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.
“Pose” and “Tales of the City” Remember the AIDS Epidemic in Very Different Ways
When the first Tales of the City premiered on PBS in January of 1994, 235,000 people had already died from AIDS-related causes. Angels in America had won the Pulitzer, Philadelphia was set to win Oscars, and straight society seemed to finally be noticing the ongoing tragedy a decade too late.
Tales of the City takes place in 1976 and was decidedly not about AIDS. By pre-dating the crisis, it provided an escape, a window into gay life before the epidemic began. But just like the work about AIDS, this show would center queer people who were white, cis, and male.
When Tales of the City premiered in January of 1994, I, a millennial, was one-month old.
The recent Tales of the City reboot (which is actually a sequel, which is actually the third sequel) has been promoted as a big queer celebration. With a diverse young cast joining a handful of returning characters, the new series acts as a bridge between eras. Laura Linney’s straight cis Mary Ann is back, but out actress Ellen Page plays her daughter. White gay Michael “Mouse” Tolliver (played now by Murray Bartlett) is back, but his new boyfriend is young and black. Cis actress Olympia Dukakis is (regrettably) back playing trans matriarch Anna Madrigal, but trans actress (and writer and activist and all around icon) Jen Richards plays young Anna in a flashback episode. Margot, an Asian lesbian woman, and Jake, a Latinx trans man, are major characters in the series (played wonderfully by Margot Park and Garcia). And comic relief is provided by the Winter twins, Asian siblings attempting to become Instagram influencers.
Much has also been made about the all-queer writers’ room, a decision that should be standard for a show like this one, but regrettably is not. Like the cast, the room ranged in age and race and gender, lacking a trans feminine voice, but including Thomas Page McBee, a trans man. Again, this should be bare minimum, but, alas, it is not. Showrunner Lauren Morelli was clearly committed to starting a conversation within queer community and her task was not a particularly easy one. The original series, and Armistead Maupin’s books the series are based on, were important for their time. But they’re filled with characters, details, and plot twists that are dated to say the least and unbelievably transphobic and racist to say it plainly.
Murray Bartlett as Michael and Charlie Barnett as Ben in Tales of the City
Rather than ignore the obvious contrast between what was and what is, Morelli and her team confront these generational differences directly. The older characters circle the younger characters, the younger characters circle the older characters, both groups puzzled, fascinated, and annoyed with each other. Even when they’re sleeping together.
This dynamic reveals itself most explicitly, and dramatically, when Michael invites his boyfriend Ben to a dinner party at his ex’s house. Ben is 28. Everyone else is 50 pushing 60. And they’re all white. Ben is immediately uncomfortable. Sitting around the dinner table, discussing travels to Peru and Mexico, the men say racist comment after racist comment. Ben plasters on a fake smile and uncomfortably fidgets his body and touches his face. Actor, Charlie Barnett (who you may recognize from Russian Doll) is phenomenal in these moments, and the whole scene, as he captures an experience most of us know all too well.
“He told us about this club down there,” one of the men begins. “So we’re out walking around this totally sketchy part of Mexico City. I mean, it’s really late, and we finally think we found it… We go in and, oh my God. It’s full of trannies! It’s a tranny club, a Mexican tranny club.”
Ben’s face drops. As a white trans woman, I know that I’m generally more lenient with transphobia than I am with racism. It’s often harder to defend oneself than it is to defend others. And there’s an added sense of responsibility when an offense is not directly about you. It’s also, unfortunately, when saying something is most effective as people tend to listen to those who share their privilege. Maybe this is why Ben finally speaks up. He gently places his hand on the man’s shoulder and says kindly, “I don’t think we use that word.”
There is a dramatic silence. Michael gives Ben a look and shakes his head. (As someone who has loved Bartlett since Looking this broke my heart!) One of two men named Chris (they’re a couple!) refuses to change the subject. He says that he doesn’t appreciate having to be “policed” at a gay dinner party. A rather interesting word choice. “I just think it’s important we call other people what they want to be called,” Ben replies.
