiences with having a trans daughter. The show is all about Jazz (as it should be). She talks through her worries with them (for example, whether or not to invite boys to a bowling night she’s having with her friends, because boys are often jerks to her). She even calms her mom, Jeanette, down when one high school dude tosses out a slur under his breath and Jeanette nearly flips over a table to get at him. I like Jeanette!

What’s really interesting about the show is that Jazz is a celebrity; there’s no doubt about it. She even does a book signing in which multiple trans adults tell her how much easier their lives would have been if a book like hers existed when they were growing up. And yet, she tells her mom at one point, “I’m very self-conscious.”

It’s this nuanced juxtaposition of Jazz as an accomplished trans activist/author/YouTube star and a regular teenage girl who is going through things all teenage girls go through that really makes this show stand out from the rest of TLC’s line-up.

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Complications

Thursdays on USA at 9:00 p.m.

Gretchen continues her trajectory of becoming my favorite vigilante on television. (Sorry, Bi-Curious and the Virgin.) This week, we learn how she got tied up with seedy Wes and his dodgy hospital manipulation schemes. She was a good nurse with a bad past and he knew that she needed money to adopt her sister, Ingrid, so he roped her into doing shit for him, and then once she had a couple of years of nursing under her scrubs, she realized sometimes she’s got to go outside the system if she’s really going to help people.

This week, it’s her friend Jed, who’s in jail. Wes pitches this idea to her: Steal some cancer drugs and he’ll pay her and she can pay Jed’s bail. It’s a win-win. She gets money and cancer patients who can’t afford healthcare get the drugs on the black market. Gretchen ropes John into helping her. Gretchen wants to steal the drugs from a pharmaceutical warehouse, but John talks her out of it. So she decides to wear a beanie and break into a pharmaceutical van instead.

When they deliver the drugs to Wes, John looks at some patient records and sees that the people aren’t getting better, and the reason why is that Wes is diluting the drugs, so John just sets the whole place on fire. (Sometimes you poke the bear; sometimes the bear pokes you.)

Gretchen has to tell Jed to skip town, but is happy to adopt his curmudgeonly cat while he’s on the lam, so don’t even worry about that.

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Rookie Blue

Thursdays on ABC at 10:00 p.m.

Gail has decided to adopt a little girl named Sophie whose mom died during one of Gail’s cases back in “Letting Go.” She’s applied for it and she wants it so badly, but she keeps thinking she’s not cut out to be a mom because she can be really misanthropic, as you know. But that’s crazy talk because Gail is a True Canadian Hero and one of the most full-hearted humans on this earth. And she keeps getting put in positions to hang around with kids and prove how great she is with them.

She’s also made a bucket list of things she wants to do before she becomes a mom. One of the things is to learn to dance. I hope another of the things is to make out with one of Canada’s other billion TV lesbians. Betty McRae, maybe?

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Defiance

Fridays on Syfy at 8:00 p.m.

Whoooooo boy. Okay. OKAY. Doc Yewll saved the town (again) on this week’s Defiance by convincing Amanda and Nolan to cut down Datak from his Castithan hanging and send him out to the enemy camp with a bomb sewn into his arm. You know, a suicide mission. One he could do and die with honor, by saving the town he claimed to love, instead of destroying it. But also, Doc Yewll knows Datak Tarr is way more savvy than that. By getting him cut down, she’s giving him a chance to save his life, even as she’s putting a ticking bomb inside his body. And she’s right, of course. (She’s always right.) Datak cuts off his own goddamn arm with a chargeblade and runs away and his arm blows up and the bad guys all KABOOM! and he’s free from his hanging, and all he’s missing is a single appendage. He even managed to get Stahma pardoned before he left.

Over/under on whether or not that Indogene-as-starfish thing comes into play again and Yewll gives him one of her own arms?

Over/under when Berlin comes to her senses and comes home?

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Hannibal

Saturdays on NBC at 10:00 p.m.

Stacy says Hannibal reminded Alana again this week that he’s going to murder her, while sketching her face onto Botticelli’s “Fortitude.” This after a three-year time jump during which time he was institutionalized and she took on the role of being his therapist. He cooks desserts in his cell and draws and reads the newspaper and whatever else he wants to do. He’s there because the court deemed him insane. He knows he’s not insane, though, and so does Alana. The other thing she has stacked against her is that she had lesbian sex this season and that increases your chances of being murdered by about 300 percent. JUST GET OUT OF THERE, GIRL. Go with Margot!

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I Am Cait

Sundays on E! at 8:00 p.m.

Reviews are in for I Am Cait, and they’re all pretty good! It was my first experience watching a Kardashian show, and I was really surprised by how chill everything was. At one point, Kanye walks up in there and Caitlyn’s sister is like, “Why don’t your shoes tie?” And he slips off one of them and explains about laceless Adidas, but she’s still pretty dubious about the whole thing.

Actually, though, it was Kanye who said the main thing everyone is talking about in the episode and so I will quote it for you: “I think it’s one of the strongest things that have happened in our existence as human beings, that are so controlled by perception. You couldn’t have been up against more. Your daughter’s a supermodel, you’re a celebrity. Every type of thing, and it was still like, ‘Fuck it everybody, this is who I am.'”

Here’s what I loved about the show: It started with Caitlyn waking up at 4:00 a.m. and doing a confessional-type thing with a camera in her bedroom saying over and over, “I hope I get this right. I hope I get this right.” And then she talks about how she knows she’s coming from a place of privilege because she’s insanely wealthy and white. The episode mostly focuses on her meeting her mom and two sisters for the first time presenting as Caitlyn. Her sisters are wonderful; they talk about how they thought she would maybe grow out of this — she mentioned it to one of them 30 years ago — but now they understand that’s not a thing that happens. Caitlyn was always a girl. Caitlyn’s mom struggles a little bit. She’s worried about a thing she heard from the Bible. She’s worried because when Caitlyn was only five years old, she could tell that she didn’t want to wear boys clothes, and she’s afraid she forced her into a life she didn’t want to lead. She’s worried because she feels like she’s lost a son she loved so much.

But the best part is at the end when she says, “I was so proud of Bruce when he stood on that podium receiving that gold medal in Montreal. I had tears and the American flag was going up in the middle and I thought that I could never be more proud of him. And you know, I was wrong. Because I am more proud of him for the courage that he has shown. I love him with all my heart and I certainly love her with all my heart.”

The show uses Caitlyn’s family as a stand-in for the audience, to introduce everyone to basic Trans 101. For example, “Pronouns are important.” But it’s not just Caitlyn doing the educating: Susan P. Landon from the Los Angeles Gender Center stops by to talk to Caitlyn’s parents/the audience. And then Caitlyn goes to visit the family of a transgender teenager who committed suicide when he was 14, despite the fact that his family fully supported him and so did most of his classmates. His new birth certificate with his real name came just a few days after he died.

Previews for future episodes look like they are going to be heavy on highlighting all kinds of trans experiences, as well as your normal Kardashian shenanigans.

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Team TV coverage you may have missed

+ Pretty Little Liars Episode 607 Recap: Happy Birthday, Motherf-cker!
“Sorry I was tripping balls at your birthday party and almost got everyone killed with a t-shirt cannon.”

Just a couple more doodads:

+ Someone emailed me to say there’s a queer storyline on Mistresses again this summer, but I’m not going to put in the time unless it proves itself to not be the same old sweeps-style baloney it did in the first season.

