How Not to Throw a Birthday Party, According to Lesbian TV’s Worst Parties

I’m not much of a partygoer due to extreme introversion, but writing and reading and editing our Birthday Issue — and watching Russian Doll twice in a row — has made me think about birthday parties a lot lately. Specifically: what makes a good birthday party and what makes a bad birthday party? And so I turned to my favorite source of information and inspiration, lesbian and bisexual television, to cobble together some tips for myself for the next birthday party I throw. Below is a list of TV shows and the lessons they taught me; hopefully they’ll help you too.

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Jane the Virgin

Location, location, location.

Location is everything! Find a place that’s fun, accessible, affordable, and safe! If, for example, your family owns a hotel where your sister-in-law’s lover was tossed from a window and impaled on an ice sculpture, or your father was buried alive in concrete, or your brother’s son’s mother’s husband was shot dead, think of having your party in an entirely different and less definitely haunted place — even if said murder palace has also been home to some real good times for you personally.

Hashtag You on Netflix/Lifetime

Refine your guest list.

If you think your friend might be hooking up with a stalker who kidnapped her ex-boyfriend and locked him in a cage in his basement and murdered him, maybe say something about that before he comes into your home and steals your family heirlooms and maps out the various entrances and exits so that he can later also murder you. Additionally, if you’re only letting the potential stalker come because you don’t want your best friend to know that you’re kinda also stalking her, you should maybe work that part out in therapy before the party.

The Bold Type

Work your shit out with your partner before the party.

If you’re going to be at a party, especially a very public party, especially-especially one that requires you to canoodle with your partner on, say, a red carpet, make sure the air is clear between the two of you and one of you is not holding onto resentment that you won’t go down on them and the other of you is holding onto shame that is keeping you from going down on them, on account of one of you just might explode in front of your friends and your boss and some cameras. Communication is key! Before you arrive!

The L Word

Celebrate the party’s honored guest.

Much like TV characters should not be blank slates for a showrunner to reboot each season based on their whims, parties should not be about the host’s desires, but about the main guest’s desires. For example, if your trans guy friend gets inexplicably pregnant despite science and precautions — similar to the confounding science of your lesbian friend dying in three days of rapid-fire breast cancer — and then his partner leaves him in the middle of the night, perhaps you should not force him to come to a Willy Wonka-themed baby shower the next day and sit around listening to smug lesbian moms lecture him on, say, breast pumps. There’s a song in Willy Wonka about this exact thing, and it’s not “Pure Imagination.” It goes like this: “There’s no earthly way of knowing / Which direction we are going / There’s no knowing where we’re rowing / Or which way the river’s flowing / Not a speck of light is showing / So the danger must be growing / And the fires of Hell a-glowing.” Don’t be the grisly reaper mowing, man.

The Fosters

Give your girlfriend a heads up if your ex will be there.

If your wife suggests having a dinner party to get to know your new neighbors, it’s probably a good idea to let her know if that neighbor happened to be a “friend” you did a lot of gay things with in high school, while calling it “just friends.” Staying up all night cuddling, professing your undying love, planning your life around them, etc. Just a casual mention, just a tiny little heads up. Lesbians are all friends with their exes, but it’s nice to be able to mentally prepare to meet them, especially if they now share a yard with you.

Defiance

Choose your menu wisely.

You have to be real about who’s capable of bringing what to your party for snacking purposes. Some friends are Great British Bake Off-caliber bakers and some friends just want to stop by the wine store on the way and pick up enough booze for half your guests. Also, some friends might have a murderous vendetta against you because of how you ratted them out to their husbands about the lesbian affair they were having, and in that case, they might not bring cake or alcohol, but literal poison. Just play to everyone’s culinary strengths, know your nemeses, and make sure all your guests are familiar with poison-free alternatives to food with poison in them.

Adventure Time

Don’t let your queer friends’ family get them down.

Look, we all know that sometimes queer people have complicated relationships with their family and those complicated relationships can ruin their big days. If, for one example, your queer friend transformed her family into Candy People and they were forced to live in the bodies of peppermints, gum balls, and chocolate covered bananas for centuries, they might have an axe they choose to grind in a very public way. Try to keep your party details confidential from your friend’s family, and, at the very least, make sure her shape-shifting vampire ex-girlfriend is there to do emotional and physical damage control.

Glee

Be prepared for drama.

Parties bring out the drama in people. Honestly assess going into a party — whether you’re hosting it or just attending it — how likely drama is to occur and be prepared. Let’s say you’re going to the wedding of a former teacher whose complete lack of boundaries and maturity once saw him singing a song about date rape in the hallway while gyrating all over your classmates. You know those vows aren’t going off with a hitch. Bring a friend, and open mind, and proper identification to make use of the open bar.

Skins

Know your limits.

Partaking of alcohol or other recreational substances is a thing some people enjoy at parties — but you have to know your limits, and your audience! If you’re a closeted queer in a situationship with another closeted queer, you might want to keep your consumption to a level that doesn’t lower your inhibitions to the point of public make outs in bouncy castles. (Or, be real with yourself that you’re lowering your inhibitions on purpose so you don’t end up saying some heterosexual wankshite to your make out buddy after you’re sober.) Additionally, don’t overindulge to the point that you and your best friend both have sex with the same person and get furious at each other about it.

Pretty Little Liars

Know when to call it a night.

If all your friends have fallen asleep after a rousing night of discussing what amount of liking Beyoncé is a gay amount of liking Beyoncé, you should also consider turning in. Chances are you’re tired and not thinking straight and maybe/probably have had a little bit to drink. Just hunker on down and get some rest. If not, you might find yourself getting smashed in the head with a shovel by one of the fifty people wandering around your backyard with shovels in the middle of the night, and then buried alive by your own mother, and then pulled from your grave by a sorority witch, and then picked up on the side of the road by your arch-rival, and then taken to a seedy motel for a makeover — and by sunrise you’re flying your airplane off into the sky, resurrected, no place to go, with only a hundred masks of your own face to your name. 🎈

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The Top 12 Lesbian and Bisexual TV Fever Dreams

TV dream sequences are always tricky, and especially so when it comes to lesbian and bisexual characters, because more often that not dreams are used as a way to stage a little bit of fan service that can simply be hand-waved away when the sleeping character wakes up. Networks sometimes even use those dream sequences as queer-bait to lure is into their heterosexual traps! The best TV dream sequences reveal something about a character’s subconscious that we didn’t know, or that we suspected but hadn’t seen confirmed; they divulge a character’s deep secrets to the audience, or to the character herself, and then allow her a chance to act on the truths her sleeping mind pummeled her with. Also, usually the sex is really good.

Below are 12 of the best lesbian and bisexual TV dream sequences.

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Petra and JR — Jane the Virgin episode 410: “Chapter Seventy-Four”

Petra knew something was going on with her and Jane Ramos, but she couldn’t quite admit to herself exactly what that something was — until she dreamed JR at her door, leaning against the frame, talking about getting her off and also getting her off. Petra is shocked and delighted when she wakes up from making out with JR, and immediately finds a way to act on her latent lady-loving leanings.

Ellen — Ellen episode 422: “The Puppy Episode Part 2”

The second part of the most famous coming out episode in TV history opens with a dream of Ellen in the supermarket. Laura Dern’s walking by holding cantaloupes to her chest talking about “melons are on sale!” and k.d. lang is there winking and there’s a clerk with an alternative lifestyle haircut and a bowtie offering Ellen granola samples and the woman on the PA announces there’s a lesbian on aisle five. Ellen recounts the dream to her therapist, Oprah, and asks if she thinks she should read anything into it. It’s the first time Ellen says out loud what’s going on inside her head and heart (later, of course, she accidentally yells it into a microphone at the airport).

Willow and Tara — Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode 422: “Restless”

“Restless” is a fan-favorite episode of Buffy, especially among queer fans. Willow’s specific dream opens with her painting one of Sappho’s poems on Tara’s naked back while she muses that it’s okay they haven’t found a name for their cat yet; she’s not fully grown. The rest of the dream forces Willow to confront her fears about coming out and her worries that she hasn’t changed at all since high school and that Oz and Tara would be better off without her, even possibly better with each other. It’s heartbreaking and illuminating and oh so real.

Bette and Shane and Tina and Helena — The L Word episode 502: “Look Out, Here They Come”

You could argue that the entirety of The L Word season five is someone‘s fever dream. (Maybe mine?) There’s a lot of metacommentary and winking and nodding at the audience. One of the best and weirdest and funniest fan service moments of the whole show happens when the Lez Girls producer starts dreaming up couple combos and pitching them to Tina and Jenny. How about Bette and Shane? How about Bette and Helena? How about Tina and Shane? That one sends Jenny over the edge. It’s not a sleeping dream, but it’s definitely a collective fandom dream, and that’s good enough for me.

