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
Pop Culture Fix: Handmaid’s Tale Season Three Trailer Finds Serena and June At The Pool, S-M-O-K-I-N-G
Welcome to your weekly pop culture fix, where we stop being polite and start getting real… about pop culture.
+ The Handmaid’s Tale Season Three trailer is here! Guess what, it’s gonna be kinda dark, but Serena Joy and June are gonna, at some point, be smoking by a pool together, so.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcTvQx1Wot0&feature=youtu.be
+ Kristen Stewart told ABC News that she felt a “huge responsibility” to define her sexuality but “sees a shift” in culture that has allowed young people to accept more fluidity in gender and sexuality:
“I felt this huge responsibility, like one that I was really genuinely worried about, if I wasn’t able to say one way or the other, then was I sort of like forsaking a side. The fact that you don’t have to now is like so much more truthful.”
+ Suranne Jones, who plays Anne Lister in Gentleman Jack, hired a lesbian “intimacy expert,” Ita O’Brien, to help her with the lesbian sex scenes, recalling:
“I was quite nervous about the sex scenes we had to do, because I thought they should be approached as sensitively as they could be. One of the great things she brought was an articulacy – we could talk about the scenes. She just started talking about body parts and positions in a matter of fact way, which just liberated us all.”
+ A beautifully scathing indictment: Norman Lear and Rita Moreno on ‘One Day at a Time’ and the Agony of Death By Data at Netflix (Guest Column)
But something is missing if that is the only criterion for survival of a show, the only data point, the only litmus test. Perhaps media has gone the way of managed care — the focus no longer patient and doctor, but bottom line.
+ Entertainment mogul Lena Waithe shares her secret—call back until a black person answers
+ Lesbian musical The Prom lands 7 Tony Awards nominations
+ The Walking Dead finally explain why they killed off two LGBT characters in season 9
+ ‘Boomerang,’ ‘Special,’ ‘Good Trouble’ Bosses Talk State of Queer Representation on TV: An incredible conversation that includes people like Ryan O’Connell, Lauren Morelli, Our Lady J and Joanna Johnson.
+ My Thoughts on Netflix’s ‘Special’ as a Lesbian With Mild Cerebral Palsy
+ Rich Juzwiak talks to Ani DiFranco about her new memoir: Ani DiFranco Is Tired of Talking About Herself (So Here She Goes Again)
+ Musician Clairo Is Getting Comfortable Being ‘Not Straight’: I’m still not really sure what my sexuality is, but I do know that it’s not straight
+ 15 Gayest Moments From “Avengers: Endgame,” Which Was Great But Unfortunately Not Gay
+ Potential Trend Alert: Anne Lister Collected Her Ex-Lovers’ Pubic Hair, Kept Them In Lockets
+ From ‘Batwoman’ to ‘Evil,’ a Look at Pilot Season’s Buzziest Projects
+ Shailene Woodley Starring in Serial Killer Thriller ‘Misanthrope’
+ “She-Ra and the Princesses of Power” Season Two Is Even More Hopeful (and Gay)
+ Did you know that we have an L Word podcast now? WELL WE DO and it’s really great, everybody loves it, everybody’s doing it, check it out: “To L and Back” L Word Podcast Episode 104: Longing
+ Greg Berlanti Says Gay Execs Blocked Him Casting Gay Actors
The 25 Best TV Shows Of 2018 With LGBT Women Characters
‘Tis the season for various media outlets to reveal their list of the 10-40 Best TV Shows of the year, and this year we decided to get in on that. With a caveat, of course — to us, no matter how critically acclaimed any given show is, we cannot personally crown it “the best” unless our specific interests (read: queer women) are included within it. I’m sorry that’s just who and how we are!
To prepare for this undertaking, I looked at 18 Best TV of 2018 lists across mainstream media, both high-brow and middle-brow: The Decider, The New York Times, Paste, Vulture, Vanity Fair, The Guardian, Entertainment Weekly, USA Today, The New Yorker, TV Guide, AFI, Complex, The AV Club, Verge, The AP, Variety, Slate, The Daily Beast and The Atlantic. On the list below, you’ll see in parentheses a number: that number represents the number of other Best-Of lists the show appeared on.
Last year I documented what felt like — finally— a shift wherein regular and recurring queer women characters were just as likely to show up at the forefront of prestige television as they were in our previous homes of “soapy teen dramas,” sci-fi/supernatural epics and very small parts in aforementioned prestige television. This year that trend has continued mightily. Three shows that turned up on pretty much every Best-Of list — The Good Place, Killing Eve and Pose — had queer or trans leads. Frequent inclusions on those Best-Of Lists that did not include queer women were exactly what you’d expect: The Americans, Homecoming, Atlanta, Better Call Saul, Lodge 49, Barry, Bojack Horseman (which did have one lesbian-themed episode but that didn’t feel like enough to warrant inclusion on this list, I’m sure you will @ me re: this) and Gianni Versace: American Crime Story. Most baffling to us all was that Lifetime’s You showed up on SEVEN Best-Of Lists, despite being insufferable and killing its only queer woman character. It’s not on this list.
This list is not, then, our favorite shows of the year, or the shows that brought us the most joy or the best representation. We’re doing a lot of lists this year about teevee, and most of them are our Favorites, not “The Best.” This list are the shows that have regular or recurring queer women characters and that I personally believe were, objectively, the best. The opinions of other critics weighed heavily into these rankings, and only in a few cases did I pick a show that wasn’t on any other Best-Of lists.
I look forward to witnessing your disagreements and agreements in the comments! Also I know there’s 27 shows here but 25 seemed like a better headline.
28. Marvel’s Runaways Seasons One & Two (0)
“Marvel’s Runaways” Hasn’t Achieved Its Full Gay Potential Yet, but It’s Already a Thrilling Ride
The timing couldn’t be better for this lovely comic book adaptation about a group of fierce, supernaturally talented teenagers challenging the abhorrent compromises their parents made, supposedly in their best interest, for a “better world,” at the expense of, you know — human lives, wealth inequality, and our planet. Plus, Virginia Gardner literally shines as Karolina Dean, a human-alien hybrid initially hiding her superpowers and her lesbianism ’til coming out near the end of Season One. Her revelation is refreshingly well received by her crush, cynical goth Nico Minoru, in what feels like a fairly honest depiction of Generation Y’s alleged tendency towards nonchalant sexual fluidity. Season Two sees the lesbian couple trying to make it work amid pretty challenging circumstances. Despite an enormous ensemble — six children and ten parents for each — Runaways has mostly succeeded in making each of them count. At times it fumbles, having bit off more than it can chew thematically and w/r/t sheer population, but it still manages to combine the easy joy of a teen drama with the satisfying anxiety of suspenseful sci-fi. — Riese Bernard
27. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel Season Two (7)
Undoubtedly the most cheerful show on the list and a bona-fide critical darling, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is hawkishly agreeable, floating through its second season on unmistakable charm, its trademark breakneck quip-laden dialogue, and a generous budget devoted to picturesque sets and locations that leave no affluent late-’50s stone unturned. Then there’s Mrs. Maisel herself, a plucky heroine who occasionally does wrong but when she does, it’s always very cute, and often laugh-out-loud funny. It’s frustrating that Susie’s lesbianism remains bafflingly unspoken, especially when Mrs. Maisel’s primary flaw continues to be its chronically low stakes, like a cake inside another cake inside another cake slathered in buttercream frosting. I do love cake, though! Regardless — Susie deserves a sexuality. I hope in Season Three she finally gets it. — Riese Bernard
26. Sally4Ever Season One (2)
HBO’s “Sally4Ever” Is Hilarious, Horrifying, Tries to Make Lesbian Toeing Happen
Earning points for sheer pugnacity, Sally4Ever, described by The Guardian as “a lurid lesbian sitcom,” is a disgusting, often offensive and downright bizarre comedy about an absurdly passive middle-aged woman, Sally, who leaves her droll underachieving partner for a wildly manipulative narcissistic lesbian musician / actress she first sees on the Underground. Julie Davis’s Emma is a madcap creation only Julie Davis’s mind could’ve created. Sally4Ever is one of four reminders on this list that you can always rely on British television to wallow in discomfort and failure in a way optimistic American TV is rarely willing to do. — Riese Bernard
25. Legends of Tomorrow Seasons Three & Four (2)
How “Legends of Tomorrow” Became One of the Best Queer Shows on TV
Legends of Tomorrow is one of the weirdest shows on television. With everything from Julius Caesar on the loose in Aruba to a stuffed animal worshipped as a god of war, you truly never know what’s going to happen next. On paper, it seems like the writers play mad libs with storylines, picking random nouns and locations out of hats and running with it. The most dramatic lines of dialogue are, simply put, absurd. But in 2018 this goofy-ass show has blossomed into something truly spectacular, as bisexual badass Sara Lance became, in the words of Zari, “not just the captain of the ship, but its soul.” It was still everything we love about the show – the misfit camaraderie, the wacky storylines, the outfits, the heart – but turned up to eleven. Sara also got her first post-Arrow longterm relationship with another woman. Their love story was fraught, sweet, sexy, complicated — and oh so rewarding. Best of all, it’s still going strong. — Valerie Anne
24. Everything Sucks! Season One (1)
Everything Sucks! is a Bangin’ TV Show With a Sweet Lesbian Lead
Sure, everything sucks, but something that specifically sucks is that this show only got one tiny season to breathe. Sweet and nostalgic, Everything Sucks! made the noteworthy choice of placing a lesbian character front and center of a tender coming-of-age dramedy set in Boring, Oregon. Amid pitch-perfect references to Frutopia, “Wonderwall” and the Columbia House Music Club, we have two girls on separate journeys towards queer revelations (and each other) and in this story, the pre-teen boys in their crew aren’t the main event. Considering all that, I suppose, perhaps it’s not so surprising it got cancelled.— Riese Bernard
23. Forever Season One (3)
Maya Rudolph’s Forever is Finally Here and Quietly Queer
Every critic on earth adored Forever, partly because of the show’s unique and brilliantly executed concept, but mostly because of Maya Rudolph’s stunning and triumphant return to TV. What made Forever even rarer than those two things was the central conflict for Rudolph’s character, June, who experienced a middle-aged queer awakening at the hands of an enigmatic, furious, and sometimes even unlikable(!!) Kase, played by Catherine Keener. It does seem like maybe some vital character development for Kase was left on the cutting room floor in an effort to make sure the audience didn’t root too hard for her relationship with June — but what remained was still breathtaking and frankly revolutionary. — Heather Hogan
22. Counterpart Season One (3)
After years of lurking in the Showtime/HBO shadows, Starz has emerged over the past few years to, intentionally or not, feature queer women characters in nearly all of their original programming. And what original programming it has been! A lot of the well-deserved praise for this taut, suspenseful, dystopian spy thriller has gone to J.K. Simmons for his riveting performance as two versions of the same man, one in each of the show’s two parallel worlds. But the reason I tuned in was for one of the year’s few masculine-of-center lesbian regulars: Baldwin, a trained assassin never given the chance to develop a true emotional life or any dreams of her own, a fact laid bare when she’s forced to watch her counterpart, an accomplished classical violinist, die in an alternate dimension. She struggles with her sexual and emotional connection to a sleeper agent and an unexpected romance with a waitress, as brooding butches are wont to do, but we never struggle with our affection for this unique point of connection in a really good story.— Riese Bernard
21. Adventure Time Season 10 (1)
Princess Bubblegum and Marceline Smooch On-Screen, Live Happily Ever After in the “Adventure Time” Series Finale
Adventure Time is easily the most influential show in Cartoon Network’s history; echoes of its style and themes reverberate far beyond kids TV. And really Adventure Time never was kids TV. Yeah, it was animated and as silly as bing bong ping pong. But as it evolved, it became as philosophical weighty and psychologically curious as Battlestar Galactica. Fans of Princess Bubblegum and Marceline enjoyed growing canonical support of their favorite couple over the seasons, both on-screen and in spin-off comic books — but they’d never actually confirmed their relationship physically until the series finale when Bonnie got womped in the dome piece and almost croaked and Marceline rushed to her and caressed her and professed her love and they smooched right on the mouths. — Heather Hogan
20. The Handmaid’s Tale Season Two (4)
“The Handmaid’s Tale” Season Two Gets Even Darker, Queerer, Curiouser and Curiouser
Season Two of Handmaid’s Tale was darker than Season One, which’s saying a lot. I mean we opened with a fake-out mass-hanging and before long Offred was basically slicing off a chunk of her own ear, then staring at the camera while we watched her bleed. And there would be so much more blood where that came from! But damn, the artistry of this brutal show and its magnificent cast, capable of communicating entire worlds without a single spoken line. The season’s most unspoken message, though, was this: pay attention. Look up. Don’t wait for them to come for you. Clea Duvall and Cherry Jones graced us with winning cameos and lesbian characters Moira (Samira Wiley) and Emily (Alexis Bledel) took greater prominence. So did Gilead’s persecution of lesbians in a specific dystopia designed by religious fundamentalists who are obsessed with traditional gender roles and able to rationalize their actions in the wake of a fertility crisis. It’s not a pleasant world to witness, yet it remains a seductive watch. Every moment of dark humor is hard-won, like, I suppose, freedom itself.— Riese Bernard
19. The End of the F*cking World Season One (5)
I Demand a Lesbian Cop-Show Spin-off of The End of the F*cking World
Sure, we could watch fresh-faced teen dreams fall in love in the lemon-scented hallways of suburban California high schools, or we could watch … whatever this was? A 17-year-old self-diagnosed psychopath who loves knives goes on a traveling caper with the only girl in town who’s sad, alienated and nihilistic enough to wanna run away with him. Hot on their tail are two lesbian detectives who had a thing once and definitely deserve their own show. — Riese Bernard
18. Dear White People Season Two (4)
In this current television landscape, binges come and go. A television show drops on streaming, you watch it, maybe even obsess for a spell, and then it fades to the recesses of your memory to make room for whatever trendy new show is coming next. In those dips and waves, sometimes something really special falls through the cracks. I say that because there’s a chance that you didn’t watch Dear White People last year and that’s a mistake.
