18 Juicy Queer Love Triangles From Television
Call me a simple gay, but I sure am a sucker for a really good love triangle. Who isn’t? It’s a classic trope for a reason. And the queer ones are always the best ones, so I figured I’d revisit some standout examples from television through the years.
As tends to happen when I write lists like this, I started way overthinking the definitions of “love triangle” and “queer love triangle.” Initially, I set out to only include love triangles that didn’t involve cis men at all, but that didn’t feel right — or fair to bisexuals! So in the instances of queer love triangles that feature cis and (ostensibly?) straight men, I stuck to ones in which the two women involved have a romance together at some point. You would think this would be obvious, but it meant ruling out a love triangle like Riverdale‘s Jughead/Betty/Toni, because even though Betty and Toni are both bisexual (Toni, explicitly so, and Betty a little more nebulously but in a manner I’d still consider canon), they never have a thing together, thus sparking my realization that perhaps the definition of “queer love triangle” is not simply “a love triangle featuring queer characters” but a love triangle in which queerness is acted upon within that triangle and fully at the surface. Meanwhile, I also couldn’t bring myself to include Cheryl/Toni/Jughead, because while Cheryl/Toni happens and Toni/Jughead happens, there is never really tension between who Toni might choose. It was more like Toni/Jughead naturally ended and then Toni/Cheryl got together. There’s queerness there, but it doesn’t have the trajectory of a love triangle! Few shows do love triangles (which at this point have so thoroughly transcended that particular geometry to look something more like love…helixes?) as well as Riverdale, which is also full of lesbian and bisexual characters, but I just couldn’t quite pinpoint a combination that worked for the purposes of this list!
After spending probably too much time crafting my own definition of and “rules” for this queer love triangle list, I inevitably will deviate at some point, because I’ve never been particularly good at sticking to definitions, even the ones I construct myself. If you’d like to argue with me over what “counts” and doesn’t count as a love triangle, by all means, do so! I’m highlighting the character combinations that feel like queer love triangles to me. And that’s my longwinded disclaimer!!!!
Niko/Mel/Jada, Charmed
I meeeean, three witches of color in a love triangle together? This is my catnip, this is my religion, this is my anthem.
Lauren/Bo/Dyson, Lost Girl
Most of the time, I’m like GET OUTTA HERE DYSON! But truth be told, I do like the tension of this triangle, even if broody Dyson has to be involved. I’m now fondly recalling a simpler time on tumblr when my friends and I would photoshop his face onto vacuums. Take me back!
Ryan/Sophie/Montoya, Batwoman
I know this is controversial, and I’m sorry!!! Sometimes love triangles are long drawn-out things, and other times, they are…let’s call them isosceles love triangles? What Sophie and Montoya had was brief, but it was real, and it intercepted Ryan/Sophie in a dramatic way!
Villanelle/Eve/Hélène, Killing Eve
Yes, they COUNT! Wives who stab each other belong together, I’m always saying. Both of these deadly women are obsessed with Eve! It is a fact.
Rose/Luisa/Susanna, Jane the Virgin
This is not REALLY a love triangle for reasons that are extreme spoilers, but I’m counting it since it still plays out like one! Because I am Me, I was always rooting for the ill-advised ship of Luisa/Rose and in fact have lost many precious hours (days?) of my life to consuming fan-made literature and art about them, but it sure was fun when the show explicitly about love triangles started introducing lesbian ones (again…sorta…there’s definitely a soap opera twist to this one). Also, I kept trying to figure out a way to get Petra and JR on this list, but they never felt like they were in a love triangle really! Jane was so done with Rafael by then.
Dani/Sophie/Finley, The L Word: Generation Q
So, even though this particular love triangle was not my cup of tea (I don’t get Sinley, I’m sorry!), I’d be remiss not to include them on this list. Although, I do think it should have been a rule on Generation Q that if you were in a love triangle, you also had to have a threesome. Which brings me to…
Alice/Nat/Gigi, The L Word: Generation Q
A love triangle that had a threesome together is a love triangle I enthusiastically endorse. That’s my political platform!
Tina/Bette/Jodi, The L Word
Sure, there were probably a lot of love triangles I could have selected for the original The L Word, but this remains a favorite! Sorry to her haters and to mine, but Jodi’s introduction into season four of The L Word remains one of my favorite arcs, and the Bette/Jodi sex scene IN Jodi’s art installation is top tier — emphasis on top since I do believe the only reason these two didn’t work out is because they’re top4top.
Tasha/Alice/Jamie, The L Word
Okay, yes, one more L Word universe entry. This love triangle was a doozy! What can I say, I’m addicted to emotional pain in my queer romantic storylines. 🥰
Idina/Hattie/Ida B., Twenties
One of the many love triangles on this list that screams MESS!!! And it’s no surprise Hattie is at the center of this particularly steamy three-sided polygon. Autostraddle EIC Carmen aptly pointed out that once upon a time there were TWO television shows airing on THE SAME NIGHT that featured love triangles comprising three queer Black women (Twenties and the aforementioned Batwoman) and WHAT A TIME TO BE ALIVE!!!!!!!!
Rue/Jules/Elliot, Euphoria
Here’s another show where “triangle” doesn’t really geometrically cut it when considering the shape of all the various intersecting and complex relationships, but this particular combo does count as a love triangle imo!
Lana/Kalinda/Cary, The Good Wife
Now, did this love triangle actually go anywhere? Not really! But Kalinda Sharma remains one of my favorite queer characters of all time, and I was equally invested in both of these relationships.
Emily/Sue/Austin, Dickinson
I am a big fan of this hyperspecific trope: a brother and sister who are both in love with the same woman, who loves them each (in different ways) as well. I mean, hello, I am marrying the author of Mostly Dead Things.
Forrest/Billie/Ivy, The Lake
Here we have another, albeit narratively distinct, iteration of the queer love triangle that involves siblings!
Spencer/Ashley/Aiden, South of Nowhere
Throwing it way back with this particular triangle! In the five years later special webisode for this series, it is revealed that this love triangle makes a baby together?! Ashley is pregnant as a result of Spencer donating an egg and Aiden donating sperm! That’s a beautiful love triangle development right there!
Amy/Karma/Liam, Faking It
Whewwwww this love triangle was MESSY! In a good way! It had so many twists and turns that I genuinely didn’t see coming!
Kat/Adena/Coco, The Bold Type
Adena has to decide between Kat and Coco on more than one occasion, and it’s DRAMA every time!
Sam/Brittany/Santana, Glee
I will be a Brittana shipper til the day I die, but I’ll take a little drama in the form of a love triangle even when it comes to them. Also, “Trouty Mouth” lives in infamy.
What are your favorite love triangles from television?
“Euphoria” Episode 208 Recap: The Artist is Unpleasant
During a Q&A for Martin McDonagh’s Seven Psychopaths, the playwright and filmmaker said that he didn’t do rewrites.
It was a bold little piece of self-mythologizing from an artist who had just shown us a messy shadow of his previous work. It had the stylized dialogue and the bursts of violence, but the formal achievements of his plays and previous feature were gone. It felt less like the work of a rule-breaking artist and more like that of a teenager who thinks recreating scenes from Tarantino movies makes him a genius. More than anything, it could’ve used a few rewrites.
I thought about that moment while watching the season two finale of Euphoria, because it was a turning point for me. Two months into film school, I realized the stories we tell about making art need to change as much as the stories themselves. Call it a disillusionment with the auteur theory or a realization that while artists may need some ego, we should emphasize the some.
I have no idea what the last two episodes of Euphoria looked like on the page. I do know that Sam Levinson likes to respond to critique far more than he likes to listen to it. Considering his career consisted only of two failed indies, a screenwriting gig on his dad’s project, a mildly successful movie, and a wildly successful show, it’s a bit silly that he’s dedicated his next movie and the second season of said show to defending himself.
Rue may be the narrator, Nate may share Levinson’s identity and likely sexual proclivities, but this season confirmed that Lexi Howard is the obvious authorial stand-in. So maybe that’s why the last two episodes of an eight-episode season were dedicated to her and her play. What is Euphoria if not a funhouse mirror of other people’s experiences? Lexi’s take on the lives of those around her is as thoughtful and well-written as Levinson’s own.
I’m not sure what’s more disconcerting: the thought that this season of Euphoria was shot without a plan only to be cobbled together in the editing room or the thought that these eight episodes were true to Sam Levinson’s ultimate vision. They’re so scattered — so unsatisfying — all they have is being audacious. That’s Levinson’s whole thing. If you make something bad enough you can just claim it’s art. Not since Duchamp called a urinal Fountain, has an artist attached genius to something so full of piss.
Most of what I said last week continues. We’re still at Lexi’s play, the play is still used to jump in and out of the past (and now the future??) in ways that are incomprehensible, and throughout we check back in with Fez who will never make it to the auditorium.
Let’s start with that last thread since it’s simplest. We rewatch the moment with Fez looking at himself in the mirror and smelling the flowers he bought Lexi. (Finding a movie or show in the editing is a natural part of the process and repeating key moments can be effective, but these two episodes have reused so much footage??) Faye tips off Fez so he knows not to say anything incriminating. She then starts talking to her boyfriend about how Laurie killed Mouse. Ashtray, does not catch on and stabs the boyfriend in the neck.
Fez tries to take the fall for this killing but Ash will have none of that. He starts collecting their guns before hitting Fez in the head and locking himself in the bathroom. There’s not enough footage to stretch this tension across two whole episodes. We keep checking back with Fez but it feels out of place in a way the episode’s only real plot turn should not.
Eventually the feds raid the apartment. Fez is shot. Ash shoots one of them and then is shot and killed. Fez is arrested. None of this hits nearly as hard as it should even if Angus Cloud is doing his best.
Back at the theatre, some more violence is about to take place. Cassie Howard makes her way down the aisle before getting on stage and beginning a rant. Honestly, this is the best theatre of the night, a fact that only stage manager Bobbi seems to recognize.
My job is to literally write personal essays where I sometimes reveal information about the people in my life. In my fiction, I do this even more. But there is a way to be an ethical writer and Lexi has not figured it out! Now, that’s fair enough, she’s a teenager. But this episode seems to imply that Lexi is in the right and that just explains so much about Sam Levinson. His deepest belief is that someone making art, can never be at fault — this includes ethical violations and bad writing.
This season has been cruel to Cassie. I’m so focused on the ways Levinson misses when it comes to race, transness, and cohesive storytelling, that I sometimes forget to dwell on the good ol’ fashioned misogyny. After Cassie makes a fool of herself, her mom rushes the stage, and Maddy rushes the stage and then chases Cassie away, Lexi comes back out to speak to the audience. She apologizes for the delay and quotes Fez telling her that sometimes people need to get their feelings hurt.
There is such an intense Rachel Berry/Ryan Murphy energy coming from Lexi Howard/Sam Levinson. They all share a feeling that because they are the underdog, they cannot be held accountable for any wrongdoing. They are the perpetual victim so their cruelty is earned. Never mind that none of them are even underdogs. At least Murphy has being gay — Levinson just has an inflated idea of his own artistic importance.
Speaking of an inflated idea of one’s artistic importance, our first non-Fez-related cutaway from Lexi’s play takes us to a Dominic Fike concert. Rue has gone over to Elliot’s house to apologize and he asks if he can play her a song. This moment is a really easy one to mock, but honestly… I didn’t hate it. This is one of those times where Zendaya is a good enough actor to save something that really shouldn’t work. She’s a good enough actor that watching her listen to a boy play guitar is compelling television to me.
Our next random moment follows Nate, once again drinking and driving, once again with a gun. He finds his dad in a garage hanging out with a group of vaguely queer people including at least one trans woman. Nate asks if his dad is happier and then tells the other people there that he found videos of his dad “fucking hookers” when he was 11 and since then has had nightmares that Cal was raping him. Cal tells the other people to leave and then Nate confesses that he’s there for revenge. He takes out a flash drive to show his dad that he still has the evidence and then he escorts the cops into the garage where they arrest Cal.
Okay a lot to unpack here. First of all, I thought Nate’s mom said he “darkened” at 8. He didn’t find the tapes until he was 11? Two, what was the point of the Nate Jacobs apology tour, if he had another copy on a flash drive?? Three, other than to trick the audience of this television show, why did Nate have a gun, if he was just turning Cal over to the cops??? And four, why is queerness always shown so negatively???? The episode opener with Cal’s past did nothing to explain why Cal was taping people without their consent. It’s this desire to always do the most that results in a show that feels confusing more than edgy. I want art with “bad” queer people but that’s only radical if their humanity is centered. The way Sam Levinson writes just feels very Hays Code to me.
The rest of the episode takes place during the play except a moment after the play where Rue tells Lexi that she loved the play except wait that’s also part of the play still? I don’t know. I guess it’s supposed to be artful that we don’t get to know which scenes actually happen and which don’t.
The play finally ends and Jules sits next to Rue in the emptying auditorium. She says she loves her and misses her and Rue kisses Jules on the forehead but says nothing. The season ends with Rue walking through the school as she narrates. She says that Jules was her first love even if she was too high throughout their relationship. She then says that she stayed sober throughout the rest of the school year.
For those keeping track at home, Lexi’s play gets two episodes. Rue’s sobriety throughout the rest of the school year gets some narration.
And that’s… the season?? The credits roll confirming what we all could’ve guessed — Sam Levinson responded to criticisms that he should work with other writers by no longer working with other directors. It goes without saying that because of his various identities — including nepotism baby — Levinson gets to do things in a way nobody else would. But I see nothing enviable in using all the resources in the world to make something bad.
Congrats to Martin McDonagh for not having to do rewrites. Congrats to Sam Levinson for not needing a writers room or other directors or a shot list. Congrats to every artist privileged enough to squander their talent with ego. Congrats.
More Glitter:
+ This episode was once again written and directed by Sam Levinson.
+ What happened to Laurie? What was the point of Laurie? Where is Laurie??
+ Laurie is just the most obvious dropped plot thread, but I’m also trying to figure out the point of Minka Kelly’s character and her vaguely erotic relationship with Maddy.
+ I still don’t understand why Ethan played Lexi’s mom in the play.
+ Cassie, Maddy, Kat, and BB end the season in the bathroom together. I don’t know.
+ I’m still pretty sad about Jules getting a special episode that finally deepened her character only for this season to reduce her role to “cheats on Rue with a boy.”
+ It really is impressive how little happened in these eight hours of television considering a million things are always happening.
+ I watched season one for Rue, Jules, and Kat. Or, rather, for Zendaya, Hunter Schafer, and Barbie Ferreira. But now Kat isn’t a character, Jules is barely a character, and even Rue — the narrator of the show — has had her story reduced to focus on the Howards and the Jacobs. So, why am I still watching? Well, because I was paid $80 an episode. The bigger question, I suppose, is why are you still watching?
“Euphoria” Episode 207 Recap: Opening Trite
The only reason I write about Euphoria is because I think it’s good. Don’t get me wrong, it can also be very, very, very bad, but if it wasn’t also good I wouldn’t bother. I went to film school — I’ve seen enough bad movies from people who think they’re geniuses to know the harshest critique I can give something is it doesn’t warrant discussion. When something is just bad, there’s not much to say. Sure, writing a total pan can be a fun creative exercise, but, for me, the point of criticism is to unravel and contextualize a work that provides enough to do that.
When I say I have no idea how to write about last night’s Euphoria I mean that in the worst possible way. It’s my job to recap this show each week so I will try my best to break down the reasons I found this episode incomprehensible. But, to be honest, it’d probably be better for you not to waste any more minutes on an hour of television that doesn’t deserve it. Instead might I suggest watching a work that plays with theatre, performance, and the falseness of reality with far more astuteness? Specifically, might I suggest watching John Cassavetes’ Opening Night?
I brought up John Cassavetes a couple weeks ago, because he’s often the filmmaker cited by auteurs who love improv — even though his films were meticulously planned. My guess is Sam Levinson loves Cassavetes just as much as he loves not planning. This episode may have been a tribute to people who have an intellect for theatre but really it was an attempt to mimic one of the great theatre movies: Opening Night.
Like that film, this episode drifts in and out of stage reality and real life. Unlike that film, it does not work.
We begin at Lexi’s play. She’s taking a deep breath before curtain and then we cut to an overture. In this moment, I realized I’d be a lot more sympathetic to Sam Levinson’s artistic flourishes if he was a teenage girl.
We then go to Lexi at the actual memorial for Rue’s dad. Lexi’s mom is comforting Leslie. Kat, Maddy, and Cassie are in the hallway played by the high school actors portraying them in the play. Lexi (who is playing herself) walks into Rue’s room and Rue (still Zendaya) is snorting her dad’s leftover meds. Lexi and Rue talk for a bit and Lexi reads her a poem and then we pull back to reveal Lexi on stage on a set of Rue’s bedroom. Fake Rue’s back is to the audience which, as a viewer, communicated to me that the play itself was not meant to exist in reality of the show as a play. But I’m not sure that was what it was meant to communicate.
One of the most frequent responses I get when I criticize Euphoria is the suggestion that I just don’t understand its artistry. I’m looking for realism in a show that embraces fantasy. I’m looking for narrative logic in a show that transcends things like character development and plot. I’m looking for substance in an exercise of style. The problem with this suggestion is that nothing Euphoria is doing is that inventive. Putting aside the film and theatre references the show itself presents, television as an art form has taken such greater risks. I can list obvious examples like Twin Peaks and The Leftovers, but even more grounded character pieces like Atlanta, Search Party, I May Destroy You, BoJack Horseman, and Better Things have taken far greater swings than this show has ever attempted.
My complaints with this episode are not things that are objectively bad. There are no rules to television, no rules to art. When I say, for example, that this episode again and again breaks its own internal logic, I’m not saying that’s bad. I’m saying it’s a risk that did not work — for me, as a critic, as the person writing this article that you clicked on, as the person whose opinion you’re reading instead of watching Opening Night.
The entire episode may take place around Lexi’s play, but I wish it had committed to that conceit more. I can make concessions that sometimes we cut from the play to real life inspiration that goes far beyond what Lexi would know. What I find baffling is the combination of Lexi’s play narration and classic Narrator Rue. What I find baffling is the detours that continue our characters from where they were in episode 206 but in ways that feel rushed and provide very little new information. If you’re going to make your episode a concept episode then do that! As is, it feels chaotic and muddled even for a show that’s always chaotic and muddled.
I understand what Levinson was trying to do cutting back and forth between the play and Fez getting ready for the play. The problem is when the play part of that equation is so much wider in scope and so much more confusing than it needs to be. The Fez timeline just becomes another timeline to track. We know early on that he won’t be making it to the play so the moments with him provide little other than dread — a dread that doesn’t get a payoff this episode and that’s undermined by too much else going on.
I’m not even dwelling on the play itself which, again, doesn’t seem to really exist within the reality of the show as a play. Sex Education — the anti-Euphoria — did such a good job in season two giving us a school play that obviously had a budget far beyond an actual school play BUT held a DIY charm that sold it. Here, Lexi has a seemingly endless number of realistic-looking sets. Which, again, isn’t that big of a deal — the far bigger problem is that the substance of the play is even more scattered than the show that contains it. At first, it seems like it’s about Lexi’s parallel relationships with her sister and her best friend. But by the end of the episode we’re getting a dance number, where the Nate Jacobs character and all his fellow locker room guys are being gay with each other.
Again, Lexi doesn’t have to be a good playwright. I’m just not really sure what I’m supposed to think about the whole affair. And, worst of all, I was bored.
I haven’t gone through this episode in my usual linear way, because I’m not sure the value in breaking down every moment here. We get flashbacks like child Lexi and Cassie getting in their dad’s car while he’s high. We get a sequence where Nate and Cassie recreate the Cal and Jules motel scene but then it turns into Cal fucking Nate and then Nate waking up in Cassie’s bed from a nightmare. Oh and we get a scene where Leslie tells Rue that she’s done trying and Rue can just kill herself?? Which feels totally off from where we left last week??
After this episode ends with Nate storming off and Cassie left heartbroken and a “To be continued…” on the screen, I got a wave of panic. Maybe last week was five not six and I should’ve watched six not seven. I thought maybe I’d skipped an episode. Nope! Levinson just decided to have this weird non-episode instead of dealing in a meaningful way with pretty much any of the threads left open last week.
I don’t know. I’m sure some of you will share my disdain for this episode. I’m sure some of you will be pissed at me in the comments and in my DMs. But one thing we all share is that we should watch or rewatch Opening Night.
More Glitter:
+ This episode was once again written and directed by Sam Levinson.
+ We see a moment where Lexi is on the phone with Fez worrying about the reaction people might have to this play. BABE. Even Jenny Schecter changed SOME information about her friends. You literally only changed the names.