Mona and Alison — Pretty Little Liars episode 513: “How the ‘A’ Stole Christmas”

With a defter showrunning hand and less chasing after Twitter trends, Pretty Little Liars could have been one of the most consistently satisfying dreamscape shows on TV. Its very best episodes were fully Lynchian, which makes sense: Alison DiLaurentis is very much Laura Palmer’s offspring. One of the show’s most fun dream sequences happened after Mona’s death and before her resurrection, when she returned to Rosewood to haunt Alison as an omniscient Christmas ghost. There was always something antagonistically queer about their relationship, and Ali always seemed both threatened and delighted by the way Mona was the only person who could outsmart her. Mona guides Ali through her past and through her future, teaching her and chiding her and looking like the most beautiful unhinged snow witch the whole entire time.

Marceline and Princess Bubblegum — Adventure Time episode 711, “Take Her Back”

Near the end of Stakes, Marceline’s very own mini-series, she almost dies, and in those moments while Princess Bubblegum is holding her and begging her to wake up, she dreams something as honest as the first song she sang on the show: She and Bonnibell have grown up and old and they’re together. Together-together. That last thing Marcy says in the mini-series is that she wants what she saw in the dream. To be with PB, forever.

Amy and Karma — Faking It episode 210: “Busted”

This is the most queer-baity dream sequence I can ever remember and it made queer fandom want to set this show on fire. But! I am a forever Karmy shipper and I can’t help it. I love this dream! In the season two midseason finale Amy goes camping with Reagan and it seems like she has finally gotten over Karma and is ready to be with someone who wants to really be with her and also who knows she’s gay. Reagan crawls on top of her and they start having sex and when Amy opens her eyes it’s Karma on top of her. They do their “whoa” “I know” thing and then Amy blinks and she’s in bed with Liam but really it’s Karma in bed with Liam and maybe she was the one dreaming the thing? Or maybe she and Amy were dreaming the same gay dream?! No one ever really knew what the heck was going on here, even the world’s most famous Faking It recapper, Riese Bernard.

Root and Shaw — Person of Interest episode 504: “6,741”

“6,741” is generally regarded by mainstream critics as one of the best dream sequence episodes of TV ever, and it’s generally regarded by lesbian critics as one of the best queer episodes of TV ever. It’s very, very good. After leaning into the subtext over the years, “6,741” finally went there with Root and Shaw. They slept together and caressed each other’s faces and Root even called Shaw “baby”(!!!!!!). At the end of the episode it turns out Shaw is dreaming the whole thing, in captivity, and has in fact dreamed nearly this same thing — Root saving her, Root loving her, Root fighting with and for her — over six thousand times! It’s heartbreaking and harrowing and so romantic it makes me want to hurl myself off a cliff into the ocean!

Sestras — Orphan Black episode 301: “The Weight of This Combination”

Orphan Black‘s third season opens with Helena trapped in a box with a talking scorpion, but we don’t know that at first because we’re seeing inside her mind where her sestras are throwing her a surprisingly sweet baby shower: Felix is grilling ox liver and Cosima is maybe Frida Kahlo and Alison has cooked a million cupcakes and the sun is shining and everyone loves her and her babies are going to be okay. There’s nothing explicitly queer about this, besides the fact that Cosima’s in it, but I’m counting it because it’s an exemplary dream sequence that opens up a character to the audience in a new way and I’ll never get over that all these women are Tatiana Maslany. Never!

Jenny and Madame Vastra and River Song — Doctor Who episode 713: “The Name of the Doctor”

You put River Song, Madame Vastra, and Jenny in a room together and it’s going to make every list I ever make. Best people sitting at a table. Best people drinking champagne. Best people getting attacked by monsters. Best people being people. (And one lizard women from the dawn of time.) In “The Name of the Doctor,” the three of them plus Strax plus Clara enter the dreamscape to discuss some troubling news about the Doctor’s ultimate demise, and while they’re in there Jenny gets attacked and killed. Vastra flips out and might as well have punched through my chest and pulled my heart out of my body for how badly her pain hurt me! Through the sheer force of Vastra’s will and rage, Jenny is resurrected! And, of course, my beloved bisexual semi-Time Lord, River Song, saves the whole entire day (as usual).

Bo — Lost Girl episode 203: “Scream a Little Dream”

We knew a little bit about Bo after season one of Lost Girl, but we didn’t really know her. “Scream a Little Dream” takes us inside her mind and shows us her deepest, darkest fears. That she’ll outlive everyone she loves. That they’re better off without her. That she’ll never really be part of a found family. That they’re only tolerating her. That she’ll never experience real, lasting love. It’s like a series of Dementor attacks that just won’t quit. (Actually, that’s almost exactly what it is: a Dark Fae is feeding off of her nightmares to stay alive.) She finally beats it back with the help of a Light Fae, but not before revealing how very human she is to herself and to the audience.

Kat and Leila — The Bold Type episode 205: “Stride of Pride”

I’m going to call this “best” because: 1) It completely faked me out! I thought Kat was cheating with Adena’s friend! And 2) There’s this thing that broadcast network TV shows have often done with bisexual characters which is give them one woman love interest, and when that woman leaves, their bisexuality is never mentioned or explored ever again. The number of times Riese and I rolled our eyeballs out of our head being forced to put Angela from Bones on a list of queer characters is in the hundreds. Kat being interested in other women (and men, as she showed in season one) is good progress! This dream was ultimately the catalyst that led to Adena and Kat exploring the things that ended their relationship, and that’s a sad business, but drama is inevitable on television and at some point every youth has to deal with the fact that dream sex isn’t cheating.

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What are some of your favorite lesbian and bisexual TV fever dreams?

Boob(s On Your) Tube: The Lesbians on “Hannibal” and “Defiance” Made It Out Alive!

This is the very last week of summer TV, which used to mean that all the reruns were mercifully ending and Real TV was starting back, but that’s not the case at all anymore and the final days of happytime programming coming to an end always bums me out a little bit. Or maybe I’m just feeling morose because USA already pulled the plug on Complications, which means my beloved Gretchen will never return to me again!

It’s not all bad news, though: Faking It returns tonight, and so do Riese’s recaps! And Survivor’s Remorse returned early and is back with us this week, which means so is M-Chuck, one of the most interesting lesbian TV characters from last season and one of the very few black lesbians on half-hour comedies.

Saddle up to say goodbye! Next week’s Boob(s on Your) Tube will be the end of most of these shows for a whole year.

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Chasing Life

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

Well, except for you don’t have to say goodbye to Chasing Life yet. For some reason, it’s running a month behind the other shows on ABC Family. So, April’s brand new husband Leo died, like straight out of a John Green novel or a lesbian trope playbook. They got married and he got dead. This week’s episode focused mostly on April trying to accept it and begin to deal with her grief, but Brenna was around for a little bit, mostly hanging out with Finn, the guy she gave her stem cells to but neither of them know it. He’s recovering from cancer too, and viewing it as just another obstacle in life that he can conquer, a sentiment that inspires Brenna, not only because of her sister having cancer and her new brother-in-law dying of (essentially) cancer but also because it’s hard out here for a bisexual woman whose sexual orientation is consistently erased and maligned.

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Scream

Tuesdays on MTV at 10:00 p.m.

Audrey is still in the running to make it out of Scream‘s first season with all her limbs and livelihood in tact, something that would have been impossible for a queer character even a few years ago! This week, it’s Halloween. There’s no train with a body bag stuffed into the soda cooler, like on Pretty Little Liars, but it’s still gross and creepy. (Also, unlike PLL, they’re revealing the killer in the finale next week for absolute sure, after only ten episodes.)

Audrey’s main worries at this point are: 1) That Emma keeps kissing people who are not her, and 2) That everyone is ignoring the death of Rachel, the girl Emma opened up the show making out with and who was murdered second out of everyone. Emma grunts and mumbles about the first thing, but sets to work investigating Rachel’s murder hardcore with Noah to deal with the other thing. Firstly, they hack Rachel’s iCloud where she kept the zillion hours worth of video footage she had of her own life. What they find is a video showing Kieran leaving a bar with Nina (who is now dead) and who peeps Rachel (also dead) filming them. He looks pissed.

The problem is that Emma’s basically dating Keiran now, even though Will just got sawed in half a hot second ago. So if Emma accuses him of being the killer, Emma’s just going to think she’s doing it because she’s jealous and wants to kiss her, which seems silly but I one time tried to run over my best friend’s boyfriend in our high school parking lot with my literal car, so, you know, it’s not entirely outside the realm of possibility that a lesbian would accuse a teenage boy of murder to keep him away from her teenage best friend. “Best friend.”

If Audrey makes it out of this week’s finale alive (and not the killer), it’ll be a goddamn miracle.

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Rookie Blue

Thursdays on ABC at 10:00 p.m.

It’s been a rough couple of weeks for my precious Gail Peck. Her brother Steve, you’ll remember, was arrested for being a Bad Cop. I don’t think I’ve mentioned this before, but Gail comes from a long line of police people. The Chief of Police is her actual godfather. So she shows up to testify in her brother’s trial, looking so fly, and her dad sweeps her away and tells her to lie on the stand and give her brother an alibi. So while she’s contemplating that impossible thing, the Child Services worker who’s trying to help her adopt Sophie shows up because Gail has missed two meetings since Steve has been arrested.