+ Like I mentioned in last week’s Pop Culture Fix, the lesbian character is back on BoJack Horseman this season, but I won’t recap that in this column since it’s a marathoning show.

+ I am still getting caught up on UnREAL; maybe next week it’ll finally make its appearance in this column.

+ And finally, do you want me to cover Steven Universe here, for the more queer episodes?

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Tell me your feelings, cucumber kittens, and I’ll tell you mine.

Boob(s On Your) Tube: ABC Family Gets Even Gayer, Hannibal’s Lesbian Sex Happens Inside a Kaleidoscope

Hello, cinnamon biscuits, and welcome back to Boob(s On Your) Tube, your weekly queer TV round-up! You’re in for a double-doozy today! I was flying back from our senior staff retreat in Big Bear last Monday and intended to get this column done on the six-hour flight from Los Angeles to New York, but the seats behind me, on both sides, were occupied by the worst behaved children in the universe. Actually, I don’t know. That’s not fair. New Horizons only just passed Pluto. Maybe there are worse children in the universe and we just don’t know about them yet. For accuracy’s sake, let’s just say these were the worst children from here to Charon. They screamed and screamed and cried and kicked everyone, including the flight attendants, while their parents watched Jet Blue TV.

But we’re here together now at last and so let’s do this thing. (I don’t have screencaps for you this week, but I’ll be back to full speed with them next week!)

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Chasing Life

Mondays on ABC Family at 9:00 p.m.

201: “A View from the Ledge”

I am a firm believer that ABC Family shows succeed in direct proportion to the number of queer characters on them, so it was a smart move of Chasing Life to have Brenna come out as bi last season (even though the love of her life, Greer, had to move away to go to school). And the show is building on that momentum. In last week’s episode, they introduced a whole new queer lady! (And dude.)

First, though, in the season two premiere, Brenna has joined a film club to get her mind off of Greer and is writing/directing a movie about two teenage guys who fall in love, with Ford playing the accidental beard of one of them. Her guy friends are worried about people seeing them making out on-screen and thinking they’re gay, but she tells them to get the fuck over it because it’s 2015 and modern sexuality is fluid and also it’s going to look good on their college applications.

The new film club sponsor, a recent college grad named Margo, is impressed with Brenna’s style. They make eyes at each other.

202: “The Age of Consent”

So, Margo’s queer. Brenna and Ford find this out when they run into her at a solo-girl-with-guitar concert and she tells them she’s there with her dude buddy because they’re gay best friends. Brenna is quietly into it. Ford is super mega hardcore into it. In fact, she wants Brenna to go after Margo and make out with her face so it’ll be like Ford herself is making out with Margo’s face. (You’re going to have to make out with Greer’s face first, for that plan to make sense, Ford, just FYI.)

I’m going to tell you what’s going to make this whole thing even better: Leisha Hailey is coming to town, and she is going to play Margo’s “crazy ex.”

YOUR MOVE, PRETTY LITTLE LIARS.

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Complications

Thursdays on USA at 9:00 p.m.

105: “Outbreak”

Ugh, I am so in love with Gretchen, how did this happen? When I was binging these last two week’s episodes, I realized that Gretchen is kind of like if Marceline the Vampire Queen became a nurse in real life. Like she’s just so curmudgeonly and ready to beat people’s brains in if they cross her, like just in a nanosecond she’s ready for that, but also her heart is like a unicorn’s, so pure and heroic.

In “Outbreak,” she treats the shooter who started off the series of events that make this show a thing. She can tell the shooter is in serious pain, but the shooter won’t say so. Finally, the shooter confesses she needs to just get arrested and get to the police station so she can call and check in on her brother. Gretchen gets pulled away to do other things, and by the time she gets back, the shooter has coded. So Gretchen asks to do the paperwork so she can remove this girl’s bracelet. It’s a gift from her brother. Gretchen is going to find this little Elio and keep him safe.

106: “Diagnosis”

Obviously Gretchen doesn’t call the Department of Family and Children Services to report the Elio thing. She takes the bracelet and gets in her car and drives to what seems like a pretty dodgy part of town, only to find that Elio has been taken in by a neighbor. The neighbor is a creep. Like a pedo creep. Gretchen lies and says she needs to give Elio an exam. Once she sequesters him, she asks him what the heck is going on with the pedo neighbor and Elio confirms that his now-dead sister urged him to stay away from this fucker.

Again, Gretchen decides not to call for backup, but instead wallops this guy in the nuts and grabs Elio and makes a run for it. He chases her with a gun, and then a whole other guy with a gun shows up and Elio has to explain about the pedo-ness of his neighbor. The second guy shoots the pedo guy and promises to help Elio find his family. Gretchen allows this.

Next week, she’s going to save a cat!

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Defiance

Fridays on Syfy at 8:00 p.m.

306: “Where the Apples Fell”

I was so psyched after the first episode of Defiance this season because I thought the show was finally stitching together the elements of the post-apocolyptic space western theme that I like the most, namely: character development, character development, character development. What I love about Defiance is learning all the things that make these humans and aliens — with their different cultures and religions and planets of origin — come together and make the living, breathing organism of their town work. And Stahma Tarr’s “fuck the patriarchy” trajectory over two seasons was so satisfying I can hardly sit still when I talk about it.

This season, though, y’all? What the heck? It’s like some kind of Game of Thrones video game where the main thing is leveling up your avatar in the bloodiest way possible so they can join the fight against the Big Bad at the end of the game. I don’t like it very much. Stahma is spending the whole season at the mercy of every man, fucking that giant purple guy over and over, and getting to do exactly zero schemes. I don’t like that very much either.

“Where the Apples Fell” follows Stahma and Datak as they try to make an escape from Defiance after Alak returns and dimes out his parents for being Votanis Collective spies. Datak hits up Doc Yewll’s office for some help, because she’s the most competent person in town besides Stahama, and the only one besides her who gives as good as she gets with ol’ Datak Tarr. She agrees to help him escape — after chiding him for covering her mouth with his unwashed hands during flu season — but their plans are foiled by Nolan standing in the middle of the street giving some giant HURRAH speech or whatever Matthew Mcconaughey thing. Datak is arrested.

307: “The Beauty of Our Weapons”

Datak is sentenced to death for treason by the Defiance town council. The vote is unanimous; even Yewll casts her black marble for him to be executed. When she comes to examine him in his jail cell, to make sure he’s “fit to die,” she tells him she did it because she’s a pragmatist. He was going to hang anyway, and she’s got to keep living in this town after he’s dead. She squeezes his shoulder and tells him she’ll miss him, which is the most emotional thing she’s ever done, outside of hallucinating her ex-wife for half a season one time. Datak does get trapped in that Castithan torture machine, and everyone throws their rocks onto it while Amanda and Nolan watch.

He’s probably not dead, though, right? The episode ends before he gets stretched to death.

In other queer character news, Amanda once again invokes Kenya’s name in front of Stahma, and it sets Stahma’s blood on fire. They’re in a one-on-one face-off while the manhunt is on for her and Datak, and Stahma says she doesn’t want to have to kill Amanda, but that just makes the good mayor laugh and laugh and shout about, “Just like you didn’t want to kill my sister/your lesbian lover but you did it anyway!?!?” Stahma doesn’t murder Amanda, though. She says she’s going to leave her alive so she can wonder why.