+ I love that even Euphoria High’s theatre department has no rules. These kids WILL perform the second act of Into the Woods. These kids WILL sing “Contact” during their production of Rent.
+ Why is Ethan playing Lexi’s mom as well as Nate?? I feel like the high school theatre problem is you can’t get enough boys, so it’s way more likely that girls play boy parts than vice versa. Are we just supposed to think it’s funny that Ethan is dressed like a woman? I don’t get it.
+ The audience had Playbills. Did Lexi… did Lexi print out Playbills??
+ Last week, a bunch of people commented that the reason Nate darkened at 8 or so was because he found his dad’s tapes. Thanks for noting that from season one! I’d forgotten. I still think that explanation makes the most sense even with Nate’s Cal rape nightmare in this episode.
+ The only Kat moment we get in the play is her character doing her sexy cat dance… intercut with Nate and Cassie fucking?? Just because Kat is no longer a character doesn’t mean Levinson is going to give up sexualizing her body!
+ Fez is going to die, right? I assumed he would once Laurie gave Rue the suitcase of drugs. But it seems he’s going to die separate from that? Has Laurie just disappeared? She’s totally cool with Rue owing her money and escaping?
+ The best part of the episode is that Lexi’s mom was obsessed with every single moment of this play. Alanna Ubach’s laugh was the MVP.
+ I don’t want to dwell on Twitter drama, but it’s so funny to suggest that Euphoria — a show created by someone whose resume is co-writing his dad’s Bernie Madoff movie — is a work born from the theatre. Like… one of the best show’s on TV — P-Valley — was created by Katori Hall, an actual playwright.
+ Something I was thinking about a lot this episode that the show isn’t really engaging with is Cassie isn’t just dating Maddy’s ex-boyfriend. She’s dating her abusive ex-boyfriend. That feels like it would be the bigger issue if Levinson took any of the very serious things his show deals with seriously besides his narrow experience of addiction.
+ We have one more episode of the season but if you liked Opening Night, John Cassavetes made a lot of other great movies you could check out instead. Faces is my personal favorite. Or I can recommend some plays if you have an intellect for theatre. Or, I suppose, you can watch the finale with me — I doubt it could be worse than this week.
“Euphoria” Episode 206 Recap: The Devil You Know
It’s not always a good idea to read the comments. No matter what you write people are going to take issue with it — sometimes with cause, sometimes very much without. But if you do read the comments literal and proverbial there are a few ways you can respond. You can make a pandemic movie with rants against your critics using stand-ins with different experiences from yourself. You can become the main character on Twitter and then stay the main character for a week. Or, you know, you can actually reflect on the ways you need to improve.
And so let me start this Euphoria recap by saying I had to respond way too much last week with “I’m not saying this couldn’t happen, I’m saying it isn’t being done well” for the problem to not have been on my end. Whether my writing was muddled or whether I let my frustrations with this show — and how seriously I take the issues the show deals with — get the best of me, I don’t know, but I wasn’t clear.
So let me be clear. My issue with Euphoria is not about the realism of the broad strokes. Like Sam Levinson, I cannot speak to many of the experiences portrayed and even the ones I can are just my own personal experiences. Never mind the fact that “realism” is not something that is inherently good or bad in storytelling. My issue with Euphoria is not the broad strokes, it’s the moment to moment intimacies. When I say those feel false, I don’t mean what is happening is false to our world — I’m saying line by line, beat by beat they feel hollow.
It’s strange then to get to this episode that will definitely incite less praise and discussion than last week, but that I ultimately found more successful. If Euphoria was just a show about Sam Levinson stand-ins Nate Jacobs and Lexi Howard, I wouldn’t be watching. But this week felt like a relief to have so much time with dynamics that Levinson seems to actually understand. The intimacies ring true amidst all the soapy drama.
We open on Rue sitting at her kitchen table, going through withdrawals. She’s looking at a Jolly Rancher as her nose drips. Narrator Rue delivers one of my least favorite lines of the episode saying, “You know what I love about hospitals? They don’t need to know if you’re a good person.” She goes on to wax poetic about the neutrality of hospitals and I promise I’ll get to the stuff I do like in this episode but my God does Sam Levinson really live in such a bubble that he thinks HOSPITALS are neutral? That Rue as a middle class mixed race Black girl would be treated the way he was? That trans people are given the same care as cis people? You’re killing me, Sam.
Rue’s mom is caring for her and Rue notes that her mom grew up in the church and at least Christians believe in forgiveness. We get our first glimpse of a young Leslie singing in a church choir and I really thought we were finally getting a Leslie-focused episode! But no. All we get is she was in the church and in the choir in the church and is Rue’s mom which we already knew.
Rue is feeling remorseful about all the things she said and all the things she doesn’t remember saying. Most of all she’s feeling remorseful about what she said to Ali. She knows most of the world, including his family, writes him off for the same reasons she could be written off and she doesn’t want to contribute to that.
She calls him and says she’s sorry. He says he forgives her. All the talk about last episode securing Zendaya a second Emmy, this was the moment for me. It’s quieter than last week — I mean she’s still sobbing, it’s still Euphoria — but it’s just an incredible moment of nuanced performance.
Ali comes over to cook for Rue and her family. He sends Rue and her mom away and talks to Gia. He says as tough as things have been on Rue, it’s been tougher on her. Thank God someone is thinking of Gia! I still don’t think Levinson has written in a nuance to these moments the way he does with the Jacobs or the Howards, but I do think what he understands best about Rue is her addiction and these discussions of forgiveness and hurt worked for me. And it helps when you have Colman Domingo to deliver your lines.
Smash cut to Nate Jacobs lifting weights. He’s happy his dad is gone and doesn’t yet know that he has 38 missed calls from Cassie. You know, Cassie Howard from Maddy-is-on-the-phone-with-Kat-talking-about-how-she-wants-to-literally-kill-her fame. Kat is taking said call while out with Ethan who she’s about to break up with. She chickens out and instead tells him that she has a terminal brain disorder. He doesn’t buy it and storms off in frustration. Considering this is one of Kat’s few scenes this season, I wish it didn’t make Kat into such a comical bad guy. Would the Kat we know really break up with Ethan like this? I’m not sure… but Barbie Ferreira does her best to sell it.
Meanwhile, it’s seeming like Cassie might do the job herself. She is hysterical to the point that her mom has Lexi hide all the knives in the house. Lexi is starting to have doubts about her play but then she goes over to Fez’s and he reinforces her artistic spirit. The internet has been begging for Lezco? Fexi? Lezco. scenes since they flirted in the premiere and Levinson has finally delivered. Fez tells Lexi that she should include him beating up Nate in her play and insists re: Cassie that some people need to have their feelings hurt. They talk about how the play is going to have Stand By Me vibes because these characters all have the cultural references of their 37-year-old creator.
Another unlikely pairing happening across town is Nate and his mom. She’s gone full wine mom mode in the wake of her husband’s breakdown and she tells her son not to marry someone he meets in high school. She mentions him being an angry guy and Nate angrily argues that he is not. His mom then comes out as #TeamCassie and talks about how Nate was such a sweet boy until around 8 or 9 he darkened. Is the implication that Nate was raped? By Cal? Later Narrator Rue will confirm that Cal is technically not a pedophile so maybe something else happened that will be revealed later? After this mother-son drunk bonding moment, Nate sets out to recover Cal’s evidence. He doesn’t care about Cal but he does want to save the family real estate business. Of course the Jacobs are in fucking real estate.
While this is happening, the Howards are having their own family togetherness moment. Cassie is ranting about how she didn’t do anything wrong while her mom is like… okay babe. Lexi is just sitting there observing. This is a BIG episode for younger siblings trying to keep quiet and keep the peace. Cassie then tries to slit her wrists with a corkscrew before finally getting into a big fight with Lexi about her ratting on Fez. She continues her rampage a bit later shouting about how she may be bad but Rue is worse, as if that is relevant or comparable. Cassie’s mom, rightfully, says that Cassie needs an exorcising.
These scenes are so good?? Sydney Sweeney is hilarious and Cassie’s antics ring so true for a nightmare teenage girl. These moments are both painful and funny and they feel worth all the exhaustion of this season’s Nate and Cassie affair.
It was around this time that I thought “where is Jules??” and Rue answered by explaining that Jules is at home and— fuck Jules and Elliot, Rue doesn’t want to talk about them. Back to Maddy.
Samantha — MILFka Kelly — comes home and tells Maddy they should get drunk and go for a swim. Maddy confides in Samantha about Nate and Cassie and Samantha admits to pulling a Cassie against her best friend when she was in college. There’s a vibe as they bond about being messy and then Samantha pointedly notes that Maddy is 18.
Lezco are watching the end of Stand By Me and Lexi is crying. It’s a cute little moment that convinced me the kids on Twitter are right about this pair. While this is happening Faye takes out the trash in the rain — elite house guest — where she meets her boyfriend who admits to collaborating with the police against Fez and Ashtray and asks Faye not to reveal this secret — less elite house guest.
Next stop on the Nate Jacobs redemption tour is a reminder that he does not deserve one. He’s sitting in Maddy’s room in the dark holding a gun. He asks Maddy where the disc is of his dad’s sexual exploits and when she says she doesn’t have it, he puts one bullet in the gun and gets on top of her. He points it at her head and then moves the gun to his own. Click. No bullet. Click. No bullet. Maddy, through tears, tells him it’s in her purse. He gets the disc and then apologizes(??) saying there weren’t actually bullets in the gun(??).
He pulls a Cal — drinking and driving with a cocky smirk — as he calls Jules to tell her he’s coming over. She goes outside to meet him with a boxcutter up her sleeve — the literal definition of bringing a knife to a gun fight. He apologizes. He says he was protecting someone who didn’t deserve it. And then he gives her the disc. As she’s leaving, he grabs her hand and says that he meant everything he said to her. She leaves — thank God — but if Levinson tries to endgame them, I will lose my mind.
Nate calls Cassie and tells her to pack a suitcase. As Cassie stands at her front door, she locks eyes with her mom. Then she gets a text from Nate that says “here.” To roughly quote Lady Bird: “You’re not gonna get in a car with a guy who texts, are ya?” Alas, she does. They drive to Nate’s house and he lets her beat his chest before they kiss. All the while, Jules is watching her experience with his dad on her computer that still has a disc drive.
Finally, we return to Ali’s dinner with the Bennetts. Rue says she wants to get clean and Ali asks Gia how she feels about that. She’s skeptical. Leslie starts to object and Ali defends her. He says losing faith is fair until Rue finds some for herself. Really loving all of Ali’s Gia defense!!!! All Gia has done is be a good sister!!! She hasn’t even used the material for a play!!!
Gia asks to sleep in Rue’s bed and, as they lie there, Rue says she feels like she doesn’t know anything about Gia’s life. Gia says I’ll tell you when you get back.
But back from where is the question. The episode ends with Leslie on the phone with the rehab facility. She’s crying and begging and it’s clear there’s some sort of problem. Rue may not be going back to rehab after all.
This episode doesn’t work, because it’s realistic. It works because it’s grounded in its creator’s experiences. Levinson may not know that people get treated differently at the hospital, but he does have experience with addiction. He has experience with Rue’s guilt and her forgiveness. He has experience with people like Nate Jacobs and Lexi Howard. And, I assume, he has experience getting dumped by someone hotter than him.
More Glitter:
+ This episode was once again written and directed by Sam Levinson
+ I know Fexi is the more common ship name but this is Autostraddle dot com. I’m calling these straight people Lezco.
+ Nate’s mom mentions wanting to buy a Peloton. What is it with TV and Peloton?? Were all these scripts written early pandemic when Pelotons were all the rage?
+ I’m on Team Maddy because she’s funnier, but I do think there’s a difference between having sex with your best friend’s recent ex and having sex with your best friend’s boyfriend. Cassie is right that she didn’t technically fuck her best friend’s boyfriend. Continuing to fuck Nate once he and Maddy rekindled wasn’t the best though.
+ I really, really, really like when older writers make recent period pieces rather than awkward contemporary-set stories. Not to reference Lady Bird for the second time, but that movie being set in 2002 let’s Greta Gerwig include all her personal specificity. I wish Sam Levinson had done that with Euphoria even if Rue wouldn’t get to be born right after 9/11.
+ People on the internet are so fucking harsh on Rue and Jules. They’re teenagers! Rue is an addict! Jules is… Jules has done barely anything wrong. It’s one thing to critique their behaviors but the hatred toward these flawed teen characters is wild.
+ This TikTok is fascinating. It’s not uncommon for actors to reword their lines, but it is uncommon for every single line to be vastly improved. Give Zendaya a writing Emmy along with her second acting Emmy.
https://www.tiktok.com/@dannyrayes/video/7062614798101400878?lang=en&is_copy_url=0&is_from_webapp=v1&sender_device=pc&sender_web_id=7058522922752181765
“Euphoria” Episode 205 Recap: Ah! Ah! I’m Acting!
I’m friends with a lot of actors. My ex was an actor. My current girlfriend is an actor. I love actors. But the worst part of knowing actors — and one of the worst parts of being an actor — is that even the most talented actors end up in shitty projects. There are the ones that are truly bad — plays they’d never think of inviting people to, movies they don’t promote — but then there’s the stuff that comes so close to being worthy of them. So close that actors can almost be convinced they’re in something good.
This episode of Euphoria felt like ending up at your friend’s mediocre new play. You’re thrilled to see bestie Zendaya is the star, but God do you wish the material matched her talent. And the talent of her co-stars.
It begins with Rue’s mom yelling at her. She knows Rue has been doing drugs. Rue, in turn, yells at Gia, blaming her for telling about the weed. But Rue’s mom isn’t talking about weed — she’s talking about pills. And it wasn’t Gia who told — it was Jules.
Rue’s suitcase of pills are missing and she starts to frantically ask where they went. Rue’s mom says, “You’re not a good person,” which feels more in-line with Rue’s simplified negative self-talk than anything we’ve seen from Leslie Bennett. Then Rue tells Leslie that she’s a bad mom which is true in the sense that she’s a badly written one. Gia is screaming shut the fuck up shut the fuck up and when Rue reaches for her, Leslie slaps Rue.
Recently, a scene from season one between Rue and her mom circulated around Twitter. Supposedly, the moment was improvised which people first shared as a testament to Zendaya and Nika King’s talents. But this was followed by a wave of questioning why such a pivotal scene would be improvised. Improvisation as a technique isn’t inherently bad and there are plenty of talented directors who have used improv to varying degrees of success. But, personally, I wonder what these actors might do with a bit more structure. And I wonder how much more improv is being utilized in scenes with the Bennett family vs. the Jacobs family that Levinson knows so much better.
Two directors most known for the improvisational nature of their work are John Cassavetes and Mike Leigh. Except John Cassavetes didn’t use improv at all — his work just feels raw in a way people assumed was improvised. And Mike Leigh only uses improv as a workshop tool before taking these improv sessions and crafting them into a final script. Again, I’m not saying improv is wrong — I just think it works best when paired with good writing. And, frankly, Sam Levinson is totally out of his element in writing Rue’s family dynamics.
That’s a problem throughout this entire episode. I trust that Sam Levinson has experience with addiction. But how addiction might affect a Nate Jacobs and a Rue Bennett is different. I said this in an earlier recap, but I’m not sure Levinson really understands the stakes of casting Zendaya as his fictional surrogate.
Anyway, Rue is panicking asking what her mom did with the pills when Jules’ voice comes in from the kitchen saying that they flushed them. Rue’s energy shifts. Her mom asks if she’s embarrassed that Jules heard everything she just said.
Rue walks into the kitchen and sees Jules and Elliot. She says the cruelest things to Jules as Jules insists through tears that Rue doesn’t mean them. Jules just keeps saying, I love you. It’s a devastating scene. All the while, Rue’s mom is just hanging back listening. For all the chaos, it seems a bit odd that Rue’s mom wouldn’t say anything until Rue runs away.
Rue then cries to her mom and says she misses her dad and asks if her mom will take her to the hospital. As they drive away, Rue looks back at Elliot who is now outside smoking a cigarette. Rue admits to relapsing right when she got out of rehab and talks about wanting to kill herself. Then her mom slips that they’re taking her to rehab, not to the hospital, and so she jumps out of the car and runs away through traffic.
The title finally appears.
The over-reliance on improv — or writing that’s as scattered as improv — results in this entire first section feeling like rehearsals between talented performers rather than finished scenes. I really don’t know what to say except that Zendaya proves that she’s the best actor of her generation. She also proves that an actor with mediocre writing is still an actor with mediocre writing.
It’s nighttime and Rue goes to Fez’s. Nobody answers. Her next stop is the Howard house which provides this episode’s few moments of levity. Rue banters with Lexi and then Lexi’s mom about why she looks like shit — she has a cold, they don’t want a cold, she says it’s not contagious, they say colds are contagious — and then she goes to the bathroom to rifle through their medicine cabinet.
While she’s failing to find drugs and succeeding in stealing some jewelry, Lexi calls Rue’s mom. By the time she goes back downstairs Leslie is there along with Lexi, Cassie, their mom, Kat, and Maddy.
Rue says she can’t go to rehab because she can’t stay sober forever and Cassie in her very Cassie way suggests Rue just take it one day at a time. So out of spite Rue asks how long she’s been fucking Nate Jacobs. Chaos ensues! Everyone wants Maddy to postpone her reaction or take this outside but Maddy is Maddy so she does not! For a show that relishes in darkness, Euphoria is at its best when it’s a screwball comedy. Levinson wants to be the auteur genius behind a prestige drama, but his talents are better suited for run-of-the-mill teen TV. There are artists who could pull off his formal and narrative ambition — he’s, unfortunately, not one of them.
Somehow Rue’s mom gets distracted by these hijinks — seems weird but okay — and Rue slips out the door. She goes back to Fez’s and he lets her in. She begs him for drugs but he says he doesn’t keep anything at the house anymore. She tries to steal some of Fez’s grandma’s meds but Fez catches her and kicks her out.
Rue breaks into a random house where she’s met by a growling dog. This is the suburbs so she pets “Harold” and he quickly becomes adorable. Rue steals a bunch of stuff and then somehow guesses the safe code and steals even more. But then the fighting couple she’s stealing from come back early and she has to hide under the bed. Despite fully getting caught, she somehow escapes.
Rue is feeling very nauseous with withdrawal symptoms. She’s not doing a very good job hiding it and when some cops pull up and ask where she’s going, she pukes everywhere. They go towards her and she runs away.
We then get a very impressive chase for someone who is as ill as Rue. She froggers across a busy road, runs through a party, jumps on some cactus, and, finally, manages to escape by hiding in a trashcan.
She has reached peak desperation and this brings her to Laurie’s apartment. If you’re not good with names, Laurie is the former schoolteacher/current drug kingpin who inexplicably entrusted a teen addict with a suitcase full of drugs to sell. Rue gives her two thousand dollars in stolen cash and what she estimates to be a thousand dollars in stolen jewelry. Laurie says she can’t take the jewelry, says she’s never been mad, gives some background about her own experience with opiates, and then suggests Rue get into sex work to pay back the rest of her money.
Rue is desperate for drugs and Laurie tells her that she doesn’t have pills. She has Rue get in the bath and then she injects her with morphine. Rue sinks into the bathtub and it shifts into a fantasy/memory of her in the bath as a baby and then her giving a speech at her dad’s funeral.
When she wakes up, now desperate in a new way, Rue tries to escape through the window. It’s sealed shut. Then she tries to go out the front door past a big guy sleeping next to a gun, but the door is locked. Finally she manages to get out through another window where she drops two stories to relative safety.
I’m not sure what Sam Levinson is trying to accomplish with this Laurie storyline, but I do not like it! I’m not interested in having a conversation about how realistic it is for this character to exist let alone interact with Rue the way she does. Whether or not it’s real doesn’t concern me — even if it all feels false. My bigger issue is the way it plays into misconceptions about sex work and sex trafficking.
If Levinson wanted to take Rue’s addiction journey toward survival sex work that would’ve been one thing. It would have bothered me because as a little rich boy that was absolutely not something Levinson himself had to do and we don’t exactly need more mainstream stigma on sex work, but it would at least make sense. However, this heightened version where Rue is being groomed by Laurie is absurd. It’s using sex work — and specifically sex trafficking — in a way that reinforces this false misconception that suburban girls are getting kidnapped and sold. It’s this false misconception that leads to so many of the laws that make the lives of actual sex workers more challenging.
It also feels especially gross to go this route in the same season where it’s suggested that Rue is somewhere on the ace spectrum. I know there are people who are ace and still do sex work as a job. But it just feels like an attempt to put Rue through as big a nightmare as possible — or impossible — when the more common experiences of drug addiction would be traumatic enough.
Thankfully, the episode ends on a moment of relative hope. Rue has run away from Laurie’s. Leslie is at home. The sound of a door opens and Leslie says, “Rue?”