Gail doesn’t lie on the stand, despite her father literally yelling at her in court about it. Because she’s a good, noble human being who makes hard decisions that aren’t always what make her the most happy, but she does them because they’re right. And in keeping with that theme, at the end of the episode, she tells her social worker that she should allow the other family that wants Sophie to adopt her. It’s a teacher and like a doctor and they already have one really happy foster kid, and Sophie will be better off there. Gail does it because she thinks its right, which means she broke her own twice heart today.

I wonder if I sorted Gail too soon. She’s not really a Slytherin after all, is she?

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Defiance

Fridays on Syfy at 8:00 p.m.

I think we have probably witnessed the very last episode of Defiance, and I’m weirdly okay with that. I wouldn’t have been at the beginning of season three, but this was a really frustrating 13-episode run that took the show in a direction I don’t really care about and didn’t grow any of its awesome female characters even a single bit. At least Yewll was the real hero of the finale!

Her plan is to zip on up to the Omec spaceship and hook her own personal brain up to the ship’s hard drive and blow up all the sleeping aliens who will soon wake up and take over the earth. Datak Tarr takes out Kindzi, so that’s not an issue. Irisa has some problems with Yell’s plan, though; namely that there are thousands of innocent Omec children on this ship who will be murdered preemptively, for doing nothing, if they explode their shup. (She doesn’t mention that wiping out this ship would also, in effect, be a genocide of people of color, but that’s a true thing as well.) Yewll says they could slingshot themselves out into space to get the Omec away from earth, but if they do, they’re probably never coming back. Only she needs to stay and other person to pilot the ship.

Irisa says she’ll do it, but Nolan conks her on the head and sends her back to earth with Datak.

A couple of weeks later, the arch is restored with a holographic light and named after Nolan, even though every plan to save Defiance, including this one, was Yewll’s idea and Yewll continuously sacrificed her body and her life to make it happen. RIP first season of this show that was my favorite season of any sci-fi show ever.

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Hannibal

Saturdays on NBC at 10:00 p.m.

Firstly and most importantly, I want to thank my girlfriend, Stacy, for making sure y’all knew everything going on with Hannibal this season. I never could ever have watched, so she did and wrote up notes for me for nearly every episode and even did screencaps for me so I wouldn’t have to do them and accidentally stumble onto a photo of an eel eating a man’s face. Here’s what happened in Saturday night’s series finale, according to Stacy:

I love you so fucking much.

Wait, no. That was my email to her. This was her email to me:

Earlier in the episode, Alana visited Dr. Chilton, a fame-hungry psychiatrist who has been tormented repeatedly by Hannibal and basically every other character on the show. DO NOT look up pictures of that scene. He’s in the hospital, face disfigured and his full body burned last week by the Red Dragon. She was somewhat complicit in this, since there was a scheme with Will Graham and the FBI to try to get the Dragon out of hiding — as Chilton reminds her when she tries to pass the blame onto Hannibal.

And now Will and the FBI have a new plan: faking Hannibal’s escape in order to draw the Dragon out of hiding, which is obviously not going to work at all how they plan it. Plus Will is playing the FBI anyway, since he and Hannibal are in love (probably really and not just metaphorically?).

Alana proposes the plan to Hannibal, promising him all of his privileges back if he cooperates with the FBI. He helpfully reminds her yet again that he will escape for real, and that every second she has lived since his first promise to kill her has been borrowed time, and that her, her wife, and their son all belong to him. Fun murder-times on the horizon!

So of course Hannibal really DOES escape (duh), and in a shocking twist of characters using their brains on a show with serial killers, Alana, Margot, and their son get on a helicopter and get the fuuuuck outta there and actually survive!!! …. But clearly only because the series got cancelled. If there was even one more season or a movie, you can count on Hannibal killing Alana — at the very least — in a particularly terrible way.

Other things that happened: Will and Hannibal kill the Red Dragon together (after getting stabbed and shot, but sure) and embrace, covered in blood, for a really long time, and then fall off of a cliff together into the ocean. Hannibal says something like “this is all I ever wanted for you, Will” and Will says “it’s beautiful” — again, they are absolutely covered in blood — and then they hug, and then Will makes them both fall off of this seaside cliff.

I will not tell you what Gillian Anderson’s character did in the end, because it was psychotic.

Oh, and that actress who played Tara on True Blood also survived after much torment.

The end.

YAY! #NoMovie

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I Am Cait

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

I Am Cait has suffered dismal ratings after the first episode of the summer docu-series. Y’all don’t seem to be enjoying it too much, either. But I’m still intrigued by it, mostly because as Caitlyn learns about the trans community, so does the audience, from people like GLAAD’s Jenny Boylan and the Human Rights Campaign and parents of trans kids and trans women of color who have been victims of so much oppression and hardship. And that feels really important right now. I mean, yes, half the show is that and half the show is vapid entitlement that I can’t even wrap my head around, but if people are coming for that and learning in the process, I think that’s an okay trade-off.

This week, Boylan and Candis Cayne work really hard to help Caitlyn understand that gender and sexuality are two different things, and that Caitlyn should follow her heart when it comes to dating and to love. The tabloids are all speculating that Jenner and Cayne are together, and the recent episodes have hinted that that’s a thing that will happen by the show’s end next week.

Obviously the main Kardashian thing that was happening last night was Kim watching Kanye announce his bid for presidency, so this episode was overshadowed just a little bit.

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Survivor’s Remorse

Saturdays on Starz at 9:30 p.m.

If you didn’t watch the six-episode first season of Survivor’s Remorse, here’s a quick rundown: The show follows professional basketball player Cam Calloway as he joins the NBA and brings his family along with him to a new life of luxury. M-Chuck is Cam’s sister. She’s very openly and unapologetically gay, and she and Cam have a very loving but antagonistic relationship. Even though the show is about an NBA player, it actually never shows Cam on the court (or allows the characters to say “NBA” or like “Atlanta Hawks.”) It focuses instead on his relationship with his family, and his family’s relationship with their new lifestyle, and on Cam’s relationship with brands and media and fans and stuff.

After a stellar first season (on the court), Cam gets a crazy bonus and so the first episode of this season (of the show) opens with the Calloway family moving into a palatial home in Atlanta. M-Chuck takes at least a little credit for the move, telling Cam: “If I hadn’t accidentally launched that lawn chair off your roof deck, your condo association would’ve never kicked us out, and we would’ve never moved here to Calloway Castle!”

The episode mostly revolves around Cam learning to deal with all his off-court responsibilities, but the B-story focuses on his sister-in-law’s decision to stop chemically relaxing her hair. This after she awesomely destroys an archaic lawn jockey that came with their new house. She tells Reggie, “I’m sick of forcing myself to accept another ethnicity’s ideal.” And he supports her 100 percent. Teyonah Parris, who plays Missy, was the inspiration for the storyline, after she made the same decision in real life. (If you don’t know her from this show, you might know her as Dawn from Mad Men or Coco in Dear White People.)

This week’s episode focuses on a fight between Cam and M-Chuck that promises to deal with violence against men, so we’ll see how that goes.

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Carmilla

Tuesdays and Thursdays on YouTube

For starters, the street cats Stacy and I are socializing are super into Carmilla.

On this week’s Carmilla, Mattie reveals everything she knows about Corvae, the corporation her mom wanted her to transfer Silas University to in the event of her death. It’s just a bunch of really old vampires and demigods, whatever, and basically Laura is stuck between handing control over to them or keeping it with Baron Vordenberg (WHICH IS A TERRIBLE IDEA, I’VE READ THE BOOK). Actually, the idea that Laura has any control at all makes Mattie cackle with glee. She explains, once again, that Laura is an impotent pawn in a game of immortals and the only reason she’s still breathing and walking around and being adorable is because Carmilla is in big gay forever love with her. Laura decides probably she should let the vampires deal with the vampires for now, and after they bounce, she tells the secret of how to kill Mattie to Danny, even though Carmilla told that secret to her in the strictest confidence!

In the middle of the night, Carmilla and Mattie try to sneak out to drink a fish god’s blood to either go crazy or hulk out and take out Vordenberg, but Laura wakes up and stops them and gives a season one-style speech about how people always underestimate her and tell her what she can’t do, but she showed them all when she figured out the old Dean was murdering virgins and she’s going to do it again this time! Carmilla is so turned on/reminded why she fell in love with Laura in the first place that she tells Mattie to go on without her to dine on the fish god; she’s gonna stay here and stare longingly at Laura.

Also, Perry gets weird with Danny, using her neverending star-crossed affection for Laura to puppeteer her into a place where she’s ready to so some murders.

Tumblr says Perry is possessed by the Dean. I don’t know. I feel for sure like Danny’s gonna die, though.

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Team TV coverage you may have missed

+ Fan Fiction Friday: 15 Multi-Fandom Love Stories Featuring Queer Women of Color
Orange Is the New Black, The Fosters, Sense8, Pretty Little Liars, Glee, and more!

+ Nicki Minaj Calls Miley Out, Kanye West Announces Presidential Run and More MTV VMAs Revelations
Taylor and Nicki performed together, Nicki gets real about Miley, Kanye dissed award shows at an award show and Amber Rose unveiled a radically feminist new look at this year’s VMAs.