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The Fosters

Mondays on ABC Family at 8:00 p.m.

305: “Going South”

Stef and Lena have finally decided to get some therapy, thanks to their plumber who tells Stef at the end of “Going South” that he’s pretty sure they’re headed for divorce. Sadly, going south isn’t about going south to Scissortown. It’s about Callie and Brandon making a day trip to Mexico to go hang gliding and also about Brandon’s ego going down when Callie verbally thraxes him for blaming every one of his stupid man tears on the women in his life. He agrees that she — and the entirety of the lesbian internet, who have been saying this to him for two years — is right.

But for Stef and Lena, the days starts out rough and gets rougher and rougher. They fight about Stef hiring a plumber without running it past Lena, they fight about how Stef gets a little slut-shamey with Mariana when she finds out she had sex with Wyatt and took a precautionary pregnancy test, they fight about what Brandon and Callie are doing in Mexico and how to solve that problem. Lena wants to go to a couples counselor, but Stef has a hard enough time communicating with her best friend/wife; adding a third person into the feelings roundtable makes her want to vomit. But she agrees to it, in the end, because if a random handyman in the house thinks it’s broken, maybe they could use a tune-up.

306: “It’s My Party”

Stef handles therapy exactly how you think she would. When the therapist tells her and Lena to make a list of all the things they love about each other, and all the things that drive them crazy, she keeps calling it The Hate List, and every time she does something she knows pisses off Lena, she’s like, “Put it on The Hate List!” (By the way, is that Monty/Lena kiss gonna come up in therapy? I need them to deal with that and get on with it; every week, it’s a heart attack for me, waiting for that information to come out!)

Jude throws Callie a big birthday bash and everyone who loves her comes to it, including Rosie; the ladies from Girls United; handsome Cole, who is over his broken prom heart; Robert, who buys her a car; Sophie, who inexplicably schemes with Brandon the whole time; and Wyatt, who yells at her about how he and Mariana had sex and deal with it dot gif.

Lena finally convinces Stef that her list of things she loves about Stef is a million miles long, and the things that annoy her, those things are rooted in Stef’s goodness and loyalty and mama bearness. They smooch and they jump in the bouncy castle.

They still need to keep going to therapy, though.

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Clipped

Tuesdays on TBS at 10:00 p.m.

Sigh. Charmaine’s queerness still isn’t being mentioned or explored. I’ll keep watching for you, though.

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Scream

Tuesdays on MTV at 10:00 p.m.

Wellllll, Audrey’s gal pal, Rachel, got murdered in the first two minutes of the second episode of Scream, slashing the queer population of MTV’s new horror drama in half. Audrey is really upset about the whole thing, obviously, in large part because A murdered Rachel by luring her out onto the balcony and slipping a noose around her neck, and then making it look like a suicide. Audrey doesn’t believe it. She doesn’t believe it so much that she wraps a belt around her throat at Rachel’s wake to see if it’s possible she really hanged herself from the ceiling fan.

On the upside, it looks like Audrey and Emma have a Big Lesbian Past, which is kind of like if Regina George and Janis Ian had a Big Lesbian Past, so I’m excited to see where that goes.

(Probably nowhere. Probably death.)

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Hannibal

Saturdays on NBC at 10:00 p.m.

306: “Dolce”

As you know, I cannot watch Hannibal, but the promised lesbian shenanigans did happen, and this is how Stacy told it to me via email when I was at Big Bear:

So Margot and Alana had a lot of business this week.

Margot and Alana discuss with Mason (Margot’s brother) how Hannibal disemboweled/hung Mason’s Italian hired-to-capture-Hannibal-so-Mason-can-eat-him detective, and Alana makes eyes at Margot while simultaneously schooling Mason on how his ego is going to fuck him over. If you’re wondering why Alana and Margot are somehow party to Mason’s scheme, for Margot it’s because she’s basically Mason’s prisoner and also probably because Hannibal used her for numerous psychological games last season. And for Alana, she got shoved out of a window, practically breaking all of her bones, and then was stuck lying on the ground while Hannibal stabbed and slashed all of her friends.

I won’t even tell you what Hannibal did to Mason to get him all riled up because you would literally never forgive me.

Later on, Margot has a scene with Mason where they acknowledge that he fucking straight-up cut out her uterus last season. His reasoning being that she weaponized it and shouldn’t have “waved it around like a loaded pistol.” He kind of said it like he was joking, but he wasn’t.

As a refresher, last season Margot slept with Will in an attempt to get pregnant because the only way she can inherit Verger family money and escape Mason and his abuse is through producing a male heir. Mason found out (thanks, Hannibal) and decided removing her uterus would be the most reasonable solution.

Okay, so Mason talks about how he wants a baby — specifically with her, his sister, and could she please figure something out? What a shame he cut out her uterus. They could be a family again. I guess he’s been getting into Game of Thrones.

And then Margot and Alana have sex inside of a kaleidoscope. (That’s a real thing. The director and editor put some crazy psychedelic effects throughout the scene. It’s like their skin and faces and limbs were merging and sometimes it looks like Margot is making out with herself??? It’s a very Hannibal sex scene.)

Afterwards, Alana helps Margot get dressed, which is kinda sensual and hot until Margot asks Alana if she knows anything about sperm farming.

I fear for Alana. It seems like her womb is on the market now. :/

At the end of the episode, it seems like Mason has captured Hannibal and Will — it’s a bit confusing because Hannibal was about to cut into Will’s skull but then suddenly they’re tied up in front of Mason? Who ever knows with this show.

307: “Digestivo”

This week I was home from Big Bear and so as soon as I woke up on Sunday, Stacy had watched the new episode and gently explained to me (#PillowTalk) how Margot discovered that Mason was incubating a baby he’d made with her eggs and his sperm inside of a pig?  And so Margot and Alana — who kept dressing each other sensually, by the way, implied post-coitally — cut the dead fetus out of the pig? And then they used a cattle prod to harvest Mason’s sperm? And then they fed him to an eel? Like an eel that lived inside his floor? I’m pretty sure that’s what happened. I think Mason doesn’t have a face, but Stacy says she can’t tell me why, and that’s for the best. It doesn’t matter anyway now because faceless Mason is dead.

It seems less and less likely that Hannibal is going to get picked up by a streaming platform now that NBC has pulled the plug. Apparently Margot isn’t in the rest of the season, so maybe she makes it out of this show alive, after all!

Update: Stef says Margot is maybe coming back for one more episode and that she wants to tell you why Mason doesn’t have a face, but I can’t listen to that second part, so.

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Team TV coverage you may have missed

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Orange Is The New Black Episode 308 Recap: Fear and Loathing in Panty Town
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The 2015 Emmy Nominations Include More Queer and Black Women Than Ever!
It’s like the opposite of the Oscars.

Pretty Little Liars Episode 606 Recap: How You Get The Girl
Emily and Sara make out with their faces while the rest of the Liars are attacked by woodland creatures in the night.

Orange is The New Black Episode 307 Recap: Some Kind Of Fetish Fangirl
Strong brews for everybody!

Fan Fiction Friday: 10 Historical Femslash Stories Full of Cowgirls and Knights and Nuns and Scissoring
Santana and Btittany join the circus! Paige and Emily traverse the Wild West! Carmilla and Laura are princesses!

Orange Is the New Black Episode 306 Recap: All That Is Gold Does Not Glitter
Chang has a lot of secrets. The main one is she’s a total badass!