Last season, Euphoria was criticized for glorifying drugs. This felt like a pretty shallow criticism considering how even last year Rue’s drug use was mostly shown in a negative light. This episode seems designed as a response to those criticisms. Out of all the things Levinson was rightfully criticized for, why would this be the one he listened to? Well, because this allows him to get darker, to be serious, to put his characters through more turmoil.
Listening to the other critiques would’ve meant giving up power.
More Glitter:
+ This episode was once again written and directed by Sam Levinson.
+ I’m feeling for Gia! Why did her mom take her to drive Rue to rehab? Why did she have her in the car when driving around looking for Rue? And especially why did she tell her to get off her phone and do a better job looking?? Rue was right — Gia really does have to be perfect to make up for her.
+ I guess my main problem is Rue’s mom does not feel like a real person. Maybe if we’d spent as much time with her as we did Cal, this all would hit harder. But, again, Levinson knows how to write Cal Jacobs and does not know how to write Leslie Bennett.
+ One Sam to Rue thing I find interesting as well as frustrating is the idea that Rue is an addict because of her dad’s death. If we’re to read this autobiographically, we’re to believe that having a father who is absent because he’s a famous movie director is the same as having a father who is dead. Not sure about that one!
+ Zendaya really was phenomenal but when the writing doesn’t work to create an immersive experience, it becomes a detached sort of appreciation. I didn’t feel for Rue as much as I admired Zendaya.
+ The episode had this vibe:
“Euphoria” Episode 203 Recap: Great Tits and Kurt Cobain’s Haircut
This Euphoria recap contains mild spoilers.
Euphoria makes me think about trust. Not because Rue is lying about doing drugs or Cassie is lying about fucking Nate or Cal is lying about his whole deal. I’m thinking about the trust a creator asks from an audience — especially when telling stories about people whose stories have often been told wrong.
I don’t want queer media that’s simple. I don’t want queer media that’s palatable and boring and risk-averse. I don’t want to put rules in place that say this kind of storyline is not okay and this kind is. Because in my own life these rules get broken. Sometimes I say things “a trans person wouldn’t say” or do things “a trans person wouldn’t do” and I want to see those things on TV.
But it’s about trust. The problem I face again and again is trust. I don’t trust Sam Levinson.
Some of that is because of his identity. But it’s not just that — while I generally prefer work made by people who share the lived experience of their characters, that’s not always the case. And sure it’s in part that instead of acknowledging his limitations, he has stubbornly insisted on writing the main seasons himself unlike any other ensemble show on TV. But even this alone wouldn’t lose my trust if the work itself didn’t reveal these limitations. In both his film Assassination Nation and Euphoria — I skipped Malcolm and Marie — his writing has had moments that feel off. I can’t speak for anyone but myself but the work itself has felt like it’s written by a cis straight white man. And yet, it’s some of these moments that have the most potential for complexity.
This episode begins with a queer love story — a flashback centering on Nate’s dad Cal. Narrator Rue tells us about his high school best friend Derek who he wrestled with. Like on a wrestling team. As a teen, Cal stares at dicks the way his son will two decades later. He gets tangled up in a relationship with Nate’s mom who is extremely horny and aggressive in the way Levinson’s teens love to be. Cal repeats his sexcapades to Derek like they’re in a whitewashed porn parody of Y Tu Mamá También. And then one day Cal starts “eating pussy” and Derek gets upset.
Sometimes you just have to bro down with your bro at the gay bar and Cal and Derek do just that. It’s under the guise of the bar not carding but pretty soon they’re several tequila shots in and when-in-Rome-ing their way to rimming. A little dancing, a little crying, a little making out and who knows what else. Of course, this show is a tragedy, so the next morning Cal wakes up to a call from Nate’s mom that she’s pregnant. Based on what I learned in health class this is not due to all the pussy eating.
Levinson doesn’t feel the need to clarify Cal’s sexuality and that’s okay. I’m just left confused about what he’s trying to communicate. It makes sense that Derek would be hurt by Cal doing a sex act he, as a cis boy, reads as aggressively straight. But Cal’s obsession with the act makes me shrug. It doesn’t really tell me anything. Just like my confusion with Cal’s habit of secretly fucking young men — with the exception of when he fucked Jules. Is Cal supposed to be bisexual? Or is he gay and read Jules as a male because the Jacobs boys — like their creator — just really love dicks? I’ve talked to enough cis male-amorous trans friends to know that none of this is inherently unrealistic. I just don’t really get what Levinson is going for in how he’s telling these stories.
When I reviewed the show in 2019, I was quick to say that Levinson’s storytelling was unrealistic. I now feel less inclined to make that kind of declarative statement. But I will say that his writing feels muddled, that it leaves me confused, and that it makes me uncomfortable in the wrong kind of way. I will say that I don’t trust Levinson’s perspective.
Like the previous episode, this is a chaotic hour of television that jumps from character to character and is never quite clear when it’s fantasy and when it’s reality. Maybe that’s to mirror Rue who is high dancing around her house singing along to “Call Me Irresponsible” by Bobby Darin. Her sister Gia asks if Rue is high and we shift into our first fantasy sequence. Rue is in professor mode flipping through an old-timey projector, teaching us how to get away with being a drug addict. Basically she’s managed to convince everyone in her life that she’s just smoking a little weed and that she needs to do that to avoid being suicidal. It’s a good cover since most non-drug users and even some casual drug users can’t really tell the difference between highs and Rue is so obviously high on something.
In addition to her faux weed confession, Rue also asks Jules why she doesn’t like Elliot. Jules says it’s because he’s obviously trying to fuck Rue. This leads to a moment I thought was a fantasy but I think was real where Jules is grilling Elliot about his identity and sexual history. She asks how many girls he’s fucked and how many guys he’s fucked. And he asks her the same. We find out that Elliot is basically bisexual but he doesn’t really like labels. And we learn that Jules has started wearing a binder.
Rue and Jules race on bikes and then make out. Rue reaches her hand down Jules’ pants and as she checks in if that’s okay. It’d be sweet if Rue wasn’t so fucking high.
All of this is exciting to see. It’s rare for queer trans women to be on TV and it’s thrilling to have these sorts of complicated conversations about this character’s identity. I’m sure Sam Levinson has consulted with Hunter — especially since she’s the only other person to ever get a writing credit on the show — but I still felt a little uncomfortable watching this. Again, not because anything is wrong. I just wanted more detail. It’s a big deal to have a trans girl character who is wearing a binder! I wish I trusted Levinson to get into it more and to do it well.
Rue and Jules begin hanging out with Elliot and start playing an ongoing game of Truth or Dare. This includes Elliot daring Jules to pee standing up in the road. Jules makes a remark about genderfucking and this all felt so real and true. Jules goes down on Rue while Elliot sleeps in the bed next to them. So, um, things seem to be heading in a complicated direction.
Meanwhile, chaos is brewing with the Howard sisters. Lexi has decided she’s meant to be an observer and so she begins turning her life as a sidekick into a play. It seems her play is largely about Cassie who is busy waking up at 4am in a twisted take on self-care that’s really about looking as hot as possible when she passes Nate in the hall — even though he’s ignoring her except when they fuck on Friday nights.
There’s a very funny scene in the girl’s bathroom where Lexi is trying to hide her play from her sister — who is in an absurd cutesy outfit — and says that she’s just talking about the school play Oklahoma. Maddy and Kat then think that’s why Cassie is dressed like that. This cast has such good comic timing! Sam Levinson can be a good writer when he gets out of his own way! Like last week’s bowling scene, it’s nice to get a moment of relief when the show lets itself really be a teen show. And I’m sure we’ll get way more drama in the future as Lexi is positioning herself as Euphoria High’s Jenny Schecter.
One person who will for sure be coming to her play is Fez who continues to be harassed by Cal. Ashtray leads Cal inside by gun point and smacks him with the gun as Fez tries to figure out why Cal has been hanging around. Cal seems to think that Fez has the disc and is going to release the tape of him fucking Jules but Fez has no idea what Cal is talking about. This is another really funny scene — if the stakes weren’t so high for Jules.
All the bisexual men want to fuck Jules. It turns out that Elliot isn’t into Rue because he thinks she’s probably ace — he is into Jules. Jules confesses that Rue is probably not the most sexual person and Elliot starts really flirting saying that Jules is creative and a whore and has great tits and Kurt Cobain’s haircut and she deserves all the love and sex she needs.
I want to get mad at Levinson for having every person who is into Jules be bisexual, but every person who is into me is bisexual so it kind of takes the weight out of my argument. I do think it’s true that people who are sexually fluid tend to be more interested in trans people because monosexual people bring so much baggage to dating us. But, again, it’s not about whether this is realistic or not. It’s about how the story is being told, the specificity — or lack thereof, and whether or not I trust Levinson to give him the benefit of the doubt here. Just because something can be true doesn’t mean that it’s not revealing the biases of its writer. Like I wonder how Jules — who I’ll remind you is currently wearing a binder — feels about being told she has great tits.
One thing Levinson does have experience with is drug addiction. And Rue is really struggling. She’s trying to figure out a way to do drugs for free and this leads her back to the lady drug dealer’s place. She offers to deal to kids at her school and the drug dealer gives her a suitcase with $10,000 worth of product. She then says that if Rue screws her, she will sell Rue to some sick people.
Rue brings her drug suitcase to a meeting and when Ali asks her what’s in the suitcase it leads to a heartbreaking confrontation. Ali has been trying to find the balance between encouraging her and letting her come to recovery at her own pace. In this moment, it seems like he’s accepting that she may be beyond helping. At least at this point.
The episode ends with Rue doing some of the drugs herself and there’s just no way this isn’t going to end extremely poorly. It’s heartbreaking to watch. It’s also part of the problem with Levinson projecting his experiences onto a middle class queer Black girl. I know Rue is fictional — and Levinson’s creation — but I care about her. The risks are higher for her than they ever could have been for Levinson and it’s really hard to watch the show treat her this way.
Again, it’s not a critique. I know this is a dark show about dark things. I just wish I trusted the puppet master to understand who he’s playing with. These characters aren’t real, but trans people are real, queer Black girls are real, addicts with far less privilege than Sam Levinson are real. I hope he remembers that.
More Glitter:
+ This episode was again written and directed by Mr. Levinson.
+ As a trans woman who has never dated men, I know I’m a bit limited in understanding Nate and Cal. I’m curious how other people perceive their sexualities and if you feel like Sam Levinson is writing them in a way that feels authentic and well-developed.
+ Fun fact! Chloe Cherry who plays Faye played Jules in a Euphoria porn parody!
+ The only thing Kat gets to do this episode is go to an awkward dinner with Ethan’s parents.
+ I like the comparison of Jules to Kurt Cobain because I am a Kurt Cobain was trans truther.
+ Rumor has it Hunter Schafer is dating Dominic Fike who plays Elliot. Apparently some people are upset because they thought she was a lesbian and I just want to say leave Hunter alone! Let her date the cute boy with the little apple face tat!
“Euphoria” Episode 202 Recap: We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order to Live Through High School
This Euphoria recap of episode 202 contains spoilers
When I was in high school, I had several teachers, several friends’ parents, and even a therapist tell me that I was the most self-aware kid they’d ever met. It’s funny to think about that, knowing I was closeted to myself — even funnier to think about all the other less obvious things I didn’t know, too.
What these adults actually meant was that I could articulate a story about my interior life in a way that was convincing. It didn’t necessarily have to be the truth or the entire truth, just clear, just using the right language.
As Instagram infographs spread and viral TikToks teach people about themselves, I’d imagine it’s easier than ever to be this kind of kid. Euphoria has never been a show that feels especially astute when it comes to teens today as it is entirely written by a 37 year old and has teen actors ranging in age from 23 to 31. But if it gets one thing right about today’s teens — and teens in general — it’s in the stories these kids tell themselves about themselves, the misguided self-awareness of youth.
The episode begins with Nate, beaten to a bloody pulp, being rushed to the hospital with Maddy and Cassie by his side. Narrator Rue muses about Nate being in love with Cassie and I groaned with indifference. This opening culminates in a montage where Nate is imagining a life with Cassie and I’m really trying to get on Sam Levinson’s level and not be a prude but God he sure does love to show Sydney Sweeney naked again and again and again. The most interesting part of this opening is the flash we get of Jules — proof that even in his ultimate fantasy Nate can’t help but think of her.
I get it — I would still be thinking about Jules, too. We see her at school in a great pair of low rise jeans and a white graphic tee. Rue narrates that she has everything she could ever wish for and then she kisses Jules.
This is all I’ve ever wanted from this show so why does it feel so bad?? Maybe because Rue is in such a bad place and trying to hide that from Jules. Last season did a good job capturing the appeal drugs have for Rue — this season is showing their dark side.
Jules says “I love you” and Rue doesn’t respond because she’s too busy staring at Elliot. He comes over and there’s a very awkward scene where Rue is nervous about Elliot revealing they’ve been doing drugs together which Jules mistakes for Rue trying to hide romantic feelings. It ends with Jules walking away barely holding back tears.
Last week, I wondered what the show would do without new characters to focus on and this week we get our answer. While the episode begins like it’s going to focus on Nate, Narrator Rue ends up bouncing the story from character to character the whole episode. It makes for an exhausting hour of television, but what is Euphoria if not exhausting.
We learn that Cassie had been committing herself to abstinence. This is the kind of narrative I was talking about. Sometimes it’s absolutely good to take a break from sex. But it’s also an extremely juvenile thing to make a grand declaration like I rely too much on sex so I’m not having it ever — only to give in by fucking your best friend’s abusive ex. She’s a mess and only gets more upset when Maddy calls to brag about a sweet text Nate sent her from the hospital.
Speaking of Maddy… she might be going from Nate’s B Team to the B Team. She’s working as a babysitter because she likes trying on the mom’s fancy clothes and when this mom — played by Minka Kelly — gets home there’s a tense moment where the mom has Maddy unzip her dress. I’m not saying they’re going to fuck but the mom definitely wanted to fuck her!
The Cassie/Maddy/Nate drama is boring to me. I don’t care about Maddy’s blackmail — beyond its effect on Jules — or Nate and Cassie’s forbidden love. I would gladly accept a story shift where Maddy leaves her toxic Nate obsession and starts fucking a mom. Like yes, officially, that’s gross because she’s in high school but Alexa Demie is 31 so, like, you’re either on board with Euphoria sexualizing its teenage characters or you’re not. (I’m officially not — but as long as we’re here I’ll take the oldest cast member having a mommy issues fling.)
When Maddy, Jules, Kat, and Kat’s boyfriend Ethan are out bowling, Maddy tells Jules that she’s jealous of Kat. She says that she’s just not sure she could ever be in a relationship that didn’t have darkness. Jules commiserates. Here’s another narrative. It’s easier to think you’re built differently than to imagine you could eventually learn to respect yourself more.
Of course, Kat isn’t happy either. Ethan is a total dweeb and she’s having sexual fantasies of a Game of Thrones warrior killing him and ravishing her. She feels super guilty about this and haunted by a world of hashtag feminism models encouraging her to love herself more. It can feel empowering to say I hate myself. I don’t think I deserve the good kind of love. It’s a lot harder to say that maybe the “nice guy” you’re with just isn’t doing it for you. That maybe at 17 you haven’t found the person you want to be with and you’d rather be alone. Self-deprecation is a form of control. It’s difficult to accept you have none. But, babe, Ethan?? If you really loved yourself, you’d KNOW you deserve better!
And then we have Lexi who has spun a tale about Fezco, the drug dealer with a heart of gold. She is meek so to be who she wants to be, she must date someone who is edgy and strong. There are other choices, Lex!! Then again all the guys at this high school suck even more than your average high school guy, so maybe Fez really is the best choice.
Elliot is not so bad. Except that he and Rue are bringing out the worst in each other. He keeps saying this, but he’s crushing too hard to stop. And Rue is crushing too hard on being around someone she can openly use with. Rue’s self-narrative is the most destructive — that her life doesn’t matter, that she’s destined to die young. Elliot notes that Rue is probably using because of her dad dying and Rue is quick to say it’s not that simple. Maybe it’s not, but it’s convenient for Rue to feel that dying from an overdose is her destiny rather than circumstantial.
There’s a part of her that wants a different story. That part drags herself to a meeting where Ali is there to greet her. He drives her home and walks her in and tells her mom she has a long way to go without fully ratting her out.
There are the stories we tell about ourselves and the stories we tell about others. And everyone in Rue’s life is telling a story about being there for her while selectively oblivious to her relapse. I don’t blame Rue’s mom or Jules for choosing ignorance, but Rue isn’t hiding her drug use as well as she thinks. And if they don’t start telling another story soon, Rue’s narrative will have its not so inevitable end.
Extra Glitter:
+ The big cliffhanger of the episode is Nate confronts his dad about Jules and we get a hint that if Maddy finds out about Cassie, she’s going to release the tape of Nate’s dad and Jules to the world. I really, really hope not?? And would she even do that since she’s getting closer with Jules? Maybe she’d just share a video with the random guys instead.
+ Once again this episode was written and directed by Mr. Levinson.
+ Maddy at one point casually uses the R word. Can someone tell me if bitchy teens still use the word like that? It felt very 2006 and very unnecessary.
+ Kat not being able to think of a single con on her pro/con Ethan list… babe. Big Nice Guy has a chokehold on our nation.
+ I liked the too-brief moments of Jules and Kat and Maddy bowling. I would like more moments like this, please. Even the edgiest teens have casual fun sometimes.
+ The only scene we get just focused on Jules is when her dad asks if Rue is a good influence. I hope the next episode spends more time with Hunter and her haircut!
“Euphoria” Episode 201 Recap: Literally Heartbreaking
This Euphoria recap contains spoilers
I don’t hate watch television. There is simply too much good TV to waste my time watching Emily in Paris or something else that brings me no joy beyond Twitter camaraderie.
I say this, because as I embark on my self-imposed task of recapping the second season of Sam Levinson’s hit teens-gone-wild HBO drama, I must clarify that I want to love Euphoria. I would never waste your time — you presumably being someone who likes Euphoria enough to read recaps — if I didn’t share your enthusiasm. I think the show has one of the best casts on television — not just young casts, I’m talking in general — and it has a style that is wholly its own. And yet.
To understand my relationship with Euphoria, you need only to look at its central relationship — trans girl dreamboat Hunter Schafer’s Jules and literal Emmy winner Zendaya’s Rue. Jules loves Rue and she wants her to get better, she believes she can get better. She’s rooting for Rue at every step and yet… and yet… and yet… Rue keeps relapsing. But based on this premiere Jules isn’t giving up on Rue and I’m not giving up on this show. So let’s begin, shall we?
The season begins with Fezco. Or, rather, it begins with Fezco’s grandmother. If you missed Rue’s omniscient narrator in last year’s holiday specials, she’s back to fill us in on the history of her drug dealer, friend, and chosen family.
Fez’s grandma was a drug dealer who shot his father (not her son) after he beat up Fez. He became her assistant and eventual heir, adopting little Ashtray along the way. Before you know it he’s a high rolling drug dealer with his own kid assistant and Rue Bennet in his backseat.
It’s New Year’s Eve and he’s on the way to a drug deal. Rue is high and rapping along to “Hit Em Up” by 2Pac and Fez and a very concerned little Ashtray tell her to calm down. She’s supposed to wait in the backseat with this other dude’s girlfriend named Fay. Fay starts to do heroine and Rue is like maybe don’t before Fay says she’s just a “junky bitch” too. Then they’re both getting pulled out the car windows by drug goons.
Inside, Fez, Rue, Fay, and Fay’s boyfriend are told to strip. Ashtray is taken into another room. The main goon starts dancing around to “Right Down the Line” by Gerry Rafferty in a moment that feels like a film student failing to imitate the Alfred Molina Boogie Nights scene. Rue is hesitant to strip and then taken into the shower and forcibly stripped there. It’s a rough and uncomfortable scene which I guess is Sam Levinson’s whole deal.
Eventually the drug kingpin — a soft-spoken female former teacher — trusts them and makes the deal with Fez. And despite the experience being traumatic just to witness, Rue is chatty and excitable once they’re back in the car.
This takes us to the main setting for the rest of the episode — a predictably wild New Year’s Eve party. We see Jules with her incredible new haircut — it looks so fucking good on her! — and so does Rue who immediately runs away to hide.
We then check in with Maddy and Lexi and Kat and Cassie! I won’t spend too much time on them since we’re primarily here for the gay stuff but my feelings for Alexa Demie and Barbie Ferreira are gay and I’m invested in every female character on this show regardless of who they’re dating.