Boobs(s On Your) Tube: Caitlyn Jenner Attends Pride, Canada Adds Another Queer Character and More

It’s the slowest time of the TV year, that weird lull between summer television and fall television, when everything is winding down and everything else is gearing up. Before fall TV kicks off in earnest, Autostraddle CEO/Editor-in-Chief, Riese, is going to do her annual Queer Lady Teevee Viewing Guide. Until then, here’s what happened on what’s left on the summertime boob(s) tube.

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Chasing Life

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

I was wrong last week when I told you Chasing Life had aired its midseason finale; there are still six more episodes left! However, we already talked about what happened last Monday night, so we won’t be able to discuss tonight’s episode until the next Boob(s On Your) Tube column.

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Clipped

Tuesdays on TBS at 10:00 p.m.

Wellll, Clipped‘s first season has now come and gone and Charmaine didn’t reveal her queerness, after all. Such a shame.

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Scream

Tuesdays on MTV at 10:00 p.m.

I really pushed my luck watching Scream as long as I did. As I mentioned last week, Will go sawed right the fuck in half and it made me feel sick for two days. This week opened with a flashback of that thing and so now I can never watch it again. I can, however, tell you that Audrey survived the penultimate episode of season one! Next week, we’ll find out whether or not she’s immortal and/or the serial killer who has offed half the students in her school. Maybe also she’ll kiss Emma? I’m pushing my luck even wishing for that.

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Rookie Blue

Thursdays on ABC at 10:00 p.m.

One thing I promised myself this year is that I would watch Rookie Blue with the American audience and not, um, obtain episodes as they aired in real-time in Canada. It hasn’t been a problem — until this week! Because holy bananas, y’all, there’s a new detective in town, a Homicide one, named Detective Anderson, and she kind of hates Gail but also she is gay! She just comes right out and says it when she’s accosting Gail about her brother, Steve, getting tossed into the slammer jammer for being a bad cop. Like, “Oh, he wanted to hook us up one time, but I’m glad that didn’t pan out since your family’s legacy is dirty cops.”

That’s the only thing that happens this week. Gail’s face is like EXCUSE ME. And my face also is like EXCUSE ME.

It turns into a thing, though, in the coming weeks. It’s like watching Pride and Prejudice only it’s Canadian cops and they’re both Mr. Darcy.

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Defiance

Fridays on Syfy at 8:00 p.m.

Yewll! Yewll! Yewll! Yewll! With one episode to go in Defiance‘s third (and probably final) season left, Doc Yewll gets her bad self un-brainwashed, breaks out of Omec jail with Datak Tarr, chews bubblegum, gets a gun, and says the words: “Looks like mama got her groove back.”

Stahma also got her groove back, a little bit. She did some manipulating, some conniving. She’s still not her old self, not close, and probably we will never witness that old self again, but it’s good to see Jaime Murray getting to do something before the series end.

Next week is the finale. The Big Omec Showdown.

Oh, also Nolan and Amanda finally Zzzzzzz.

Whoops, sorry, dozed off.

Nolan and Amanda finally Zzzzzzz.

Dang, come on. Kissed. Nolan and Amanda finally kissed.

(ZZZZzzzzzzz.)

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Hannibal

Saturdays on NBC at 10:00 p.m.

Next week is the series finale of Hannibal, a thing Margot will be returning for, which means probably her or Alana or both of them are going to get serial killed. This week Hannibal ate a pair of lips in front of Alana to prepare her for the doom. The Red Dragon mailed them in an envelope and I guess “loose human lips” are not a thing that show up on the X-Ray machine because the couriers at the asylum just gave the package to Hannibal and there were lips inside and he chomped right down on them in Alana’s face.

Thank God I have a girlfriend who watches this show and explains it to me. I would be vomiting for days.

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I Am Cait

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

https://instagram.com/p/4fIHySyb3z/

The biggest surprise of the summer is how many real, earnest, truly moved tears I have cried over I Am Cait, which, despite its detour into Karsashianville last week, has actually served as a sort of mini-documentary to educate the world about trans people as Caitlyn Jenner learns so much about the trans community herself. This week, Candis Cayne challenged Caitlyn to start using the word “we” instead of “them” when referring to the LGBT community, and also to get more involved. Caitlyn was worried that her appearance at events like Trans Pride Los Angeles or Gay Pride NYC was going to cause a media circus, and also she was afraid that the queer community, at large, was going to have a hard time accepting her being there.

Before she headed out to NYC, she met up with two of her dude buddies who hadn’t seen her since she began her transition, and they were both a little uneducated about trans issues but also so warm and welcoming to her. One of the most moving moments was when her friend Sergio told her he’d already changed her name in his phone, before she even called to hang out with him.

Caitlyn also met with GLAAD to discuss her fears, and they told her to use the media circus she was afraid of to spotlight all the hardships facing trans women in America today, and of course, that’s exactly what she’s using this show to do.

At Candis’ performance at NY Pride, Caitlyn was so nervous to go out and meet the crowd, but as soon as they saw her, they started chanting her name and cheering and waving, and she was just so overwhelmed. Candis introduced her, and the crowd began cheering and filming her with their phones as she stood up, and filmed them right back.

The episode closed with Caitlyn meeting some Broadway starts, doing a Rockettes dance with them, and voicing over how the response to her coming out as trans has been bigger than even her huge Olympic fame, while walking outside to a jam-packed Times Square and driving away with her trans friends as people line the sidewalk and called her name.

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Carmilla

Because there are so many TV shows with queer women in them these days, it’s almost impossible to also keep up with any web series, unless the web series you’re talking about is Carmilla. For those of you not in the know, Carmilla is very loosely based on the Sheridan Le Fanu novel and is probably the queerest web series in the history of the internet, and one of the more diverse ones. The main protagonist, Laura Hollis, is a student at Silas University, a place with more Magical Beasts than Hogwarts, and her roommate is Carmilla Karnstein, a — spoiler alert! — full-on vampire.

Season one revolves around Laura and her friends’ quest to find out why girls keep disappearing from Silas. (The reason girls keep disappearing from Silas is Carmilla kidnaps virgins for her mom, who, it turns out, is the Dean of the university.) Also, season one revolves around Laura and Carmilla finally realizing they’re in big gay love with each other.

Season two follows the story of Laura and Carmilla moving into her mom’s old Victorian mansion with their friends and the rest of the student body dealing with the fact that the school is super duper supernatural. Carmilla’s sister, Mattie, shows up and is AWWWEEESOME in every Slytherin way. She’s on the Silas Board of Trustees. We’re 24 episodes into the 36-episode season and so far Carmilla and Laura have broken up, despite still being in big gay love with each other; a group of students has formed a basically fascist vigilante enforcer group to eradicate all non-humans from the campus; Carmilla and Mattie have waged open warfare on the human population; and Carmilla and Laura have stared longingly at each other and cried and talked about how they’re sacred to each other and miss each other like holes ripped inside their bodies. It’s so campy. It hurts SO GOOD.

Get caught up and we’ll get into the nitty gritty next week!

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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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In which things start falling apart.

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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: 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

Fan Fiction Friday: 10 Sapphic Superhero Stories to Save You
Renee Montoya and Kate Kane, Peggy Carter and Angie Martinelli, Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy!

Orange Is The New Black Episode 308 Recap: Fear and Loathing in Panty Town
Ruby Rose, the results are in and you are NOT THE FATHER!

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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I’ve got a full-on glorious season three Orphan Black roundtable coming at you tomorrow. We’re talking queer themes, feminist themes, and that goddamn death that I’m still not over.

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.”

Fan Fiction Friday: Get Your Six-Legged Monkey Crawl On With These 8 “Defiance” Fics

Stahma Tarr from Syfy’s not-praised-enough Defiance is one of my favorite TV characters ever, which is why I’m maybe the only person on the internet who’s as excited about the third season of the space western landing today as I am about the third season of Orange Is the New Black. Do you know Stahma? In two seasons, she’s 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 (who may or may not still be alive as a cloned version of her original self? It’s complicated). (Also, don’t get weird about Jenny Schecter when you look at these two; Mia Kirshner is a singular talent in this world!)

Stahma is complexly queer, but Defiance also boasts a(nother Slytherin) lesbian alien named Doc Yewll, who is kind of like April Ludgate’s post-apocalyptic fever dream of her own future. It’s good stuff!

Anyway, below are 8 femslashy Defiance fics, but I’d really love it if you could tell me where to find at least a hundred more.

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A New World by AgentJoanneMills

Pairing: Myka Bering/Stahma Tarr and Myka Bering/HG Wells and Kenya/Stahma
Plot: It’s kind of a Warehouse 13/Defiance crossover. Kind of.
Length: 125,000

“That’s H.G. Wells.”

Amanda shakes her head. “No.”

“She is. The H.G. Wells the world knew was actually her brother Charles, and —”

Rafe cuts him off. “That can’t be H.G. Wells.”

“Lemme explain first!”

“No, no.” Amanda says. “That can’t be.”