Michael and his ex keep trying to pivot the conversation, but the other men are ready to fight. “Why is your generation obsessed with labels?” one of them asks with disdain. Ben says it’s about dignity and visibility. He says we owe it to people especially when coming from a place of privilege. This word sets Chris off.
“Any so-called privilege that we happen to enjoy at this moment was won. Okay? And by that, I mean clawed, tooth and nail, from a society that didn’t give two shits if we lived or died, and indeed, did not care when all our friends started to die. When I was 28, I wasn’t going to fucking dinner parties. I was going to funerals. Three or four a week. All of us were.”
Ben tries to respond but Chris shuts him down. “This world that you get to live in, with your safe spaces and your intersectionalities… This entitlement that you now have to dignity and visibility as a gay person. Do you even know where that came from? Do you know who built that world? Do you know the cost of that progress? No, of course not. Because it would be more than your generation could ever bear to comprehend. So if a bunch of old queens wanna sit around a table and use the word tranny I will not be told off by someone who wasn’t fucking there.”
Ben leaves the table. The show lets Chris’ monologue hang in the air. Underlining every word.
Outside, Ben and Michael continue the argument. Michael tries to apologize, but Ben won’t accept it. He asks how they could suggest, as a black man, he doesn’t understand “a society that doesn’t care whether we live or die.” This is a fair response. But it still allows most of Chris’ words to remain unexamined.
This scene made me mad. I felt like the show gave Ben and Chris’ arguments equal weight. I wanted it to take a firmer stance on the issues it was presenting. But then, as I try to do when something that’s meant to provoke provokes me, I considered. As a young millennial, of course I’d agree with Ben. Of course, I’d take his side. Maybe I did need to consider the privileges I hold living in 2019 instead of 1989.
I was still think about this moment when Pose began its second season and settled my mental debate.
Tales of the City was inevitably a show of compromise, but Pose is an unadulterated television fantasy. With Ryan Murphy’s industry clout, Steven Canals, Janet Mock, and the rest of the creative team are getting to tell the exact stories they want to tell, stories never before seen on mainstream television. Within their first ten episodes they’ve portrayed aspects of the trans experience I previously only dreamed of seeing represented. They’ve also portrayed the realities of the AIDS epidemic for queer and trans people of color.
Media about the AIDS crisis has not been completely devoid of queer black and brown representation. Most famously, Angel in Rent and most notably the work of legendary filmmaker, Marlon Riggs. But Angel is overshadowed by Roger and Mimi (and rarely cast as the trans woman she obviously is). And Riggs has only recently begun to receive the mainstream respect he deserved when alive.
Danielle Cooper as Wanda, Sandra Bernhard as Nurse Judy, Billy Porter as Pray Tell in Pose.
The extent and nuance that Pose is bringing to these stories is, at the very least, incredibly rare. The first season established two main characters, Blanca and Pray Tell, as positive. And while a lesser show may have used their diagnoses as mere character motivation, Pose‘s decision to skip ahead two years after season one shows a commitment to confronting the crisis directly. The very first scene of the new season has Blanca and Pray Tell visiting the secluded mass grave on Hart Island.
The second scene takes place at a hospital where Blanca enters her appointment brandishing her usual optimism. She’s been taking her Flintstone vitamins and she’s feeling good. Unfortunately, Nurse Judy shares that her T-cell count has dropped below two hundred, officially giving her an AIDS diagnosis. She suggests Blanca start on AZT. “Ain’t that stuff for rich folk?” Blanca asks.
This prompts a montage. Judy says that there are some people out there who care about the community. We see Judy and her hot butch girlfriend (sorry off-topic!) enter a stunning apartment with purpose. “When the wealthy white queens and their friends know that the end is coming close they call us,” she begins. “We pay our respects, we say our goodbyes, and then we collect the leftover meds.”