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P.S. I heard a lesbian character came out on UNreal, so I’ll try to catch up with that this week!

Boob(s On Your) Tube: Abby Wambach Makes Out With Her Wife On International TV, Deal With It

Two very important things happened since we last met to discuss the boobs on our tubes. I will list them for you in order of importance.

Number one: Abby Wambach made out with her wife on national television after the United States Women’s National Team won the World Cup last night. (A TV event my girlfriend live-reviewed like this: “Whoa. WHOA. WHOA!!! WHOA!!!!!!!“‘ And that was just the first 15 minutes.)

https://vine.co/v/en7PUTVxgb0

Number two: When Empire returns for its second season, Marisa Tomei will play a “lesbian billionaire.” Which: I mean, cool and everything, but I just want Cookie Lyon back in my life, Boo-Boo Kitties.

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Complications

Thursdays on USA at 9:00 p.m.

I have, very weirdly, fallen in love with Gretchen on Complications. I didn’t let myself believe in her because of White Collar, of course, but now she has won me over completely. She’s a total misandrist! This week she said out loud to a guy who asked her out, “Don’t like sushi, don’t like guys, and don’t like you.” Also, her cat is named Measles!

This week, Gretchen and John are still hustling to hide the patient they stole on the pilot episode. Gretchen’s not really feeling it, but then her sister shows up by breaking in through her bedroom window, and Gretchen has to find a way to get $10K to get her back into rehab. So, she hits up this skeezy plastic surgeon she used to work for and he says he’ll hide the guy from the pilot $25K, so Gretchen gives John a price tag of $35K and all her problems are solved. He gives her a sack of cash; she pays to move a body and send her sister back to drug counseling. Well, I mean, not all her problems are solved. Her sister is prone to breaking and entering and addiction and also she let Measles outside and forgot about her! And, you know, all the Medicare fraud and rage and all that. But she’s okay for now!

We also find out this week that Gretchen and her sister come from foster care, which seems like it will be important somehow.

Hashtag Measles, though.

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Defiance

Fridays on Syfy at 8:00 p.m.

Doc Yewll showed up in a major way this week, saving the lives of both Irisa and Nolan for the hundredth time, despite the fact that they held her down and “skinned her alive” a couple of weeks ago. That’s how she tells it to the veterinarian who helps her remove the alien brain ticks that are inside Nolan and Irisa’s noggins anyway.

To do the surgery, Yewll had to borrow a kind of sentient tech from Kindzi, the lady Omec whose screentime has been seriously neglected, and who, upon meeting Yewll for the first time, said to her: “T’ep k’udademet raniip gipekel av k’useket nok, dats’ik Indo! Ve’ak!” (Translation: “I will gorge upon your hexagonal brain and bury the pulpy remains in the dirt, Indo betrayer! Face taker!”)

Anyway, Yewll’s definitely got a crush on her!

Stahma continued having such sex with the dude Omec that Syfy gave me a warning to avert my eyes every time a commercial break was over. Alak returned after chopping up a bunch of humans and held a knife to his mom’s throat and wailed about dead boring Christie. Amanda fawned relentlessly over dying Nolan. And Nolan remembered how he turned into a hardcore killer and turned Irisa into one too. She tried to bounce to get some space, but the way Doc Yewll did their surgery, they have to stay within 200 feet of each other for the rest of time.

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The Fosters

Mondays on ABC Family at 8:00 p.m.

Cole returned to The Fosters this week to host a queer prom that nearly caused Jude to lose his mind. Jude was psyched to go to the dance and slow dance with Connor and stuff, but completely overwhelmed by everyone introducing themselves with their chosen labels and their pronouns. Connor was freaked out that Jude was freaked out and told him he wasn’t interested in being Jude’s Big Gay Experiment or whatever, so, after a heart-to-heart with Cole about how sometimes labels are restrictive but sometimes they are safety and freedom, Jude said out loud that he is gay.

Cole got a big ol’ crush on Callie, but she only wanted to be his friend. He assumed it was because he’s trans, but she assured him that she is only attracted to entitled teen assholes, so it was most definitely her and not him. Cole — being neither entitled, nor an asshole — took her at her word and danced with her for funsies anyway.

Meanwhile, Vee returned and brought along Nate to a dinner party at Stef and Lena’s, which made Lena more upset than we’ve ever seen her, times a billion. Because Nate called Vee a horrible racial slur when Lena was a teen and he still hasn’t apologized for it. It gets even weirder when Nate shows up with his girlfriend and she is black (due to him being pretty racist last time Lena saw him). Vee keeps telling Lena to please stop talking about Nate’s mistake and Stef begs Vee not to erase Lena’s experiences, and finally Nate came clean about saying what he said, but still refuses to apologize for it.

Off-screen, Monty was lady-killing at the Cubby Hole, one supposes.

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Clipped

Tuesdays on TBS at 10:00 p.m.

A.J. turned his attention toward Charmaine in this week’s Clipped, and Dani noticed immediately. You think it’s because they’re trying to Ross and Rachel A.J. and Dani, but then Dani launches into this monologue about all Charmaine’s perfection: her fingers, her face, her wit, her “sexy energy,” the way she smells. (“Annoyance, by Charmaine” is how Charmaine describes it.) But Charmaine realizes Dani is really only noticing her because she’s noticing A.J., so she tells her to figure out if she’s in love with A.J. and Deal With It like a grown-up.

No lady love — or even discussion of Charmaine’s queerness — yet, but Diona Reasonover is a joy!

Are y’all watching this? I don’t think y’all are watching this.

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Hannibal

Thursdays on NBC at 10:00 p.m.

There was no Margot on this week’s Hannibal, but I want to mention her because Stef proposed to her in the comments of last week’s Boobs Tube, and I don’t want you to have missed it.

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Scream

Tuesdays on MTV at 10:00 p.m.

Did you watch the series premiere of Scream? I did!

I know, I know: Whaaat? But I decided if I can watch Pretty Little Liars, I can watch this. I already feel bad for making Stacy tell me everything that happens on Hannibal and The Walking Dead and every other bloodbath on primetime TV. I don’t know if I’ll be strong enough to keep watching, but here’s the scoop, in case you want to dive in:

1) There are two, maaaaaybe three queer girls on this show. All white. One of them is one of the main characters, Audrey, and she is played by Bex Taylor-Klaus, who is a stone-cold teenage fox on this show. She says, “I’m not a lesbian” about a hundred times, so maybe this season will explore the the concept of queer labels in Generation Z. (Or whatever we’re calling post-Millenials. Generation T for Tumblr, maybe? Generation Harry Styles.) The second queer girl is Audrey’s gal pal. The third queer girl is a Mean Girl who says the word “bicurious” and invites Audrey to a Mean Girl party where she tells her about her fantasy of making out with ScarJo.

2) The whodunit revolves around a popular girl who was one of seven girls who recorded Audrey making out with her girlfriend and posted it on YouTube. That’s how the show opens. So, like, you know how in a horror movie, the person that gets massacred first, you’ve got to see her being a monster so you can get behind it? This girl is presented as a monster for outing a nerdy gay kid, which I’ve never seen before. I think it’s pretty revolutionary. (Like compare that to Finn Hudson just four years ago outing Santana like the world’s greatest hero.)

3) This GIF.