“Won’t you please just listen to me? Just because she’s a woman doesn’t mean that —”

“It’s not because of her being a woman,” Nolan says. “Though you’re gonna have to elaborate on that later.”

“Then what the hell is this about?”

It is Irisa who tells him, “That can’t be your H.G. Wells because that woman… she’s Stahma Tarr.”

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Name in Lights by murraysmistress

Pairing: Kenya/Stahma
Plot: Defiance AU, in which Amanda is attending law school in what’s left of New York while Kenya enrolls in high school.
Length: 46,000 words

When the bell rang at last, Kenya was stopped by a hesitant tap on the shoulder and a troubled white smile.

“Will you spend your fuavano with me?” Stahma asked, her voice songlike on the one word of her mother tongue. “Datak is not here today, and I- I cannot bathe alone.” Her smile deepened and her eyes fell lower as she finished her sentence in a manner that made Kenya think she was actually ashamed of asking the question.

Kenya nodded slowly. Then, as realization hit, she began to shake her head vigorously and wave her hands.

“Woah there, you want me to bathe with you? I don’t think-”

Stahma cut her off with a laugh. A laugh. A laugh that trembled and danced and faded quickly, but a laugh nonetheless. Kenya’s heart leapt. “No, I understand. I just wanted to know if you’d eat your lunch with me?”

“Oh.” A vivid red swept over Kenya’s cheeks. “I’m sorry. Maybe that was a bit rude. Yeah, I’d… I’d love to have lunch with you.”

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Light Gets In by kathryne

Pairing: Stahma/Kenya
Plot: Just a glorious little missing moments drabble.
Length: 1,500 words

The dimness of the lights gives the patrons of the NeedWant only the illusion of privacy, but Stahma has little fear as she passes through the room. With her cowl up, few humans will be able to tell her from her Castithan sisters. Those that can are not the type who concern her. She enters Kenya’s quarters unnoticed, but only then does she let her cowl fall.

“Stahma, hello.” Kenya greets her with a cup of tea and a kiss, just brushing the corner of her mouth, promising greater delights to come. The heat of the cup and Kenya’s touch tingles through Stahma and she smiles back with real affection.

Kenya is composed of vibrant colours, even more so than her brothel. Her hair is unbound; it frames her face and the soft swell of her breasts where her robe gapes open. Her dark brows and the bold, artificial red of her lips make her skin look pale for a human, but against Stahma’s whiteness she is pink and gold. Stahma studies her eyes – such a different blue than the light outside! Framed with thick lashes and outlined in shades that match her robe, they watch Stahma guilelessly.

“You look very… pretty… today,” Stahma says, setting the tea aside. She draws her fingers through the dark fall of Kenya’s hair, marvelling at the contrast. Kenya’s skin is warm; her cheeks flush pinker at Stahma’s words.

“Pretty for a human?” Kenya asks.

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These things without names by CherryIce for diadelphous

Pairing: Kenya/Stahma
Plot: A fantastic 4,000-word character study of the inside of Stahma Tarr’s magnificent mind.
Length: 4,000 words

Kenya. Kenya is something more like the Castithans in her easy sexuality, not like the Humans who hide their sex and bodies, as if they were things of shame, not given by Reyatso.

Kenya is nothing at all like a Castithan. She burns too brightly, wants and takes and builds and meets everyone’s eyes. She is clever without being smart about it, smooth and polished but without a hint of subtlety or restraint. She demands and expects the world to fall into line. She makes Stahma – she makes Stahma want.

And her husband – she loves her husband, loves his strength and his assertion, but Datak is such a waste, because he has the potential to be so much more, so much greater. He is all intelligence and grand ideas; his aspirations hobbled not by only by himself, by his own ambition and desire to dominate a world that no longer exists. Datak could rule this world, but he is too busy trying to dominate one that’s gone, that he never lived in and never truly existed as he thought it did, a liro he saw only from a distance. He could yet be brilliant if he would but bend to her hand…

The gutter has never been bred out of him, and he sprawls atop his blue cast throne in the Hollows with a sneer unique to someone looking down upon those who were once their betters. She wishes he would understand that she loved him just as well when he had nothing.

Kenya is making her own world with her own rules, but she cannot seem to weave her pieces amongst the existing thread.

Stahma could sing poems about her.

(Kenya is good at knowing exactly what people need. She makes Stahma wonder if she herself is as astute in that way as she has always thought.)

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Flatterly by diadelphous for Lyrstzha

Pairing: Kenya/Stahma
Plot: Post-season one finale, Kenya wakes up alive.
Length: 6,000 words

Kenya opened her eyes.

A light shone overhead, bright enough to pierce through her skull. She turned her head to the side, squinting, fluttering her eyelashes. It wasn’t just the light. Her head throbbed in time with her heartbeat, in time with the beeping of a nearby vitals monitor.

“What—Where—“

Trees. That was the last thing she remembered. A forest floor the color of blood. Dappled light falling through the pine needles. Over her clothes, over the silver flask, over Stahma’s skin—

Oh God. Stahma.

“Where am I?” Kenya shouted. There was no answer. She tried to prop herself up, but her muscles were weak and she could only hold herself for a few seconds before collapsing down, exhausted. She looked off to the side. There wasn’t much to see. A wooden wall. Shelves sagging with plants—healing plants, most of them.

“Doc?” Kenya rolled over onto her back. The light didn’t hurt her as badly now. “I’m up, if that’s what you’re waiting for.”

Still no answer. Kenya took a deep breath and gathered up all her strength and pushed herself up. Immediately she swooned, her head spinning. The beeping off to the side went crazy, beepbeepbeepbeeeeeeeeeeeep.

“Keep your head down!” The voice was unfamiliar. Definitely not Doc Yewll’s. “Good lord, girl, don’t you know what you’ve been through?”

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Royalty by eyepatchesandpipes

Pairing: Stahma/Irisa
Plot: A drabble of Irisa drawing Stahma. Like drawing-drawing her. Not drawing her a bath.
Length: 1,000 words

Irisa had felt as though she and the Castithan had stared at each other for hours, forming a connection that took root within her chest and spread out to suffuse her body with a strange warmth. However it had, in reality, been but a few seconds before the Castithan’s attention had been drawn away.

“Stahma?”

Irisa now focused on the man addressing the Castithan, Stahma. Her heart nearly stopped at the sight of his face – Datak Tarr. She watched as Stahma took his arm and allowed him to lead her away before Irisa glanced down at what she assumed would be a blank page. Instead she found a rough sketch of Stahma’s face, her head tilted to the side and a small smile tugging at the edge of her lips. But those eyes, eyes Irisa was sure she could lose herself in if she so wished.

Gazing at the drawing Irisa felt a smirk of her own adorning her face. This woman was the wife of Datak Tarr, the king of the crime world in Defiance. Stahma was his queen. They were tough, living in a world where few would dare to tread; the city’s equivalent of the Badlands. Not only did they demand respect, but they earned it. Stahma was dangerous, Stahma was respected, and Stahma was off-limits. Stahma was everything that Irisa wanted.

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Tell Me What You Want by MykaWells

Pairing: Kenya/Stahma
Plot: Post-season one finale, Kenya is mad as hell, but still super into Stahma
s sexy Slytherin deal.
Length: 5,000 words

Stahma. Stahma fucking Tarr.

Because of course it was Stahma. It was always Stahma pulling this sneaky shtako.

It was coming back now, the memory of entering the forest, then the memory of blackness rapidly closing in on Kenya, then her very last memory, which felt more like a bizarre fever dream, of hearing Stahma sing one of her poems, the poems she refused to ever perform for Kenya before that moment, before she poisoned Kenya.

Kenya gritted her teeth, felt her hands shake with all the suppressed rage in her body. It wasn’t suppressed out of choice. Kenya had no other option, because doing what she wanted to do to Stahma in that moment would have caused excruciating pain far beyond anything Kenya would have been capable of inflicting upon Stahma.

Kenya could, however, glare into the darkness in the general direction of Stahma’s voice. Stahma moved out of the shadow to stand at the foot of Kenya’s bed, which as far as alien prison mattresses went, was actually quite comfortable and felt unaccountably clean.

“What,” Kenya started, her voice weak and rough. She paused to swallow, and forced out the next words. “The fuck do you want?”

Stahma smiled in that infuriating way she had when she was amused by Kenya’s humanness. She moved to kneel by Kenya and took a small vile out of one of those hidden pockets the Casti dresses always seemed to have.

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taking back the chance to feel alive by wariangle

Pairing: Stahma/Kenya
Plot: Inside the head of Clone!Kenya after she leaves Defiance.
Length: 3,000 words

She stumbles out of Defiance, a patchwork creature dressed in a dead girl’s skin with someone else’s memories rattling around in her head. She is breaking apart at the seams, failing to encompass the identity, the being, of Kenya Rosewater, a specter haunting a deserted name and face. Caught in the horror of existing in this non-existence, she flees without a backward glance.