The first season of Dear White People was regrettably uneven, particularly in regards to its lesbian representation, but the second season aired this year and came back stronger, more focused, and razor-sharp! It’s a stylized and poignant exploration of being a black student at a predominantly white university that is as smart (if not smarter) than almost any other comedy I watched last year. The weekend of its drop, I finished all 13 episodes in two days. The next weekend, I watched it again. I couldn’t shake how insightful it was, how bright, how one-of-a-kind. You can watch the second season with no knowledge of the first and follow along easily. As a bonus, it comes with the bittersweet gift of two smaller, but significantly better executed black lesbian plots. One of those plots stars Lena Waithe. It also features Tessa Thompson as a parodied take on a Stacey Dash’s “black republican television pundit” figure. Her character plays out over a series of cameos, but as far as I’m concerned her final scene is worth the entire season by itself. — Carmen Phillips
17. Steven Universe Season Five (2)
“Steven Universe” Makes History, Mends Hearts in a Perfect Lesbian Wedding Episode
Steven Universe continues to explore more adult themes more fully than nearly every non-animated show on TV: family, grief, depression, commitment, betrayal, duplicitousness, forgiveness, puberty, gender, gender presentation, sexuality — and it does so in a way that’s warm and engaging and funny and, most of all, hopeful. This season, Rebecca Sugar’s beloved non-binary lesbian gems, Ruby and Sapphire, broke more ground by becoming the first same-sex couple to get married on all-ages TV. Their wedding featured masc gems in dresses, femme gems in tuxes, kisses right on the mouth, and swoon-worthy proclamations of eternal love. Also, of course, ass-kicking. Steven Universe remains one of the best shows on television, full stop. — Heather Hogan
16. Black Lightning Seasons One & Two (0)
Recaps of Season One & Two of Black Lightning
The CW has delivered a very entertaining batch of fresh-faced white superheroes determined to battle off some wacky Big Bads, but Black Lightning really elevates the genre and takes notable risks. The story is rooted halfway in this world, too, spotlighting a family wrought together over love and a deep commitment to their community and social justice, while divided on how best to manifest that commitment. Annissa Pierce, aka Thunder, became network television’s first out lesbian superhero when she debuted in early 2018. “I’ve said before that bullet proof black people is my favorite superhero trope,” Carmen wrote in a Season One recap, “but there is also something so sweet about a television lesbian who can’t be shot.” We hope to see more in future episodes of her girlfriend Grace, played by Chantal Thuy. Don’t sleep on Black Lightning. Wherever it’s going, you’ll want to be on board.— Riese Bernard
15. The Bisexual Season One (2)
Hulu’s “The Bisexual” Is Here to Make Every Queer a Little Uncomfortable
This has been such a great year for queer weirdos with their fingers acutely upon their own pulses. In between impeccable L Word references and fetching fashion choices, The Bisexual is an uncompromising journey of sexual discovery, jump-started when Leila breaks up with her much older girlfriend (and business partner) Sadie. Akhvan’s world feels undeniably authentic — she points out that “it’s the only show on TV where you can watch two Middle Eastern women in a car, talking, taking up the screen with their different bodies and different ethnicities.” Fumbling and unafraid of its own potential, The Bisexual also portrays a multi-generational, diverse network of queer and often gender-non-conforming women in London’s East End in all its messy, self-reflexive glory. — Riese Bernard
13. The Good Fight Season Two (9)
The Good Fight lives in that very special sweet spot that I like to call organized chaos, almost ballet-like in its sweeping rhythm. It is very much a playground for Christine Baranski and Cush Jumbo to do their impeccable work. But it also, better than any other show, captures the collective meltdown that has become a ceaseless hum in Tr*mp’s America. It’s sharp, and it’s dark, and it’s still funny and fun, with a very women-driven, diverse cast. And one of its central lawyers, Maia Rindell (Rose Leslie), also happens to be a petite lesbian mired in staggering lesbian drama, and by lesbian drama I mean her girlfriend literally testifies against her in a massive court case that Maia’s parents have her swept up in! Also, in season two we learn that Maia was in love with her tennis instructor as a closeted baby gay, and I have never felt more Seen. — Kayla Kumari
12. Harlots Season Two (0)
Harlots Season Two Is Here, Queer and Transcendent
Harlots might be the year’s most underrated show (Seriously, how does this show earn a nearly perfect score on Rotten Tomatoes but not make it onto anybody’s Best Shows Of the Year list? I endeavor to suggest that the reason is Men). I declared Harlots the most accurate portrayal of indoor-market sex work ever represented onscreen in Season One — surprisingly more resonant to me as a former sex worker than any contemporary portrayals — and its extra queering in Season Two made it moreso and then some. If Season One was about sex work, Season Two is about the reality that what’s done to sex workers is inextricable from what’s done to all women — the lessons about power, violence, solidarity and struggle in stories about sex work are ones that the larger conversation about gender ignores at its peril. — Riese Bernard
11. High Maintenance Season Two (6)
In between High Maintenance‘s first and second season, a lot happened for husband-and-wife co-creators Ben Sinclair and Katja Blichfeld — including Katja coming out as gay, thus ending their marriage. Although the split hadn’t been finalized at the time, Season One ended with the reveal that Sinclair’s “The Guy” marijuana-delivery character lived down the hallway from his ex-wife, who’d left him for another woman. Its Season Two, then, is a long time coming and imbued with a rapturous affection for contemporary queer culture. The characters calling upon “The Guy” negotiate languid lesbian sexual dynamics, LGBT-affirming churches, sexually fluid teens and anti-Trump feminist gatherings attended by well-intentioned, hysterical liberals. Particularly touching was a bittersweet episode that saw “The Guy” visited in the hospital by aforementioned now-lesbian ex-wife. But honestly, with few exceptions every story in this scene is like a nice hybrid edible that makes you giggle, relax, and occasionally feel profound.— Riese Bernard
10. Vida Season One (2)
“Vida” Review: Starz’s New Latinx Drama Is Sexy, Soulful and Super Queer
Tragically overlooked by mainstream critics, one of 2018’s most innovatory offerings sees emotionally estranged sisters, bisexual attorney Emma (Michel Prada) and Lyn (Melissa Barrera), reuniting in their home of Boyle Heights after the death of their mother who, it turns out, was in fact dating her butch lesbian “roommate,” Eddy. Showrunner Tanya Saracho’s writing team is entirely Latinx and mostly queer, and they deftly address the complications of “gente-fication” and the joys of living breathing loving community with all the nuance and authenticity it requires. But perhaps most notable for all of us here was the graphic butch/femme sex scene that opened Episode Three. “It isn’t just about the hot sex — though the sex is very hot — it’s about creating spaces where Latinx queer bodies can feel ownership,” wrote Carmen in her recap. “It’s tearing down shame. It’s about saying that our love, our sex, our sticky sweat is valid.”— Riese Bernard
9. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Seasons 4 & 5 (4)
“Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” Is Singing Our Song: Valencia Has a Girlfriend!
Maybe we should’ve seen it coming — after all, soon after we meet Valencia for the first time, she’s kissing Rebecca on the dance floor and lamenting the fact that everyone wants to have sex with her — but it wasn’t until Valencia met Beth that we got to see her bisexuality as something other than comedic fodder. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend has always been a queer-friendly show but with Valencia and Beth, it finally put lady-loving ladies on centerstage. Valencia’s bisexuality was the pitch perfect end to a show-long character arc: she’s evolved from the vain yoga instructor who couldn’t build meaning relationships with women to loving, working and living with one.
The Golden Globe-winning series is currently in its fourth and final season and Valencia and Beth are still together, happy and, in an unusual twist for Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, relatively normal (unless you count the $8000 they pay in rent for their new closet size NYC apartment). We feared that the couple’s recent relocation meant that we wouldn’t get to see as much of them but the show’s found a way to bridge the distance between West Covina and New York. Hopefully, Valencia’s recent return for “the rest of the series of holidays” means we’ll finally get that lesbian loving musical number we’ve all been craving. — Natalie Duggins
8. Jane the Virgin Season Four (4)
While Jane the Virgin has been rightly critically acclaimed since day one and praised for its revolutionary diversity, it’s always had a complicated relationship with its queer characters. Luisa started off strong but was ultimately relegated to a one-dimensional punchline before essentially disappearing, and Rose was never really fully formed. This year, though, the writers picked up on the long-running fan theory that Petra is bisexual and agreed. Unlike Luisa, Petra actually started out as a caricature and became more layered and complicated as the show went on. Her coming out journey was essentially realizing she’s into women because her chemistry with Jane Ramos spawned a sex dream into her subconscious — and then just going for it. The self-revelation, the exploration, even the way she told Jane and Rafael about it was so sweet and sexy and prickly and Petra. Jane the Virgin has gotten better every year, and the surprise of Petra and JR’s storyline was one of the reasons season four was its best ever. — Heather Hogan
7. The Haunting of Hill House Season One (4)
Netflix’s New “Haunting of Hill House” Gave Us a Lesbian Who Lives, Took Our Whole Weekend
The Haunting of Hill House had a challenge ahead of it with adapting its queer storyline; the original text had one of pop culture’s first recognizably lesbian characters, but preserving her “authentically” would mean falling far short of today’s expectations for representation, as in 2018 we look for more to signify lesbianism than “wears pants” and “is unmarried.” So Haunting gave us Theo, a lesbian character whose sexuality isn’t her whole storyline, but does tie into it; who goes through some wild and traumatizing stuff, but on a level that’s comparable with the also very wild and traumatizing stuff that her straight siblings go through. And in a show where romantic relationships are rocky at best, Theo does manage to both survive and get the girl. —Rachel Kincaid
6. Brooklyn 99 Season Five (6)
As evidenced by our very own Gay Emmys, this year was a very good year for Stephanie Beatriz and her character Rosa Diaz, who came out as bisexual — like, actually said the word! — on this season of Brooklyn Nine-Nine. The show itself had a good year, too, almost annoying in how persistently it outdoes itself year after year with its annual, always excellent Halloween episode. The Backstreet Boys lineup might go down as one of the greatest comedy cold opens of all time (up there with The Office’s “Fire Drill”). And even though we’re now five seasons into the series, that doesn’t mean the writers are just coasting by on humor that relies on how well we know all of these characters. It still regularly serves up new, emotional character arcs that peel back the layers to this lovable squad, as with Rosa’s personal life developments. Above all else, the show celebrates earnestness and friendship in a really lovely way that proves you don’t have to be mean or cynical to be really fucking funny. — Kayla Kumari
5. One Day at a Time Season Two (6)
“One Day at a Time” Brings Even More Heart and Humor and Gayness to Season 2
There’s an easy reason that One Day at a Time shows up on so many critics’ “End of the Year” Best Lists. It’s quite simply that damn good. One Day at a Time is the most generous, compassionate, loving family sitcom on television. It’s also not afraid to have frank, sometimes dark discussions – PTSD, depression, the fragility of age, the perils of being a young queer teen, the financial struggles of being a working class family in the 21st century. It’s all on the table.