While a show like Tales of the City views the realities of the television industry as a limitation, Pose views them as an opportunity. Both shows feature famous white actors alongside their lesser known queer and POC cast. Both shows frame these characters in opposition to one another. But Pose never strays from its primary point of view. Even last season when a significant amount of time was spent on Trump employee and low-key chaser Stan, it always felt in service of creating contrast with the characters we cared about most.
Again Sandra Bernhard’s nurse is not the focus, but an access point into another world. Last season the glitz of Trump Tower paralleled the glitz of ballroom. This season the tragedy of the AIDS crisis for cis white gay men parallels the tragedy of the AIDS crisis for our main characters and their immediate community. The differences may not be as obviously stark, but they’re just as vast. The straight cis world doesn’t care about any of them, but it especially doesn’t care about anyone black or brown or trans.
Tales of the City‘s Chris understandably looks back on this time as one of impossible hardship, but it’s clear he does not understand that hardship was even greater for anybody poor, trans, and/or a person of color. Instead he buys into the mainstream narrative, where his story, that of cis white gay men, is the story. He credits all of them for making the world a more hospitable place for queer people. We sometimes say simply existing is activism. It can be, to an extent. But the actual activists, the ones who helped make the world more palatable for 28-year-old black gay Ben, were not just cis white gay men, and they did more than simply exist.
When Chris said, “Do you know who built that world?” I shouted at my computer, “Not you, bitch! You weren’t at Stonewall! You weren’t at Compton’s Cafeteria!” And while this visceral reaction is in need of some nuance, it’s not wholly unfair. Maybe Chris was involved in Act Up, maybe he was engaged in community organizing, but probably not. These seem like specifics he would’ve used for leverage in their argument.
Indya Moore as Angel in Pose
I will never know what it was like to be gay in the ’80s and ’90s. I cannot imagine the trauma of watching your community die one by one. But the Chrises of the world were not the only people to experience this trauma. And many of those who had to face racism and transphobia in addition to homophobia were also those who fought hardest for the rights of the entire community.
The question becomes, are the generational differences portrayed in Tales of the City actually generational differences? Is the argument actually between baby boomers and millennials, gen x-ers and gen z-ers? Or have we simply widened the conversation to include, or begin to include, voices that were already there? By pretending like transness is new, like queer people of color are new, like queer disabled people are new, we do a disservice to so many of our queer elders and ancestors. That’s what I wish Ben had said to those men.
Then again, maybe he should’ve just skipped the dinner party altogether.
Lauren Morelli on the Terrifying, Rewarding, Humbling Experience of Remaking “Tales of the City”
There are a lot of ways you know Lauren Morelli: As a writer on Orange Is the New Black, as the wife of heartthrob Samira Wiley, and now as the showrunner for the reboot of Tales of the City — which landed on Netflix just in time for the tornado of rainbows usher in Pride. Lauren came to A-Camp this year to chat with Brittani Nichols, and she also hopped on the phone with me to talk about the rewarding and terrifying things about adding to a series as iconic as Tales.
Spoilers below for Netflix’s Tales of the City.
How did you come to Tales of the City as a story consumer and how did you come to it as the showrunner?
I had actually never heard of Tales of the City, and I felt a lot of queer shame around that when I got involved with the project. There’s a generation where this series is a really important representation milestone for them, and then there’s a sort of generational drop-off. When I went back and read the series, I was really struck by the fact that Armistead Maupin, in 1978, was writing about queer life and love in a way that wasn’t traumatic or over-sexualized, just queer people living their lives, and that’s something we still don’t see enough of today.
Obviously San Francisco and the queer community — particularly the dialogue in and around the community — have changed so much since the original series began. Can you talk a little bit about the intentionality behind marrying the original series with the cultural shifts that have happened since then?
That was the hardest thing, certainly, to try and do. How do I honor the fact that I get to tell these stories because of the work and activism people like Armistead have been doing for four decades before me, while turning my head in the other direction and honoring the fact that there’s a generation of queer people coming up behind me whose interactions with their queer identities look and sound and feel very different than mine? How do you expand the point of view in both directions so it includes all of those things?
No big deal, just having a conversation that includes all queer identities from all generations.