Someone I’m not invested in is Nate who has a wild drunken joy ride with Cassie before fucking her in the bathroom. Maddy knocks on the door and this leads to a chaotic episode-long hijink where Cassie is hiding in the bathtub while Maddy smokes and flirts with a new guy. Meanwhile, goody goody Lexi begins to have an unpredictable spark with the episode’s main dude Fez.
Back to Jules — she’s dancing with Kat and she makes eye contact with Nate once he’s removed himself from the bathroom. She says her goal is to blackout the entire year. Then we move to Rue who is doing just that as she makes friends in the laundry room with a guy named Elliot and starts doing more drugs. At first I thought he was transmasc because he’s short, has dyed blonde hair, and is named Elliot, but actually he’s played by cis musician Dominic Fike.
Jules begins to look for Rue and as if a broken heart could be literal, Rue’s heart begins to stop. Really it’s the drugs and she’s going into cardiac arrest. She asks Elliot to crush up some Adderall from her sock and with a chuckle she narrowly avoids death. Elliot says he’s not sure that it’s good they met and Rue says he’s her new favorite person.
Meanwhile, Jules has given up her search and apologizes to Kat for not being better friends. Jules says she let her world get too small. For a brief moment, I abandoned my Rules shipping and started dreaming of a Jules/Kat romance! Imagine how hot! Alas Kat is still with the boring guy from last season. If she’s happy, I’m happy, I guess.
Jules finally sees Rue sitting by a fire with Elliot and she makes her way over to her. She walks over and says Rue and Rue looks up and the sound design drops. The look, look back, walk over, first word is stretched across so much other chaos with the other characters. A glance between these two holds the drama of a fuck or fight between the others.
Before we get to this conversation, we unfortunately must check in with Nate. McKay has just had a sad conversation with Cassie where she finalizes the end of their relationship and when McKay emerges, Nate asks if he was back there “dicking her down.” McKay says no and Nate gets increasingly intense as he asks McKay how he fucked Cassie and where he came. He’s towering over McKay like he wants to dick him down. Nate’s confused closeted hypermasculine sexuality is one of my least favorite aspects of the show. I don’t find it to be compelling or to be a sharp commentary on masculinity or for it to be anything but a big cliché. If you want to see this trope done well go watch Sex Education. But here I fear Levinson continues to miss the mark.
From upsetting in a bad way to upsetting in a good way, Jules asks if she can talk to Rue. Elliot leaves and Jules sits down. She asks Rue when she relapsed and Rue lies and says it’s just weed. Jules asks her again. “Do you want me to be honest?” Rue asks. “The night you left.” Hunter Schafer and Zendaya are devastating in this moment, their faces filled with so much pain and love. Now that we know the guilt about her mom Jules is bringing to this relationship, Rue’s words cut even deeper. Their conversation gets cut short when Fezco sees Nate, gets Lexi’s number, and tells Ashtray to start the car. On his way to the getaway, Ashtray tells Rue they’re leaving.
Euphoria then gives us some stylistic flourishes in a slo-mo montage where each character gets overexposed as the camera pushes in. Eventually we get Rue going back up to Jules and apologizing She says she didn’t mean to be mean. She’s just having a tough time and misses her. Jules says she misses her too. Rue says she really wants to be with her. AND THEN THEY KISS.
Because of the fantasy sequences of the holiday specials, I fully thought this was a dream sequence. But it’s not! I know officially I should not be rooting for these two to get back together. It’s almost definitely not what either of them need. But I can’t help it! I love them together so much! The bond between these two characters and these two actors is what keeps me coming back to the show, it’s what makes it such a special work of television. It doesn’t matter how many swooping camera moves you do if you’re not swooping over something worthwhile — Rules is what’s worthwhile.
I will always bristle at Sam Levinson’s gaze. I will never be as fascinated with gratuitous nudity or corny violence as him. And I’ll remain frustrated with his limited writing as long as he keeps insisting on writing this show about all these different people solely by himself. But even if Euphoria will never be my favorite show, I want to meet it as the show it’s trying to be. I won’t nitpick complaints or criticize it for not being the show I wish I could watch with this cast. Instead I’ll enjoy what it offers — silly plots, dramatic form, and actors I adore.
It helps that the episode ends with Fezco doing what all of us have wanted to do since 2019 — beating the absolute shit out of Nate. Sometimes all you need is one good kiss and a very tall asshole getting what he deserves.
Extra Glitter:
+ Thanks for joining me on this journey! I’ve been told by some people who I really respect that I’m too harsh on this show and other people that I really respect that I’m too easy on it. So I’m going to assume my opinions are perfect and correct!
+ Okay but seriously can we just take a moment and appreciate Hunter’s haircut!?!?
+ Sam Levinson is obsessed with showing dicks and we get a hard one between two bullet wounds first thing in this episode.
+ Nate is over-the-top in a lot of ways but the assholes at my high school really did drink and drive with that level of abandon.
+ Now that we’ve gotten a Fez episode, is Lexi the only main character who hasn’t had an episode focusing on her? I wonder if the show will start repeating characters or drop that format like the season one finale and holiday specials.
+ I’ll be curious to see how many episodes Sam Levinson directs himself or if pilot director Augustine Frizzell or any other directors join him. I am pretty sure unlike the second holiday special co-written with Hunter, he’s still writing the entire season solo. I really wish he wouldn’t!
+ Anyway, shoutout to the uncredited writers of Euphoria. See you next week!
Autostraddle March Madness: Canon vs. Fanon – Baby Gays
A few numbers from this year’s Autostraddle March Madness, through our first two sub-regions: 8, 23, 2 and 891.
Eight is the number of votes that separated Shane and Carmen from The L Word and Root and Shaw from Person of Interest in the Battle for Sarah Shahi Sapphic Supremacy.
23 is the number of votes that separated Callie and Addison from Grey’s Anatomy from OG Jane and Petra from Jane the Virgin. Callie Torres’ canon pairing, Callie and Arizona, had a smooth ride to the second round: easily dispatching another Jane the Virgin combo (Rose and Luisa).
2 is the number of brackets, out of the 891 that were submitted in Challonge competition, that are sitting at 100% accuracy through two rounds. Just two!
With only eight competitors in every sub-region, every match-up’s going to be tough so it feels like anyone can win at any point. The only real surprise for me, through two rounds of voting, is Debbie and Ruth’s upset of Emily and JJ in the Fanon region; I may have underestimated the G.L.O.W. fanbase. I worried about Brittana overcoming the allure of Bettina but the favorites from GLEE were able to advance with no problem. And, on behalf of the TV team, let me thank you for advancing Emma and Nico of Vida over Alice and Nat from The L Word: Generation Q…I think the team would have mutinied if you hadn’t.
So let’s take a look at that updated bracket, shall we?
Canon #1. Syd and Elena – One Day at a Time
Elena and her Syd-nificant Other got Heather’s vote for Best Queer Couple of 2020. Here’s what she wrote:
It’s funny that I’ve seen a hundred queer couples on TV at this point, and it was finally these two teenage dorks who really reflected my own reality back to me for maybe the first time. They’re sweet and they’re silly and they communicate and work to balance their own needs with each other’s needs and each have their own hopes and goals for the future, and personalities, but they make such a match together too. They make each other better and they make each other happier and they make each other feel safer and those are some of the greatest things anyone in your life can ever do for you.
Canon #8. Juliana and Valentina – Amar a Muerte
Juliana’s walking with her mother when she first spots Valentina and though not a word between them is spoken, her entire life is changed in that moment. When they meet later in the park, the chemistry between the two is palpable. They find refuge in each other: as Valentina copes with the loss of her father, Juliana stops her from giving into her worst impulses. When Juliana’s mother is kidnapped by the cartel, Valentina offers her sanctuary. Theirs is one of the greatest love stories ever told.
And, just in case Juliantina’s improbable love story wasn’t amazing enough already: the fan effort to have their story go on, even after Amar a Muerte‘s end, was successful. Production on the Juliantina spin-off has resumed after a prolonged COVID pause.
One of the consequences of Lisbeth being off-screen so often is that Bess has more time to build chemistry with other people on the canvas. That, of course, has its consequences. As our intrepid Nancy Drew recapper, Valerie Anne, wrote last year:“Someone please explain to me why I still ship Nancy and Bess even though Bess has a perfectly lovely girlfriend RIGHT HERE?”
Pondering it further, Valerie told me: “Nancy and Bess is just a fun ship because Nancy is so SERIOUS so often and Bess is a little more breezy and instead of being annoyed by it, Nancy is charmed by it. They’re an unlikely duo and it has the endearing feeling of those videos where like a panther and a puppy have become best friends.”
Canon #2. Cassie and Izzy – Atypical
There’s something beautiful about crushing on someone…it’s idyllic…you get to imagine the best version of you and the best version of them and the best version of yourselves, together, without thinking about the outside world. But the moment that it becomes real and suddenly, you’re at the mercy of all these forces that you’d never considered before and that can be scary, so you act weird. That’s what happens to Cassie and Izzy in Atypical‘s third season and, for a while, it looks like they won’t make it.
“I’ve been thinking, you’re right, I’ve been awful to you and you’re so good and solid and wonderful, but I get it if you don’t want do this,” Izzie concedes. “I know I’m not easy.”
But Casey, who’s not sure about a lot, is sure about this one thing, “I’m not looking for easy.”
Canon #7. Bess and Lisbeth – Nancy Drew
When Bess first meets Lisbeth, she’s acting as a distraction: keeping Lisbeth busy while Nancy Drew breaks into the morgue. They flirt as Lisbeth fixes Ace’s car and, at some point, Lisbeth slips Beth her number. Asked about it later, Bess claims she doesn’t date — boys or girls — because she’s been on her own for so long, she never lets herself get that close to anyone. But, after running into Lisbeth while out on a mission, Bess thinks maybe she ought to let herself get close to someone and invites Lisbeth to dinner.
Though Nancy Drew hasn’t given Bess and Lisbeth nearly enough screentime — Lisbeth is gone more than she’s around, according to resident Nancy Drew expert, Valerie Anne — the couple compliment each other nicely. Lisbeth sees through Bess…past the fancy clothes she wears to play socialite and into her thoughtful, anxious insides. In Lisbeth, Bess finally finds her anchor: someone who serves as constant in a way few other people in her life have.
Canon #3. Rue and Jules – Euphoria
From Drew’s magnum opus on Euphoria‘s first season:
Rue (Zendaya) is a 17-year-old bored with everything in life but drugs. She’s a regular teenager, trapped in the suburbs, annoyed with her family, alienated from endless high school drama, and struggling with mental illness. Drugs are her escape. Unfortunately, this escape led to an OD and a stint in rehab. The show opens with her returning home from this stay, less invested in staying clean than immediately finding her next fix. That is until she meets the new kid in school, an enigmatic trans girl named Jules (Hunter Schafer). They meet, they become best friends, and then, they become something more.
Canon #6. Emily and Sue- Dickinson
From Valerie’s review of Dickinson‘s second season:
In the season finale, Sue goes to see Emily and tries to explain why she tried to push her off on Sam Bowles. She was afraid of the way she felt about Emily, the way Emily and her poems made her feel. She was afraid because she didn’t feel it anywhere else, not at her parties, not with Austin, not with Sam. Just Emily.
And then Sue comes out and says it. It’s not poetic but it’s crystal clear: “I’m in love with you.”
Emily doesn’t believe it. She’s been hurt by Sue before. But Sue shouts it. Emily pushes back, pushes her, but Sue says it again and again. She’s not backing down, not anymore. And then Sue says the thing that could be a line from one of Emily’s poems, “The only true thing I’ll ever feel is my love for you.”
Canon #4. Cheryl and Toni- Riverdale
It’s hard to draw close to someone like Cheryl Blossom. Over the years, she has honed her ability to keep people at arm’s length. It becomes almost a natural instinct when even Cheryl’s mother doubts her capacity for love and dismisses her as “a jealous, spite-filled, starving, emotional anorexic.” So when Toni tries to get to the root of why Cheryl called Jughead to tell him about Archie and Betty’s kiss, Cheryl lashes out at the attempt to draw close: “Get your Sapphic, serpent hands off my body!”
But Toni persists…and, eventually, Cheryl starts to relent. Cheryl admits she used to be such a carefree kid but then her mother crushed her spirit by taking away her first love: her best friend, Heather.
“You’re not loveless. You’re not deviant. Okay?” Toni assures her. “You’re sensational.”
Canon #5. Kate and Emaline – Everything Sucks!
As confident and brash as Emaline appears, when her boyfriend, Oliver, absconds to New York to become a famous actor, she’s at a loss. She had been doing all of this — drama club and acting in the A/V Club’s movie — for him and now she doesn’t know who she is. Thankfully, Kate’s there to reassure her and offer Emaline a glimpse at herself through Kate’s eyes. Kate offers niceties, at first — Emaline’s funny, confident and talented — but when Emaline accuses her of being effortlessly cool and cute, Kate finds the confidence to make bolder admissions.
“I think you’re the most sexy and attractive person I’ve ever met,” Kate confesses.
“You really think so?” Emaline asks.
“I think you’re perfect.”
Fanon #1. Betty and Veronica – Riverdale
In Riverdale‘s pilot episode, Betty and Veronica kiss. They’re in the middle of cheerleading tryouts and Cheryl is looking for some sizzle and so Veronica gives it to her…and while their “faux lesbian kissing” doesn’t lead to anything in canon, it launched (or re-launched, if you follow the comic books) the Beronica ship. But perhaps Beronica’s biggest moment comes during Riverdale‘s musical episode, “A Night to Remember.”
Here’s how Kayla described it in her recap:
Veronica and Betty also sing it out after Archie convinces Betty that Veronica’s bad deeds are the result of pressure from her parents and reminds her how quickly Veronica forgave her after the Black Hood manipulated Betty into being mean to her. Archie and Betty start singing Tommy and Sue’s love ballad to each other rehearsal, and then the show just seamlessly shifts to BETTY AND VERONICA SINGING THE LOVE SONG TO EACH OTHER in what is definitely fuel for the Beronica ship. Somehow, this is the gayest scene to happen in the episode.
Fanon #8. Penelope and Eloise – Bridgerton
It was surprising to step into the world of Shondaland — Bridgerton is the first Netflix project from the great Shonda Rhimes — and not find out that one of the main characters was canonically queer. Sure, the entire show (and its source material) is about 19th Century London’s marriage market…which doesn’t lend itself to being anything besides a testament to (or indictment of?) heterosexual marriage…but this was Shondaland, right? But then we meet Eloise who so fervently resists the trappings of the patriarchy that you can’t not hope that she’s just not queer yet. A baby gay Anne Lister, perhaps?
The friendship between Penelope and Eloise is one of the highlights of Bridgerton‘s first season. There is no competition them, only the shared longing for a different life than they have been afforded. They are different — Penelope is far more amendable to society’s demands of women — but they are only truly seen by each other.
Fanon #2. Spencer and Aria – Pretty Little Liars
I’ve got to admit: even as I’ve revisit Pretty Little Liars patheon — watching old clips and reading episode recaps — I still don’t have the foggiest idea what would cause anyone to ‘ship Spencer and Aria. But people do: of the fanon femslash pairings for Pretty Little Liars, Sparia generates the most fanfic.
Obviously, they cute together: Spencer’s small frame fits perfectly beneath Spencer’s chin. I suppose, insomuch as any of the Liars were good at solving clues, I suppose Spencer and Aria were the best at it…and the show plainly encouraged the ‘shippers by referring them as Team Sparia on-screen (which feels like faux pas to me…like a band wearing their own t-shirts). But shipping? I don’t know about that.
Fanon #7. Bess and Nancy – Nancy Drew
One of the consequences of Lisbeth being off-screen so often is that Bess has more time to build chemistry with other people on the canvas. That, of course, has its consequences. As our intrepid Nancy Drew recapper, Valerie Anne, wrote last year:“Someone please explain to me why I still ship Nancy and Bess even though Bess has a perfectly lovely girlfriend RIGHT HERE?”
Pondering it further, Valerie told me:”Nancy and Bess is just a fun ship because Nancy is so SERIOUS so often and Bess is a little more breezy and instead of being annoyed by it, Nancy is charmed by it. They’re an unlikely duo and it has the endearing feeling of those videos where like a panther and a puppy have become best friends.”
Fanon #3. Josie and Hope – Legacies
In her reflection on the queer legacy of Legacies, Valerie Anne charted the series’ history: from Rebekah Mikaelson’s 2014 threesome to the current Salvatore School where everyone seems just a little bit gay. During this iteration’s first season, Josie reveals that she used to have a crush on Hope. And while it takes a while for Hope to admit it: she had a crush on Josie for like a week when they were 14.
Here’s how Valerie captured what followed that admission:
Hope opens up to Josie in a way she has a hard time opening up, and it’s beautiful and heartbreaking to watch. Josie considers her carefully as she talks; because the thing is, people don’t often let Josie make decisions like this. They don’t take HER feelings into consideration as much as they should, because she’s usually the one who is catering to someone else’s feelings. But Hope is willing to upend her ENTIRE LIFE if Josie says so, just to save her some pain. While Josie fights back tears and takes Hope in, the song croons about not wanting to forget. “How could I blackout you?” Appropriate, given Hope’s recent journey of being unknown. In the end, they hug, and it’s decided Hope will stay. Josie misses Hope, too. And Landon is leaving, so they are both sharing a specific pain; they need each other. They were two points of a love triangle, but when the third point disappears, they find themselves on a straight line toward each other.
Fanon #6. Hanna and Mona – Pretty Little Liars
In Pretty Little Liars‘ second season finale, Spencer figures out that Mona is “A.” Mona corrects her: she’s a part of the A-Team and invites Spencer to join. As Mona drives frantically to Lookout Point, Spencer asks if A’s torture has just been Mona’s payback for the Liars’ tacit acceptance of Alison’s bullying. But Mona swears that she’s been over all that.
“[Ali] was never my friend, but Hanna was and you bitches took her from me,” Mona explains. “It’s not about betrayal, Spencer, it’s about revenge! You deserved everything you got! You stole my only friend.”
Torturing, blackmailing, committing violence…totally something you do because someone stole your “friend.” Sure, Jan.
Fanon #4. Lydia and Allison – Teen Wolf
Soon after Allison arrives in Beacon Hills, Lydia spots Allison at her locker, expresses appreciation her fashion sense and dubs her her new best friend. Over the years, they grow closer and fiercely protect the the other from whatever supernatural force threatens them. But when Lydia’s captured by the Nogitsune in the show’s third season, she begs Allison not to come find her: according to her premonition, the battle could be prove fatal.
Of course, Allison won’t let anything stand in the way of getting her best friend back. In battle, Allison summons unimaginable strength — killing an Oni with her homemade silver arrowhead, a feat once thought impossible — but, in turn, gets stabbed in the abdomen. As she lays dying, she worries about Lydia — “Did you find her? Is she okay? Is Lydia safe?” — and Lydia, who senses Allison’s death from afar, lets out a Banshee scream in grief.
Fanon #5. Maya and Riley – Girl Meets World
When I’m writing these blurbs about shows I’ve never seen, like Girl Meets World, I’ll watch some scenes on Youtube and read a lot about the couple, just to get a sense of who they are so I can write about it sensibly. But as I watched Rilaya scenes, I kept checking my notes over and over again: “are we sure that this couple isn’t canon?”
In the series finale, as Riley’s parents consider a job offer that would take their family to London, Maya can’t stomach thinking that her best friend might leave. There’s no way Riley could leave, Maya rationalizes, because there’s no replacement for her and no cares about her like Riley does. Later, they make a pledge to each other: “Time and distance have no power over us. You and I are together for as long as we live.”
As always, the clock’s set: you’ve got 48 hours to cast your ballot in this round of March Madness. We’ll be back on Monday to unveil the updated bracket and vote in our final sub-region: SCI-FI/Fantasy.
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“Euphoria” Finally Gives Jules Agency In A Special Episode Co-Written By Hunter Schafer
When I was in high school, I loved therapy. I always knew what to say to make that man laugh or smile or seem just the right amount of concerned. I knew how to feign vulnerability and growth so he’d call me self-aware and praise my progress. I treated myself as a sort of test subject — my life as a tool — an easy continuation of the disconnect I felt every day. The game was to convince them I was okay — convince myself that I was okay. I always won.
A few years later I started again, but my new therapist saw through my bullshit. And then it became less fun. Sometimes I left therapy feeling worse than when I’d arrived. I wasn’t sure if I was getting better. I wasn’t sure of anything. But it was good. It was better. Some sessions brought actual vulnerability and with it actual revelations. I became someone less controlled by my OCD, I became someone capable of being in a long term relationship, I became someone who came out of the closet.
Therapy has been essential to my survival and I am still in therapy and yet it has also been difficult and damaging and a total waste of my time. I feel the same way about on-screen representation.