As I wrote in my Season Two review, some of the show’s brilliance comes from leaning into its multi-cam sitcom roots. One Day at a Time uses an old school format, and they are proud of it. They leverage the intimacy and familiarity of the genre to their advantage, luring their audience into cutting edge and weighty conversations from the comfort of the Alvarez’s living room. It’s a stand-out in a class of stand-outs and I would put it against any other comedy on television. In fact, I’ll go further. The fact that One Day at a Time has now gone two years without any acting or writing Emmy nominations is one of the most shaming indictments of the white, male majority of the Television Academy that we have right now. Yes, it’s just that damn good. — Carmen Phillips
4. Pose Season One (13)
“Pose” Is Full of Trans Joy, Resistance, and Love
This show just flatly rejected the idea that the best way to tell our stories is slowly, character-by-character, putting one white cisnormative queer in one show and then another show until we somehow achieve critical mass. The problem with that has often been that that’s not how we live — we’re not out here one by one, lone queers in schools/towns/families composed entirely by normals. Enter Pose: a show written by and for trans women of color, set in an era when the only thing louder than the daily trauma of oppression and omnipresent fear of HIV/AIDS were the LOOKS, and all the beautiful ways a body can move to express itself. Pose radiates with a glittery, gorgeous aesthetic and complicated characters. Trans bodies are so often portrayed as somehow tragic or compromised, and Pose — in addition to being a story about real human lives, love, friendship, and “chosen family” — is about the triumph of the body, its ability to mean as much to the world as it does to itself. — Riese Bernard
3. G.L.O.W. Season Two (11)
G.L.O.W. Season Two Doubles the lesbians, Doubles the Fun
After a first season that bafflingly pursued outlandish homoeroticism yet was seemingly void of homosexuals, Season Two introduced a Latina lesbian fighter and pulled Arthie off the bench for a romantic awakening. G.L.O.W., based on the real-life Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling, was a delightful mid-summer ride that took a more decidedly feminist bent as the Gorgeous Ladies explored how to advocate for, instead of against, each other, in an industry hell-bent on exploiting women for male fortune. Still, with its electrifying outfits, ostentatious costume drama and carefully-calibrated balance of comedy and drama, it only failed at one thing: an ensemble this dynamic needs longer episodes or a longer season, or both. — Riese Bernard
2. The Good Place Season 3 (12)
The Good Place, like The Office and 30 Rock before it (although I’m, admittedly, not a 30 Rock fan), has accomplished nothing short of a complete re-imagination of what the half-hour network comedy can be. It’s got everything: prestige sci-fi level world-building, cartoonish aesthetics, highbrow esoteric wit, running gags and plenty of ‘ships. Its premise, writes Sam Anderson in The New York Times, “is absurdly high concept. It sounds less like the basis of a prime-time sitcom than an experimental puppet show conducted, without a permit, on the woodsy edge of a large public park.” And yet it works. And in Season Three, The Good Place amped up Eleanor’s bisexuality and Janet’s particular take on non-binary, and we are so pleased, because that means we can put what will undoubtedly be one of the most legendary television programs of all time on lists like this one. — Riese Bernard
1. Killing Eve Season One (17)
Killing Eve is Your New Queer Obsession
Crescendoing, relentless, all-consuming obsession fuels the narrative of Killing Eve, Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s sexy, smart, distinctly feminine action thriller starring Sandra Oh and Jodie Comer as the toxic spy-assassin duo who can’t stop thinking about each other. Watching Killing Eve feels exactly like that: seering obsession. This category was stacked with great, complex dramas, but there’s something just purely intoxicating about Killing Eve that sets it apart. Though it’s the phrase most often used to describe Eve and Villanelle’s dynamic, “cat-and-mouse” hardly covers what Oh and Comer bring to these characters or what’s even on the page. It’s never quite clear whether they want to murder each other or make out. Hunting each other, longing for each other, Eve and Villanelle might be one of the most complex queer relationships on television. But beyond that dripping subtext, it’s just a very good thriller with compelling twists and turns and sharp edges that refuse to be dulled. — Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya
Boob(s On Your) Tube: All of Samira Wiley’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” Season Two Storylines, None of the Torture
It’s Boob(s On Your) Tube! Your one-stop shop for the week in queer TV! This week on Autostraddle dot com, Valerie Anne prepped you for the new season of Wynonna Earp. Kayla and Carmen and Natalie made a list of 18 LGBTQ women of color crushing TV this year. Kayla also recapped another fantastic episode of The Bold Type. Riese and I chatted about GLOW season two’s big gay storylines. I cried all over the place about Steven Universe. And Kayla ranked the Emmy nominees from Mommi to Mommiest.
Speaking of which, so many lesbian and bisexual and queer women were nominated for Emmys this year! Evan Rachel Wood for lead actress in a drama series for Westworld; Samira Wiley for outstanding guest actress in a drama series for Handmaid’s Tale; Lily Tomlin for outstanding lead actress in a comedy series for Grace and Frankie; Kate McKinnon for outstanding supporting actress in a comedy series for SNL; Jane Lynch and Wanda Sykes for outstanding guest actress in a comedy series for The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and black-ish, respectively; Jane Lynch also fro Host for Reality/Reality Competition Program for Hollywood Game Night; Ellen DeGeneres for Host for Reality/Reality Competition Program for Ellen’s Game of Games. Sarah Paulson for outstanding lead actress in a limited series or movie for American Horror Story: Cult; Cherry Jones for outstanding guest actress in a drama series for Handmaid’s Tale; Carrie Brownstein for Variety Sketch Series for Portlandia. Also Viola Davis got snubbed on lead actress but did score a nod for her guest arc on Scandal, which is relevant because she is not gay but is my girlfriend.
I don’t have an update on Younger this week because my DVR didn’t record it and Spectrum keeps telling me it is “not available right now” on demand. Next week! Here’s the other goings on from the TV world.
The Handmaid’s Tale Season 2
Written by Carmen
The season two finale of The Handmaid’s Tale dropped on Hulu Wednesday morning, and I couldn’t help but wonder how things worked out for one of our all-time favs Samira Wiley, errrr, I mean Moira.
From Heather Hogan: “Her face is literally perfect”. I hardcore agree.
But first, a disclaimer: I watched the first season of The Handmaid’s Tale last year, so I have a basic understanding of the major characters and their relationship to each other. That said, I only made it through the first two episodes of the second season before I decided time lost in the trauma in Gilead was not how I wanted to spend my one, precious life. I think The Handmaid’s Tale is one of the most important shows on television, even when they get things wrong. (To be clear, they do get a lot wrong, especially when it comes to certain themes of race and all the torture porn.) Personally, I just couldn’t handle it anymore! I combed Wikipedia for general plot points, and then fast-forwarded around so I could just watch Moira’s parts. I may be missing some details! I may get some things wrong! But as they say, “Nevertheless, She Persisted!” What a rollercoaster we are on!
Where we left off at the end of season one, Moira escaped the brothel where she was forced into sex work and safely made it to the American asylum community in Toronto. (Yes, the implication of Americans’ being in need of asylum and finding themselves actually welcomed at the border of a neighboring nation, given our current political field, is purposeful and not lost on anyone.)
Moira’s second season arc is about working through some pretty severe PTSD. She’s moved into an apartment with Elizabeth Moss’ husband (also safe in Canada) and another American refugee. Together they are forming their own, new kind of tentative family. It’s sweet — but also, sad? The whole show is sad, so that’s not new.
One night, Moira finds herself drinking away the painful memories of her past at a Toronto gay club. There she catches the eye of a cute girl and they next thing you know they’re fingerbanging in the bathroom. I was so happy for Moira that she finally got to have sex on her own terms! Consensual sex on this show is rare and fleeting, I’m hard pressed to think of another character who’s even had the chance?
Today the Autostraddle TV Team had to decide if “fingerbanging” was one word or two. It’s a tough job, but somebody’s gotta do it.
Too bad, that joy wasn’t meant to last. After Moira finishes her hook up, she turns her partner’s down the offer to, ahem, have the favor returned (if you know what I mean). She grows cold and distant in the bathroom, shaking off her partner’s advances. When the hook up asks for her name, Moira tells her it’s “Ruby.” The name she went by as a sex worker in Gilead. My boor baby, she’s so broken! She can’t let anyone in.
Later, in a flashback, we find out that in the time before Gilead, Moira was once a pregnancy surrogate to pay off her student loans. That’s how she met Odette — her OB/GYN turned fiancée. We don’t get to watch enough of their relationship develop on screen, but it seems like it was full of smiles and laughter!
“We could’ve had it allllllllllll….”
In the wake of a bombing in Gilead, Moira finds out that Odette died sometime ago, alone on the streets. She leaves a picture of them in remembrance at a public memorial in Toronto. It’s her first step in really beginning to heal from the trauma she’s been put through. PS: Samira Wiley still has the best smile on television, and it’s made even more effective and special thanks to its sparring use on the show.
The last time we see Moira this season, representatives from the Gilead government (and Elizabeth Moss’ captors!) are visiting Canada on a diplomacy trip. Moira, along with her found family in Canada stage a public protest to raise awareness against them. In the final shot of her, she’s banging on the Commander’s window, holding a sign that says “My name is Moira.”
F*ck yes.
My heart! She’s Ruby no more.
(Alexis Bledel’s Emily is The Handmaid’s Tale other major lesbian character. Her work in the role is phenomenal. Unfortunately, her plot is way too intimately tied to the central violences of the season for me to watch it and still be able to sleep at night! What I gathered is that she somehow escaped the toxic waste labor camp that they sent her to, and after a few other bloody plot twists, is now safely on her way to Canada for asylum with Elizabeth Moss’ baby in tow. It’s my dream that Emily gets together with Moira in Toronto and they become the new Lesbian Avengers ready to reign down pain on the patriarchy! It’s time for the revolution, this show needs it. Stay tuned!)
Quick Hits
Critical Role Campaign Two, Episode 26
On last night’s episode of Critical Role, since they are down three players (Laura Bailey and Travis Willingham are on parental leave since they just had a baby, and Ashley Johnson is back to filming Blindspot), they had a guest playing with them, and it was none other than arguably the cutest human on the planet, Ashly Burch. You might know Ashly from the first installment of Life is Strange, where she voiced Chloe Price (and others), or the billions of other games and cartoons she has lended her voice to. Or just from being a tiny ball of adorable with a badass haircut. Her character was butch and brass and our resident gay disaster* didn’t know how to handle herself and eventually flirted with her, as she is wont to do. (*We don’t know for sure how Beau identifies yet beyond “super into Yasha” so I’m using gay as a general term here and because “gay disaster” has a nice ring to it.) Ashly’s character, Keg, seemed to be on board, because every time Beau did something badass, like extract a sac of toxin from a fallen monster with graceful expertise, Ashly would said, “Keg is aroused.” It was a good gay time for all involved. — Valerie Anne
Claws 205: “Vaginalologist”
Reunited and it feels so…temporary
With a episode title like “Vaginalologist,” you’d think this episode would’ve been gayer, but no such luck. We did, however, get a glimpse of a newly reunited Arlene and Quiet Ann at the unveiling of Polly’s new male revue. They’re there just long enough to wish a newly engaged Desna well before sneaking out and enjoying some vaginalogy of their own at home.