[Laughs] Right! But I was lucky, because a lot of those conversations were already inherently in place. In terms of the executive producers, it was me, who had never heard of Tales before; Alan Poole, who directed three episodes and produced the original, and has been such an important voice in gay content for a long time; Armistead; and Laura Linney. I started by listening to what it was like, in 1993, when the mini-series came out, about marching in the Pride parade in San Francisco as Congress debated whether or not the show could even air on PBS because of the federal funds that were directed to public television. It was a humbling experience.
You had an all queer writer’s room, right?
Yes, and that’s when I started pushing the conversation in the other direction. I’m a 36-year-old white cis queer person. I knew if I was going to put six bodies in this room, they needed to represent six very different queer experiences from mine — and understanding, even then, I’m only getting a tiny fraction of the myriad experiences in our community. We are so desperate for representation that when we get even a tiny droplet, we’re like, “Oh god, please just let me see myself in it.” And when you don’t, or when you see part of yourself but it doesn’t reflect the fullness of your intersecting experiences, it’s feels so disappointing.
I think it’s really brave to try to work out a lot of that intergenerational tension on-screen. The conversation Ben has with Michael’s friends who lived through the AIDS crisis, I’ve rarely, if ever, seen something like that on TV. How does it feel to be doing that?
It’s exciting and it’s an honor and it’s fucking terrifying.
[Laughs] Of course! My favorite thing about this series is your willingness to let these characters be messy, to do messy things and say messy things, and yet you don’t shake them down to some lowest common denominator of “good” or “bad.” For nearly my entire career, the point of LGBT characters on TV has been to make them squeaky clean and lovable so straight people in real life will be nicer to us.
That’s exactly it. I think a lot about trying to get it “right,” and I’m putting “right” in air quotes, because I think that line can be very dangerous, and this is something I’ve evolved on as I’ve educated myself more and more about our community. I do not want to see two characters with marginalized queer identities having a conversation on-screen just to educate straight people. And I’ll give Netflix a lot of credit. In telling Jake and Margot’s story, for example: That relationship is something in my own personal community that’s happening all the time now. It feels important to talk about it. And Netflix never gave us any notes that said, “Oooh, I don’t think straight people are going to get this.” They trusted us to trust the viewers.
A hallmark of the original series is there are ten thousand stories going on at any given moment. You really honored that. Every character is going on their own journey. All the characters are going on relationship journeys with each other. And there’s this over-arching pulpy mystery. Did you have a like a murder board style story plotting wall in your house, all these headshots linked together with like a web of red thread?
Oh well, we for sure felt like it was going to kill us, in the writers room, keeping up with all of it. And trying to strike the right tone. The pulpy mystery is so important in Armistead’s original series. I knew we had to maintain it. But when have we gone too far? When have we not gone far enough? Does this seem insane? Striking the balance between fun and ridiculous is surprisingly hard. But more than that, knowing that the mystery centers a trans woman and is going to contain an entire flashback episode with trans characters and trans actors, making sure that the mystery isn’t going to be damaging to the community.
I do want to talk a little bit about that episode. Jen Richards is always transcendent.
Yes, I can’t get over how good she is. I knew going in, that to address the tension between what Tales was and what it needed to be, Anna had to be played by a trans woman, and the way we were able to do that was to cast Jen in our flashbacks. I had obviously just come off of five years on Orange Is the New Black, which is all small flashbacks all the time, but one of the other writers in the room said, “Let’s make it a whole episode” and so we made, essentially, a mini-movie inside the series. Watching Jen and Daniela Vega work together was a gift. My favorite moment of the entire series was the day we did the table read for that episode, watching them together, and the trans women we’d cast as their friend group, was so dynamic and wonderful.
You brought up Orange Is the New Black, which, in my opinion, completely changed the landscape of LGBT television. How have you personally experienced the sort of tectonic shift of the last several years in terms of representation?