This weekend brought the second special episode of Euphoria: “Fuck Anyone Who’s Not a Sea Blob.” Written by show creator Sam Levinson and star Hunter Schafer, this episode attempts to tell Jules’ side of the story — not just in the weeks since the finale but for the entire show. As I’ve written about — and then written about again — my relationship to Euphoria is fraught. I love the show, because of its cast, its creative spirit, and its representation. And I hate the show because of its limited writing, exhausting self-importance, and, well, its representation.
Like therapy, it’s easy to frame representation as either bad or good. We need to destigmatize therapy and make sure its accessible to all is a simple enough point. We need to increase the stories told about marginalized communities and diversify who we see on screen is simple as well. But the actual experience of those things — the experience of sitting in a room while someone unravels your life, the experience of sitting in front of your TV and seeing glimpses of that life — these are not simple things. So much depends on the quality of your therapist/the show. So much depends on what you bring to the space and what you can handle. At their best, these experiences are challenging. At their worst, they’ll fuck you up.
Watching this new episode of Euphoria, I finally understood why so many trans women avoid trans-specific media and choose projection instead. I understood why it might be easier to live in cis fantasy than our own realities. Because how often are they truly our own? And how often are they simply a different kind of cis fantasy with us as the supposed subject? Even when we’re involved in front of the camera, or even behind, our voices are still filtered through more powerful cis collaborators or cis financiers and studio execs or simply the cis world we live in. I do think trans creators have made a lot of remarkable art, but the search is painful, because of how often it fails to connect — and because of the feeling when it does.
The majority of this Euphoria episode takes place in a therapist’s office. Jules is back after running away and now she’s reluctantly talking to a therapist played by Lauren Weedman (who I adore because of Looking). The therapist asks Jules why she ran away and we cut to a close up on Jules’ eye. We watch a montage of memories set to Lorde’s “Liability” and in this moment I knew I was fucked. That song came out two months before I did and the short story I wrote to process my newfound revelation culminated with the me character singing that song at a karaoke bar to the character based on my girlfriend at the time. This isn’t as much a coincidence as it is very easy to project a trans narrative onto this song about a girl worried she’s “too much” for the people around her.
The episode is filled with lines and moments that sting with relatability. Everything from the specificity of that Lorde song to the suggestion from a therapist that you’re using self-criticism as a defense mechanism. Jules has long acted as the show’s object of desire — why do you think cis women are so obsessed with her? — and this first look into her POV reveals what can happen when a trans character is given agency. Jules talks about wanting to remove her puberty blocker to expand her notion of womanhood, she talks about the judgements of cis girls, she talks about defining her femininity through the approval of men. All I’ve wanted since Euphoria began was for Sam Levinson to write with people who actually have the characters’ perspectives — this episode shows why. Hunter’s lived experience is felt in each moment of nuance.
Despite the similar set up of a wise adult talking to a young protagonist, this episode does not have the same two-hander feel of the previous special. In lieu of theatricality, Levinson jumps in and out of the therapy session with frenetic montages of memory and fantasy. Some of these work better than others. After all, it’s still Euphoria.
Part of Jules’ problem is she’s stuck in these very fantasies. She talks about “Tyler,” her texting boyfriend we eventually learned to be the abusive Nate. She says that even though he isn’t real she’s still in love with Tyler. She says that the sexting they had was the best sex of her young life. Don’t worry, she’s also in love with Rue, but that relationship carries a weight of reality. Jules says maybe what she’s attracted to is the letdown — that it’s all a fantasy. Again, Hunter’s influence is felt here. It’s not that this is an exclusively trans concern, but it feels trans. Many of us feel disconnected from our bodies and therefore from reality resulting in the formation of meaningful connections online before we’re ready to confront the difficulty of in-person bonds.
But it’s not just Jules’ transness that has shaped her damage. We learn that while Rue was struggling with sobriety throughout the first season, Jules was struggling with the sobriety of her mother. Jules says the pure way Rue looks at her reminds her of a mother’s love. Then she talks about how she felt responsible for Rues’ sobriety and her mother’s. The therapist points out the obvious connection which Jules has inexplicably failed to realize. Sometimes therapy is like that. Sometimes television is like that. Sometimes adolescence is like that. Subtlety is overrated.
The final scene shows Rue and Jules finally reunited outside a fantasy. We learn that this episode has been taking place before the last one — Rue stopped by Jules’ house before going to the diner. They barely speak and Rue leaves crying. That’s what prompted Jules’ text with the Moses Sumney song. We end on Jules crying, seen artfully through a rainy window.
I don’t trust Sam Levinson. It’s not personal — I don’t know the guy — it’s just based on the many dangerously transphobic missteps in the first season. But I love this show and I welcome change. I’m so glad Hunter got to work on this episode and the results are clear. But distrust doesn’t fade so easily and there were still moments that made me cringe. Maybe if I was approaching them from a place of trust, they wouldn’t have. I want to offer that as a possibility. But the perspective of the montages with Jules taking naked selfies or Jules and fantasy Tyler fucking felt a little off. The point of the episode was to finally make Jules less of an object and Sam Levinson’s gaze is just so fucking objectifying. It felt like an odd contrast with the words Jules was saying about men and her sexuality — words clearly influenced by Hunter’s own personal life.
Representation is complicated. To be seen when you’ve so rarely been seen is as painful as it is powerful. And when that image feels both true and false it has an extra layer of pain. It’s why we’re often so hard on art from our own community. When we’re finally promised a glimpse at ourselves, it’s upsetting to see anything but a mirror. Euphoria is not a mirror for me. It’s more like the trick mirrors they use to achieve some of their most striking visual moments. But I don’t need a mirror — I just need a reflection of truth, not my own. And this episode felt close. I hope it keeps feeling closer.
I’m going to go to therapy tomorrow. I’m going to look at myself and try to be vulnerable and hope the trust I’m placing in my therapist isn’t misguided. And when Euphoria comes back for its second season I’ll be watching. The defense mechanisms, the avoidance, the fantasy is easy. The reality is hard. But the only way to get a better reality is to feel the pain. And ask for more.
Also.Also.Also: Nothing Makes Hunter Schafer Squeak With Happiness Like Seeing Other Queer Trans Lesbians
Feature Image via Net-a-Porter
Well, look at us! We’re making it through another day!
Queer as in F*ck You
“I don’t think I should be a spokesperson for any community! But, as far as the individual and emotional, nothing gets me more than having a moment with another T girl. I’m like… [she emits a long squeak]. There is a wavelength that is special and important. Whenever I see another T girl or a pair of lesbians, I’m like, ‘Yes!’ It’s a good feeling to know that you are not singular.”
Euphoria star Hunter Schafer on being a Supernova for Porter
Spelman College Today Announced That It Has Met the $2 Million Dollar Match It Needed for Their New Audre Lorde Chair Endowed Professorship of Queer Studies!!! LET’S GO BLACK QUEER STUDIES, I AM SO EXCITED ABOUT THIS DEVELOPMENT!!
Speaking of which, Language Is Critical: How Alice Walker Broke Taboos in Writing Celie in The Color Purple
I have been waiting all week to tell you about this, but we have to talk about Aretha Franklin’s queer sister Carolyn that I never knew about until now! (This is an excellent biographical essay, with a lot of great analysis of Carolyn’s music, if that’s your kind of thing)
I actually don’t even know how to describe this one, but please just know that it is delightful and one of the best personal essays I have read about life in your 30s, probably ever, and certainly one of the best personal essays I read last week — The “Flop Era:” Acceptance, Liberation, and Renaissance by Harron Walker for W
Big news from the weekend: Nicki Minaj Has Agreed to Pay Tracy Chapman $450,000 to Settle a Lawsuit Over the Rapper’s Song “Sorry
Katie Sowers not returning to Niners (but we will always have that sexy ass Super Bowl ad from last year)
We technically already have a whole post about it on the site, but I’m too hyped to keep my mouth shut! Have y’all checked out the trailer drop for Lee Daniels’ new Billie Holiday biopic yet?
Speaking of which…
https://twitter.com/carmencitaloves/status/1349132085479538691
Saw This, Thought of You
Instead of a ‘New You,’ Reconnect With Your OG Self
“It’s very difficult for people to really have a very clear perspective on the future if you have not really taken the time to understand your history.” Meet the Southern Librarians Fighting for Racial Justice and Truth-Telling
As an Intense Winter Unfolds, Some Lessons From Herbalists from Jenna Wortham at The New York Times
The WNBA Can’t Keep Kelly Loeffler Around by Jemele Hill for The Atlantic. (“The defeated senator and Atlanta Dream co-owner is too far out of sync with the league’s values.” — ya damn right.)
Yesterday was Mary J Blige’s 50th Birthday, and while Black women online every celebrated with #ToMaryWithLove, I wanted to share my favorite performance of hers of all time. From her Lifetime Achievement Award from BET in 2019 when — at 48 years old! — she performed an entire 20 minute set, with full choreography and live mic, by herself:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hI7GqHxr7EE&ab_channel=BETNetworks
Political Snacks
Whew political snacks are weird AF today because… well last week there was an insurrection and attempted coup on United States, and tomorrow Trump will become the first US President to be Impeached twice. And it’s at least reasonably likely that there might be another violent insurrection between now and the inauguration of a new President. So, yeah. There’s that.
- Impeach Him, but We’re Past the Point Where Impeachment Fixes This
- If you, like me, are still trying to wrap you brain around what the fuck happened last week — may I suggest Melissa Harris Perry’s (who I trust always) new podcast “System Check” with Dorian Warren at The Nation, Political Violence Is No Anomaly in American History
- Also perhaps more surprisingly, this Twitter thread: To make sense of the pro-Trump attack on the Capitol, many folks have analogized to military conflicts like the War of 1812. A better analogy is rooted in our long history of racial authoritarianism. This wasn’t war, this was a Lynch mob.
“Euphoria” Returns With a Wonderful and Frustrating Zendaya Tour De Force
Last year I wrote what I would call a highly critical review of Euphoria’s first season. Show creator, and sole season one writer, Sam Levinson is a cis straight white guy and that fact resonated through every one of the show’s many, many missteps. But did you know that when you search Euphoria on GIPHY it’s just Zendaya and Hunter Schafer and Barbie Ferreira and the rest of the cast being hot and cool and charming and cute and GAH OH MY GOD I LOVE EUPHORIA.
My critiques of the first season largely remain, but when productions shut down due to Covid my first thought wasn’t for any number of the shows I wholeheartedly love. It was for this messy, often terrible, sometimes transcendent program about some very fucked up teens. Maybe that’s because Levinson doesn’t lack talent, only perspective. Or maybe it’s just because he was wise enough to fill his limited writing with the best cast one could imagine.
I ship Zendaya’s Rue and Hunter Schafer’s Jules like some people shipped Brittana. And while last season ended on a sad note for them, my hope for the future remained. At the very least, I imagined I’d get more GIFs. The circling around the bed kiss and the “Are you talking to your momma about me?” can only be used so many times before my group chat starts to worry.
Well! Here we are! It’s not season two, but last night the first of two Christmas specials dropped and yes I did watch it on HBO Max immediately. AND OH MY ARE WE GETTING SOME NEW GIFS.
Euphoria Special Episode Part 1: Rue begins with what can only be described as fanfic torn straight from my brain and every other teen and stunted queer twenty something’s Rules-obsessed brain. We open on Jules’ naked back. The sun is rising on a new day in the type of artsy studio apartment that represents freedom to a certain kind of teen. Rue kisses Jules’ butt. She kisses the top of Jules’ underwear. She kisses up the skin encasing her ribs. She kisses her shoulder. She kisses her cheek. She kisses that awkward place between your lover’s cheek and mouth and nose that isn’t awkward at all when what you need is just to feel their face on your face, their skin on your skin. Rue kisses Jules’ lips.
Jules has a presentation. She’s in art school it seems. And today is a big day. Jules is nervous and Rue is intent on kissing the nerves right out of her — morning breath be damned.
Jules gets up and her body looks like my body. She’s skinny with minimal hips, broad shoulders, and cute wide-set boobs. Rue looks on with desire. Emmy winner Zendaya looks on with desire. An audience of people — cis and trans — look on with desire.
Rue hugs Jules while she brushes her teeth. Then there’s a montage: Rue sitting in the windowsill all bohemian. Rue hugging Jules again as she puts on a paint covered button-down. More hugging. More kissing. It feels like a fantasy. It is a fantasy. Rue is actually doing drugs in the bathroom of a diner on Christmas Eve where she’s eating pancakes with her sponsor Ali.
The next fifty minutes are a bottle episode — a one-act play of sorts — where veteran of stage and screen Colman Domingo spars with arguably the best actor under the age of 25. Euphoria is not a show that likes to settle in one moment for very long and it’s such a treat to spend this much time just sitting with Domingo’s Ali and Zendaya’s Rue. Sure, Sam Levinson’s camera is up to his old swooping tricks, but given the limited setting it lends the episode some dynamism and actually works really well.
Rue starts by telling Ali she’s doing great. Ali knows she’s high and that those two things are mutually exclusive. He breaks down her walls as they get into a debate around shame, responsibility, and the salvageability of the world itself.
There are parts of this episode that really work. The discussions of addiction feel sharp and true. The moment when Ali steps outside to call his estranged daughters while Zendaya listens to Moses Sumney’s “Me in 20 Years” is effective in an unsubtle expressionistic Euphoria sort of way. But then there are parts that don’t work — or if they do it’s only because Domingo and Zendaya are salvaging the writing.
One of my biggest critiques of the first season was Levinson’s lack of a writers room. Levinson’s decision to filter his experiences with addiction through a queer Black girl in love with a trans woman was welcome. But his insistence that he could write this story alone is baffling. Unfortunately, Levinson is again credited as sole writer.
As a white screenwriter, my brain simply cannot grasp the ego of a white person who would write this episode on their own. There’s one monologue about Nike supporting Black Lives Matter and another monologue about Malcolm X and MLK and I just cannot understand the insistence of doing these things alone! I’m not even qualified to write about these moments as a critic! (But even I know Levinson’s representation of MLK’s politics and how people viewed MLK when he was alive is completely inaccurate.)
The great thing about television is it’s a medium based in collaboration. It’s frustrating with all the talent he has that Levinson refuses to collaborate on his show’s writing. Imagine if this episode’s discussions of race hit as hard as its discussions of addiction — imagine the nuances someone else could bring to the moments not about race but still influenced by race because that’s part of who these characters are. Colman Domingo and Zendaya are so fucking good and there is so much good about this show and yet it continues to frustrate me deeply.
I don’t want to criticize this show. I want to talk about the moment where Rue says Jules cheated on her and Ali slowly explains why kissing someone and telling them you love them is not the same as agreeing to a relationship. I want to talk about the moment when Rue finally admits Ali is right about sobriety but says it doesn’t matter because she doesn’t plan on being alive much longer. I want to talk about these moments where the actors meet the material and it resonates with my past in ways that shake me. I want to talk about how it’s unlike anything else on TV.
But as long as Levinson insists on writing the show by himself, my complicated relationship to it is likely to continue. “Rue’s perspective is very much Rue’s perspective,” Levinson says in the post-show talkback. “She’s not always accurate in her retelling of things. She is limited in her ability to understand the other emotional worlds of other characters.”
So I guess Levinson understands these concepts in theory. Ego is a hell of a drug.
Autostraddle’s Favorite and Least Favorite Lesbian, Bisexual and Trans TV Characters of 2019
When GLAAD released their annual Where We Are on TV report this year, they announced that LGBTQ+ TV characters are at an all-time high. The headlines all over the internet were ecstatic. Gays win! Best year ever! But the reality is a lot more complicated than that. “Our community,” as GLAAD President Sarah Kate Ellis noted, “finds itself in 2019 facing unprecedented attacks on our progress.”
Every year, our TV Team compiles a list of our favorite and least favorite characters. (For example: 2018, 2017, 2016). It’s fun. Nothing excites us like loving our favorite stories out loud. But there was also a sense, as we approached this list this year, that it was so much more than just good-time reminiscence, especially when so much of the quantitative and qualitative growth we continue to see on-screen is for thin, cis, white, non-disabled queer characters. Our stories matter politically and they matter personally. When they’re good, it makes us so happy. When they’re bad, there’s so much more at stake than our annoyance or discontent. Politics and pop culture have always had a symbiotic relationship, which is why representation — legitimately good representation that explores the fullness of humanity of all LGBTQ+ people at the intersections of the myriad oppressions we face — is more important than it ever has been.
Here’s what we loved this year and what we didn’t like very much at all. We’d love to hear about your favorite and least favorite characters in the comments!
FAVORITE CHARACTERS
Heather Hogan
Anne Lister, Gentleman Jack
I think most LGBTQ people have those a-ha! fictional characters who finally allow them to look closely at and accept their sexuality and their gender, and I also think most LGBTQ people have those if-only fictional characters they wish had been around when they were whatever age or going through such-and-such thing, to show them the way. I’m going to do that second thing to Elena Alvarez in just a second, in fact! It’s much rarer for a real-life queer adult to stumble upon a fictional queer adult who reminds them of who they are right now, who reflects their grown-up gay reality back at them. Anne Lister is the first — and maybe she’ll be the only — character to ever do that for me. There are so many of her soft butch ways that just resonate. The masculine way she dresses, her stride and gait, the firmness of her gesticulations, going toe-to-toe with every man in her way; but the tenderness too, and the overwhelming need to hold it all together and make everything okay. It was a new thing, to me, to see that on TV. And also, for someone who, on a cellular level, is comprised as much of Jane Austen stories as I am of water, well — finally.
Sophie Moore, Batwoman
There were so many ways Batwoman could have gone wrong that actually went so, so right — and my favorite one of them is Sophie Moore. The source danger is that she’s a kind of one-dimensional flashback in the comics. The current danger is that she’s Kate Kane’s ex-girlfriend who is presently married to a man, so there’s a real tightrope there between some really longstanding and harmful bisexual tropes. Yet, Batwoman‘s writers are walking it deftly, and have, on top of that, made Sophie more than Kate’s love interest. Sophie is drawn to rules, structure, order, regulated heroism. She’s also a queer woman in love with a winged vigilante who got kicked out of a prestigious military academy for breaking their Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy and refusing to deny it or apologize for it. We’ve barely scratched the surface of Sophie and I can’t wait to see what we find as the writers keep digging.
Annalise Keating, How to Get Away With Murder
“I still believe, and I will say this until I go to my grave, that Annalise Keating and Olivia Pope are the greatest characters on TV,” is a thing Viola Davis told Variety this year, because the writers on HTGAWM aren’t “writing tentatively” for people of color. They’re writing bold. And they’re writing messy. Six seasons in, the fact that Annalise Keating exists and is played by Viola Davis still blows my mind. Viola Davis! That she’s bisexual on top of it it all and also now has a best friend who also is a queer Black woman? It’s honestly unbelievable and I feel fucking blessed to be living on this timeline to witness it.
Elena Alvarez, One Day at a Time
This brilliant, driven, dorky, heroic queer teen was always going to make the list for me. One Day at a Time is one of my all-time favorite shows and she is just so wonderful and refreshing. Exploring Elena’s anxiety disorder this season just made me love her even more, and also made me wish I could have known her so much earlier in my life. I only understood mental illness to be one very specific thing that manifested itself in one very specific way (violence against me) when I was growing up. I never saw someone like me — a compassionate, silly overachiever — dealing with panic attacks. Never! And to have a mother who didn’t tell her to snap out of it or that she was being emotional or over-reacting, but to sit beside her and gently, lovingly teach her to breathe through it? I’m crying right now just thinking about it. Also, Syd-nificant other? COME ON! THAT’S PERFECT.
Petra Solano, Jane the Virgin
Petra is the opposite of every terrible bisexual TV character’s trajectory. Instead of being boldly proclaimed as A GAY CHARACTER and then reduced to one-dimensional writing and stereotypes before getting shuffled off to The Parking Lot of No Return, she was a just a caricature of a human being who evolved into a fully realized and deeply vulnerable and loyal friend/family member to Jane — and then she went and fell in love with another woman and got even more raw and real and wonderful. But don’t get it wrong. She never lost her edge. Love made her tender, but she absolutely still blackmailed her bleeding ex-husband who was trapped inside a teddy bear suit while lecturing him about bisexuality as the cops came to cart him off to jail.
Dex Parios, Stumptown
Stumptown itself has not lived up to my expectations. It’s RIDICULOUS that Dex hasn’t formed any relationships with any other female characters, and that her limited interactions with women are also limited to single-episode story arcs. RIDICULOUS. But gosh, I do love Dex. She’s a mess and she makes so many mistakes but she always wants to do the right thing and keep her friends and family safe. She’s also dealing with persistent trauma that’s never going to end. She’s self-destructive, but in a controlled way. She self-medicates, but not like before. She’ll never really “have it together” and she knows that and she’s not sorry for it. She’s doing the best she can with what she has, including a shocking variety of very cool ’80s jackets.
Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya
Cheryl Blossom, Riverdale
Unsurprisingly, I am still very obsessed with Cheryl Blossom, and the fact that the show has turned her into an Addams Family-meets-V.C. Andrews character makes me just love her more. Cheryl Blossom does not belong to our world. She does not speak like a human teen but rather like the town witch in a gothic horror story. I wish the Riverdale writers were more thoughtful in the writing of Toni Topaz this year, but I’ll always be thankful for the bizarreness of Cheryl and Toni’s most recent storylines — including burying and unburying bodies all the time????
Tegan Price, How To Get Away With Murder
How To Get Away With Murder has been all over the place as it spirals to its series finale next spring, but the introduction of Tegan to the show’s arsenal of morally questionable lawyers and lawyers-to-be has been a blessing. She’s funny, smart, and occasionally vulnerable, one of Annalise’s few real friends and an angry gay divorcee. We love to see it!
Bette Porter, The L Word: Generation Q
She’s back, she’s the mom of a teenager now, and she’s still ruining lives. Missed you, mommi.
Jules Vaughn, Euphoria
I didn’t love Euphoria as a whole (and I actively hated parts of it), but there are some little magical bits of it, especially when it comes to Jules and Hunter Schafer’s nuanced, visceral, specific performance. The show does messy friendship very, very well, and the love between Jules and Zendaya’s Rue is the most compelling part of the show.
Arthie Premkumar, GLOW
I went back and forth on whether to include Arthie here, because yes, she does continually hold a very special place in my heart, because I am a queer South Asian woman starved for representation on television, and season three not only lets her be hella gay but also includes LESBIAN SEX SCENES for the first time for the character and for the show. But that ends up being kind of… all we really get for Arthie this season. She doesn’t really exist outside of her relationship with Yolanda, who spends much of this season being pretty manipulative and yet it ends on a forced romantic note? In any case, I do love Arthie so much. And I can’t wait for the day when there are enough queer desi characters on TV for me to be able to pick and choose from.
Eve Fletcher, Mrs. Fletcher
I think Mrs. Fletcher ended up being one of the most underrated television shows of 2019. It’s sexy, real, and every episode unfolds like a colorful short story contemplating desire, personal evolution, and vulnerability. Eve is a fantastically complex bisexual character, and the show is thoughtful in how it explores her fantasies and emotions.
Carmen
Kat Edison, The Bold Type
As the year winds down, I keep returning back to Kat Edison. I don’t think I saw another queer character this year whose characterization and storytelling choices around their queerness was so fully developed without having to depend on a romantic partner to bring it to screen. That’s very hard to pull off. I loved Kat more on her own (and later with Tia, and later again with Adeena once more) than I ever loved her in pervious years. I finally related to her. I related to the questions of how do you redefine your queerness after suffering your first break up? When previously your sexuality had been tied up in you having a girlfriend? I related to her drive and ambition and desire to do good in the world. And yes, I’m sure we are all going to look back at the year when Kat “ran for city council” and laugh at the ridiculousness of it — but what is The Bold Type if not a wee bit ridiculous and running on glitter and girl power? Kat Edison lost a girlfriend, but she gained herself. And that was journey damn well worth watching.
Tia Reed, Boomerang
If you didn’t watch BET’s Boomerang, you missed one of the sleeper-hit best developed lesbian characters last year. It’s rare that we get to see a lesbian character in a half-hour comedy. Usually queer women’s stories are regulated to the high stakes tensions of “prestige dramas,” sci-fi epics, and soaps. In real life, lesbians and bisexuals are extremely funny and quirky, but television doesn’t seem ready to catch up. When I watched Boomerang last winter, I marveled at having such gay content front-and-center on the historically homophobic BET network that I didn’t give the craft of Lala Milan’s work enough credit. Sure, I laughed at Tia’s one liners and antics as they aired, but what’s stunning is that ten months later — I am still laughing. I can recall jokes in crystal memory. That’s talent. Yes, it’s important that Tia is one of the few queer characters on television who’s allowed to fully exist within a black space, and isn’t asked to check her queerness at the door. It’s important the she has black friends, and a black masc girlfriend. Sometimes, though, I worry that we get lost in the “representation conversation.”
Not that representation isn’t important! But also, everyone we are watching on screen — these are dedicated performers. Lala Milan has infectious energy and exquisite comedic timing; she can find the warmth in any conversational pause and twist it to her liking. And that is what makes Tia so memorable.
Candy Ferocity, Pose
This is controversial, I realize. I want to be clear right away: I do NOT agree with Pose’s decision to kill Candy Ferocity. I don’t think there was anything to be learned from (re)traumatizing it’s largely black and brown, trans and queer audience by showing her death, particularly in the gruesome way it was showcased. I was livid when that episode aired. One of my biggest editorial regrets this year is that I didn’t make space on our website for those grievances to be aired. They needed to be. Pose should be held accountable for those decisions, especially by the QTPOC folks that their show represents and serves.
OK, that all said and true: As the season progressed, I loved getting to know Candy through her afterlife. Angelica Ross found such life in Candy’s death and it was absolutely, hands down my favorite performance this year. It’s December and when I close my eyes it’s still July, and Candy is singing to me in a red shimmering dress. I close my eyes and it’s August, and she’s on a girl’s trip with her sisters peering down and smirking at me from her sunglasses. I close my eyes and her spirit is still there — with me. Not many actors could have pulled that off, but Angelia Ross is an impeccably unparalleled talent.
Emma Hernandez, Vida
Vida found itself in a difficult and unenviable predicament. It had one of the strongest first seasons of television I’ve ever seen. A true masterclass of the art form. How do you top coming out of the gates so strongly? The second season of the show is a bit more uneven, but I found it nonetheless mesmerizing, if only because it was so damn messy. And if we’re being real with ourselves, queerness is messy. I’ve never seen a protagonist like Emma Hernandez, who is so full of pain but trying to find these small spaces of reconciliation with her past and her hurt — whether that’s through some pretty complicated sex across the gender spectrum or quiet attempts at understanding with her sister and stepmother. Emma’s carrying her entire family’s future on the small frame of her ice cold shoulders. She definitely doesn’t always get it right, but my goodness — watching her is magnetic. You quite simply cannot stop rooting for her and for her utter complete mess, you know?
There’s a fine dance that can be struck between performer and writer, and Michel Prada and Tanya Saracho have found it in each other. They’re creating pure magic. I hope they never let go.
Batwoman, Batwoman
The other day I was joking that I didn’t necessarily mean that Ruby Rose’s take on Kate Kane was one of my my favorite performances this year, as much as I was fully prepared to hate their version of Batwoman, and instead — I really don’t. Batwoman is easily one of my favorite queer television shows of the fall, and certainly my favorite superhero story of the moment. Given how trepidatious I felt last spring about this entire shebang, that’s no small feat. I remember the first time I saw the trailer — and then the press screener — for Batwoman, I was stunned with a single thought: Ruby Rose might actually just pull this off. And you know what? They really have. I felt like that deserves some acknowledgement, so here I am: Way to go, Ruby Rose. Despite all of our collective fears and the entire queer world’s eyes thrusted upon you, you are somehow really pulling it off.
Riese
Sarah Finley, The L Word: Generation Q
Finley, Generation Q’s charming grifter with a complicated relationship to church and (her home) state, is a character. Like literally she’s a character, but she’s also a person that if she existed in real life, you’d be like “she’s a character.” She’s that one-of-a-kind person in your friend group whose presence is never forgotten and when she’s not around, it feels like something is missing, the same way you might feel when your adorable dog is at the groomers. She offers comic relief, is a winningly extroverted foil to Shane’s withdrawn intensity and steals every scene she’s in.
Abbi and Ilana, Broad City
Broad City did so much for queer representation by the time it ended its five-season run on Comedy Central — including its acknowledgment of bisexuality as an identity that transcends romantic relationships and its centering of a goofy, self-indulgent, transformational, hilarious and undeniably epic romantic friendship unlike anything we’ve seen on television before.
Kay Manz, Mindhunter
Okay so Wendy was gay in Mindhunter’s first season, but her girlfriend was one of those blink-and-you-missed-her types that always seem to be attached to the complicated female detective/investigator who is gay but not TOO gay in so many shows of this nature. But in Season Two she got to have a real relationship with a woman who usually wore sleeveless shirts, thus revealing her very attractive arm situations. She challenged and changed Wendy in difficult and important ways that also opened Wendy up to us.
Abby, Work in Progress
It’s hard enough to find a butch dyke side character on television, let alone a show about a butch dyke. Middle-aged men wondering what the fuck the point is are a standard of half-hour prestige television, but a self-described “fat dyke” eating one almond every day on a nihilistic march towards death and alienating most of her peers falling for a (much younger) trans guy? That’s a new fucking story! And so far I’m very intrigued by it.
Hen, 9-1-1
9-1-1 isn’t a typical procedural — the personal lives of the main characters aren’t sidelined and often take center stage. (It helps that everybody in the ensemble has decided to date… each other.) But even under those circumstances it felt unlikely we’d ever get to see a real fleshed out storyline for lesbian EMT Hen (played by Aisha Hinds, who also played gay in Under the Dome). This season we saw her and her wife, Karen (played by Tracie Thoms, who also played gay in Rent, UnREAL and The First) struggle with their attempts to get pregnant and then deal with Hen’s PTSD after a deadly vehicle crash. It’s a rare opportunity on television to see a black lesbian couple living out their complex adult lives within work and out of it, telling a story that never felt less important than the others. Through it we’re seeing so much more of who Hen is and what marriage looks like, brought to you by two women who are VERY GOOD at playing gay.
Drew
Rue Bennett and Jules Vaughn, Euphoria
As you might know, I have, um, complicated feelings about Euphoria. But God I love Rue and Jules. Because of Zendaya and Hunter Schafer’s astonishing performances, they don’t feel like mere characters to judge by Sam Levinson’s writing, but real people separate from the frustrations of the show. Since the first season ended I’ve found myself missing Rue’s wise for her age world-weariness and Jules’ determined joie de vivre. The way they intersect with one another and explode. Their specific teenage brand of messy, emotional fuck-up-ery. They are cooler than I ever was and cooler than I’ll ever be and I just want to watch them fall in love and friendship forever and ever.
Villanelle, Killing Eve
While the first season was a glorious introduction to my favorite lovesick assassin, the second season elevated Jodie Comer’s Villanelle in all the best ways. Her murders were more creative and brutal, her outfits more gorgeous and sharp, her accents even sillier, and her emotions even greater. More doesn’t always equal better, but with Villanelle, for me, it did. Bitmoji sucks if you have curly hair, so I’ve found when I need a cartoonish reaction in the group chat I always turn to Villanelle. There’s something about the way she’s a sociopath who cares too much, mixing viciousness and innocence and sexiness and terror, that makes her the perfect reaction GIF for everything. The first season I watched as Eve became obsessed with Villanelle. But this season the obsession was mine.
Emma Hernandez, Vida
What else can I say about Emma that I didn’t already say when Mishel Prada won a Gay Emmy for playing her? Prada’s performance is Emma. And yet, I can’t very well not include my very favorite character on my very favorite show. I love characters who are highly competent and totally in control. I love watching them crack. I love watching them put themselves back together – or be put back together. It’s comforting, as someone who tries to be highly competent and always in control. Despite our differences, I feel myself in Emma’s attempts to be a good sister, a good lover, a good citizen, and it’s a painful relief to watch her try. Also – and I cannot stress the importance of this enough – Emma is the hottest. Mean with a good heart? Distant but occasionally tender? A power femme more chaotic than Bette Porter? Emma Hernandez was created to ruin my life. Thank God she’s fictional.
Natalie
Nasreen “Nas” Paracha, Ackley Bridge
Early in the third series of Ackley Bridge, Nasreen Paracha is out for venegance after the death of her best friend, Missy Booth. She seeks out her girlfriend’s unsavory mates for help — she wants the culprit, Anwar, to pay for what he’s done — and they gleefully oblige. Despite never having known her, they shout, “this one’s for Missy, murdering scum” as they pummel him, recording the entire attack for prosperity.
The video makes its way across Ackley Bridge, stoking resentment between the whites, who think Anwar got what he deserved, and Pakistanis, who think he was targeted because of his race. Nas confesses to her mother that she was behind the attack and Kaneez is livid. Nas knows the stories about racist, anti-Muslim violence and should know better to incite it for her own ends. Nas offers a meek defense: for her, it was never about race.
“It is always, ALWAYS about race!” Kaneez shouts. “You should know that. You should bloody know that!”
Nasreen Paracha is a queer Muslim teenager growing up in a fictional British township. Her reality (however imagined) is so far away from my own. And yet, as I watched her mother chastise her for not remembering the realities of the world in which she lives, the words thump against my chest… and I’m reminded of the first time I’d had a similar confrontation with my father. I’d forgotten the world in which I lived and my father chastised me for my capriciousness. It is always, ALWAYS about race! Hearing Kaneez echo my father reminded me of the power of representation, not just to reflect our identities back to ourselves, but to shine a light on our shared experiences.
That said, I’d be remiss if I didn’t note the improbability of Nasreen Paracha’s existence on television. The depiction of Muslims on television remains exceedingly rare and queer Muslim characters are even rarer still. To have a young queer Muslim woman as, essentially, the lead character in an ensemble show… that’s groundbreaking… and with the third series of Ackley Bridge ending with Nas leaving for Oxford, who knows when we’ll ever have it again.
Tegan Price, How to Get Away with Murder
One day, after the final chapter of How to Get Away with Murder is written, I hope someone asks Amirah Vann or Pete Nowalk how long they intended Tegan Price to be a character on the show. When Tegan Price first emerged at Caplan & Gold as Michaela’s mentor in Season Four, I only expected that she’d last a season. I expected that she, like so many recurring characters before her, would push the story forward and then exit, so I tried not to get too attached. But Amirah Vann has this way about her — if you’ve seen her performance as Ernestine in WGN’s Underground, you know — of imbuing her characters, however slight their role, with so much heart that not getting attached becomes an impossibility.
It’s been remarkable to watch HTGAWM give Tegan’s character so much more depth this season and to watch how they juxtapose her story with Annalise’s. Women, and women of color in particular, rarely get the opportunity to be celebrated for their ambition but Tegan has owned hers from the day that we met her. She wants to change the world and saw rising at C&G as an opportunity to amass the power to make that change happen. Even as Tegan’s actions give us cause to doubt her sincerity — I need April to hurry up and get here so I can find out how she’s connected to Laurel and Christopher’s disappearance — her heartbreak over losing Cora and her genuine affection for Annalise ground her character and make her someone we want to cheer for.
Petra Solano, Jane the Virgin
When we met Jane Gloriana Villanueva the first time, her passions included her family, God, grilled cheese sandwiches and writing…. and then, 99 episodes later, when we say goodbye to Jane Gloriana Villanueva for the last time, her passions included her family, God, grilled cheese sandwiches, writing and Rafael Solano. Things have happened, lives have shifted, but, essentially, the Jane that we meet at the beginning of Jane the Virgin and the Jane that we meet at the end aren’t that different from each other. Petra Solano though? The Petra Solano that ends JTV, with her girlfriend clinging to her side and her twin daughters smiling brightly nearby? She couldn’t be any more different that the Petra Solano we first met.
As I mentioned back in August, Petra is who she is in Season One because her mother made her that way. Magda taught her the way of the grift and that all relationships, including the one between mother and child, were transactional.
“I’ve had to lie my whole life and manipulate, and cheat, just to survive my crazy mother, and my psychotic sister, and my violent ex-husband. And, yes, those things made me who I am,” Petra admits to Jane “JR” Ramos early in Season Five. “But I can tell you this: I have changed a lot… and I’m going to change more.”
The impetus behind all that change? The other Jane. It wasn’t until she fell in with the Villanuevas that Petra has a model for what healthy relationships — between friends, between mother and child, between family — look like. Once she develops trust in those relationships, she’s able to believe in real love… and that’s when she finds JR.
Sorry, Rose, but the character development that turned an ice queen to a warm and loving mother and girlfriend might be the greatest love story Jane the Virgin ever told.
Valerie Anne
Nia Nal, Supergirl
Alex Danvers has long since been a go-to on my year-end list of favorites, but this year Nia eked out a win in my books. I will always love Alex, but Dreamer has been such a refreshing gift to the past two seasons of Supergirl. I love that being trans is an important part of her story, and I love that the show draws clear parallels between Nia and Season One Kara: a little green but not without life experience, excited about everything, endlessly hopeful. Nia is the hero we needed, and I hope they let her suit up again soon.
Jenna Faith Hope, Impulse
I’ve already written so much about why Jenna is so important to me and I could write so much more. The writing and direction and acting all handle Jenna’s queerness with such subtlety and care and I’ve never trusted a show to get a queer teenager right the way I trust this show. It was one of the most realistic coming out arcs I’ve ever seen, from the early clues to avoiding the truth to the inevitability. The acceptance and betrayal and fear and joy are all wrapped up in this adorable bundle of a girl, a reluctant but loyal sister, a recovering perfectionist, a girl who is in pain but trying her best. Jenna is another character I wish I had as a teenager, and one who is retroactively healing a lot of old wounds.
Elena Alvarez, One Day At A Time
Elena Alvarez will forever be one of my favorite characters because she is exactly who my teenage self needed to see on TV so I know she’s helping so many others just by being her gay, nerdy, joyful self.
Emily Dickinson, Dickinson
Dickinson was my favorite show this year. I watched it all in one weekend and wanted to lie on the floor and stare at the ceiling for a year when it was over. Emily represented all the most dramatic parts of me and I loved her for it. She is emotional and introspective in some of the same ways I am, wild and impulsive in a way I wish I were, defiant and radical in a way I’m learning to be. I don’t always love a period piece but the mix of modern and historical in this imagining of Emily Dickinson’s life was delicious and fun, it was funny and heavy and relevant. And it was so, so gay. Emily was exactly the best friend loving, poetry writing, death obsessed, patriarchy smashing character I needed to close out my 2019.
LEAST FAVORITE CHARACTERS
Heather Hogan
Karen Walker, Will & Grace
When Will & Grace brought Samira Wiley on to be Karen Walker’s love interest, I was like, “Finally! It’s taken two decades but at last they’re going to stop playing Karen’s bisexuality as a joke that was already tired in the ’90s!” Actually, it was the opposite thing. Karen and Samira Wiley met, hit it off, dated, grew closer, planned to attend Jack’s destination wedding together — and then, in the airport, the show pulled a reverse “Puppy Episode” and had Karen announce her straightness over the airport loudspeaker. I hate throwing the word “erasure” around because it dilutes it beyond recognition, but this was some of the stupidest and most disrespectful bisexual erasure I’ve ever seen. And why? What was even the point of it?
Claire Duncan, Tales of the City
Claire was the most confusing part of Tales of the City to me. On the one hand, I get that Netflix’s reboot was leaning into the wacky pulpy twisty weirdness of the original, but on the other hand, I still have no idea what Claire was supposed to be to viewers or to Ellen Page’s character. She was like a spoiled and bratty documentary filmmaker blackmailing a trans woman to expose San Francisco’s gentrification issues? And she had an actual connection with Shawna? Or… no? She was using Shawna to get to Anna to do the blackmail? And Shawna, who couldn’t trust due to being abandoned as a child, did take a chance and trust Claire — and the lesson she learned was: your instincts are correct, never trust anyone? It’s all very bizarre and incomprehensible, and not in the good way I was consistently confused by the zany hijinks of the first few season of Pretty Little Liars.
Natalie
Anissa Pierce and Grace Choi, Black Lightning
Writing these posts is always difficult, in part because as a community, we’re still grappling with what it means to be invested in qualitative representation instead of just quantitative representation. Also, because, given the nature of TV, it’s hard to disassociate these critiques from the actors themselves, despite the fact that the critique almost never about them. But just so there’s absolutely no confusion about my intention here: this post is not about Nafessa Williams or Chantal Thuy.
Williams and Thuy have sustained the #ThunderGrace fandom on the backs of their natural charisma and chemistry. I cannot imagine two other actresses having done so much when given so little. But Black Lightning is failing Anissa, it’s failing Grace, it’s failing its fans…and the responsibility for that falls squarely on the shoulders of its writing team.
I have given this show a pass for its shortcomings. I have watched as the female villains wither and die while the men — Gambi, Lala, Tobias, Khalil, O’Dell — come back, over and over and over again. I’ve watched as the show devoted episode after episode to telling the story of Jennifer clinging to her abusive boyfriend and as the show tried to convince me that abuse was romantic. I kept watching even as Grace and Anissa went weeks without scenes together. We’ll endure so much for the sake of representation…so even as the writers minimized and marginalized the show’s queer story, I kept watching. I kept watching because I wanted so much to see myself as super. I wanted so much to see us as celebrated heroes. I wanted to see us as bulletproof.