I dunno. Audrey just seems like the kind of girl who would CLEAN UP at A-Camp, so I want you to know she’s out there existing on MTV, even if I get too freaked out to keep watching this show.

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Rookie Blue

Thursdays on ABC at 10 p.m.

Many of you expressed an interest in Gail Peck when I showed you a photo of her last week for the first time, so I feel like I should back up and properly introduce her: She is a cop on the Canadian show Rookie Blue, which ABC airs in the summer time like Syfy does for Lost Girl. The show is in its sixth season now, but Gail didn’t start exploring her sexuality until she met a pathologist named Holly, who appeared in the seventh episode of season four, “Friday the 13th.” So that’s where you can start watching if you want to see queer Gail realize she’s queer. Holly left at the end of season five, but Gail’s gayness is here to stay.

This week, Gail & Co. investigated the disappearance of Gracie from Orphan Black, who played an abused teenage girl on this show too. It appeared that she’d been kidnapped, but really her dad killed their dog and locked her in the freezer and was an all around monster. So Gail helped the mom leave the dad with Gracie and Gracie’s brother too.

Gail is awesome. And a total babe; y’all were right about that, of course.

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Boob(s On Your) Tube: “Scream,” “Hannibal” and “Complications” Are All About That Bad Blood

Space clams, hello! Welcome to Boob(s On Your) Tube, your weekly round-up of queer lady TV! A lot of bloody things happened last week; let’s relive them!

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Complications

Thursdays on USA at 9:00 p.m.

Okay, this show is bonkers, y’all. Remember in last week’s pilot when Gretchen convinced that one patient to lie about her symptoms so she could stay in the hospital and get away from her abusive boyfriend? Well, this week Gretchen goes to the house of the abusive boyfriend to get the woman’s stuff, and it does not go as planned. Or maybe it does. I honestly do not know what Gretchen is thinking ever.

The abusive boyfriend pulls a gun, for starters, so Gretchen smacks him in the head with a waffle iron and then later on she ties him up so tight with an extension cord that his hands almost fall off. She dips out then, for a minute, to go meet up with her friend who is helping her scam Medicare and make an extra buck. He tries to ignore her, but that’s a big mistake because she smashes her way into his house through a window and destroys his laptop by throwing it into a fish tank. She goes back to the house where the abusive boyfriend is tied up, and he escapes. So she gets into a car chase with him, runs him off the road, and very seriously considers leaving him there to die! John the Batman tells her she has to save his life because of the hippocratic oath or whatever, so she doesn’t let him die, but that doesn’t mean that she hasn’t killed before and won’t kill again next week.

At the end of the day, Gretchen goes home and sweetly snuggles with her girlfriend.

She is like if Lisbeth Salander and Kate Kane had an angry little baby who grew up to be a healthcare worker inside a Walt Whitman poem hijacked by Flannery O’Connor. She’s too much, she’s not enough. She’s wonderful. And also horrible. But mostly wonderful.

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Defiance

Fridays on Syfy at 8:00 p.m.

Doc Yewll only made the briefest of appearances on Friday night’s Defiance. She didn’t even say any words. There are no other queer shenanigans to report. But I want to show you her five seconds on-screen because it so Doc Yewll. She walks outside and finds the entire town in a state of hysteria because the St. Louis arch has exploded and is raining down around their ears, right, and the people are just running and screeching and body parts are flying everywhere, and Yewll’s face is so unmoved. So unimpressed. Like her main emotion when she sees that the town’s symbol of strength and unity and freedom is crashing to the ground in the form of a billion tons of steel is just pure annoyance. Like she’s trying to watch someone’s grandma use the self-checkout at Kroger. I love her so much.

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The Fosters

Mondays on ABC Family at 8:00 p.m.

The Fosters nearly gave me a heart attack last week.

It starts out all cute and zoo-y like every episode, but there’s only one shower this time because of how the ceiling in the kitchen exploded last week and the bathtub fell on top of the stove or whatever tragedy. Fine, NBD. A day in the life, honestly. Okay, but then Stef goes out with one of her buddies to a gay bar that night and guess who they see while they’re drinking and talking about Pretty Little Liars like all lesbians do at cocktail hour? Oh, it’s Monty. Principal Monty. She’s at a gay bar on a gay date, and Stef’s friend, Jenna, wants the hook-up.

What follows is the second most awkward lesbian dinner party after the one when Bette called Jenny’s movie a mastubatory opus on The L Word. Stef invites Jenna, and begs Lena to invite Monty, so she does. Jenna stares at Monty the whole time with love eyes and Monty stares at Lena with love eyes and Lena’s eyes dart around wildly making contact with nothing. After dinner, it’s all, “Did you know she was gay?” And, “Do you think she’d be into dating women?” And, “How would you say she fares on a scale of one to ten in terms of surprise kisses?” And Lena doesn’t tell Stef anything! Doesn’t tell her about the kiss in the finale! Just lets the conversation sliiiide on by.

It was at that point that I almost threw up — but my nausea was not yet complete!

The next day at school Monty goes, “Do you not want me to date your friend Jenna?” And Lena goes, “I don’t want you to date anybody.”

And that fucking sentiment hangs in the air long enough to slaughter ten thousand lesbian hearts, and then Lena finally clarifies that if Monty isn’t dating women, she isn’t gay, which means Lena doesn’t have to tell Stef about the kiss. It’s really upside-down logic, the kind you expect from Stef.

Monty is going to date women, though, because Lena woke up the sleeping homosexual inside her, which is apparently Lena’s spiritual gift.

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Clipped

Tuesdays on TBS at 10:00 p.m.

Clipped‘s second episode continued to color in the lines of its characters while toning down their improvised Bostonian accents in a major way — both of which things were very good decisions. Diona Reasonover‘s Charmaine Eskowitz didn’t have much to do this week. The main story revolved around 25-year-old Danni and A.J. giving up on their dreams of becoming a singer/professional baseball player, and Charmaine stepping in to tell them to stop their navel-gazing whining and start living their lives. She also spent some time flirting with a dude in a bar, so it looks like she’s going to be bisexual. I actually can’t even remember the last time we had a bisexual black woman on TV. I guess Maya St. Germain on Pretty Little Liars, maybe? Here’s hoping Charmaine doesn’t have any fake cousins.

For real, though, y’all? Are you watching this? I think you should be watching this. There are never queer leading characters on sitcoms! Watch this!

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Hannibal

Thursdays on NBC at 10:00 p.m.

https://twitter.com/BryanFuller/status/614494436521738240

Lesbian lady Margot made her first season three appearance on Hannibal this week and exchanged meaningful glances with Alana. What I know about these two is what Stacy tells me about these two, between saying, “Don’t look over here at my laptop!” while she’s watching the show, due to all the gore. For example, Margot lives with her psychotic brother and owns a lot of horses. She is gay and slept with a man last year and when queer women told showrunner Bryan Fuller why that’s a problem, he Ryan Murphy-ed it, and trolled them grossly.

Okay, but this year, Margot is going to have a female love interest. Perhaps it will be Alana. Fuller’s #LoveWins tweet from Friday (pictured above) seems mean if it’s not going to Alana. What I know about Alana is she’s mad. Like really mad. So mad! I know it because the whole time Stacy was watching this week’s episode, she kept being like, “You mad, Alana? You mad?” And then she’d look at me and be like, “Alana is mad.”

So Alana came to Margot’s house and Margot was wearing her horse gear and they looked each other up and down like dessert.