Queer people getting to tell queer stories still feels revolutionary. When that happens, things don’t feel approximated or generalized. One of the most important things I learned on Orange is that very specific stories still attract a really broad audience. I also think there’s so much momentum around lots and lots of TV being made, so it feels like there’s a new kind of room for all of our stories. There are so many ways to love and be loved. Now we get to explore that.
I don’t know how the rest of the world will react to this but I love lesbian villains. My favorite joke on Tales is Michael saying, about the contractor, “She can’t be the bad guy. She’s a lesbian. It’s too cliche.” And then having the bad guy be a whole different lesbian.
[Laughs] I was really worried about that for a long time. I’m glad you liked it.
The more queer characters you have, the more queer villains you can have! If you could adapt another book series for TV, what would it be?
I know everyone on earth is adapting Nancy Drew right now, and I don’t know why I’d trap myself into another mystery, but I’m starting at my collection of vintage Nancy Drew books right now, and that’s such a fun world!
Your wife, Samira Wiley, maybe you’ve heard of her—
I have heard of her.
Do you think you’ll work together again?
Definitely. We loved working together, but it’s also been good for us to find our professional footing without going into the same space together every day. With a few years behind Orange now, we talk about it all the time.
I want to thank you, on a personal note, because at last year’s GLAAD Awards, where Samira was getting the Vito Russo Award, we were on the red carpet at the very end and they hurried y’all past all the smaller media after the big names got their interviews at the top of the carpet, and as the handlers were rushing you by, I yelled out “Autostraddle!” and you both stopped and turned around and smiled waved.
We love you guys.
And thank you for being in love on Instagram. It’s really important to balance out our “love is a lie” Vapid Fluff content.
[Laughs] Well, that’s an honor!
“Tales of the City” Believes in the Power of Gay Love and LGBTQ Chosen Families
As I was watching Netflix’s sequel to Armistead Maupin’s long-running Tales of the City — a serialized story that ran in the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner starting in 1978, was collected in nearly a dozen novels, and spawned multiple TV mini-series in the ’90s — the two thoughts I had repeatedly were: 1) I’m not qualified to write about this show, and 2) Every one of these characters would be cancelled on Twitter if they said this stuff out loud.
That might not sound like praise, but it is. Orange Is the New Black alum Lauren Morelli had a monumental task when she joined the latest iteration of Tales as showrunner: Honor the original characters, and original readers and viewers (mostly middle-age cis gay men), and bring the conversation into 2019, where a TV series centered on San Francisco’s LGBTQ community needs to reflect the experiences of queer and trans people of color; people of various genders and gender presentations and socio-economic statues; and the intergenerational conflicts that have always taken place in the LGBTQ community around activism priorities, distribution of resources, and the ever-evolving and imprecise language we use to talk about ourselves and each other.
Netflix’s Tales Of The City introduces Anna Madrigal’s (Olympia Dukakis) iconic home at 28 Barbary Lane to a new audience by reintroducing Mary Ann Singleton (Laura Linney) to the family — including ex-husband Brian (Paul Gross), daughter Shawna (Elliot Page), and best friend Michael “Mouse” Tolliver (Murray Bartlett) — she left to move across the country to pursue a career in journalism decades earlier. Mary Ann has arrived back in San Francisco for Anna’s 90th birthday, much to the chagrin of Shawna and angst of Brian. Michael still lives at Barbary Lane and Shawna’s moved into Mary and Brian’s old place. The other residents include queer couple Margot (May Hong) and Jake (Josiah Victoria Garcia); and Ani and Raven (Ashley Park and Christopher Larkin), a pair of twins looking to make it big as Instagram influencers.