Looming over Ann’s rediscovered happiness is Arlene’s work with the Sarasota Police Department, who’s moving closer to unraveling the pill mill/money laundering schemes. I fear that Ann’s well-deserved happiness may be short-lived. — Natalie
Mi Familia Perfecta
Breakfast and a laugh with the future in-laws
Tonight, Mi Familia Perfecta, Telemundo’s Party of Five-esque telenovela, takes its final, if premature, bow. As secondary characters on the show, Megan and Génesis didn’t get nearly enough screen-time and it certainly faltered when it came to showcasing intimacy, but we still got to see Megan be fully embraced by Génesis’ family and friends. Their storyline was adorable and affirming and an important step for Spanish-language television. — Natalie
General Hospital and The Young & the Restless
Remember our roundtable on TV that breaks our hearts? Well, few things have broken my heart quite like daytime television…and, yet, I’ll keep coming back to soaps because I believe in the potential of the genre to impact the audience.
A trans woman playing a trans woman. Still a novel concept to some.
Last week, Autostraddle reader, Shez, alerted us to a new story on General Hospital. Cassandra James joined the soap’s cast as Dr. Terry Randolph, an old friend of Elizabeth Webber’s who returns to Port Charles to visit her friend and consult at the hospital. But, in the years since they last saw each other, Terry has transitioned (James is a trans actress) and General Hospital gives her the stage to share her journey with Liz, her fiancee and the audience. I’m hoping that we’ll see more of Dr. James in the coming weeks.
Can lightning strike twice for Mariah and Tessa?
Meanwhile, over in Genoa City, it looks like…maybe…possibly…the Mariah and Tessa storyline that stalled last year, could be picking up again. Thanks to an effort by Mariah’s ex-boyfriend, Devon, and her new wingman, Kyle, Mariah and Tessa find themselves tricked into having their first date.
I’ll let you know, as things progress, if my faith in daytime is vindicated or if I’m just Charlie Brown to daytime’s Lucy, continuing to chase after that elusive football. — Natalie
Spring/Summer 2018 TV Preview: All the Lesbian and Bisexual and Trans Women TV Characters Your Heart Requires
The time has come to talk about spring and summer teevee! Okay, the time has kind of passed to talk about spring teevee, but not by too much — all of these shows that started in spring are still airing! It’s been a pretty okay year for LGBTQ women on television so far. Very few deaths, historically speaking, and a decent amount of kissing and some critically acclaimed series filled out with queer women. Summer is always an exciting time for us because it’s when the genre shows rain down in full force and we’ve always had the most representation in sci-fi and fantasy. This spring and summer, though, there’s plenty of non-supernatural dramas too. Below is every show we know about that has a premiere date. We’ll keep this list updated as new premiere dates are announced, and you can bookmark this page or reference it from the Arts & Entertainment Menu at the top of your Autostraddle Website Page.
April 2018 Queer TV Show Premieres
It’s true, these shows have already begun — but they weren’t in our winter preview, and we want to make sure they’re on your radar!
Star, Wednesday March 29th (Fox) – Season Two
Star’s a soap opera about low income, teen girls of color reaching for the music superstar dreams. It has had an impressive slate of black QTPOC representation in front of and behind the camera — including Amiyah Scott as Cotton Brown, becoming the first trans actress to play a trans woman in a regular network TV role, and out actor Miss Lawrence as Miss Bruce. It also stars Queen Latifah and is produced by out gay producer Lee Daniels. One of the show’s lead protagonists is Simone Davis, a biracial, bisexual teen who’s in and out of foster care. She’s got an unbreakable spirit and determination to go after her goals. It wouldn’t be fair not to warn you that (SPOILER ALERT) Star buried one of its gays last winter. I still find the musical soap enjoyable, but it’s something to keep in mind. — Carmen
Siren, Thursday March 29th (Freeform) – Season One
A murder mermaid temporarily shed her tail and popped onto land for a while, learning the way humans do things and then tossing them aside to do what she wants. And sometimes that thing includes kissing a girl. The girl has a boyfriend but the boyfriend is into the mermaid too so we might have our first-ever man-woman-mermaid throuple situation heading our way on Freeform in this ten-episode series. — Valerie Anne
Famous in Love, Wednesday April 4th (Freeform) – Season Two
Bisexual actress Alexis is the star of her own reality television show this season, which means regularly negotiating the temptation to ruin the lives of everybody she knows and cares about in order to amass fame and the veneer of success! What an inspirational character for us all. — Riese
Imposters, Thursday April 5th (Bravo) – Season Two
The Bumblers, including our fave, Jules Langmore, are riding high after exacting revenge on the ex that betrayed them all but things quickly go sour and the trio are forced to regroup in Mexico. Season Two promises to delve more into Jules’ backstory, including introducing us to her sister, Poppy (Rachel Skarsten). — Natalie
Killing Eve, Sunday April 8th (BBC America) – Season One
Sandra Oh has finally booked the post-Grey’s Anatomy leading role she deserves, playing Eve, a spy tracking down a notorious bisexual assassin named Villanelle (Jodie Comer). Their obsession with each other is laced with sexual attraction. And even though it’s a spy thriller, Phoebe Waller-Bridge infuses this dark world with bits of unexpected humor that Oh and Comer bring out masterfully. Killing Eve is the sexy, queer spy thriller I’ve long craved. — Kayla (warning: due to the genre of this show, steady yourself for some gays to get buried.)
Supergirl, Monday April 16th (The CW) – Season Three
Supergirl took a hiatus to sort some stuff out and I’m really hoping that means great things for the back half of this season. Our resident lesbian, Alex, is still getting over her ex-girlfriend Maggie, so I doubt she’ll have any kind of lady love until Season Four, but hopefully the show continues to focus on her relationship with Kara, and remember that the show actually is about Supergirl, not her boring ex-boyfriend. Also if Alex wanted to go on a few bad Tinder dates just for giggles I’d be fine with that, too. — Valerie Anne
Westworld, Sunday April 22nd (HBO) – Season Two
When asked about exploring Dolores’s sexuality, Evan Rachel Wood said her character is “not either a man or a woman” and, furthermore, “All I can say is, yes, there’s going to be something. I wasn’t disappointed. I was like, ‘Yay,’ but that’s all I can say.” It is very difficult to describe Westworld at all in a little paragraph in a teevee preview — because LOL I barely understand what’s going on half the time. Still it’s some of the most exciting television on television these days, even if all the queer stuff has been either deeply buried/implied or very surface level. — Riese
Into the Badlands, Sunday April 22nd (AMC) – Season Two
Season Two came back both with and without a bang. That is to say, Tilda isn’t sporting her classic bang look anymore, but it’s because she needs her hair slicked back — the better to murder men with, my dear. It looks like she’ll be slaying enemies alongside her girl Odessa this season while she works out her mommy issues. We’ll also meet a new character who really upped the murder game; she has potential to really shake things up. — Valerie
The 100, Tuesday April 24th (The CW) – Season Five
I’ll be honest: It doesn’t matter how we do or do not write about this show, someone will get mad at us because we did or did not write about this show. So, here are the facts: The 100 still boasts a badaass bisexual leading character. The 100 also unrepentantly murdered a lesbian character that set off a chain reaction of activism that changed the landscape of queer TV forever. Whatever your relationship is to this show, it’s valid. We’re not telling you what to believe. What we’re telling you is that The 100, unlike Lexa, continues to exist.
The Handmaid’s Tale, Wednesday April 25th (Hulu) – Season Two
This show remains hella dark and chock-full of queer women — one of whom (Moira, played by Samira Wiley) has escaped to Canada where she’s dealing with Gilead-inspired trauma and another (Emily, played by Alexis Bledel) who has been sent to The Colonies to dig up nuclear waste until she dies! You can read my review of it here. — Riese
May 2018 Queer TV Show Premieres
Dear White People, Friday May 4th (Netflix) – Season Two
The black queer women supporting characters of Dear White People’s first season were super underwhelming, which personally hurts me because one of them was played by Nia Long — one of my oldest childhood crushes. Dear White People‘s based on the cult classic satire indie film of the same name about being a black student in a predominantly white university. The original film was produced by Lena Waithe and brought to screen by out gay writer/director/producer Justin Simien. Simien also helms the Netflix series and, according to the trailer, we can at least expect a Lena Waithe cameo in the second season! In her brief clip, she says “black lesbians” real slow and felt so good to my ears, I rewound it three times. — Carmen
Vida, Sunday May 6th (Starz) – Season One
I am so excited for you all to fall in love with Vida! Vida is about two Chicana sisters returning to their old neighborhood in East LA after their mother’s death. One of the sisters is queer. Both sisters are surprised to find out that, upon her death, their mother was married to a woman. Out non-binary actor Ser Anzoategui plays the butch lesbian widow. The show’s produced by an out queer Chicana, Tanya Saracho, and has a predominately queer Latinx writers room. It’s sooo, soo good y’all. It’s on Starz, which I know is not a cable channel that’s easily accessible for everyone, but I promise you that it’s going to be worth the effort to seek out! We’re going to be talking more about Vida in the upcoming weeks and helping you all find ways to support it — because we want you to have nice things!! And this is a really nice thing. — Carmen
Sweetbitter, Sunday May 6th (Starz) – Season One
Sweetbitter is the story of Tess, a 22-year-old who flees her old life for a new one in Manhattan where she immediately snags a job at an exclusive restaurant. Set in 2006, Tess serves an upscale clientele, hangs at an industry dive bar, learns a lot about food and wine and, mostly, learns a lot about people. One of her new friends is Ari, played by Eden Epstein, described as “a backwaiter by day and an adventurous lesbian and DJ by night.” The book was pretty good (although I was partial to it, having also been a young New York aspirant in 2006 and having waited tables in the city), perhaps the series will be even better! — Riese
13 Reasons Why, Friday May 18th (Netflix) – Season Two
I found Season One to be really f*cked up on just about every level including basic storytelling, and allegedly creators are taking this feedback into account with Season Two, which will shift its focus from Hannah’s suicide to a sexual assault trial. According to Netflix, “Liberty High prepares to go on trial, but someone will stop at nothing to keep the truth surrounding Hannah’s death concealed. A series of ominous Polaroids lead Clay and his classmates to uncover a sickening secret and a conspiracy to cover it up.” Furthermore, “Jessica’s recovery will also be explored as Yorkey looks to examine what it’s like to go from being a victim of sexual assault to being a survivor of sex assault.” Lesbian character Courtney Crimson will continue her role and sexually fluid Hannah will remain front-and-center.