… which is probably not a good metaphor for this show. I’m sorry.

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Rookie Blue

Thursdays on ABC at 10 p.m.

Everyone’s favorite Canadian police procedural has arrived back on American TV, and with it lesbian officer Gail Peck, who broke my heart into one hundred thousand pieces last year when she had to let her girlfriend, Holly, go (to stupid California). Gail only had a few moments on screen in the summer premiere, mostly to just set up her storyline for the season, which is going to be: adopting a glorious Canadian baby who will grow up to be a hockey-playing lesbian or a bisexual succubus, like all the best Canadians. She has to make a video for the adoption agency. I hope the video lasts an entire episode and involves outtakes of Gail dancing around in her underwear singing Pat Benatar into a hairbrush.

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Scream

Tuesdays on MTV at 10:00 p.m.

MTV’s serialized Scream remake, in which Bex Taylor-Klaus plays a queer lady, lands tomorrow night. We can watch the first eight minutes of it right now, though. Or, well, you can. I can’t. Why is there so much damn bloody TV this summer?

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Boob(s On Your) Tube: Hey, It’s Another Queer Woman of Color on Summer TV!

Welcome to your weekly queer TV round-up! Do you want to talk about Sense8? Here’s Mey and Aja and Gabby’s roundtable about it, as promised! Do you want to talk about Clipped, The Fosters, Defiance, and Complications? OK, here we go!

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Clipped

Tuesdays on TBS at 10:00 p.m.

Remember when Brittani interviewed queer writer/performer Diona Reasonover, and she told us about her new comedy Clipped? Well, TBS launched the first episode into the world last week, and it’s really cute! Diona plays Charmaine Eskowitz, a black Jewish queer gal who channels a healthy mix of April Ludgate and Casey Klein in every hilarious interaction she has with her customers and colleagues.

Clipped is a half-hour sitcom about a group of longtime friends who work together at a Boston barber shop called Buzzy’s. It’s very Boston. So Boston. It’s the most Boston TV show to ever Boston. The accents, the way the Celtics and the Patriots appear in every other conversation and on every other piece of apparel, the Sam Adams references. And also Norm works in Buzzy’s. Norm from Cheers! He plays a gay barber married to a gay cop played by the dad from Family Matters!

The creative team behind Clipped was also behind Will & Grace, which will tell you a whole lot about this show’s humor. Charmaine calls Norm and his husband Brokehip Mountain because of how they’ve been together 42 years. When their boss threatens to fire one of them to cut costs to pay for their healthcare, and then recants because he loves them all too much, she says, “And they say the douchebag’s heart grew three sizes that day!”

I think you should watch this. In the whole history of sitcoms, there have only ever been a small handful of queer female characters who play leading roles. This TV season saw the addition and cancellation of Marry Me and One Big Happy, so at this moment in time, Charmaine is it. She’s the only one. And she’s a woman of color! And she’s played by an actual queer woman! So, yeah, let’s give this one some attention.

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Complications

Thursdays on USA at 9:00 p.m.

I wasn’t really psyched on Complications when I first heard about it, despite the fact that it boasted Jessica Szohr — who was awesome at playing awful Vanessa on Gossip Girl — as a lesbian nurse. The problem is that USA burned me good with White Collar, a similarly-premised show that also promised a woman of color playing a kickass queer character, but basically ignored her for five years in favor of straight white dudebro shenanigans. And in terms of white dudebro shenanigans Complications is a straight-up Dark Knight origin story.

John is a doctor who shoots a gang member to save a young boy and becomes a health care vigilante in his attempt to keep himself and the boy safe, but — praise the heavens! — Jessica Szohr’s Nurse Gretchen is the Nightwing of the whole shebang. Shebang. She’s John’s right-hand sidekick, but she’s bigger than that and will ultimately outgrow it and become a vigilante of her own. She’s misanthropic. She’s seen the system fuck up too much to believe she can do any real good in the world. So she decides to mirror John’s efforts to make real change, in really illegal and HIPPA-ly unethical ways.

In the pilot, John does some identity-switching between a dead and alive patient, and Gretchen changes a patient’s chart and helps her lie about having the symptoms of meningitis to get away from her abusive boyfriend. It’s dubious on both counts, but it’s also successful.

I hear this week Gretchen is going to take a hostage. Very excited for that. I always knew Vanessa Abrams was going to grow up to be a righteously indignant felon!

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Defiance

Fridays on Syfy at 8:00 p.m.

Doc Yewll only makes a brief appearance on this week’s Defiance, to patch up Datak Tarr when Stahma wheels him home with a gunshot shot wound, and also to let Nolan know that she’s not doing her doctorly duty because she owes him anything, so spare her the thank yous. (He drugged her and stole some of her Indogene skin last week, remember, for the purposes of healing the Omec daughter.)

Oh, but that’s not the queerest part of “Broken Bough!” Stahma and Datak have returned to Defiance on the orders of Rahm and the Votanis Collective, for the purposes of bringing down the town, but Stahama’s never only playing one game at a time. So yeah, she helps Datak plant some shrill-infested weapons to destroy Defiance’s stockpile so they’ll be defenseless when the VC shows up. But she also finds T’evgin hanging out at the NeedWant and starts working an angle on him immediately. Stahma is so good at manipulating people with her lies because she always mixes some real soul-bearing truth in with them. For example, Stahma tells T’evgin she can help him learn to coexist with the humans because she learned to coexist with the humans, because she fell in love with one of them. (KENYA! COME BACK!) He’s intrigued by her vulnerability, her knowledge of the ancient poems of his race — which, she’s quick to point out, would have been off-limits to her on the Omec home planet because of misogyny — and because she’s also coyly flirty with him. You flirt with a face that looks like Jamie Murray’s face, it’s going to get you places, during all phases of the apocalypse.

Kenya Rosewater gets another shout-out in the episode, which makes me think she/her clone will for sure return this season. Amanda nearly murders Stahma with her eyeballs when she and Datak roll back into town, and after Amanda has Berlin arrest Datak, she visits him in jail and shows him Kenya’s St. Christopher medal. Then, she forces him to bow down and swear his fealty to Defiance.

He does, but it’s a damn lie. A) The shrill. B) Rahm walkie-talkies a command for him and Stahma to blow up the arch.

It’s a bummer because Irisa could have killed Rahm when she and Nolan invaded the VC camp earlier in the day, but she’s got some PTSD from all the weird murders she did last year when she was the alien Jesus. Nolan, though? Still not trigger-shy. He shoots a whole bunch of Castithans at the VC camp, and then he shoots Pilar — who actually gets to say the phrase, “Come with me if you want to live” at one point early in the episode — after kidnapping back Alak and Christie’s baby. He returns the kid to Stahma and Datak, even though Irisa has a really hard time letting it go.

This week, maybe Amanda and Stahma will hate-fuck to get over losing Kenya? A girl can dream!

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The Fosters

Mondays on ABC Family at 8:00 p.m.

Like I mentioned last week, we’re moving our coverage of The Fosters to Boob(s On Your) Tube because it’s just impossible to fully recap all the remarkable queer shows on TV right now. So:

This week, in honor of Father’s Day, Stef and Lena invited all their kids to invite all their dads over for brunch. Because Stef and Lena are saints on this earth, that includes Connor and his dad, who has spent his entire life on this show trying to thwart Connor and Jude’s attempt at being in big gay love with each other. The guest list probably also included Robert, but he decided to have Callie out to his yacht for brunch instead, because of course he did. Robert should have his own show called That’s So Robert where he sails around on his yacht and cries about all the things he thinks he deserves but doesn’t have, like his right to be called a hero for trying to blackmail a kid into living with him, or a daughter without mental illness, or a pony. (JK, Robert has ten ponies.)