Tales Of The City is legendary for weaving together dozens of intersecting storylines, and letting them all play out against the encroaching backdrop of a pulpy mystery. Over the years, Maupin’s stories have been celebrated for being revolutionary (Michael, for example, was diagnosed with HIV in the ’80s and lived) and derided for being regressive (the reveal that Anna is a trans woman was clumsy and dangerously cliched, just for one example). Morelli picks up Maupin’s mantle in terms of the sheer number of narratives that take place over the ten episodes, and the inclusion of a slowly unraveling secret. Nearly every character has their own arc within the larger arcs of the season. Shawna struggles to deal with Mary Ann’s return while getting closer to a queer filmmaker named Claire (Zosia Mamet) who’s “making a documentary about queer community and its dissolution as a result of the strangling grip that capitalism has on San Francisco.” Jake and Margot deal with the fact that she still considers herself to be a lesbian, despite the fact that Jake has come out as a trans man, and he’s starting to develop an attraction for other men. Michael and his younger boyfriend, Ben (Charlie Barnett), work to navigate an interracial, intergenerational relationship. Mary Ann’s having a hardcore midlife crisis. And Anna’s at the center of the mystery.
Much has been made of the decision to bring back Dukakis in the role of a trans woman, here in 2019, especially when some of the other original roles were recast. Morelli and the creative team tried to work around it by casting trans actress and activist Jen Richards to play a younger Anna in flashbacks, alongside A Fantastic Woman‘s Daniela Vega. We’ll be publishing a roundtable-style discussion of the series with people of various intersecting identities to speak to the stories and storytelling decisions that I, a 40-year-old white cis lesbian, don’t have the authority or experience to speak on — but I do feel qualified to say that in Anna’s flashback episode, “Days of Small Surrenders,” Richards proves herself, once again, worthy of awards, big screen roles, and a place on every queer woman’s list of heartthrobs.
Tales of the City is a sweet show. It wants its queer characters to find love, to be happy, and to move through the world without shame. But it does have its moments of deep discomfort, almost always when trying to articulate the nuances of queer conversations many of us are afraid to even have in real life. If I had to guess, I’d say the most talked about scene of the series will be the dinner party Ben attends with Michael and his longtime gay pals. These men lived through the AIDS crisis. They survived. Most of their friends didn’t. When Ben speaks up against their casual racism and the use of a trans slur, they turn on him. “Any so-called privilege we happen to enjoy at this moment was won from a society that didn’t give two shits if we lived or died,” one of them snaps at him. “When I was 28, I wasn’t going to fucking dinner parties; I was going to funerals. Three or four a week, all of us were. This world you get to live in, with your safe spaces and your intersectionality, this entitlement you have to dignity, as a gay person, do you even know where that came from?”
And while Ben agrees that he can’t understand what living through the AIDS epidemic was like, he is a gay black man, and he absolutely understands what it’s like to live in world that is relentlessly hostile to him. No, he wasn’t alive in the ’80s, but he’s sympathetic, and he doesn’t believe any level of trauma or persecution should be used as an excuse to stop fighting for members of the LGBTQ community who suffer more oppression than rich, cis, white gay guys.
To the show’s great credit, it tries as very few shows have — I’m thinking only of Desiree Akhven’s The Bisexual, really — to have those conversations on-screen. It’s uncomfortable, and it doesn’t always work, but it’s bold and it’s necessary. And that dinner party scene is prophetic, really. As I’ve talked to other critics and witnessed the conversation in comments sections as reviews of Tales begin to trickle in, longtime fans of the series seem to think it’s gone too far, tried to do too much; while many newcomers feel like it didn’t go nearly far enough.
Tales has a little something for most queer viewers. Queer and trans people playing queer and trans people written by queer and trans people? Check. Gay sex? Check. Pride flags? Check check check. Scenes to make you laugh? Check. Scenes to make you cry? Check. Inside jokes and light inter-community jabs? Check! (“How very ’90s of you,” Elliot Page’s bisexual Shawna drawls when Margot tells her she’s not queer; she’s a lesbian.) Tales leans into some tropes, flips others on their head, makes plenty of jokes at its own expense, and — above all — believes in the power of LGBTQ people who come together to make their own family.
Tales of the City lands on Netflix tomorrow, June 7th.