These days, the world is a freakshow, torn apart and patched jaggedly together, alien technology rushing in to fill the holes appearing as the Earth was ripped asunder. Defiance was supposed to be an escape from all that, a place where humans and Votans could meet not in a collision, but in understanding. It, too, was a place with rough edges, but it had been a work in progress, a beacon of hope, a new start. They had passed through war and strife to get there, the small, teetering town in the middle of nowhere, but with Amanda by her side it had seemed a haven, a shot at happiness. A place to build a future.

She grits her teeth at the memories, the way they invade her alien mind and fills it with shreds of artificial humanity. She is not Kenya. Kenya was a woman of warmth and kindness, a survivor against impossible odds, a loving sister.

She, whatever she is, is something else, something that carries silver beneath her human facade, that can crack bone as easily as twigs; something that Amanda Rosewater has bled into and merged with. There are too many layers – Kenya, Amanda, newly created memories upon implanted ones. She fears that beneath it all, where who she really is should be, there is nothing but a void.

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I really, really enjoyed talking to so many of you about fan fiction at camp. I’ve created a list of all the pairings/shows you want me to explore in this column, and will begin checking them off next week!

Boob(s On Your) Tube: 16 Summer TV Shows You Can Count On For Queer Characters

Hello, goji gummy berry bears! Welcome to Boob(s On Your Tube)! We’re in that weird two-week window between fall and summer TV where there’s hardly anything happening. I mean, my DVR managed to record 22 episodes of The Golden Girls in the last seven days, so something is happening, but not a lot of new somethings. So! This week, I’m going to run down the 16 TV shows that are coming at you this summer that definitely feature queer characters. There will probably be more. Old shows will add new queer characters. New shows will debut queer characters. (For new shows, my money is on Killjoys, a new Syfy show by the producers of Orphan Black and creator of Lost Girl; and Stitchers, a new ABC Family show that is probably gay because nearly all ABC Family shows are gay these days.) However, here are the shows I know we can count on.

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June

Pretty Little Liars

ABC Family, June 2

Super lesbian Emily Fields returns to continue her courtships with Alison DiLaurentis, Paige McCullers, probably a new handful of gorgeous queer women who fall out of the sky, and potentially an actual Liar. Masks will mask masks of faces on faces. Parrots will fly. Mona will transcend. And Hanna will continue to know what Hanna means. Can’t miss, must see, Rosewood forever.

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Hannibal

NBC, June 4

Margot Verner is a lesbian character on NBC’s brain-bending gorefest, Hannibal, a show my girlfriend calls “the most beautiful, psychologically damaging thing on network TV.” I have asked her multiple times about the fate of Margot Vener, but I keep checking out when she gets to the part where Margot’s brother cuts out her ovaries. She’s alive, though. That much I know for sure.

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The Fosters

ABC Family, June 8

In the season two finale, Lena kissed another woman! The other woman was Monty, the principle at Anchor Beach! But Lena didn’t have time to tell Stef because Jesus and Mariana and their birth mother (who was pregnant with a child Stef and Lena had agreed to adopt) got into a car accident that included one fatality! If that level of drama delights you, you’re gonna love season three, which promises a brand new foster kid and Lena not telling Stef about the aforementioned kiss.

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Becoming Us

ABC Family, June 8

Mey has watched the first two episodes of this show, and she’s not really feeling it. From her review:

I also said I hoped that, unlike Maura’s family in that show, the transgender parent in Becoming Us‘s family wouldn’t be filled with horrible people. While I wouldn’t go that far, after watching the first two episodes I was definitely expecting Carly’s family and the other people in the show to be much more supportive of her and to be better examples of how to act when you have a trans family member than they were. After all, why would you agree to star in a reality show unless you thought it was going to paint a good picture of you? Instead, I found myself crying halfway through the first episode — not because the show was touching my heart, but because I couldn’t believe how Carly was being talked about by her family.

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Orange Is the New Black

Netflix, June 12

This needs no introduction or explanation. Orange Is the New Black is everything. I know it, you know it, Netflix knows it. Now we just need it. Give it to us so we can binge it!

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Defiance

Syfy, June 12

Last season, Syfy’s post-apocalyptic alien/human western revealed that Doc Yewll is a lesbian who sometimes has visions of her dead Indogene wife. Also, of course, there’s Stahma Tarr and Kenya Rosewater’s love affair that did not die when Stahma shot Kenya in the face. Sure, Kenya is dead now, but only kind of, because Kenya is also alive as a clone. She’ll be back in season three, and it’s one of the things I am most looking forward to this whole summer.

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Chasing Life

ABC Family, June 17

Brenna came out as bisexual during season one, a thing her grandmother loved and celebrated every time she had the chance. Brenna’s girlfriend, Greer, had to skip town to go live with her dad in like Rhode Island at the end of the season, but everyone’s fingers are crossed that she will return for some more live-in lady-love.

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The Last Ship

TNT, June 21

Lt. Alisha Granderson is the only lesbian lady surviving on the last ship, but she does have a girlfriend back home. Granderson didn’t have enough to do last season, but I’m hoping the writers explore her backstory and place on the ship a little more this summer. Christina Elmore, who plays Granderson, is a marvel.

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Rookie Blue

ABC, June 25

Rookie Blue kicks off its sixth season here in the States this summer. The Canadian drama kicked off its new season in its home country on May 19th. The show’s creatives have talked very candidly about being blown away by the online response to Gail and Holly’s relationship. On the upside, Gail is not going back to men. On the downside, there’s no firm word on how Holly will factor into the coming season.

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Under the Dome

CBS, June 25

Last year, lesbian mama Carolyn Hill spent too much time in captivity and not enough time on-screen. The show is headed to Thursdays this summer, hoping to capitalize on Big Brother viewers. CSI fan favorite Marg Helgenberger is also joining the cast for an extensive arc. Carolyn remains one of the only black lesbian TV characters on broadcast network TV, so I’m rooting really hard for more for her to do this season.

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Scream

MTV, June 30

Bex Taylor-Klaus, who you remember from The Killing and Arrow, has joined the cast as a “bi-curious” character. In the realm of horror films, that means she’ll face an imminent and horrific death. Let’s see how that trope translates to the small screen.

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July

Ray Donovan

Showtime, July 12

Kate Moennig as Lena never has enough to do on this show, but also, it’s Kate Moennig, so every minute on-screen counts as ten minutes on-screen.

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Masters of Sex

Showtime, July 12

Betty was upgraded to a series regular in season two, but weirdly, it didn’t translate into much more screen time. Mainstream and queer critics alike thought it was a dumb move to relegate her to the shadows. She did, however, ditch The Pretzel King, so her storyline is wide open for sapphic shenanigans this summer.

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Hollywood Game Night

NBC, July 17

Jane Lynch doing her best Jane Lynch once a week with other celebrities!

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August

Survivor’s Remorse

Starz, August 22

One of the biggest and best TV surprises last year was M-Chuck, the lesbian character on Starz’s original series about a basketball player who makes it from poverty to the NBA and brings his family along with him. She’s smart about life and smart about business and completely unapologetic about being an openly gay lady. She’s also her family’s rock. I am very excited to see where Survivor’s Remorse takes her this season. (Riese also just watched this show and loved it!)

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Faking It

MTV, August 31

Amy’s in love with Reagen, or Karma, or herself, or all three. Who even knows at this point. Definitely season three will be a lot of girls kissing and fandom losing its mind and Riese writing brilliant recaps. Those are things you can count on.

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I’ve also made you a downloadable PDF calendar with each of these premiere dates! I’ll updated it as more information becomes available!

What shows are you most looking forward to this summer?

Autostraddle’s Favorite LGBT TV Characters Of 2014

NPR ran a story yesterday about how LGBT rights activists are calling 2014 a “super banner year” for marriage equality (after the banner year of 2013). It’s silly, but that’s exactly how I would describe 2014 in terms of LGBT TV. In 2012, we added 11 new queer female TV characters to the pop culture canon. In 2013, we added 44; an enormous leap! And this year, 53 new lady-lovin’-ladies made their way to our televisions, bringing the yearly total to 128. ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-EIGHT. When I started writing about gay women on television, there was one single leading lesbian character on primetime. Just one. I’m going to break this down for you, in chart form, tomorrow, but before I do that, our crack team of writers has weighed in on their favorite characters of this monumental year.

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Riese, Editor-in-Chief

Recaps: Faking It, Glee, Orange is the New Black

Amy Raudenfeld (Rita Volk), Faking It

Amy has really nice hair! Even first thing in the morning, her hair looks really fantastic! She’s got really cool t-shirts, too, I like her t-shirts. Oh right, and her coming out experience has resonated deeply with all of y’all. This show (and Amy’s character) was a surprisingly delightful situation delivered to us by MTV this past summer, against all odds, and although the show had some profoundly disappointing moments it had some touching, honest and hilarious ones too. Now we must just close our eyes and pray that she’ll get over Karma and get under Reagan, stat.

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Poussey (Samira Wiley), Orange Is the New Black

This season, we finally got the inside scoop regarding our girl on the inside, Poussey, who I consider to be the heart and the moral center of this consistently challenging, innovative and progressive series. We loved her even before she wore that sleeveless shirt, tried scissoring and dissolved into a fit of giggles, stood up for her lesbian love life against all odds and a very stern German military man and dealt with that awkward thing where you’ve got a crush on your best friend. But afterwards? Our heart was in her hands.