But this season, I finally reached my breaking point: In Chapter 4 (“Lynn’s Ouroboros”), Anissa’s dad, Jefferson, stops by her new loft and is surprised to discover Grace — who, apparently, he never even knew existed — there. Anissa slinks downstairs in her armor and we come to the realization at the same time as Jefferson: Anissa’s superpowers aren’t a secret from Grace. As with most of their relationship, the conversation where Anissa reveals her powers and that she moonlights as Thunder/Black Bird happens off-screen. We never got to see it.
It’s hard to overstate the significance of that conversation…how meaningful it would have been to Grace, who has had trouble harnessing her own powers, to know she had someone who understood her struggle or how meaningful it would have been for Anissa, who’s struggled with emotional vulnerability, to reveal this personal thing about herself. We missed the chance to see Grace’s face light up at the realization that she’s dating a superhero. We missed the chance to hear Anissa tell the only coming out story that’s ever been important on Black Lightning. No conversation between those two characters was more important than this one and we never got to see it. It is an inexcusable and infuriating omission…and it’s impossible to see its omission as anything other than homophobia manifested.
Anissa Pierce isn’t the lone lesbian superhero on the CW anymore. While I reject any effort to erase Anissa Pierce’s claim to the title of “first lesbian superhero,” as I take in Batwoman on Sunday nights and Black Lightning on Mondays, I wonder if we’re seeing, before our eyes, the difference between qualitative and quantitative representation…or, to put it more simply: the difference between acceptance and tolerance.
Cruz, Vida
Midway through Vida‘s first season, Emma happens upon her ex-girlfriend, Cruz, in a bar. There’s a playful flirtation between them…from the adorable way Emma trips over her words when they first reconnect to the sensual way their bodies meld together on the dance floor…but then the ground shifts beneath them. With one simple provocation — See? Things aren’t so bad around here — Emma’s truth spills out. The revelations are a defining moment of the series for Emma but they’re also a gamechanger for Cruz. For years, she’s lived with the belief that Emma was running — from her, from them, from this place — but none of it was true and from that moment on, everything changes.
Later, all Emma wants to do is fuck the pain away and, for a while at least, Cruz allows it. But, in that moment, all Cruz wants to do is show her that they’re more than just an aggressive fuck…that, through distance and time, their love survived Vidalia’s internalized homophobia. After being denied all night, their lips finally connect and Cruz pours every bit of love and comfort into their kiss. And while the story rightly focuses on Emma — who is so overwhelmed by the intimacy of the moment, she has a panic attack — one thing is undeniable: Cruz intends to be part of that story.
It is hard to reconcile that version of Cruz — that indelible impression — with the Cruz we meet in Season Two.
The Cruz that wanted to shelter and comfort is gone, replaced with a Cruz who doesn’t protect her now girlfriend from the withering onslaught of judgment from her friends. The Cruz that saw Emma break in front of her, as she recounted being sent away from home twice for the sin of being her mother’s child in ways her mother desperately wanted to ignore, wouldn’t weaponize that knowledge against Emma, but Season Two Cruz does. The Cruz we met in Season One provoked, intentionally, but never cruelly, and yet, in Season Two, Cruz says, “Emma, you are the classic cautionary tale of why moms need to hug their children.” When the words come out of Cruz’s mouth, I was convinced of two things: 1. Emma and Cruz are over…Cruz has crossed the one line that you absolutely cannot cross with Emma and there’s no going back now; and 2. Season One’s Cruz would never have said that.
Still, all these months later, I don’t know why she had to.
Eve Rothlo, How to Get Away With Murder
Drew
Eleanor Shellstrop, The Good Place
Okay, okay, OKAY. Let me explain. I love Eleanor. I really do. But I do not like her as a queer character. Bisexual characters obviously do not have to be romantic or sexual with more than one gender on-screen. Like in life there isn’t a behavior requirement to be bisexual. But that doesn’t mean an occasional punchline makes for a well-rounded queer character. There’s a difference between having a person’s sexuality not define them and all but ignoring that sexuality. We’ve seen Eleanor go through a lot of life – and a lot of lives – and I find it frustrating as the show winds down (beautifully I must add) that throwaway jokes about Tahani being hot are still all we’ve received. I don’t mind if more and more TV characters are lowkey sexually fluid, but I’m tired of attempts to celebrate Eleanor as a queer character or celebrate The Good Place writers for being so progressive that they ignore Eleanor’s bisexuality almost completely. It’s the one thing they shouldn’t be celebrated for as far as I’m concerned.
Clare, Derry Girls
The first season of Derry Girls ended with a really wonderful coming out episode for Clare. It seemed to promise new depth to her character – and new queerness for the show. But the second season was pretty much devoid of both. Clare doesn’t need to share Michelle’s confident horniness or Erin’s awkward horniness, but when Clare’s lesbianism is treated as a mere label, it feels frustrating in contrast with her friends’ teenage love lives. The new season brought a hot new teacher and a hot new student and neither storyline even addressed Clare’s possible attraction.
It just feels like show creator Lisa McGee doesn’t really know what to do with an out character. Like with The Good Place, de-centering Clare’s queerness doesn’t feel radical – it feels safe. Placing these two characters side-by-side demonstrates that it’s not a matter of sex drive. Eleanor is consumed with horniness, whereas Clare doesn’t seem to think about sex at all. And yet in both shows the characters aren’t seen acting on their queerness. Which is fine! The writers can tell the stories they want to tell. But as more and more television includes queer people, I think it’s worth considering what we do and don’t define as queer television and what we deem worth watching specifically for its queer content. Having one out of five characters be queer should be the bare minimum. And if you don’t center that person’s queerness I’m going to lose interest.
Valerie Anne
Dex, Stumptown
The Stumptown pilot was one of the best pilots I’ve ever seen, but the show has been slowly losing me as each episode goes on. Dex barely ever interacts with other women, and sure the one she did talk to the most was her ex-girlfriend, but I still had hoped there would he more women on the show, and maybe even some men Dex HASN’T slept with. But somehow the show has turned into being about Dex’s dating history/present instead of her badassery and I am bummed about it.
Jade, Why Women Kill
I…I guess I just thought this show was going to be about why women kill men. Jade came on screen and I was like, “Jade and Taylor are gonna team up and kill their boyfriend.” But instead they went ahead and decided to score a hat trick of harmful tropes before the show’s end.
Nora West-Allen, The Flash
I was SO EXCITED when it was revealed that Nora was queer, especially since Jessica Parker Kennedy played one of my favorite queer characters of all time (Max on Black Sails) but alas, it was mentioned then forgotten. Not that I needed her to be in a relationship, because that’s obviously not what defines your queerness, but they could have at least worked it into the conversation one way or another. At least one other time. Anything. And then her last episode in 2019 had her entirely erased from the timeline. Which is a metaphor for what the show does to its queer women if I’ve ever seen one.
Carmen
Anissa Pierce and Grace Choi, Black Lightning
It’s ironic that I’ve written more about Anissa Piece and Grace Choi than any other couple I’ve covered for this website. Ironic because when Black Lightning first began, I had never been more excited for a black lesbian superhero and now I groan to complete my weekly requirements. Ironic because Black Lightning is actually, when it wants to be, a truly exceptional show, but it’s decided in the last year that writing cohesive storylines — especially for its queer characters — is apparently just too much work. There is no reason why Anissa’s love life shouldn’t have been given the same on-camera, seasons long, full treatment that’s been given to her straight little sister and her parents. I made excuses for far too long, I think we all did, really. We wanted to believe in the power of a bulletproof black lesbian superhero. We wanted to believe in a shapeshifting bisexual Asian tough-as-nails badass with a tough past. We were right to believe. They deserved our faith in their love. Even when the writers of Black Lightning showed over (and over!) again that they weren’t willing to do the same.
This year, Heather and I made the difficult decision to move Black Lightning from full recaps to our weekly Boobs on Your Tube television roundups on Friday. A lot of factors went into that decision that aren’t just about the romantic pairing on screen, but it’s also true that I no longer wanted to reward minimal effort and bad behavior. Nafessa Williams and Chantal Thuy are kinetic together; they’ve found such depth and caring in Anissa and Grace, despite being only given the scraps of the table to work with. My point is — they shouldn’t have been given only the scraps to begin with. We should demand more. And from now on, we will.
Eve Rothlo, How to Get Away With Murder
There’s a narrative structure to storytelling. Yes, writing is an art form, but there’s also basic building blocks that are mechanical. Stories have a beginning, they crescendo across an arc, and then they end. I know I sound incredibly basic, but please follow me for a moment — Even Rothlo came back into Annalise Keating’s life at the start of How To Get Away With Murder’s second season (the beginning); through both flashbacks and their “present time” relationship we learned that Eve and Annalise were lovers in law school and that Annalise had broken Eve’s heart, but they were never fully over each other (the story arc); and then Annalise let Eve go to follow her new life and love in San Francisco (the end). I always believed we might see Eve on last time before the show was over, that she might be Annalise’s final love — her “end game” of sorts. Still, this story had found a satisfying conclusion on its own. Basic building blocks.
So why did Pete Nowalk decide to undo all his own writing and bring Eve back for a “special episode” in which her only purpose was to be intimately cruel to Annalise (which was never Eve’s personality to begin with) and then have her disappear into the night once again — leaving Annalise with just tattered pieces of her soul to deal with? I have no earthly clue. For a while I thought Eve’s coming back was a stepping stone in allowing Annalise to find new love with Tegan Price, but that doesn’t seem to be happening either. As much as I’d love for a romantic flame to blossom between Tegan and Annalise, I’ve also come to respect them as platonic queer friends, which we rarely get to see on television. Still, the question remains, if Annalise and Tegan aren’t getting together, and if Eve isn’t coming back in some grand romantic gesture, why did Pete Nowalk re-open this wound at all? Why pour salt somewhere that was already stitched? It was a confusing and bad story choice, point blank.
Tamia “Coop” Cooper, All American
I don’t know what happened in All American’s writing room between Seasons One and Two, but the sidelining of Coop from being a central character of the series, rivaling on co-lead, to a nearly D List background player is absolutely egregious and appalling. I don’t have anything else to add — it’s wrong by any definition and the show should be working overtime to fix it.
I Love “Euphoria” and I Hate It
The first time I went to the Alamo Drafthouse was to see Sam Levinson’s Assassination Nation.
I knew about the Alamo Drafthouse for years. Founded in Austin, this chain of movie theatres is known as a safe haven for cinephiles. With several other theatres closing down, the opening of an Alamo Drafthouse in Brooklyn felt like a promise that the theatrical experience was not fading from New York.
And yet I’d been avoiding the theatre. Their decision to rehire Devin Faraci after he’d been accused of sexual assault told me that their safe haven for cinephiles was not a safe haven for cinephiles like me.
Then a year passed, and the show time was convenient. It had never really been a boycott anyway, just a casual avoidance. It made sense to go there for the first time to see a movie co-starring a trans woman. A new chapter of New York City movie-going, a new chapter for representation on-screen.
I was immediately disappointed upon entering their lobby. Right in the middle of their retro video rental stand was Woody Allen’s 1971 comedy Bananas. Nothing says we’ve learned from our sexual assault scandal like prominently displaying work from film history’s second most famous pedophile filmmaker.
But the anger I felt in the lobby was nothing compared to what I’d feel in the theatre.
Assassination Nation is a film in love with its own importance. It begins with the first of many American flags and a trigger warning montage that suggests a minimal understanding of the definition of trigger warning. (“Swearing” is not a trigger warning.)
What follows is an ultraviolent, hypersexualized, classic male-written/male-directed rape/revenge film. But unlike the men who popularized the genre in the 70s, Sam Levinson has a Twitter account. And with that, the knowledge to keep the rape attempted and get more creative in his misogynistic violence.
The vast majority of the film focuses on the brutality the women face. Levinson doesn’t understand that we’re already angry. We need not watch 90 minutes of abuse to root for a group of women to kill. We’re bloodthirsty to begin with.
Even the joy of seeing Hari Nef on-screen was diminished by how harshly her character is treated and a transphobic subplot about a “male” politician (played by a cis man) dressing in women’s clothing.
After the movie ended, I walked out of the theatre, picked up the DVD copy of Bananas, and threw it against the wall.
This is not how I’d start an analysis of Sam Levinson’s talked about HBO show Euphoria if my intention was to write a scathing review. I’ve more than abandoned any promise of objectivity, establishing myself as a crazy woman who wants to see men murdered and can’t be trusted in a video store.
Fortunately, objectivity is not my goal. Nor is a scathing review.
The fact is I love Euphoria. And I hate it. I’m not going to trip over myself trying to prove the objectivity of my complicated reaction because cis white men decided that objectivity was a tenet of criticism. It’s not. It never has been.
I can only review Euphoria as a gay trans woman who desperately wants to see herself on screen, who desperately wants to see her past, her present, and her potential futures. I can only review Euphoria as a gay trans woman who for the first time on television got to watch a cis girl fall in love with a trans girl. I can only review Euphoria as a gay trans woman who for the first time on television got to watch any girl fall in love with a trans girl.
Euphoria has a comically provocative beginning. After recalling the peace of the womb, our protagonist and narrator Rue says, “I was born three days after 9/11.” As the show often does, it cuts away, showing us footage of a plane flying into the World Trade Center.
Rue (Zendaya) is a 17-year-old bored with everything in life but drugs. She’s a regular teenager, trapped in the suburbs, annoyed with her family, alienated from endless high school drama, and struggling with mental illness. Drugs are her escape. Unfortunately, this escape led to an OD and a stint in rehab. The show opens with her returning home from this stay, less invested in staying clean than immediately finding her next fix. That is until she meets the new kid in school, an enigmatic trans girl named Jules (Hunter Schafer). They meet, they become best friends, and then, they become something more.
A lot of former Disney actors have played risqué parts to move on from a child star image. But Zendaya does more than prove she’s a mature actor. Her performance here is an emphatic declaration of her talent. Saying Zendaya is good on Euphoria is comically understating what’s happening on screen. Levinson and Rue ask so much from her as she gets high and sober, falls in love and heartbreak, works through OCD and possible mania. She even has to narrate, a device that so rarely works, but in her voice makes the show what it is. Every facial tic, every vocal crack, Zendaya is remarkable when the show is at its highest extremes and in its rare moments of quiet.
If Zendaya is the grounding center of the show, Hunter Schafer is its explosive force. Jules so easily could’ve been a sort of trans Manic Pixie Dream Girl, but Schafer turns her energy, her elusiveness, her “I could watch you forever” presence into a realistic series of defense mechanisms. Jules has lived in the world her whole life. She knows how to get what she wants and what she needs. Schafer is so good at one moment playing into Rue’s point of view fantasy and the next being a very normal human just trying to make it through the day.
And as good as Zendaya and Schafer are separately, it’s nothing compared to how they are together. Even if Euphoria runs for seven seasons, I hope these two actors work together on other projects. Chemistry is always rare, but chemistry like this is once in a generation. No matter where they are in the messiness of Jules and Rue’s relationship, the way these two actors play off each other is a privilege to watch. Also they both have such good smiles and when they direct those smiles at each other it’s really, really cute!
The show treats their love casually, but in the landscape of media, it’s groundbreaking. The only prior show to feature a queer romance with a trans woman played by a trans woman was Sense8 and that begins with the characters coupled. Emmy-nominated web series Her Story is really the only piece of media to show a woman, any woman, falling in love with a trans feminine person. That’s all we had. One web series deemed too niche for any network, even after an Emmy nomination. Until now.
Because oh how Rue loves Jules. The first few episodes of the show are painful (and adorable) as Rue fights her ever-growing crush, even helping Jules take naked photos for the guy she’s texting. The whole time Jules flirts and Rue melts. And then, after a dramatic episode where Jules’ crush falls apart, they lie in bed, the camera swoops around them as they cuddle. Every time it goes under the bed it reveals a new scene, laughing at the carnival, laughing by the lockers, the first night they lay in bed together, and then, back in the present, they kiss.
This isn’t a happy ending. It’s unclear how much Jules loves Rue and how much she likes the comfort and attention. It’s unclear how much Rue’s love is just displacement of addiction feelings. It’s complicated, but still a joy to watch, largely because of the two actors. And because of how rare it is to see a relationship like this on-screen.
During that first night together, the one we see again briefly in this climactic, visually inventive montage, the show features another rare representational milestone. Jules is lying next to Rue half naked. We can see the outline of her genitalia through her underwear. This is radical. I’ve never seen this before. Correction: I’ve only seen this before in real life when I’ve been lying in bed next to someone in my underwear.
We also see her casually inject herself with hormones.
These moments, Jules’ moments, Rue and Jules’ messy love story, may be what I care about most, but they are not the entire focus of the show. It’s an ensemble, each episode focusing on a different person at Rue’s high school, including Nate, the violent quarterback who turns out to be Jules’ internet crush. The best of these other storylines focuses on Kat, played by another phenomenal actress, Barbie Ferreira. When the show begins, Kat is just the fat friend in the cool group. She’s a little too nerdy, a little too nice, and an easy punching bag for her friends. But after losing her virginity, Kat begins to own her sexuality, and herself. She begins camming, and completely reinvents her identity. All of the storylines are explicitly sexual, but Kat’s feels like it belongs to her, even when she loses control. Again, a lot of this can be credited to Ferreira’s performance.
Throughout all these storylines, Levinson reveals his strengths as a filmmaker to be visual. Like the flourish during the kiss scene, he’s always pushing the formal boundaries of what a show about a bunch of teenagers can be. Sometimes his constant camera movements can be annoying, like when he flips upside down again and again to signify the characters are getting high. But more often than not I admired the style of the show. It’s bold and weird and sometimes silly, but almost always interesting. Along with directors Augustine Frizzell, Jennifer Morrison, and Pippa Bianco, and a quartet of male cinematographers, Levinson has created a show that truly looks, and feels, like nothing else on TV.
But for every moment I love, every actor I adore, every formal choice that thrills, the show does something that breaks me. During the pilot, these missteps made me mad. Now I just feel sad. It’s devastating to watch a show that is both everything I want to see on TV and everything I don’t want to see on TV all in one. And I can’t help but connect those elements, the things I don’t want to see, back to the writer of the show, the director of most of the show, and the creator of the show, Sam Levinson.
I think conversations about nepotism are generally misguided. The child of a famous director doesn’t have significantly more privilege than any other rich kid whose parents go to the same country club. The film and TV industry is incredibly imbalanced. The only reason I was able to make my senior thesis, one of the cheapest in my NYU class, was because I was poisoned by a major drug company and sued them for what would eventually be the budget of my short. And compared to your average non-NYU student, I grew up very privileged. The best, and queerest, script in my class was never made because the filmmaker couldn’t find the money.
This is all to say that it’s not deeply important that Sam Levinson is the son of Barry Levinson, the director of Rain Man, Wag the Dog, and Sam’s first mainstream produced screenplay, The Wizard of Lies. It is, however, important to look at Levinson’s background overall. Sam Levinson is a cis straight white man who grew up in the skewed world of Hollywood. And it was under these conditions he struggled with drug addiction, going in and out of rehab and halfway houses throughout his teen years.
Levinson decided to filter his experiences with addiction through a character who is a middle class queer black girl with a single mom. And I commend and celebrate this decision.
I’m less enthusiastic about his decision to be one of the few showrunners across all television networks to write alone without a writer’s room. For a show that’s structured episode to episode around various characters, many with marginalized identities, this decision is especially baffling. And egregious.
When you have the experiences of people with marginalized identities distorted through a writer who doesn’t understand them you end up with an uncanny reality. One moment, a trans girl is saying she thinks having sex with men validates her womanhood, a common experience of trans women across orientations. But then in several other moments the men who have sex with her are treated as if they’re secretly gay, a common transphobic stereotype that literally leads to trans women being murdered.
Often these distortions are confusing and hard to quantify. Since the writer is attempting to replicate a reality they’ve observed, you end up with something that feels authentic and inauthentic all at once. If you try to explain it, you might fail. If you want to justify it, you probably can.
But there are obvious textual missteps made throughout the show, most obviously with Nate and his father Cal. They share a secret. They’re both attracted to trans women, and men, and, most specifically, penises.
During the first episode, Jules is scrolling through Grindr when she comes across a profile named DominantDaddy. He says he’s looking for “twinks and femboys.” Jules, of course, is neither of these labels, so it’s confusing why his message excites her, especially if one of her main reasons for casual sex is validation of her womanhood.