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
Watch Ellen Page and Lauren Morelli’s “Tales of the City” Trailer and Cry Some Happy Gay Tears
If you’re ready to shed some happy gay tears on this day, I’ve got good news for you: Yesterday Netflix dropped the first trailer for its Lauren Morelli-helmed, Ellen Page-anchored Tales of the City reboot and holy heck! I don’t think I’m allowed to say anything specific, but I think I can say I’ve watched several of the first season’s episodes and cried during every one of them (in a good way). This trailer really captures the spirit of the thing, which Morelli described a few weeks ago as “The escape that I hope we all kind of deserve right now. The characters deserve it, we, as an audience, deserve it. Let’s just create a safe space where we can disappear an hour at a time.”
Tales of the City lands on June 7. You’ll find your reviews and interviews right here on Autostraddle dot com very soon.
Ellen Page and Lauren Morelli’s “Tales of the City” Is Maybe the Gay Reboot We Actually Need in 2019
While most of our queer eyes have been fixed on Showime’s upcoming The L Word reboot, Lauren Morelli — former Orange Is the New Black writer/wife of Samira Wiley — has been quietly writing, casting, and filming the reboot we actually need/deserve in 2019. At least that’s what it sounds like from Joanna Robinson’s first look at Netflix’s Tales of the City that Vanity Fair published today. The new series, which drops on Netflix later this summer, brings back old favorites and puts Ellen Page right in the center of Armistead Maupin’s beloved queer world. Morelli promises familiarity, but also clear-eyed storytelling about what the queer community in San Francisco actually looks like today, and how those identities intersect with the realties of living in a city being suffocated by the tech industry.
Nino Munoz/Netflix
For the uninitiated, Tales of the City is a series of nine soapy, pulpy, delightfully addictive novels that were published in serialized format in the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner starting in 1978. In 1993, the books were adapted for TV by UK’s Channel 4. They also aired on PBS in the U.S. The stories follow Midwestern native Mary Ann Singleton (played in the original series and the new one by Laura Linney) as she decides to stay in San Francisco after visiting for vacation and takes up residence in an apartment at 28 Barbary Lane. Her landlord is a trans woman named Anna Madrigal (played in the original series and the new one by Olympia Dukakis) and she is surrounded by a cast of LGBTQ characters, most especially Michael Tolliver, who has the great distinction of being a gay man in fiction from the ’80s and ’90s who was diagnosed with HIV and lived.
In the original series, Linney’s Mary Ann actually left her family — including her adopted daughter, Shawna — to move to across the country. In the new series, Mary Ann returns to San Francisco and finds that Shawna, played by Page, has stacked up some big time resentment against her. Also, Shawna is queer. And a player. “Shawna’s being brought to life by such a gifted woman, who also happens to hold the queer community at the center of her own personal life, it just doesn’t get better,” Morelli told Vanity Fair. Shawna’s story will spend a lot of time focusing on her relationship with Zosia Mamet’s Claire Duncan.
That’s already exciting, but what’s got me extra hyped is the way Morelli talked about casting for the reboot. Anna Madrigal, she agrees, should be played by a trans woman, so she cast Jen Richards to play the young version of her, while also bringing in trans writers and directors Thomas McBee, Silas Howard and Sydney Freeland. Non-binary actor Garcia will play a new trans character. Morelli cast Asian actress May Hong as Garcia’s character’s love interest, along with Asian actors Christopher Larkin and Ashley Park as siblings, noting that any show set in San Francisco without Asian representation just doesn’t ring true.
Nino Munoz/Netflix
Plus, it just sounds fun. And that was the thing about Maupin’s books: The scant representation we had in the decades he was writing his novels was almost all tragic. Tales of the City was just a good damn time. We need that in 2019 as much as ever, and Morelli knows it. “This is the escape that I hope we all kind of deserve right now,” she told Vanity Fair. “The characters deserve it, we, as an audience, deserve it. Let’s just create a safe space where we can disappear an hour at a time.” On Instagram, she wrote, “[Tale of the City] is a show that I am immensely proud of. It’s a world filled with wonderful, kind, queer people and I hope you’ll come hang out with them.”
I absolutely will! ‘Cause that’s the way I actually live and love!