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Syd (Carrie Brownstein), Transparent

I just really hate Josh and I felt like maybe she just slept with Josh because she was secretly in love with Gabby Hoffman, which made me feel better about life. Plus it was Carrie Brownstein! Basically I loved how queer this show was so I want to plug it, but all of the bi and gay female characters on it were such selfish assholes that I’m left with only Syd to have and to hold.

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Kate, Contributing Editor

Recaps: Bomb Girls, Orange is the New Black, Once Upon A Time

Stella Gibson (Gillian Anderson), The Fall

How do I begin to describe Stella Gibson? She is my favorite television character of all time. Doubt me if you will, but like hidden dive bars and the third season of Luther, if you know then you know. Played to absolute chilling perfection by Gillian Anderson, Stella Gibson is an amazingly complex individual. There’s a tradition in storytelling of creating a heroine by hurting her and giving her a backstory of pain and victimhood; Stella is not that character. Stella does not need to be “haunted by her past” for the stakes to be high. She sees your trope and she walks right on by, honey. To show her strength, she has not been made unemotional or unfeminine. She’s at the top of her field, she is respected and intimidating without there being a stereotypical compromise in the conditions of her respectfulness.

Her sexuality is brilliantly portrayed, which might seem like a weird thing to say until you have watched her in action, in which case you know exactly what I’m talking about. I have twice on Twitter referred to The Fall as a show that “exists only to demonstrate that Gillian Anderson has chemistry with literally everybody”, and I stand by that. Stella does what Stella wants. There are attempts to slut-shame her, to which Stella Gibson responds with some of the most feminist things you have ever heard on television (coming from the mouth of Gillian Anderson to boot, as if you weren’t already breathing heavily and fainting on your fainting couch). The amount of times she cuts some dude down to his weak-ass size is episodic. I don’t want to spoil anything for those of you on the other side of the Atlantic who have yet to enjoy the second season, but let’s just say that Stella Gibson is also undeniably not heterosexual. Not that we ever had any doubts. Did I mention it’s Gillian Anderson, the human equivalent of a fine wine? It’s like watching a beautiful ice sculpture who can move us to tears with a simple curl of her upper lip. She is, quite simply, a goddamned masterpiece.

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Mey, Trans Editor

Sophia Burset (Laverne Cox), Orange is the New Black

Even though the show tried to hold her back by giving her less screen time than last season, Sophia still killed it. While just about every other character was getting caught up in the drama that Vee was causing, Sophia rose above it all and was her flawless self. One of her highlights included her tour de force explanation of human anatomy in the episode “A Whole Other Hole which not only enlightens the other inmates, but shows that once and for all, she is the best. We also got to see a really touching moment when her son came and visited her in prison for the first time. The meeting starts out a little rough, but when her son warms to her over a game of cards, it really is lovely seeing her get some happiness. I really hope that next season she gets a wider role, as she’s not only one of the most interesting, unique and funny, characters on the show, but Laverne Cox is one of the best actresses on the show that is overflowing with amazingly talented performances.

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Maura Pfefferman (Jeffrey Tambor), Transparent

I was really worried about this before I saw the show, and even still pretty worried when the show started. However, once her oldest daughter asked if she would be “dressing up like a lady all the time” and she laughed and said “No, honey, all my life, my whole life, I’ve been dressing like a man” I was 110% on board. That’s a perfectly written line and Jeffrey Tambor delivers it like an angel. I really love Transparent, and the whole thing hinges on Maura. Honestly, the idea of another man winning an award for playing a trans woman still really bothers me, but if Tambor did, I would totally understand it. This was definitely one of my favorite-written and favorite-acted roles that I saw all year.

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Davina (Alexandra Billings), Transparent

As I watched more episodes of Transparent, I was super happy to see that there were some trans women who got significant screen time who were actually played by trans actresses. Davina’s more than a friend in that she acts as a sort of guide to Maura as she begins her coming out process and her transition. But Davina doesn’t just help guide Maura, she also helps guide the audience. When she’s teaching Maura about what it’s like being trans, she’s also teaching any cis people who are watching. This is a super important role and Alexandra Billings is great in it. I hope we get to see even more of her next season.

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Shea (Trace Lysette), Transparent

Look at this! A fourth trans woman character that I loved and a third one played by an actual trans woman! That’s double the number I wrote about last year! Next year let’s go for eight! Now, I know she’s only in a couple episodes, but Trace Lysette’s Shea still plays an important part in Maura’s life. Plus, seeing as the studies show that the majority of trans women are younger, it was nice seeing someone who represented that demographic on the show. We first meet Shea when she’s teaching a “Namaste, Hey Girl Hey” Yoga class that Maura’s taking, and then she quickly joins Davina in Maura’s inner circle. She has no time for boring old men hitting on her, she offers jokes and support to Maura and she adds some lightness and fun to the series.

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Haddie Braverman (Sarah Ramos), Parenthood

I love Parenthood. But the whole time my brother and I watched it, we would always wonder, how in a family this large was there not a single queer person? And then, in the season finale of season five back in April, our wishes were granted. Adam and Kristina Braverman’s oldest daughter Haddie, played by the always wonderful Sarah Ramos, came home from college with her “friend” Tavi Gevinson in tow. At first, Haddie was nervous to come out- this was her first girlfriend, and like I said, no one else in her family was queer. But eventually, her brother Max saw her and Tavi making out and asked his mom about it. You guys, I love love love the scene where Monica Potter (who plays Kristina) and Haddie talk and Monica Potter tells her that no matter what, they’ll always love and support her and that they’re happy for her. It’s so great and it makes me cry every time. Haddie’s only shown up once since then, but when she did, the show didn’t shy away from frank discussions about her identity and her sexuality. I’m really sad that she’s on the show as little as she is, but every time she was on the screen, I was thankful that she was.

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Alley Hector, Contributing Editor

Recaps: Gotham, Orange is the New Black

Bo Dennis (Anna Silk), Lost Girl

Bo is constantly pulled in two directions, human/fae, Lauren/Dyson, monogamy/magical polyamory, you know the usual. So I can relate. The beginning of this year saw even bigger family revelations, betrayals, and shenanigans in this sometimes serious yet seriously silly fantasy series. It seems to also be the end of her lesbian relationship with the human hot doc but things change quickly in the Canadian mythological play of light vs dark.

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Cosima Niehaus (Tatiana Maslany), Orphan Black

While the trope of the sickly lesbian isn’t my favorite one, I do appreciate that Cosima is a sexy scientist. I have every confidence she will continue to be brilliant and save her own life. Plus having one actress portray so many clones feels like a meta-fantasy come true for any taste. They even introduced a new transmasculine clone this season. Not sure the haircut is working for Tony but it’s nice to meet him nonetheless. And the clone dance finale: epic. Yet another Canadian sci-fi show killin’ it for the queers.

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Jenny Flint (Catrin Stewart) and Madame Vastra (Neve McIntosh), Doctor Who

Truly groundbreaking to not just feature a lesbian household in Victorian England but a cross-species one at that. Add in their class differences and I am in absolute amazement that their relationship has survived. Although Jenny does point out in the first episode of the new season this year that she is, indeed, wearing the maid’s outfit and pouring tea for Madame’s guests so all may not be perfect in social equality land. Plus Jenny is just absolutely kick ass once that maid’s outfit comes off to reveal and full leather suit that somehow is conducive to elaborate fight scenes.

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Myka Bering (Joanne Kelly), Warehouse 13

The Hermione of the Warehouse 13 world, Myka’s sexuality is pretty subsumed under her adventurous but arduous work schedule saving the world. But there are ladies along the road and the most fun one for her to have tension with is the complex H.G Wells. It’s always fun when a protagonist falls for a potential villain. But of course perhaps Wells is a good guy after all. So hard to tell when played perfectly on the edge by Jaime Murray.

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Kalinda Sharma (Archie Panjabi), The Good Wife

She gets shit done (as a hella tough and rule-breaking investigator for Alicia Florrick’s law firm) and looks good doing it (usually in a leather jacket). But more than that she pretends to have no feelings but really they are just locked behind her perfect wall of beautiful unavailability. This season she might be letting that façade crumble just the tiniest bit for an equally hot FBI agent (just as fantasy stoking as you think this sounds). This is just the kind of woman for whom I so painfully pine. It’s tragic really.

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Rachel Kincaid, Managing Editor

Recaps: Transparent

Maura Pfefferman (Jeffrey Tambor), Transparent

Although I wish she wasn’t played by a cis dude, Maura is such a great character and deserves such great things. She’s funny and brave and nuanced and I’m really looking forward to seeing what she’ll do in Season 2. Basically what I want for her character arc is for there to be about 4x more of it.

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Davina (Alexandra Billings), Transparent

Davina is another character where my greatest criticism is that I wish I saw more of her. She’s wry, wise, and a crucially relatively objective viewpoint in a show largely populated by self-absorbed people whose perceptions of things around them are less than reliable. I hope that she and Maura get to have an even deeper and more layered friendship. Also, Alexandra Billings is a very accomplished singer, which means she can anchor my dreamt-of musical episode of Transparent.