Jude’s dad comes over, hoping that Callie will be there, ready to forgive him for drunk driving and killing her mom. But she’s not. Jude tells him right away not to worry about how he went to jail for DUI and murder and stuff because none of the other dads know and Jude won’t tell them. What Jude also won’t tell his Pops is the thing about the big gay love, something that pleases Connor’s dad immeasurably (“the less people who know, the better”), but comes out anyway because Connor’s dad screeches it when Lena tells him the boys are out at school. Jude’s Pa, he’s like, “Hey, you know what’s worse than getting bullied at school? Getting bullied at home.” He’s just happy that Jude found someone to love (and be loved by) in this cruel, unyielding world. Donald is a good guy who made some terrible mistakes.

Mike didn’t get Ana’s baby like he wanted, but Stef and Lena offer him a whole other kid: a teenage one named A.J., who you know as the guy who stole the spray paint that got Callie fired from her job at the foster center. Mike feels so good after noticing that Brandon is hungover — from getting duped into getting drunk with that mean girl at classical music camp, who was just trying to make him look bad in front of their teacher — and offering him some advice about not drinking and driving that he decides he will, in fact, foster that A.J. kid. First, he’s got to get licenses, so Stef and Lena invite A.J. to live with them and their eleven kids (and one shower) for a couple of episodes.

Sofia flips out at the yacht brunch, accusing her parents of plotting to send her away to Radley Asylum for the Criminally Insane because of how they keep whispering and shutting up when she walks into a room, but Robert finally confesses that they’re doing it because they’re separating. See, he didn’t think Jill had proven she was good enough to be with him, so he had an affair, but then she was so chill about the way he tried to buy Callie from Stef and Lena that he realized she did deserve him after all. But she’s kind of mad about the cheating, so I guess he’s moving to the yacht.

Callie realizes that humans are all awful and wonderful in their complicated ways, so she runs to the bus stop to forgive Donald for all the shitty shit he did. Like mothers, like daughter.

Mariana spends the day walking around the block with Ana, too afraid to go into her grandparents’ bakery for their Father’s Day event. She confesses about sleeping with Wyatt. Ana talks her off the ledge of self-slut-shaming, explains why maybe Mat didn’t want to sleep with her in public on the beach the night before he left, and finally escorts her into the open arms of her birth family for pastries and hugs.

At the end of the day, the kids give Stef and Lena some flowers because dads are good and everything, but loving, supportive parents are what matter, and Stef and Lena are the very best ones.

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Rookie Blue and Under the Dome return this Friday, and I promise to have some Oprhan Black season three feelings for you tomorrow! Also, NBC cancelled Hannibal, so goodbye to Margot (if she ever shows up this season, and then survives it.)

Boob(s On Your) Tube: “Defiance” And Doc Yewll Return With a Bang!

Happy Monday, butternut squash souffles! Welcome back to your weekly round-up of queer-themed teevee. Last week, I rolled out a plan to write one thousand full recaps for you, but fell very short of my goals because I was stricken with Post-Camp Plague (including pink eye!), and also because there’s just too much queer TV to fully recap right now. It’s taking up all my hours, and I have other things I want to write for you! There are so many things to say about Miley Cyrus, for example. So many personal essays that need to be stitched together. I haven’t Photoshopped any cat posters for you in months!

So, Riese and I have talked it over and decided to move The Fosters to this column, instead of doing full recaps, so I can try to get Pretty Little Liars done the day after the episode airs, and do right by Orphan Black. And also, Riese and Gabby and I are tag-teaming hard to get your Orange Is the New Black season three recaps up in a timely manner. So, that’s the plan for now. That’s where we are.

Also, if you’re looking for the place to discuss your Orange Is the Black feelings, you’ll want our FRIDAY OPEN THREAD!

Here’s what happened on the television last week.

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Sense8

Streaming on Netflix

We’ve been talking a lot about Sense8 because a lot of our writers and editors are marathoning it right now, and they have lots of different opinions and feelings, so expect a recap/review from Mey and some other folks real soon!

Younger

Tuesdays on TVLand at 10:00 p.m.

Younger aired its season one finale last week, and it was great! It wrapped a really excellent freshman season, in which every episode passed the Bechdel test! Ladies interacting about their careers! Ladies interacting about their families! Ladies interacting about other ladies! The show tackled sexism, ageism, the power of female friendships, and the inexplicable madness of unicycles in Brooklyn. Like I keep saying: Maggie, Liza’s lesbian BFF, didn’t have as much to do as I would have liked, but she did get a couple of short lived romantic entanglements and some great one-liners.

I think the second season is setting up for more of her, though! At the end of the finale, Liza’s daughter decided to move to Brooklyn to live with her mom and Maggie for a while. And also, Liza confessed to her boyfriend about her Big Lies, and they dealt with it and made up, so that should pave the way to more interactions with her lifelong best friend in the future. And I’m still not giving up hope for a Maggie/Lauren May/December love affair.

It wasn’t a deep, thinky first season, but it was a enjoyable one! It’s on TV Land on-demand, if you’re looking for a breezy way to spend an indoor weekend this summer.

Complications

Thursdays on USA at 9:00 p.m.

Jessica Szohr arrives on the series premiere of Complications this Thursday night, but you can go ahead watch the first 15 minutes of the show right now over at USA’s website page. It seems like a Batman origin story so far: Rich white guy works out the trauma of losing his family by becoming a vigilante. But Szohr’s few minutes of screentime as Gretchen Polk make me love her already. She seems like if Daria Morgendorffer were a lesbian nurse, which is basically all it takes to make me buy an engagement ring, if I’m being honest.

We’ll talk about the show more fully once the episode airs.

Hannibal

Thursdays on NBC at 10:00 p.m.

Well, Margot’s still alive, so that’s good, I guess!

Defiance

Fridays on Syfy at 8:00 p.m.

On Friday, Defiance opened its third season with a decisive, two-hour swing for the fences that left me slack-jawed and creeped out and mesmerized and even more smitten than I was last summer. This is one of my favorite science fiction shows ever, and my for sure favorite thing airing on Syfy these days (sorry, Lost Girl!), but it struggled during its first two seasons to figure out what, exactly, it wanted to be. A sci-fi western? A latter day BSG/Caprica-esque rumination on the meaning of life, with space stuff? A third-person shooter video game tie-in? Or a hardcore post-apocalyptic drama about the realities of multiple alien species living with humans on a busted earth after a world war that nearly destroyed the entire galaxy?

“The World We Seize” and “The Last Unicorns” settled firmly (and correctly) on that last thing. It added layers to every character by forcing all of them to make duplicitous and dubious choices for the greater good of their families, or the greater good of Defiance — except, ironically, lesbian Indogene doctor, Meh Yewll, who has made zillions of grey-area choices over the years and was forced to give up some of her own skin this week to heal a member of a new, hostile alien race that showed up in Defiance with the tools to mine the gulanite the town needs to supply itself with electricity. I say “ironically” because Yewll was part of a whole lot of shady doings during the war to ensure the survival of the Voltan, and even cloned Amanda’s sister and implanted a memory-fucker device in her brain to save her own life just last season, so it was very bizarre to see the tables turned and Yewll’s cool autonomy stripped away so quickly. Hopefully her ghost wife comes back to help her process her revenge.