DominantDaddy turns out to be Cal and when Jules meets him at a motel he warns her about being in the closet, an odd moment in part because Jules is so far into her medical transition, the closet long behind her. He tells her she can either live her life free and open or, he says, “You can stay in a town like this, end up like me. Living your life out of motel rooms.” Then he shoves his thumb down her throat.
With Jules on her stomach, he rips her tights, leans over her, and inserts his hand into her mouth until she gags. “Spit,” he instructs her. While he aggressively fucks her, we stay on Jules’ tortured face. Then we cut to a wide shot where we see everything. It’s a brutal scene. And while not unrealistic, it’s still a pointed choice to feature a scene like this as one of the first for a trans character.
But beyond the potentially gratuitous nature of the rape scene (she’s underage, so whether or not you view the sex acts as assault, it is rape), Cal’s speech is the first of many times being attracted to trans women is compared to being attracted to men.
The Internet has joked a lot about Euphoria‘s obsession with penises, but this obsession is not simply about the number of dicks on-screen. The real problem is how genital-focused attraction is presented. Nate, who has adopted the same preferences as his father, hates being in the men’s locker room, because he can’t help himself from staring at other men’s penises. Suddenly the decision to show Jules’ bulge feels less groundbreaking and more objectifying.
I want to imagine the show is just making a statement about the shame straight men face for dating trans women. But this is invalidated by the fact that Cal does have sex with men. We see this in his Grindr profile. We see this in the sex tapes he creates from his escapades. And we see this when he meets up with Minako, another person from Grindr. Minako has a dyed blonde undercut and wears jewelry and a skirt. He’s potentially genderfluid, but the actor who plays him, Sean Martini, is a cis male. If Levinson truly does care about casting trans people as trans characters, we can assume Minako is a man. (This assumption may be inaccurate though considering a cis male is cast to play Jules in flashbacks.) Still it’s confusing when he asks Cal whether his kids are boys or girls, something a queer person who plays with gender presentation probably would not ask. It also feels off when he asks Cal, “You want a popper?” instead of “You want poppers?” While not important compared to the other representational issues it still highlights the limits of a cishet writer telling these stories on his own.
Of course, Cal and Nate might be bisexual, but the show does not handle their stories with the nuance to suggest this. Instead the show has Jules say to Nate, “I think you’re a fucking faggot just like your daddy.” Again, I can make excuses. Maybe Jules just wanted to say whatever she could to upset Nate. But it feels unlikely that Jules would dismiss her own gender even for a dig. No, what’s much more likely is Levinson simply doesn’t understand gender and sexuality, and, furthermore, doesn’t understand what’s at stake presenting a story like this. Straight men feeling insecure about their attraction to trans women leads to violence. It leads to many of the murders of trans women, mostly trans women of color, that happen each year.
It’s especially jarring in contrast with the first season of Pose, which spent a significant amount of time humanizing and accurately presenting a cis straight man drawn specifically to trans women. That show was nuanced, asking questions, providing no easy answers, but always affirming that trans women are women. So many of the problems with Euphoria would have been resolved, if like Pose, trans women had been involved in the making of the show. Even their trans consultant is not a trans woman, but Scott Turner Schofield, a trans man.
There are further issues beyond the show’s complicated trans representation. Euphoria, like lots of movies and TV shows, especially those created by men, heavily sexualizes its teenage characters. The cast itself is not made up of teenagers, the main actors ranging in age from 20 to 24. This is a common practice, but it’s still worth mentioning. When a show as graphically sexual as Euphoria presents people in their early 20s as teens it makes a statement about what teenagers look like. It’s especially troubling when the actors are objectified as they so often are here.
During the character introduction for Nate’s girlfriend, Maddy, Rue says Maddy had “sex” with a 40-year-old man on vacation when she was 14. Rue says, “in retrospect it seems kind of rapey and weird but honestly she was the one in control.” Rue is not necessarily a reliable narrator, but the decision to have actor Alexa Demie, who is 24, also play herself at 14, does little to suggest the show disagrees with Rue’s assessment.
Beyond the way sexuality is presented, constant eroticized images of supposed teenage nudity, one might say the actual subject matter is simply realistic. But this is false. After the premiere, the New York Times released an article that counters the entire premise, stating that never before have teenagers had less sex or done fewer drugs. “They even wear bike helmets,” the article comically adds.
In episode one, Jules says to Kat, “Bitch this isn’t the 80s. You need to catch a dick.” Within two sentences the show suggests a false idea about shifting teenage sexuality and has a trans girl equate straight sex with penises.
There are other things about the show that grate on me. Like having teenagers in 2019 dress up as Romeo + Juliet for Halloween or excluding pretty much any mention of Rue’s queerness beyond Jules. But I’ve tried to focus on issues that feel less like personal annoyances and more like actual concerns. I’m not trying to attack this show. Again, I love this show. But these problems upset me because I think they’re actively dangerous.
Except the poppers line. I’ll admit that was a nitpick.
I know my standards are high. I know that while coming-of-age stories about complicated teenagers definitely appeal to me, movies and TV shows with a lot of brutality do not. I know that part of my reaction to Euphoria is connected to how rarely I get to see myself on screen, and how deeply I wish the hints I do get were perfect. I know that the show might just not be for me.
But perhaps my desire to see honest representation isn’t the reason I hate Euphoria. Perhaps it’s the reason I love it. Perhaps it’s the reason you love it. Even if you aren’t a trans woman seeing aspects of your life on screen for the first time, you are still a person seeing aspects of trans women’s lives on screen for the first time. You are still seeing a fat teenager cam and own her sexuality. You are still seeing a queer black teenager battle drug addiction with cynical wit.
We can debate the actual quality of Euphoria, but what’s undeniable is Sam Levinson is writing about people most of the film and television world has ignored. After two failed movies focusing on cis white people and one mediocre HBO movie about an old cis white guy, Levinson discovered what Hollywood at large still hasn’t.
Everyone wants to see new faces on screen. Those new faces especially. And we’re willing to settle.
You can call your freak show progress and still sell tickets to the general public.
We freaks will call it representation.
27 Summer 2019 TV Shows For Queers To Watch Out For
Summer TV is upon us; here are 27 queer shows to watch out for!
Vida (Season Two)
May 23rd, Starz
The most important tenets of Vida‘s phenomenal first season remain the same — Tanya Saracho has no interest in answering questions easily. She doesn’t want queerness that can be explained away by Merriam-Webster or a college Gender Studies 101 class. She has no use for gentrification that can be reduced into a simple “us vs them” narrative. What would even be the point of sisters who love each other without baggage? Vida is messy, perhaps even more so than it was in Season One, if that’s possible. — Carmen
She’s Gotta Have It (Season Two)
May 24th, Netflix
SHE’S GOTTA HAVE IT
What’s merciful about Season Two of She’s Gotta Have It is that, for once, Spike Lee loosens his grip just enough to let a black woman character speak for herself. She’s given wide space to selfishly explore her own desires and responsibilities on no one’s terms but her own. This iteration of Nola Darling is finally, and sublimely, allowed to step into the light of summer. — Carmen
State of Pride (Documentary)
May 29th, YouTube
The filmmakers behind this incredible documentary traveled to Salt Lake City, San Francisco and Tuscaloosa, Alabama, to interview a diverse group of LGBTQ people and obtain “an unflinching look at LGBTQ Pride, from the perspective of a younger generation for whom it still has personal urgency.”
When They See Us
May 31st, Netflix
https://youtu.be/u3F9n_smGWY
Ava DuVernay’s four part miniseries chronicles the harrowing story of the Central Park Five: five young men arrested, tried and convicted — first in the media, then in the court system — for a crime that they did not commit. Among the critically acclaimed cast is Isis King who plays Marci Wise, the trans sister of Korey Wise, the eldest of the Central Park Five. — Natalie
Burden of Truth (Season Two)
June 2nd, The CW
The Canadian import, Burden of Truth spent its first season focused on the poisoning of a group of girls by the local steel mill and the legal effort to win restitution. By the season’s end, the case had been won and the show’s adorable baby gays, Molly and Luna, were off to get their first glimpse of the Pacific Ocean (with $2M in Molly’s pocket). It seemed like a tidy ending but, apparently the CBC/CW can’t get enough of Kristin Kreuk, so we’re in for an exciting second season. This time, Kreuk’s Joanna is up against a tech giant who’s using a former employee’s coding for weaponry…but later she gets roped into a case that could change Luna’s life forever. — Natalie
The Handmaid’s Tale (Season Three)
June 5th, Hulu
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcTvQx1Wot0
Season Three of this dark masterpiece will see June become increasingly radicalized while grappling for potential allies — or enemies — in her immediate landscape. Serena Joy? Commander Lawrence? Who can say! Oh and FYI, Aunt Lydia survived the knife attack, Samira Wiley will be back, and I’d like to pre-emptively assume June and Serena Joy will again win the Series Sexual Tension Award. — Riese
grown-ish (Season 2B)
June 5th, Freeform
We were already all in on this pitch-perfect half-hour of socially conscious television that never takes itself too seriously before they brought back Shane as a Women’s Studies teacher, but now that Naomi’s not her student anymore, the back half of Season Two will be particularly enticing to a very specific subset of the queer community. — Riese
Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City (Season One)
June 7th, Netflix
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R63GxIGAaZw
Forty years ago, Armistead Maupin began writing Tales of the City as serialized short stories in the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner. Ultimately, those stories became nine books, the first few of which PBS and Showtime adapted into a TV miniseries starring Laura Linney and Olympia Dukakis in the ’90s. This year, Netflix is launching a sequel helmed by Orange Is the New Black‘s Lauren Morelli and starring Ellen Page as Linney’s character’s daughter. The entire thing is gayer than a Pride parade. There are lesbians and bisexuals and gay men and trans people and non-binary people and drag queens and queer poly couples and an entire flashback episode starring Jen Richards and Daniela Vega. The writers’ room was also 100% queer. Look for a full review, an interview with Lauren Morelli, and a big roundtable with intersecting queer identities discussing the series right here on Autostraddle dot com. — Heather
XY Chelsea (Documentary)
June 7th, Showtime
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBHkiNRIp9M
Shot over two years and featuring exclusive interviews and behind-the-scenes verité with Chelsea Manning, XY Chelsea tells the story of the whistle-blower starting from her release from prison in May 2017, exploring her position on national security and trans rights and visibility.
Claws (Season Three)
June 9th, TNT
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gFpqT7cumM
Sometimes the silence just gets to be too much. Such was the case for Quiet Ann in Season 2 of Claws. After one setback after another, Quiet Ann finally spoke up: creating friction at first but, ultimately, forging a deeper connection with women she calls her crew. Now, with their issues resolved, Ann and the ladies of Nail Artisans of Manatee County are moving on up. Thanks to Desna’s short-lived marriage and the “untimely” death of their Russian mob boss, Ann and the girls are taking over: running the salon, the pill mill and a brand new casino. With a chance to “level up” finally within their grasp, can Ann finally find the happiness — and the girlfriend — that she’s dreamt of for so long? — Natalie
Big Little Lies (Season Two)
June 9th, HBO
Despite its frustrating inability to deliver even the subtle lesbian action we deserve from this ensemble, Mommi lovers are unable to resist the siren songs sung from these Monterrey shores. Season Two sees the return of the entire main cast for a deft exploration of the aftermath of trauma and will introduce Perry’s grieving mother, played by Meryl Streep, searching for answers to who killed her shitbag son. A woman is taking the helm this season — Andrea Arnold, whose prior work includes I Love Dick, Transparent, and Sasha Lane’s debut film American Honey — will direct all seven episodes. The season promises to explore “the malignancy of lies, the durability of friendships, the fragility of marriage and of course, the vicious ferocity of sound parenting.”
Pose (Season Two)
June 11th, FX
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=30&v=JPujB1Mi8yc
Season Two time-jumps to 1990, at the peak of the AIDS crisis, on the day Madonna’s single “vogue” was released, thus putting the ballroom scene in the spotlight. Bisexual comedian Sandra Bernhard returns as a nurse, and activist groups like ACT UP will show up. Pose radiates, breaking ground with every stylized walk on top of it, wrapping universal messages about chosen family and community into stories never before told on such a prominent platform.
Queen Sugar (Season Four)
June 12th, OWN
Because we remember that Nova Bordelon is supposed to be pansexual even if the show’s forgotten. #GiveNovaAGirlfriend2k19 — Natalie
Younger (Season Six)
June 12th, TV Land
Last year, Viacom Media announced that Younger would be moving from its original home on TV Land to its sibling Paramount Network but then — presumably after realizing that Heather’s definitely not the only person that watches this show — TV Land opted to keep the show for its sixth season. The show will have a new feel now that Hilary Duff’s in charge of everything and Charles and Liza are trying to make their relationship work. The important news, though? Maggie’s getting a girlfriend! Evie Roy Nicole Ari Parker is joining Younger to play Maggie’s love interest in a multi-episode arc. — Natalie
Trinkets (Season One)
June 14, Netflix
https://youtu.be/xz1IkeXs6yI
Based on the young adult novel by Kirsten Smith, Trinkets is the story of three teenage girls who’d probably never interact with each other but for the Shoplifter’s Anonymous meetings they’re all forced to attend. According to Netflix: “Elodie — the grieving misfit, Moe — the mysterious outsider, and Tabitha — the imperfect picture of perfection, will find strength in each other as they negotiate family issues, high school drama and the complicated dilemma of trying to fit in while longing to break out.”
Aside from the intriguing premise, there are two other things that might make it relevant to your interests: 1. queer characters (!!) and 2. queer characters played by actual queer actresses (Brianna Hildebrand and Kat Cunningham, respectively). — Natalie
Marvel’s Jessica Jones (Season Three)
June 14th, Netflix
The debut of the third season of Jessica Jones marks the end of the Marvel era with Netflix. Unlike the other MCU shows though, whose cancellations came abruptly after their new seasons debuted, Jessica Jones will get the send-off our raven-haired hero deserves. Before she can say good-bye, though, there’s still work to be done: she and her former BFF, Trish Walker, will have to put aside their grievances — recall, Trish killed Jessica’s mom last season — to work together and take down a “highly intelligent psychopath.”
After recklessly grappling with her ALS diagnosis last season (and getting burned in the process), Jeri Hogarth is trying to get her swagger back. She’s opened up her own law firm and put Pryce and Malcolm on her payroll. If history’s any guide, Jeri’s definitely going to be stirring some shit up. — Natalie
Euphoria (NEW)
June 16th, HBO
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuAzkZIiGxI
Trans model Hunter Schafer plays a trans character in this Skins-esque remake of the Israeli original, starring Zendaya in a trippy sex-drugs-and-adolescence drama. In an interview with Dazed Digital, Hunter said that despite being skeptical of a white cis male showrunner considering the material, “a lot happened in those first four episodes that I, as a transfeminine person and a queer person, really identify with.” — Riese
The Good Fight (Season One on Broadcast)
June 16th, CBS
In a recent column, Michelle Goldberg called The Good Fight “the only TV show that reflects what life under Trump feels like for many of us who abhor him.” Unfortunately, because the show’s restricted to the network’s subscription service, “many of us who abhor him” haven’t been able to watch the show, but this summer, The Good Fight is coming to broadcast television. CBS will air the first season and everyone can enjoy the best show of the resistance. And as a bonus, we’ve got Dorothy Snarker recaps from season one to supplement your viewing. — Natalie
Good Trouble (Season Two)
June 18th, Freeform
We tuned into Good Trouble back in January to watch the Adams-Foster sisters start their professional lives but it didn’t take long before we got wrapped in all the drama of the “intentional living space” that they now call home. When the show returns for its second season, Mariana’s balancing a new relationship and a new dynamic at work, Davia’s balancing old desires with new interests, Callie and Malika are awaiting the outcome of the Jamal Thompson case and Alice is grappling with her new reality as an out gay woman. And maybe, if we’re lucky, we’ll get another visit from the Mamas too. — Natalie
The Lavender Scare (Documentary)
June 18th, PBS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8RPs-xrjks
The little-known story of the unrelenting campaign by the general government to identify and fire people who seemed possibly gay, narrated by Glen Close and featuring the voices of noted homosexuals Cynthia Nixon, Zachary Quinto, T.R. Knight and David Hyde Pierce.
Harlots (Season Three)
July 10th, Hulu
Charlotte Wells is forced to take over the brothel in her mother’s absence while Lydia Quigley rots in jail and some new entrepreneurs in town angle to open up a “Molly House” in her prior evirons. Season Two got much gayer than Season One, and you can expect Season Three to do the same for racial diversity. Harlots reliably reveals the soft underbelly of what is often a very difficult life: the respite of chosen family and the intensity of those bonds, more genuinely rewarding and life-sustaining than those that unite sin-soaked, supremacist brotherhoods. — Riese
Siren (Season Two)
July 11th, Freeform
The second half of Siren‘s second season picks up where the first half left off: the mermaids have returned to the sea, while Ben and Maddie are left on land to face the consequences of the attack on the oil rig. On top of that, Ben and Maddie are melancholy without Ryn, the missing third of their throuple. Thankfully Ryn returns back to land to follow through on an agreement she made with the military so Valerie’s #hornyformermaids campaign can continue, unabated. — Natalie
Sweetbitter (Season Two)
July 14th, Starz
Adapted from the bestselling novel from Stephanie Danler, Sweetbitter is a look at the 2006 New York culinary scene through the eyes of an ingénue named Tess…who definitely gives off season one of The L Word Jenny Schetcher vibes, right down to the black trash bags she carries into her Willamsburg apartment. Working at Sweetbitter, Tess meets Ari who, if we’re keeping the L Word parallels going, is a mix of Shane, Carmen with a dash of Marina; in other words, she’s a no-nonsense server at Sweetbitter by day and an adventurous lesbian DJ by night. According to Ari’s portrayer, Eden Epstein, the second season will delve more into Ari’s sex life. The second season will also add a bit more queer to the cast: as the imitable Sandra Bernhard joins the cast this summer as Maddie Glover, the owner of Sweetbitter, who once ran things in the kitchen before stepping away to launch a global food empire. — Natalie
Light as a Feather (Season Two)
July 26th, Hulu
When it debuted, Light as a Feather seemed perfectly timed: the series, which Valerie described as Pretty Little Liars-esque, with a touch of The Craft and Final Destination, dropped right in the middle of October…the exact time of year, audiences are craving spooky fair. So I’m not sure what it says about Light as a Feather‘s second season that its debuting in July instead; have we traded in scary for heat?
Details are scant on season 2, thus far, particularly as it relates to the show’s lesbian character Alex Portnoy, but we do know that McKenna’s inherited the curse brought on by the titular game. The chrysalis on her back attempts to lure her back to the game but McKenna refuses until the situation becomes untenable. — Natalie
Orange is the New Black (Season Seven)
July 26th, Netflix
Orange takes its final bow this summer. So far all we’ve got is a lil clip of many beloved characters singing the theme song in their head voices — but from that alone, it seems Flaca and Maritza could be returning. At Season Six’s end, Taystee took the fall for a murder she didn’t commit and Piper found herself granted early release, directly after marrying Alex. It’ll be a doozy, but I know I’ll be glued to my television the whole damn weekend. — Riese
She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (Season Three)
August 2nd, Netflix
When season two of She-Ra landed on Netflix, Heather noted, “there’s less implicit queerness than season one. But also: There’s more explicit queerness than season one. Way more!” So if the trend holds, the show’s third season will be extra gay. Fingers crossed!
One thing we do know about She-Ra‘s third season: it’ll feature the debut of Huntara, the Salaxian bounty hunter from the original series. In the Netflix version of She-Ra, Huntara’s the leader of the Crimson Waste who’s reluctant to help Adora, Glimmer, and Bow on a quest. And, if that wasn’t cool enough: Huntara’s being voiced by Oscar winner, Geena Davis. — Natalie
G.L.O.W (Season Three)
August 9th, Netflix
https://youtu.be/xQaCxIJX0J0
The Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling are back for their third season and now they’re headliners at the Fan-Tan Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. Everyone soon realizes that everything that glitters ain’t gold…and their residency in Sin City turns out to be more complicated than they anticipated. The Netflix logline also says that in season three “the cast find themselves struggling with their own identities both in and outside of the ring,” which sounds suspiciously like the tropes that Riese warned about in her season two conversation with Heather. Can’t Arthie and Yolanda be happy for a while? — Natalie
Other dates that might be relevant to your interests:
June 5: Black Mirror
June 7: FIFA Women’s World Cup (FOX)
June 8: The Tony Awards (CBS)
June 18: Ackley Bridge (Channel 4) – trailer
June 24: Years and Years (HBO) – trailer
July 4: Legion (FX)
July 17: Pearson (USA)
July 19: Killjoys (SyFy) – trailer
July 26: Veronica Mars (Hulu) – trailer