Picnic at Hanging Rock, Friday May 25th (Amazon Prime) – Season One
The classic 1975 novel about three schoolgirls who vanish from Appleyard College for Young ladies on Valentine’s Day 1900 has been adapted before — Peter Weir’s 1975 film “certainly picked up on the erotic subtext” of the story, but the new Foxtel series “takes the sexual undercurrents rippling among the residents of Appleyard College and the local townsfolk and makes them a tad more obvious.” Somehow, a wooden dildo is involved. Regardless, we’re in. — Riese
Queen Sugar, Tuesday May 29th (OWN) – Season Three
Details are scant about what to expect from season three of Queen Sugar but with a focus on the “journey of fatherhood,” we anticipate Nova Bordelon exploring her unresolved issues with her late father, Ernest. We’re also keeping hope alive that 20gayteen brings Nova a girlfriend. — Natalie
June 2018 Queer TV Show Premieres
Humans, Tuesday June 5th (AMC) – Season 3
Here’s what we know about Season Three of Humans: “One year after the dawn of consciousness, a decimated and oppressed Synth population fights to survive in a world that hates and fears them. In a divided Britain, Synths and Humans struggle to broker an uneasy peace, but when fractures within the Synth community itself start to appear, all hope of stability is threatened.” Pansexual synth Niska will be back, but her girlfriend Astrid isn’t showing up on IMDB as part of Season Three. I hope she finds somebody else to be queer with. — Riese
Pose, Sunday June 3rd (FX) – Season One
There has never been a show like Ryan Murphy’s Pose on TV. Ever. It boasts 50+ LGBTQ characters and the largest number of trans series regulars in American TV history. MJ Rodriguez, Indya Moore, Dominique Jackson, Hailie Sahar and Angelica Ross are all playing trans characters, and Janet Mock and Our Lady J are producing and have both been in in the writers room. You’re about to learn a whole lot about ’80s ball culture! — Heather
The Fosters, Monday June 4th (Freeform) – Finale Event
After five seasons, the Adams Fosters clan are ready to say their final goodbye. The three episode finale mini series takes place roughly four years in the future from the main body of the show. All of the Adams Fosters children have graduated from either high school or college and the entire family is coming together to celebrate Brandon’s wedding. I don’t care about Brandon Adams Foster, ever, and the trailer for the finale does little to assuage my worries. However, The Fosters really stuck the landing of their final season. They brought back heart to their storytelling and refocused their central energy on Stef and Lena. It’s enough that to have regained my trust going into summer. — Carmen
Younger, Tuesday June 5th (TV Land) – Season 5
This is a good show and I don’t care if you believe me! Yes, there’s a straight love triangle at the center. And no, resident lesbian Maggie doesn’t get as much screentime as she should. But each season gets better and better at developing her character and bringing her into the fold and the real story here is women and their careers and their friendships. The last time we saw Maggie, she was in Ireland bedding the mother of the bride of her best friend Liza’s ex-boyfriend. She also has an on-again/off-again thing with Hilary Duff’s pansexual best friend, Lauren. — Heather
Sense8, Friday June 8th (Netflix) – Finale
AHEM: “Personal lives are pushed aside as the cluster, their sidekicks, and some unexpected allies band together for a rescue mission and BPO take-down in order to protect the future of all Sensates.” — Riese
Claws, Sunday June 10th (TNT) – Season Two
Quiet Ann and the ladies of Nail Artisans of Manatee County are back using their salon to launder money for the mob, only this time, it’s for a female-led Russian mafia. As the ladies are asked to do more, they realize their own capability — they’re criminals and they are good at it — and start to think that, maybe, it’s time they became their own bosses. — Natalie
The Bold Type, Tuesday June 12th (Freeform) – Season Two
This show ended up being one of summer’s sweetest treats last year, and I can’t wait for more romance between bisexual social media maven Kat Edison and lesbian artist and activist Adena El Amin — including, apparently, a big meet-the-parents moment. I am ready to laugh, cry, and yearn for all of Jacqueline Carlyle’s power wardrobe. — Kayla
G.L.O.W., Friday June 29th (Netflix) – Season Two
When G.L.O.W. returns for its second season we will FINALLY get what we craved throughout its homoerotic first season: Yolanda, a lesbian wrestler played by Shakira Barrera. — Riese
July 2018 Queer TV Show Premieres
Heathers, Tuesday July 10th (Paramount) -Season One
UPDATE 6/5: THIS SHOW HAS BEEN OFFICIALLY FOREVER CANCELLED AND WILL NEVER AIR
The initial debut of this program was critically panned, and consequently withdrawn allegedly on account of the Parkland shooting. If they haven’t changed anything about the show since their first go-around, we’ll probably hate it.
Harlots, Wednesday July 11th (Hulu) – Season Two
We return to my favorite show ever about sex workers to find the city’s top madams in an even more dramatic feud than they were in Season One —Violet’s future in peril, her religious fundamentalist gal pal doing what she can to save her, and a new judge determined to rid his city of what he perceives to be “vice.” Liv Tyler joins the cast as Lady Isabella Fitzwilliam, a wealthy woman with zero personal freedom who has mad sexual tension with Charlotte Wells. — Riese
UnREAL, Monday July 16th (Hulu) – Season 4
Traci Thoms returns as Fiona, a power lesbian television executive, in the very uneven final season of this “Bachelor” send-up. Your favorite lesbian, Faith, does a one-episode guest spot as a therapist brought in to mediate a conflict between several contestants.
Wynonna Earp, Friday July 20th (SyFy) – Season 3
Season 2 was full of goo, babies, time warps, demons, and so many ladies kissing. It answered a lot of questions, and asked a whole lot more. Season 3 promises more mystery (Mama Earp?!), drama (a cult?!!), and, of course, quality queer content. At a recent panel, when asked about the gayness of Season Three, Emily Andras said, “What’s the straightest show you can think of? I feel like Season 3 makes Season 2 look like that straight show.” Yee haw. — Valerie Anne
Killjoys, Friday July 20th (SyFy) – Season 4
With Lost Girl’s Michelle Lovretta behind the wheel, it wasn’t really a surprise, but definitely a welcome turn when the main big bad of Season 3 ended up in a relationship with another running antagonist. Aneela and Delle Seyah are a unique pairing, to be sure, but they’ve made it clear that they’d risk just about anything for each other. Their fates were inextricably linked with Dutch, Johnny and D’av’s in the Season 3 finale, so I have a feeling we haven’t seen the last of these murder girlfriends. — Valerie Anne
Orange is the New Black, Friday July 27th (Neflix) – Season 6
Season 6 of OITNB promises, somehow, that it will get even darker than previous seasons as inmates are shipped out of Litchfield following the riot and sent to other prisons. We follow the women who end up in Max, where they try to negotiate a new set of prison gangs, divided by block, and an investigation into what happened during the riot that puts Taystee in a precarious legal position. Adrienne Moore, who plays Black Cindy, told The Hollywood Reporter, “Toward the end of season five, there were some people that were agreeing to stick together, and there were some people that were looking out for themselves. We’ll see the repercussions of those decisions in this next season.”
August 2018 Queer TV Show Premieres
Insatiable, Friday August 10th (Netflix) – Season One
The coming out story of this pretty much universally panned series is apparently its only redeeming factor!
The House of Flowers, Friday August 10th (Netflix) – Season One
A Spanish-language comedy-drama program about a dysfunctional high-class Mexican family that owns a prestigious flower shop. Juan Pablo Medina plays María José, a transgender woman who has a child with her ex-wife, Paulina, who is still carrying a torch for María.
The Sinner, August 15th (USA) – Season 2
This anthology series returns with a new case and a mostly new cast for Season 2, including Natalie Paul as Heather Novak, a black lesbian detective put on the case of a boy who murders his parents for very unclear reasons in very strange circumstances.
Mr. Mercedes, Wednesday August 22nd (Audience) – Season 2
Breeda Wool will be returning as techie lesbian Lou Linklatter, according to Den of Geek. As the first season drew from Stephen King’s book of the same name, Season Two will be drawing from a few follow-up novels. — Riese
“The Handmaid’s Tale” Season Two Gets Even Darker, Queerer, Curiouser and Curiouser
This review contains minor spoilers but I took great pains to limit myself to things already revealed in reviews and cast/crew interviews.
There’s a scene in an early episode of The Handmaid’s Tale‘s Second Season where a character devotes themselves briefly to a very much on-the-nose passion project. It’s shocking how rarely The Handmaid’s Tale feels on the nose, considering the premise, so this bit really packs the proverbial punch.
They’ve gained access to the archives of The Boston Globe, which’s now a cavernous shell where freedom of the press once existed. They’re gathering clips from its pages, pinning pieces to the wall under headings like “MILITARIZATION,” “POWER STRUCTURE,” “CURTAILING CIVIL RIGHTS.” They’re building a story, of course, the story of how we got here, and it’s a story composed entirely out of stories we were already told, but ignored. Stories we could’ve read but chose not to. Stories we wanted to see as isolated that were, in fact, components of a much bigger story, one that was devastating for both its seeming impossibility and its clear signals of approach. Signals they ignored — signals so many characters ignored, as we see in flashbacks throughout the season — until one day June was wearing a red cloak with white wings and Luke was tearing through the forest with their sleepy child under his arm and Sabrina Joy was swallowing her strength and Emily was losing a very important part of her body and Janine was losing her eye and her baby and threatening to jump off a bridge and Moira was unrecognizably dolled up to service a series of arrogant hypocrites just to stay alive.
“Yikes,” I said out loud as soon as the clip headings became visible, thinking about how much less often we talk about our current administration this year than we did last year, although the news has become no less horrifying.
It speaks to one of the show’s most enduring themes: thou shalt not remain complacent. Pay attention. Look up. Don’t wait for them to come for you.
https://youtu.be/dKoIPuifJvE
But the urge to connect Gilead to The Future America so literally isn’t, usually, quite as urgent in Season Two. Season One set up only the barest bones of this universe, and Season Two begins the work of filling in the gaps, both through flashbacks that explain how the current state of things gradually came to be and by widening its scope beyond Gilead. The result is an even bleaker show than you remember, and still just as good. I mean, The Handmaid’s Tale is just… really, really, really fucking good.
Where we pick up in Season Two, Moira (Samira Wiley) has escaped Gilead and found safety in Canada, where she’s living with June’s husband, Luke (O-T Fagbenle), and working at a processing center for new immigrants in “Little America.” But Moira hasn’t escaped the trauma she experienced in Gilead, which haunts her as she attempts to piece together some kind of life for herself with so much missing, including, she fears, her capacity for intimacy.
At a Paley Center panel with the cast I attended in March, Wiley remarked that even in “little America,” “Gillead is within you” — a line June delivers in the second season trailer. When asked at the panel which element of her character she’d like to know more about, Wiley said she’d love to hear more about Odette, the girlfriend briefly mentioned in Season One who she describes as “the love of Moira’s life.”
Emily (Alexis Bledel) and Janine (Madeline Brewer) have been sent to the colonies with the other “unwomen.” The Colonies are a scorched Mad Maxish earth of busted yellows and punishing dirt, where they batter the ground with shovels all day and, at night, wash up with polluted water, nurse their wounds, and pray for death to come as quickly as possible.
June begins the season eventually on the lam, at the mercy of an underground network of citizens who each do a small part to facilitate escape for women like her, risking their own lives in the process. The season will see her transferred from cage to never-ending cage, forced to adjust and adjust again while often singing to nobody.
In this way, the story of Gilead enlarges as it becomes increasingly specific. It’s not a more severe replica of our own potential future world — if it were, racial oppression would certainly be its primary theme. This is a specific dystopia designed by religious fundamentalists who are obsessed with traditional gender roles, rationalized by a fertility crisis. The persecution of lesbian and gay people, then, remains at its terrifying center, and as in Season One, this hits the gut hard, harder, and harder still. (I’m intentionally not getting too deep into the specifics here to avoid spoilers.)
In flashbacks, we meet Emily’s wife, played by Clea Duvall, and see the sequence of events that led to their eventual separation. We also meet June’s mother, a playful and fierce feminist always preparing for the next political action, brought to life by out lesbian actress Cherry Jones. As in the book, June resists her mother’s radical ideals, preferring to work a normal job, get married and have a family, and later regrets not giving her mother’s beliefs more credence.
In the present, Gilead’s power class remains doggedly committed to the historically elusive goal of convincing the underclass that they should be cool with oppression because it is the way of a Lord their very circumstance suggests could not possibly exist. The powerful could, alternately, just acknowledge that their power is not divine, which’d mean admitting that they are total psychopaths or else just thoroughly corrupted by power or proximity to it. At this point, everybody’s in too deep. Serena Joy, who delighted fundamentalist audiences nationwide with her speeches on a woman’s proper place in the home, now finds herself unable to speak at all, inhabiting the “proper place” for the first time and hating it.
Is anybody in Gilead having fun? There’s no smiling or laughter. There’s no golf club in Florida, no buffets, no champagne toasts, no yachts or private beach, no fame or attention. There’s Jezebels, I guess, and men shooting things, and parties where mothers pretend they’re going to birth babies they’re not actually going to birth. What kind of benevolent and loving G-d would want a world like this and what child would want to be born into it? How long will a system with such limited delights thrive, or instead will the realm of delights be forced to expand, and with it, those who are oppressed to provide them?
we have fun
This is not a pleasant world to witness, yet it remains a seductive watch. There are moments of hard, inspiring rebellion, and dark humor, sure, and those moments being hard-won makes them all the more delightful. But at times, we’re quite literally watching rape and torture! There were three — three! — consecutive shots of somebody’s peeled-off fingernail, which felt like a personal attack on my future and the possibility that I could, one day, try to take a nap. The pleasure here is the deft, capable storytelling; the world-building; the cinematography, the byzantine situations these cruel people have created for themselves and now must live within. The moral quandaries, the questions every episode leaves you with, everything kept quiet waiting to burst.