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Nicky Nichols (Natasha Lyonne), Orange Is The New Black

Aside from my crush on Natasha Lyonne and my appreciation for all that she’s done for the frizzy-haired look, Nicky was a real emotional rollercoaster for me this season. Obviously the competition with Boo was gross and awful, but the way her character dealt with addiction was really powerful and affecting, and I was #deeplymoved by her support of Poussey while Taystee was being manipulated by Vee and also her willingness to assassinate Vee.

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Heather Hogan, Senior Editor

Recaps: Pretty Little Liars, The Fosters, Gotham, Orange Is the New Black, Orphan Black, Glee, Boobs on Your Tube

First, let me second and amen and ditto everything Alley Hector said up there. And also this:

Paige McCullers (Lindsey Shaw), Pretty Little Liars

Paige McCullers makes people mad. Real mad. She’s probably the most polarizing lesbian character I’ve written about in all my life, and my career spans all the way back to The L Word, OK? I know Jenny Schecter. Paige feels like the personification, the actual physical incarnation, of everything Judith Butler was saying when she started talking about the word “queer.” And I’m convinced that’s why she pisses people off so much. Because she makes them hella uncomfortable. Because they don’t know what to do with her. Because they can’t shake her down to this one thing or that other thing. And self-identity is as much about where you stand in relation to other people as it is about what’s going on inside your brain and heart, and outside your body. Like, if you’re an X, you’re the same as other X’s and the opposite of Y’s, right? Everyone: labeled and shelved.

But Paige doesn’t give a fuuuuck. She’s not a Liar, but she’s not a boyfriend, either. She’s not hyperfeminine, but she’s also not hypermasculine. She’s not Chaotic Evil, but she’s not Lawful Good. She’s running around in the grey, ignoring the black-and-white — like the very concept of queerness itself, which has no interest in being stabilized or consolidated, but instead exists outside a system and inside the cracks of a system, to show you how broken the system really is — and most people find that shit terrifying. Queerness doesn’t apologize for being mercurial, or for not fitting in; queerness exists to perpetually evolve, and to be excluded. And here’s the best part: Paige didn’t show up that way! She was a self-hating lesbian who had been bullied into the closet by the first love of the girl she was crushing on so hard. She was meant to be around for three episodes. But here she is, five seasons later, and she’s grown more than any supporting character on the show and half the main characters too! (Here’s the second best part: She’s on ABC Family.)

Paige makes people mad. But also she is a beacon of authentic hope, a balm that hasn’t been poisoned. The hashtag is #PailyMatters, and that’s really true, but #PaigeMatters just as much, on her own, because she is the absolute true-est and the absolute best.

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Alison DiLaurentis (Sasha Pieterse), Pretty Little Liars

Yeah, that’s right: I picked Ali and Paige, and I put them right beside each other. I don’t need your shipping wars!

You know what we love? Dead blonde girls. As a society, we love TV shows about dead blonde girls who are dead when we meet them, and every new discovery about their murders reveals that they knew a lot more about sex than they should have known/were letting on that they knew. Dead blonde girls who were assumed to be oh so virginal and pure, but were, in actual fact, sexually active targets of sexual predators. Twin Peaks, Veronica Mars, Top of the Lake, True Detective, Pretty Little Liars. It’s quite a list!

So, you’re trying to solve the mystery of who killed the dead girl, but along the way it becomes pretty obvious that you’re also trying to solve the mystery of who raped the dead girl. And always, always, always there’s this sinister theme of, like: Wow, did she cause her own murder because she was both a madonna and a whore. Right? We cannot look away from these narratives about girls who are sexually abused and ultimately murdered as punishment, basically, for eating the fruit in the garden and gaining an understanding about the way the world actually works. Punished for Knowing. Punished for seeking pleasure anyway.

Enter Alison DiLaurentis, who was the same as all those other dead girls. Until she wasn’t dead at all. Alison DiLaurentis, who got it, just absolutely 100 percent figured out that there’s a violent, bloody battle raging for control of female sexuality, and she wandered into it with her eyes open, and she survived! She refused to ignore the monster and the monster came for her, and she lived! And you know what else sets her apart from all those other dead girls? (Besides the magical witch who pulled her out of her grave?) She’s queer. She used her mouth to say it this year, both with words and also by smooshing it around on Emily’s face and body during their scissor-time activities.

I hate when people call Alison a bitch. Do you call Albus Dumbledore a bitch? Because he’s a also a person who spent his whole life moving people around like chess pieces to destroy an evil so enormous they couldn’t even grasp it. He did it better because he was an old guy with lots of resources. Ali started making plans to destroy Voldemort when she was a child. (And anyway, when you call her a bitch you’re just reinforcing a world where Ezra Fitz is the good guy and the women he exploits are just silly little girls.)

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Renee Montoya (Victoria Cartagena), Gotham

Renee Montoya is my all-time favorite comic book character, so when Fox announced that she’d be part of their live-action Batman prequel, I almost lost my mind. There’s no use pretending Gotham has given Renee Montoya enough to do; they have not. But the first half of the season of Gotham has suffered from not knowing what to do with any of its characters, really. What Gotham did do, however, is boldly go where no fanboy nerdhaven has even gone before: Queerville, USA, population: (1) Kickass Latina Lesbian, (1) Bisexual Woman Engaged to Jim Gordon. When Barbara left the patriarchal safety of Detective Gordon’s straight white mansplaining arms and crawled into bed with Montoya for comfort and safety and finger-bangin’ good-times, fanboys unleashed a tornado of misogynistic fury onto the internet. And oh, I feasted on their tears. More Montoya in 2015, man. I’m shining her signal straight from my heart!

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Stef and Lena Foster-Adams (Teri Polo and Sherri Saum), The Fosters

I don’t care how hokey so much of The Fosters is, you guys. I cry and laugh and clap my hands together during every single episode, and so much of that is because I’m still not over the fact that I get to watch an interracial lesbian couple parent their gaggle of drama-bomb children like some kind of Coach and Tami Taylor. I think Tami and Lena would get along really well, actually, now that I’m thinking about it. And so would Coach and Stef. Oh, man. The spin-off I just created in my imagination.

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Stahma Tarr (Jamie Murray), Defiance

I always get in trouble for saying I love Defiance more than I ever loved Battlestar Galactica, but it’s true and at least half of that comes down to Stahma Tarr. She was raised and has survived (thrived, even) in a Castithan society that is dense patriarchy, and her husband is the worst of them all. (“I come from a culture that worship dicks,” she says at one point in season two.) Entitled. Abusive. Religious only when he wants to lord his power over his family. But Stahma beat him at his own game this year and became the most powerful woman — nay, person! — in all of Defiance. She also finally admitted to being in full-blown love with Kenya Rosewater, even if it was only after she was caressing Kenya’s tiny human skull that she’d dug up from her grave to prove the new Kenya in town was a clone. Stahma also had one of my favorite spousal exchanges in 2014 when Datak said, “I will not have my wife running around town pretending to be smarter than me,” and she spat back, “I’m not pretending!”

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Kay (Tymberlee Hill), Marry Me

There has been a complete dearth of leading queer female characters on sitcoms since Ellen came out back in the ’90s. Gay men? Everywhere. Gay ladies? Anne from the defunct Matthew Perry comedy Go On comes to mind, but that’s really it. But now! Into that void! It is Kay from NBC’s new comedy Marry Me, from the folks that brought you Happy Endings. The show itself is working through some growing pains w/r/t gender stuff, in the sense that it’s making jokes I Love Lucy made a hundred years ago. But it’s getting better, and Kay is just the best. She’s sweet, she’s smart, and she’s funny as hell. And to Marry Me‘s credit, they haven’t shied away from the sex part of her sexuality. She came out by simply announcing that she got a blast on Boobr and was going to “go get it, get it and forget it.” She identifies as a “soft butch lipstick flannel queen,” y’all. She’s perfect.

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Suzanne “Crazy Eyes” Warren (Uzo Aduba), Orange Is the New Black

In season one, Uzo Aduba went all in on Crazy Eyes’, well, craziness. There were moments of shocking vulnerability (when she asked Piper why people call her “Crazy Eyes,” for example), but the character was so disconnected from reality that nearly everything was played for laughs. Not so in season two. Crazy Eyes’ desperate need for validation, acceptance, and a maternal figure to cling to manifested itself in dangerous, heartbreaking ways. We saw her uncomfortable past with her white adoptive parents. We saw the ease with which Vee manipulated her. We saw her doubting her own sanity when she was falsely accused of attacking another prisoner. And we also saw sparks of that sweet wisdom she drops that always leaves me breathless, like when she told Morello: “I know something about loving people who aren’t smart enough to want to be loved back. I learned a secret that I can tell you: They don’t deserve it.”

Uzo Aduba deserved her Emmy so much, and she deserves every other trophy that stands at the end of a red carpet. She was the best thing about the 2014 TV season, full stop.

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Okay, your turn! Who were your favorite LGBT TV characters of 2014?