Everybody’s double-crossing everybody, and everybody is going to pay!

Also, it’s worth mentioning that Jaime Murray’s Stahma Tarr is one of the best sci-fi characters of our time. She is a badass Slytherin feminist whose story arc during the first two seasons was so satisfying, and so surprisingly queer that it felt like breathing clean air for the very first time. Her feminist awakening happened in the bed of Mia Kirsher, y’all. It was outrageous and fantastic and I just want more, more, more.

Team TV coverage you may have missed

+ Orange Is The New Black Episode 301 Recap: All About Your Mothers
IT’S HERE. WE’RE ALL HERE TOGETHER AND IT’S HERE.

+ The Fosters Episode 301 Recap: Lesbian Request Denied
Lena makes the very bad decision not to tell Stef that she kissed Monty.

+ FRIDAY OPEN THREAD: Your “Orange Is the New Black” Season 3 Feelings Go Here!
It’s live! Tell us all your feelings, and we will tell you ours!

+ Fan Fiction Friday: Get Your Six-Legged Monkey Crawl On With These 8 “Defiance” Fics
“Stahma Tarr has undergone one of the most remarkable patriarchy-smashing story arcs I’ve ever seen, just a straight up Squib-to-Slytherin transformation that actually all started when she fell in love with another woman.”

+ Pretty Little Liars Episode 601 Recap: One Hundred Years of Solitude
Alas, the Liars escape from the dollhouse without having a lesbian orgy.

+ 26 Excerpts From Scathing Amazon and Netflix Reviews Of “Orange Is The New Black”
“Two sets of breasts in the first 50 seconds told me not to bother.”

Boob(s On Your) Tube: 3 New Queer Characters Join The Summertime TV Mix

Hello, my rainbow-feathered friends! I’m sorry I didn’t have a Boob(s On Your) Tube update for you last week. We had some issues with wifi at camp, and on the real, there wasn’t much to talk about. This week, though, is a whole other story! Pretty Little Liars came back last Tuesday night (expect a 601 recap tomorrow morning, before the new episode), The Fosters comes back tonight (expect a recap of that tomorrow afternoon), Netflix dropped Sense8 on Friday (more on that below), Orphan Black kept steamrolling along (two recaps are coming, probably Wednesday morning), Defiance returns this Friday (you’ll see updates for that here in this column), and Orange Is the New Black lands this very Friday (Riese and I will be co-recapping that for you!). It’s going to be quite a week!

As promised, here is a Google Calendar I will be updating as a queer TV viewing guide. You can also subscribe to it with an RSS reader or import it into any calendar that uses iCal.

Meanwhile, here’s what you missed!

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Sense8

Streaming on Netflix

The main teevee thing that happened while we were on the mountain was the premiere of Netflix’s new sci-fi show Sense8, which features a trans lesbian character named Nomi Marks, played by trans actress Jamie Clayton; and a black lesbian character named Amanita. They are girlfriends! That sounds revolutionary, and the first glance I had of the show via Tumblr GIF sets made it look rad (and queer) as fuck, but I haven’t had a chance to watch any of it yet. However, our own Mey Rude is going to watch and review it for you, so stay tuned for that!

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Younger

Tuesdays on TVLand at 10:00 p.m.

There’s only one episode left in Younger‘s freshman year, and I think it’s safe to say it has been a really solid inaugural season for TV Land’s first original series to feature a lesbian character. Maggie still hasn’t been integrated into the show as well as I would have liked, but in the penultimate episode, “Hot Mitzvah,” she escaped from her Brooklyn loft and joined everyone at Lauren’s second coming-of-age party. Unsurprisingly, she immediately and accidentally slipped into ladykiller mode as Lauren finally confessed a year-long crush on Maggie and smooched her right on the lips. I should have seen it coming! Lauren dropped hints she was queer, and she protested way too much about Maggie’s age! It was a fun, surprising turn that could pay off big time in the second season if the two of them start dating. (Lauren says Maggie is an OWL, an “older, wiser lesbian.” I like that. I am adopting it.) It’d be such a fun role-reversal of Josh and Liza’s relationship, which: finally climaxed into love confessions and Liza telling him the truth about her age and past life.

Tomorrow night’s season finale should be a doozy.

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Complications

Thursdays on USA at 9:00 p.m.

I want to let you know that USA is unveiling a new summertime show next week called Complications. It’s about a straight white doctor dude who becomes a vigilante hero who “does the wrong thing for the right reasons.” White Collar 2.0, or whatever. But! Jessica Szohr (aka Vanessa Abrams from Gossip Girl) (aka The Girl Who Had a Threesome With Dan Humphrey and Hilary Duff) will play a lesbian on the show. Hopefully they’ll do her better than White Collar did with FBI Agent Diana Barrigan, the last lesbian supporting character on USA’s summer slate. Complications lands on June 18.

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Hannibal

Thursdays on NBC at 10:00 p.m.

Hannibal returned to NBC on Thursday night, with no Margot in sight. According to the internet. I cannot watch this gorefest even a little bit, not the commercials, not anything. But my girlfriend, Stacy, says she’ll keep us all updated like she did with The Walking Dead.

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Lost Girl

Thursdays on Syfy at 10:00 p.m.

Syfy burned through its last two episodes of Lost Girl season 5A, and the main thing you need to know — because there’s not enough space in this column to break down the whole thing, and I’ve got to write four full recaps in two days — is that Tamsin confessed her true love to Bo, but Bo shot her down because Bo’s heart belongs to Lauren. And she told Lauren so, while the Scoobies were chasing Greek gods all around town trying to keep Bo’s dad (Hades) from getting at her. Lauren was like, “Oh, boy” and let that hang in the air for almost the whole episode, until finally confessing that she meant “Oh, boy, yes.” (“It will always be oh, boy, yes.”) Season 5B returns to Showcase on September 6, and to Syfy some time in 2016. Maybe I’ll find a way to write about it better for you by then.

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Finding Carter

Tuesdays on MTV at 10:00 p.m.

Carter’s queer BFF from her past life, Madison, and her formerly straight BFF from her current life, Bird, kissed last week on Finding Carter. It was a surprise, a sweet surprise, but not the surprise I was hoping for when this show started, which was to see Kat Prescott playing gay again and Naomi rising from the grave like a Rosewood lesbian and the two of them riding bikes and making out. Sigh. #SkinsFire #NeverForget

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Team TV coverage you may have missed

+ 5 Things I Watched to Prepare Myself for A-Camp
This may sound familiar, and that’s because The Rich Man’s Daughter is basically the TV offspring of Imagine Me & You and I Can’t Think Straight.

+ You Should Watch “The Rich Man’s Daughter,” a Filipino Soap Opera Starring a Lesbian Couple
In preparing for this, my first A-Camp, I’ve turned to movies and TV to give me inspiration and calm my nerves. Hopefully I made the right choices, but if not, at least I had some entertainment while I packed.

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I am very aware that Carmilla came back last week. We had an impromptu viewing party at camp and swooned until we almost fainted dead away. Give me a week to get caught up on teevee from the big box, and I’ll get you something good for Carmilla!