The Handmaid’s Tale, despite being initially based on a book I actually read several times, is the most unpredictable show I’ve ever seen.
There’s also the film-level artistry, and how this season particularly, entire emotional arcs occur sans dialogue, relying solely on facial expressions, visual aesthetics and music. The score truly becomes its own character. Blessed be the f*cking fruit, the artistry! Much has been made, already, of Elisabeth Moss’s winning performance, but Jesus can we take a minute for Ann Dowd as the sadistic Aunt Lydia. “There’s nothing like hot soup on a rainy day!” she delights, delivering a tray to June, who, along with the other handmaids, has just spent an hour outside, in said freezing rain, arm extended, holding a single stone. What an insufferable monster she brings to life, like her morose chain-smoking white-clad character in The Leftovers but on speed and with more power and the misguided grace of G-d.
I expect to suffer a few minor nightmares this season although thus far the six episodes I’ve seen have yet to inspire the nocturnal terror Season One did. I’m not sure why, it’s no less horrifying. Maybe I’m just used to it now.
Here, Try These Semi-Sweet Morsels of Queerish TV Info From the 2018 TCAs I’ve Prepared For You
Ah hello my friends. Good news: The Television Critics Association Winter 2018 Press Tour wrapped up yesterday, and during this event we learned some things about some teevee shows that may be relevant to your interests! Let’s talk about those things, shall we?
2 Dope Queens — February 2nd, HBO
via @mediavillagecom
- Based on the podcast by Jessica Williams and Phoebe Robinson, 2 Dope Queens consists of four themed hourlong specials, directed by out lesbian Tig Notaro (deadline)
- Phoebe: “We wanted a special that represents not only women, but people of color and queer people.”
- Guest appearances include Jon Stewart, Sarah Jessica Parker and Tituss Burgess
Living Biblically – February 26th, CBS
- [Camryn] Manheim is playing a lesbian raised in a religious family by a father who felt “a woman’s place was in the home and to submit to the husband.” (source: danielle turchiano)
Life Sentence – March 7th, The CW
(Photo by Randy Shropshire/Getty Images)
- Stella’s Mom Ida “finds the courage to explore her sexuality as a bisexual woman because of her daughter’s courage to live her life to the fullest.” (Black Girl Geeks)
- She will come out as bisexual in the pilot. The director “feels it was important to flesh her out as a full woman – not closeted.” (Danielle Turchiano)
Heathers – March 7th, Paramount Network
Still nervous about this idea but here we are! Out gay actor Brendan Scannell, who plays genderqueer Heather Duke, said, “The idea is that power corrupts and that everyone is at their core an asshole and concerned for themseleves. In the movie three beautiful women where wrecking havoc on the school; that was new and hadn’t been done before. Our modern retelling centers around marginalized communities — a plus-size, a Black girl and a queer — trashing everyone around them.”
- The tone is “dark” and “edgy” and “isn’t a responsible series about teen bullying.” Instead it aims to “show the characters as they really are.” (dt)
- Jasmine Matthews, who plays black lesbian character Heather McNamara, said she identifies with her character, recalling that in high school, “I was bullied but also the bullier. It was a confusing time for me.”
- It’s an anthology series, so this cast is just a one-season journey.
- Also, more than one but less than five of the characters who were on the TCA stage will die.
- Shannon Doherty will guest in three episodes, including the first scene of the first episode.
The Handmaid’s Tale – April 25th, Hulu
https://youtu.be/xxQhWrAcQnE
- Season Two will be even darker than Season One, and “will offer a deeper look at the social and political conflicts that led to Gilead’s succession from the United States.”
- It will go beyond what the novel presented, but remain faithful to Atwood’s description to make sure everything that happens in the book has happened at some point in history, somewhere.
- Marissa Tomei has a guest role.
- Offred will be on the run, heading to “the colonies,” described as “a pretty forbidding world.”
- Elizabeth Moss: “So much of this season is about motherhood. We’ve talked a lot about the impending birth of the child that’s growing inside of her as a bit of a ticking time bomb, The complications are really wonderful to explore. She does have the baby, but it gets taken away from her. She can’t be its mother. It makes for good drama.”
- Bruce Miller: “It’s easy in a show like ours to come up with perverse cruelties toward women and then it just turns into pornography. You have to keep tethered to the world. It’s a loser on every front to be imagining evil.”
Vida – May 6th, Starz
This is shaping up to be one of the year’s queerest adventures — and you can read all about it in the post about Vida I published earlier this morning because I had too many words to say about it for this post! But, in sum: a queer Latinx showrunner, a behind-the-scenes crew that is heavily POC, queer and female and several queer leads including one who is also masculine-of-center.
Sweetbitter – May 6th, Starz
Starz’s Sweetbitter is inspired by a 2016 bestseller about a 22-year-old who escapes Kansas for New York and becomes a backwaiter at a swanky Union Square restaurant, subsequently discovering food, wine, cocaine, good sex, terrible sex, sexual harassment and so much more. I read the book in a day, and related to a lot of it, but we’re all here today because of Ariel, the lesbian backwaiter from the book who’ll be in the show, too.
- Season One’s theme is “intoxication” and it will cover a time span of just two weeks.
- Apparently this panel turned into questions about how this show can exist in the #MeToo era which, based on my reading of the book, seems like a severe misapplication of concern! It also took time away from what I would’ve liked everybody to discuss instead, which was LESBIAN ACTION.
Roseanne- March 27th
Roseanne was a groundbreaking television visionary in the ’80s who gave a voice to working-class families, challenged norms of what women had to look like to earn a place on television, and introduced some of the first-ever lesbian and bisexual female characters ever. But Roseanne turns out to be a really bad person, and has maybe always been. Recently Roseanne actively espoused trans misogynist points of view and apparently voted for Donald Trump. Her character in the Roseanne reboot will do the same. Vanity Fair points out that despite the working-class setting, it’s still hard to imagine the Roseanne we met in the 80s being a Trump supporter in the ’10s.
- Out lesbian actress Sara Gilbert will play Darlene and be Executive Producer.
- Early casting calls inspired reporters to announce that it would introduce the first non-binary character on Network TV… but Sara Gilbert told Entertainment Weekly that her TV son is not transgender, he just likes dressing in feminine clothing.
- Darlene and David are separated in the reboot, will this mean Darlene will become the lesbian she always dressed like she was?
- The TCA panel turned into an interrogation of Roseanne’s choice to portray her titular character as a Trump voter and her defense of Trump. Which she deserved.
- Sara Gilbert: “Part of what’s going on [in America] is that people feel like they can’t disagree and still love each other or still talk to each other. So to me it was a great opportunity to have a family divided by politics but still full of a lot of love. The working class has been underrepresented in politics and on television, and this just felt like a wonderful opportunity to give a voice to some of those people.”
Pose – TBD
Photo by David Buchan/Variety/REX/Shutterstock (9308388c)
Ryan Murphy, Nina Jacobson, Steven Canals, Janet Mock, Evan Peters, Kate Mara, James Van Der Beek, Mj Rodriguez, Indya Moore, Dominique Jackson, Ryan Jamaal Swain
FX ‘Pose’ TV show panel, TCA Winter Press Tour, Los Angeles, USA – 05 Jan 2018
Pose is set in 1987 New York and the ballroom scene specifically, and promises more LGBTQ+ characters than ever before.
- The five trans women of color leads will be played by MJ Rodriguez (Nurse Jackie, Saturday Church), Indya Moore, Dominique Jackson, Hailie Sahar (Mr. Robot, Transparent) and Angelica Ross (Her Story, Claws).
- Janet Mock is a writer/producer and told reporters that the women of “Pose” are “pretty full embodied in terms of their gender identities.” She emphasized that they “are beyond the struggle with their bodies, with people calling them by their right name. These are people who are creating new ways of having family — chosen family through the ballroom networks.”
- Ryan Murphy: “The show is about the search for being authentic, about creating opportunities. We’re past an era of straight men playing these roles. It’s time to think differently and offer more opportunities to people who want to work. Many of this cast have never been in front of the camera before.”
- “Bronx born-and-raised queer Afro-latino” Steven Canals, Pose Creator: “I spent years being told this show was too niche, there was no audience for it, and where would a show like this live?”
- Murphy feels obligated to use his success to open doors for other members of the LGBTQ+ community, recalling shooting ballroom scenes with 60 trans women in them and likened doing a search for series stars to “the search for Scarlett O’Hara.”
- There’s a scene where a character named Ryan comes out to his father and is beaten with a belt, which’s from Murphy’s real life experience.
- Ryan Murphy: “Now is the time to tell this story about this group of people who are sadly are more and more disenfranchised and cut off. We wanted to celebrate them. They’re part of our family. The timing of this show was very important.”
In 2017, Lesbian and Bisexual TV Characters Did Pretty OK, and That’s a Pretty Big Deal
Although most Quality of Life indicators for LGBTQ people and civilization in general nose-dived this year, one thing got notably better: television for queer women.
Granted, the bar was low.
For decades, we settled for relative invisibility, unsatisfying subtext and brief storylines buried within otherwise deficient programs, but that had started changing, along with the culture at large — and then 2016 happened. In 2015 and 2016, hoards of bisexual and lesbian characters were seemingly invented just to get murdered, like our own private Westworld (but with a lot more queers than actual Westworld), and several queer fan favorites met their untimely deaths. But “Bury Your Gays” was never the problem so much as a symptom of the disease; a virus that evolved from decades of tragic, small, desexualized, evil or sidelined queer characters into a new dawn where finally we were allowed to exist, as long as we didn’t take up too much space or live for too long.
More Shows, More Lesbians and Bisexuals
The most surprising aspect of putting together the list of 193 Dead Lesbian or Bisexual Characters last year wasn’t, actually, the death count. It was being made aware that we weren’t, as we’d thought, aware of every show featuring lesbian/bi characters out there. We didn’t know they’d lived, let alone died!
Peak TV was in full swing, and we were benefiting. There were 455 scripted original shows released in the US in 2016, a steady climb from 182 in 2009. In their 2010/2011 report, GLAAD found 53 LGBT characters on scripted cable shows, and only 34% were women. In 2017/2018, that number had increased to 173 (49% women), plus 70 more on streaming networks (66% women).
The growth of cable, streaming and on-demand technology has eased our ability to access a vast programming roster often more accountable to its audience than advertisers. Whereas in 2010, it was revolutionary for Pretty Little Liars‘ lesbian character to make it through an entire season without returning to heterosexuality, by 2016, we were confident enough to criticize its employment of damaging trans tropes and the diminishing screen time offered to Emily’s romances. Quantity wasn’t enough anymore. We wanted quality, and we wanted it now… and in 2017, we started getting it.
But before we get into that, let’s go back in time a little bit.
The Torrid Herstory of Lesbian & Bisexual Women On TV
While gay men certainly aren’t winning television, they’ve always been more represented than gay women, often accounting for 65%-75% of LGBT characters.
Throughout the ’90s and early ’00s, women-loving-women were rare, precious, elusive creatures: a little Ellen or Nancy here, some gay-but-not-too-gay doctor or lawyer there. From the mid-’00s through the early ’10s, we generally found lesbian and bisexual characters in one of seven places:
1. Secondary or sweeps week storylines on a teen primetime soap (The OC, 90210, Once and Again, Secret Life of the American Teenager, Gossip Girl)
2. Regular or recurring spots on a network ensemble program with minimal screen time devoted to girl-on-girl romance (ER, Bones, House, Rookie Blue, The Good Wife) (The Wire is a rare premium cable drama that fits into this category.)
3. Recurring or guest roles on a prestige drama (Mad Men, Six Feet Under, Heroes, Deadwood, Rome, Boardwalk Empire)
4. Queer-targeted series like The L Word (2004-2009), Lip Service (2010-2012), South of Nowhere (2005-2008), Dante’s Cove (2004-2007), Queer as Folk (2000-2005), Exes and Ohs (2007 & 2011).
5. The latest Degrassi iteration
6. A Ryan Murphy project
7. Diamonds in the mainstream rough, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, True Blood or Skins.
When we lost a Category 4 Show — and we lost ’em all by 2012 — the number of lesbian and bisexual characters on TV would come tumbling down. (Faking It is a rare example of a more recent Category 4-ish show, which lasted three short seasons.) Ilene Chaiken told Entertainment Weekly earlier this year that after The L Word went off the air in 2009, “I think a lot of people thought, ‘Okay, the baton is passed now, and there will be lots of shows that portray lesbian life.’ There’s really nothing.”
Things began shifting in the early ’10s following the success of a few stand-out programs with front-and-center lesbians and bisexual women like Glee, Skins, The Fosters, Lost Girl and Pretty Little Liars. Glee, particularly, challenged the commonly accepted practice of tightly curtailing the queers-per-show quota. Sadly, it’s likely that 2010’s stream of press-garnering gay teen suicides played a role, too — we needed our stories in order to live and we needed happy endings to believe that things could really get better, and many media-makers answered that call, some better than others. In 2013 on Grey’s Anatomy, Callie and Arizona did the unthinkable by having multi-season lesbian relationship on network TV.
Groups like One Million Moms, The Parents Television Council and the Florida Family Association, who regularly rallied against LGBTQ inclusion and pressured advertisers to drop support, faded into the political background, drowned out by our increasing Civil Rights and the ever-more-powerful media representation advocacy organization GLAAD. Teen-oriented networks like The CW, ABC Family and MTV learned they could safely produce this content and easily earn massive free buzz from social media platforms, GLAAD, and websites like ours.
How we watch television has also changed how television gets made — whereas an ’80s sitcom scored big if it could entertain an entire family at 8 PM on a Tuesday, shows these days can thrive by attracting significant numbers of solo laptop viewers. Syndication contracts, which provided lengthy profit streams, favored backstory-lite formats like sitcoms and procedurals. Now, shows can earn a solid shot at an afterlife with a plot so compelling you’re likely to Netflix-binge 15 nail-biting episodes at once.
Although high-concept television has flourished in this new era, it rarely featured queer women. Prestige TV has always privileged male-centric shows generally, and male antiheros specifically (e.g., The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Mad Men). On this track, the shift began in 2013. That’s when Orange is the New Black, a series with a racially diverse cast that showcased more queer love stories than straight ones and centered a bisexual protagonist, topped every “Best Of” list and demolished expectations on social media. Just as The L Word’s rise was enabled by the growth of online communities like fansites and AfterEllen, OITNB hit the market just as wealthy companies like HuffPo and Buzzfeed launched LGBTQ verticals, which quickly filled with OITNB-adjacent content. Transparent, in 2014, sealed the deal OITNB started — a trans woman lead presiding over an entirely queer ensemble put Amazon Prime on the map, racked up Emmys, and challenged previous conceptions of what was considered “too niche” to get made.
But in 2016, GLAAD’s annual report revealed that lesbian representation had gone down for the first time since 2004, and “while bisexual women are getting a small boost in visibility, it’s often coming at the cost of damaging cliche.” Our Senior Editor Heather Hogan called 2016 “the most frustrating year ever for queer women who love television,” even compared to years when we had “hardly any TV representation at all.” Every year for the last ten, we’d seen more and better portrayals of queer women on television, but “Lexa’s death, and the landslide of lesbian/bi deaths that came after it, were crushing because they shook the hope out of us.”
What Got Better For Lesbian and Bisexual TV Characters in 2017
I’ve spent the year building a database of every lesbian, gay and bisexual teevee character ever on English-language programming accessible on U.S platforms, and the past two months looking at 2017 specifically, finding 116 total shows with LBQ regular/recurring characters, compared to 80 in 2016. (From here on, I’ll abbreviate “Regular or Recurring Characters” as “R/Rs.”) 39 new shows in 2017 had lesbian and bisexual R/Rs, and five returning shows that previously lacked lesbian and bisexual R/Rs, added them; compared to 16 new shows and five returning in 2016.
Those 116 shows accounted for 105 lesbian and 99 non-monosexual R/R characters. These shows also featured 10 trans women (straight or queer) and non-binary R/Rs. (Four shows that included non-binary characters or straight trans characters but no lesbian/bisexual cis or trans female characters were not part of the database count, but they are discussed in the trans section later in this post.)
I personally watched 51 of these shows, and other team members bring the “Autostraddle saw this show” count to 83. For the rest, I relied on recaps and reviews from other sites, YouTube clips, wikipedia, show-specific wikis, and databases (specifically this one and this one).
Then, we made you this infographic:
infographic by sarah sarwar
The movement that started when Lexa died put LGBTQ women in the spotlight. So far this year, we’ve lost less than a dozen R/Rs to stray bullets and wayward stabbings, and of those, only two were potential 2018 regulars, as the majority occurred on anthology series. In 2016, LGBTQ viewers pointed out a persistent unconscious bias and also made it known that queer fandom is absolutely nuts about our teevee, we’re tired of being exploited and we’re happy to give praise where praise is due. Did showrunners choose to let queer characters live? Maybe shitty shows stopped inventing new queers just to kill them. Maybe good shows began negotiating potential lesbian/bisexual deaths with the same careful consideration they do straight ones. Whatever the reason, it feels like we’re finally getting somewhere.
Because moreso than a lack of death, 2017 gave us a tiny burst of life — myriad disappointments, to be sure, but small steps in the right direction too.
Also, everyone is gay and so every television show should be about us, the end.
Lesbian and Bisexual TV In 2017: Highlights
2017 opened with the charming, surprisingly captivating multi-cam sitcom remake of Norman Lear’s 1975 feminist show One Day at a Time, re-packaged as a story of a Latinx family with 14-year-old Elena struggling to come out to herself and her family (who tried brushing up on lesbian lingo by checking out Autostraddle.com). The LGBT history mini-series, When We Rise, debuted in February, and although its mediocrity excludes it from “Golden Age” territory, it’s very existence was an important milestone.
The second season of UK TV series Humans hit the states in February, opening its first episode with the beginnings of a lesbian love story between a synth, Niska, and a German lesbian, Astrid, that wove its tender way through the show’s action-packed narrative. One of the year’s most buzzy and critically acclaimed series, Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale, debuted in late April, with lesbian characters played by Samira Wiley and Alexis Bledel. Two artsy, high-brow dramas with all-female production teams — Hulu’s Harlots and OWN’s Queen Sugar — also showcased queer women’s stories in revolutionary ways.
Although Denise’s screen time was mininmal in Master of None‘s second season, the “Thanksgiving” episode, which followed Denise through several generations of Thanksgiving as she came into her own as a Black lesbian, made up for all that in a perfect hour of television that made Waithe the first Black woman to win an Emmy for Comedy Writing.
Mid-summer, Jill Soloway’s esoteric performance-art-inspired I Love Dick came to Amazon Prime with a Latinx butch heartthrob, Devon, played by Roberta Colindrez, set at an artist’s retreat in the hazy Texas desert. The second season of Tig Notaro’s One Mississippi is perhaps one of lesbian television’s most impeccable works of art, as it deftly navigated rough topics like sexual abuse with delightfully dark humor and a truly beating heart. Transparent’s fourth season bounced back from a lackluster third, with Sarah and her ex-husband entering a poly relationship and Ali beginning to come into her own as non-binary.
Freeform found a summer sleeper hit with The Bold Type, a refreshing dramedy centered on three best friends working at the same magazine, including Kat, a Black social media director who realizes she might like ladies when she falls for Muslim photographer Adena. Kat and Adena were one of only four R/R QTPOC couples featured this year.
We closed out the year with several unexpected gifts on network television: Sara Ramirez landing a regular role on mainstream cable as a dapper butch government advisor on Madam Secretary, Stephanie Beatriz’s Rosa Diaz coming out as bisexual on Brooklyn 99, Chris Alonso coming out bisexual on S.W.A.T., Luisa returning to regular appearances on Jane the Virgin, bisexual Toni Topaz joining Riverdale, Simone Davis getting gayer by the minute on Star, Nicole coming out as a lesbian on Fresh Off The Boat and, after several lifetimes of brutal queerbaiting, two women finally kissing with tongue on Once Upon a Time.
Over on Hulu, Marvel’s Runaways brought us lesbian Karolina coming to grips with her superpowers and feelings for her friend Nico. On premium cable, Audience Network debuted lesbian and bisexual characters in two new shows, Loudermilk and Mr. Mercedes. On Showtime, Shameless brought on a new lesbian of color.
Meanwhile, Danger & Eggs, Steven Universe, Big Mouth and Loud House produced important all-ages content with queer protagonists.
Lesbian and bisexual characters had guest or R/R roles on many programs dominating year-end “Best Of” lists, including American Gods, Halt & Catch Fire, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, The Deuce, Better Things, Veep, Mindhunter, Mr. Mercedes, One Day at a Time and The Handmaid’s Tale. We also got an Asian lesbian on the obnoxiously problematic teen sensation 13 Reasons Why, which was terrible but also a prime example of the year’s most buzzed-about programs seeming to come up lesbians this year.
There was also some intense lesbianism/etc on entertaining programs that may not attract wild critical acclaim but are wildly endearing nonetheless: Supergirl (although Maggie Sawyer’s departure was one of the year’s toughest storms to weather), Wynonna Earp, Younger, Degrassi: Next Class, Grey’s Anatomy, Into the Badlands, Killjoys, Saving Hope, The Fosters and The Shannara Chronicles.
“At first, I thought I had imagined them, or maybe even willed them into existence,” wrote Caroline Framke at Vox. “In 2017, the year after I came out as ‘not straight,’ television suddenly seemed to be teeming with compassionate, realistically messy coming-out stories — many of them anchored by women.” A lot of this is owed to women behind the camera, too: One Day At a Time and Fresh Off the Boat have queer women of color in the writing room, and actress Stephanie Beatriz worked with Brooklyn 99 writers to tell her coming out story authentically.
What Didn’t Get Better For Lesbian & Bisexual TV Characters in 2017
Despite centering their seasons on lesbian relationships, neither American Horror Story: Cult or Season Two of The Girlfriend Experience delivered solid stories. We were also unimpressed with lesbian and bisexual representation on shows including Top of the Lake, Famous In Love, Orange is the New Black, Claws, Dark Matter, She’s Gotta Have It and Dear White People. Because Autostraddle has already devoted countless hours to criticizing various elements of queer-inclusive television shows this year and this article is already quite long, I won’t rehash all of it here.
Instead, I’d like to talk about an area of unacceptable persistent failure and the primary problem currently facing queer TV: a severe lack of diversity.
Gender Identity
Butches, Please?
The sidelining of gender non-conforming lesbian and bisexual characters gets more absurd every damn year.
Butches are most likely to appear in prison or somehow involved in crime or criminal justice. Lucy is a convicted rapist. Franky, Silent Ann and Big Boo are all convicted criminals. Jukebox is a (now-killed) corrupt cop. Mary Agnes and Stef are both gun-toting law enforcers, albeit in very different scenarios. Ally kills humans with knives and Lena works for a Hollywood “fixer” who’s often helping criminals get away with it.
This year’s biggest gains for masculine-of-center representation were a black masculine-of-center lesbian winning an Emmy for a black lesbian story, Kat Sandoval and her pocket square on Madam Secretary (remarkable for reasons including how rarely we see a not-skinny butch in a suit on any kind of screen), Devon in I Love Dick (my favorite character of 2017) and Tig Notaro’s One Missisisippi, starring and written by a masculine-of-center lesbian. Those were four incredible portrayals, but 16 masculine-of-center R/R characters (two of whom died, and some of whom are really only television-butch) out of 204 is ridiculous.
Furthermore, Seeso’s shuttering this year has left hilarious wives Cameron Esposito and Rhea Butcher’s second season of “Take My Wife” in limbo, which says a lot about where television’s comfort with gender non-conformity begins and ends.
Transgender Representation: Better Still Isn’t Good
A few steps forward and a few steps back: this year offered three non-binary characters (up from zero in 2016), including thoughtful season-long gender journeys for Yael on Degrassi and Ali on Transparent. The animated program Steven Universe also has a non-binary character, Stevonnie.
Trans representation gets a little better every year, but the bar is so low there that it’s practically an underground tunnel, and we’re still lacking lesbian, bisexual and queer trans women. Moira Pfefferman began dating men in Transparent‘s Season Four, but does seem to still identify as queer. We’re hoping they’ll recast Moira with a trans actress for Season Five, now that Jeffrey Tambor has been outed as a sexual predator, rather than kill her off or exile her geographically.
Laverne Cox’s Sophia Burset, who had a diminished role in the past two seasons of Orange is the New Black, is queer, but her sexuality is rarely addressed. Nomi Marks, the transgender hacker from Sense8 played by Jamie Clayton, has a girlfriend and an inspirational arc — but Sense8 was cancelled this summer. “In some instances,” GLAAD wrote of trans characters in their 2017-2018 report, “it appears that the show’s creators haven’t given much thought to the fact that trans people also have sexual orientations.”
Straight trans women aren’t exactly thriving either. Four shows with trans characters — Doubt, Daytime Divas, Gypsy and Lopez — were cancelled. Maxine may not return to Wentworth. Although sources strongly suggest Cotton is returning to Star, they did leave possibly-murdered in the season finale. On the upside, the always-incredible Davina from Transparent broke ground this year with a full-frontal.
Danger & Eggs was created by a trans woman with multiple side trans characters and trans actresses — but its future is unclear. (Take My Wife‘s second season, also in limbo, promised trans-inclusiveness.)
Trans men remain woefully underrepresented in media. Elliot Fletcher plays a gay trans guy on Shameless and a straight trans guy on The Fosters, and apparently The Orville has a regular trans male alien character. There is speculation about Frankie, Sam’s daughter, on Better Things, as well as the child in the now-cancelled Gypsy. “I didn’t know they existed,” trans male actor Ian Harvie told Screencrush this year about trans men, “and I didn’t know I existed as a result of it.”
Racial Diversity
As Carmen Phillips wrote in our Favorite / Least Favorite Characters of 2017 roundtable, “representation for queer women of color was plentiful this year, but uneven in execution.”
It felt like a big year, between The Bold Type and the “Thanksgiving” Emmy win and Queen Sugar and The Handmaid’s Tale and Rosa Diaz — but the big picture isn’t great.
GLAAD reported that broadcast scripted programming for the 2017-2018 season is “finally making serious strides towards more racially diverse representations” but “GLAAD would like to see that racial diversity also represented in the increased inclusion of LGBTQ characters who are also people of color.” They found the number of QTPOC characters decreasing on broadcast, to 36%, and increasing on cable, to 35%, with streaming lagging behind at 23%. GLAAD was looking at a different data set than us — all characters (not just women), only U.S. primetime shows, and the 2017/2018 season rather than all shows that aired in 2017. But our numbers were similar: 70% of the R/R characters we counted were white.
Comparing the population to its accordant representation isn’t a great standard — I’d argue when it comes to sexual as well racial minorities, we need extra representation, not just proportional representation. Still, it’s worth noting the extreme discrepancy for Latinx people — 18% of the population, yet only 4.8% of LGBT female characters! The small, sliver of a silver lining is that those nine Latinx characters were some of the year’s best characters, period.
GLAAD reported a sharp dip in API LGBT characters, from 13% in 2016-2017 to “a meager 4% this year.” Our number was slightly higher, but still dismal. There’s a quality/quantity issue and the only API character on network television, bisexual CeCe from New Girl, had zero lesbian romantic arcs. Other interesting numbers: of 12 shows with API characters, 33% were Canadian and 42% were sci-fi/supernatural. Just two of the 12 identified as lesbians, and none of the 12 had a present or past relationship with an API female. In fact, from a cursory look at the data, no API character in our database of 303 shows has ever dated another API woman. (I’ll talk more about this in an upcoming piece on race in lesbian TV relationships.)
19% of this year’s characters were Black, which is fine but not great — especially when you take a closer look.
Although Nova and Annalise remain beloved bisexual characters, and don’t need to date women to prove their bisexuality, it’s still worth noting that neither had a romantic storyline with a woman in 2017. Nor did Empire‘s Tiana, on a show which previously imprisoned one Black butch lesbian and killed a Black bisexual woman. Nor did Suzanne or Sophia on Orange is the New Black, which killed a Black lesbian last year and has tortured the aforementioned for many moons now. Cancellations buried Survivor’s Remorse‘s M-Chuck (before she ever got a big romantic storyline), Rosewood‘s Tara, Sense8‘s Amanita, APB’s Tasha, Dark Matter‘s Ayisha and Doubt’s Cameron Worth. We were immediately drawn to Moira (The Handmaid’s Tale) and Kat (The Bold Type), but both shows fell into the trap of having characters of color in very race-relevant environments where their race was somehow never mentioned. Two shows that addressed race directly with majority-black casts, Dear White People and She’s Gotta Have It, endorsed problematic tropes about queer women (click those links for more on how).
Another interesting phenomenon: Fresh Off The Boat, American Horror Story: Cult and Transparent all included Black guest characters as love interests for white regular/recurring characters, but zero Black recurring/regular queer characters.
I’ll conclude with this quote from Brittani Nichols (a gender-nonconforming Black lesbian actress and writer who was part of that Take My Wife Season Two I keep bringing up) from her piece I Demand To Be Sexualized: “I rarely see anyone that looks like me in movies/web series/TV. To the point that the most glaring examples of people that look like me ARE ACTUALLY ME .”
The Future of Lesbian & Bisexual Characters on TV
If we’re able to stave off nuclear war, there’s a lot to look forward to. Thirteen new shows for 2017 have promised LGBTQ female characters, including the hotly-anticipated Black Lightning, with a Black lesbian regular and a bisexual Asian-Amazon recurring character.
Starz is vying for Best Network of 2018: they’re developing P-Town, a drama about the opoid crisis with a “hard-partying” Federal Fishery Service Agent lesbian lead character as well as Vida, focusing on two Mexican-American sisters in Los Angeles and promising representation of “all genders and sexualities,” including at least one queer female lead. Sweetbitter has cast its lesbian bartender, American Gods will add Native American bisexual character Sam Black Crow in Season Two, and The Counterpart debuts its masculine-of-center lesbian later this month.
Ryan Murphy’s Pose, which promises 50+ LGBT characters and is centered on four trans woman of color, begins filming this month.
The Heathers reboot, on the Paramount Network, will introduce an amab genderqueer character and a black lesbian.
The Dime, centered on a lesbian cop, has been given a script commitment from Fox. Marvel’s New Warriors, with “confidently out lesbian” character, is being shopped around after Freeform’s pass.
Of course the biggest news of the year is that Showtime is developing, bless our collective souls, an L Word reboot. Autostraddle’s roots are in L Word fandom, and although this isn’t a great time to be alive, it is a great time to be a living television writer for lesbian, gay, bisexual and queer women.
The television industry has a major opportunity right now. Scores of cis white men are getting fired for abusing power and (surprise!) also women. It’s time to promote, hire, and elevate women, queer people, trans people and people of color. It’s time to tell new stories, and getting LGBTQ folks behind the camera is a great way to get more in front of it, too. Time’s up. We’re ready, and we’ve got so much left to talk about.
2017’s 18 Best Episodes of Lesbian, Bisexual and Trans TV
Click for more 2017 End of the Year Lists
One of the most exciting things about TV this year was that there were whole entire episodes that explored queer themes and the queer lives of queer characters. It was more than crumbs and Very Special moments. These were entire TV episodes that paid off queer storylines that had been building, or approached lesbian and bisexual and trans stuff in ways we’ve never really seen on-screen, or expanded queer storytelling into genres where it’d been lacking, or utilized new TV platforms in queer ways. Pretty dang exciting stuff! Here are 18 of the best episodes of LGBTQ TV in 2017.
Our Favorite Episodes of Lesbian, Bisexual and Trans TV In 2017
Master of None Episode 208, “Thanksgiving“
Heather Hogan: Some people — the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, for example — might even say it was the best TV episode of the entire year, gay or not. (Me too. I also would say that.)
The Handmaid’s Tale Episode 103, “Late”
Heather Hogan: We spend a lot of time talking about how we’ve had enough violence against and murder of gay TV characters, but there was something almost essential about the way The Handmaid’s Tale expanded on the queer narrative of the book and forced us to witness the torture against “gender traitors.” This was the story and the show for 2017, in all its unapologetic brutality.
The Bold Type Episode 105, “No Feminism in the Champagne Room”
Kayla: “Kat finds genuine empowerment and awakening on her bike. As the instructor calls out platitudes, the words take on more meaning by scoring Jane, Sutton, and Kat confronting their individual obstacles of the episode. The affirmations resonate in particular with Kat, who realizes she wants to overcome her fears and take a leap with Adena. She cries, smiles, laughs, as she comes to terms with her own desires, and Aisha Dee is resplendent in the scene. Of course The Bold Type would take a setting used commonly for mockery and derision and turn it into a place of healing and self-realization. This show wants its characters and viewers to feel good.”
I Love Dick Episode 105, “A Short History Of Weird Girls”
Riese: “I Love Dick” consistently pushes the boundaries of its format, melding elements of live theater, experimental video and performance art into compact televised capsules, consistently catching you off-guard by slicing obsessive interior monologues into public scenes. “A Short History of Weird Girls” is the apex of this style. It removes us from the present narrative to deliver character histories focused entirely on sexual comings-of-age from narrators we rarely hear such stories from — a self-described hypersexual awkward Jewish girl with cystic acne, a Latina butch cowgirl, a Black girl who worshipped Michael J Fox but also was in love with her mother. These are weird women. Devon’s formative interest in Dick is different than Chris’s. She doesn’t desire the man, but rather the effect he has on women, his swagger, his entitlement to female attention — and something else, too, the awkward racial and class dynamics between the landowner and the immigrants who work the land for him. Plus we get flashbacks to an actual baby butch, and tender college makeout scenes, and relateable, pure heartbreak. Like Master of None’s “Thanksgiving,” “A Short History of Weird Girls” slips the generally untold story of a queer masculine-of-center woman of color into a show that’s already kinda niche, but not nearly as niche as those sweet minutes.
One Day At A Time Episode 113, “Quinces”
Yvonne: “My all time favorite part of the show was the last episode which leads up to Elena’s quinceanera. Throughout the episode, Lydia keeps tailoring Elena’s fancy dress for her big day. Even though Elena says she loves it, Lydia doesn’t believe she’s in love with her dress. Elena admits that she doesn’t feel totally comfortable in it like she does when she wears ties, fedoras and jackets. Apparently, Lydia finally gets the final wardrobe adjustment right because when Elena sees it she’s in tears and even though I didn’t see what she’s gonna wear, I’m in tears too. When Elena walks out for her big reveal, she’s wearing a glitzy, fabulous femme white suit. I busted out crying again, my friends, because her abuela made her a gay little suit. It’s more than just Elena stepping out in this beautiful suit, it symbolizes Elena’s coming out in more ways than one — as a young lady who is comfortable with who she is and with a family who’s by her side no matter what.”
Wynonna Earp Episode 202, “Shed Your Skin”
Valerie Anne: “It’s not A-frame kissing with parkas on, it’s not blurry kisses near some candles in the woods. Nope. It’s a bright room and a clear lens, an unbuttoned shirt and a belt undone. At this point Nicole stops Waverly — with effort, like dragging your feet in the sand to stop a swing — and asks if she’s sure. Waverly says yes right away. She smiles and giggles a little nervously. “The best sex is makeup sex, right?” (Making Nicole go full Paige McCullers head dip.) And listen I know this is silly but hearing adults say the word sex when they’re talking about the sex they’re about to sex is very refreshing! And of course, consent is sexy. So they exchange, “I like yous” and Nicole lifts Waverly’s chin right up. And they kiss and they kiss and then the tol redhead picks up her smol girlfriend and places her gently down on the bed in a beautiful sweeping motion that looked like something out of a ballet.”
Madam Secretary Episode 407, “North to the Future”
Carmen Phillips: “It’s a beautiful tribute of recognition. A moment of that I think we’ve all felt at one time or another. We are just going about our days, and then you look up and something has shifted. You see a glimmer of something that reminds you of your most authentic self. It’s rare for queer women, or women of color. Its even more rare for folks who are butch or genderqueer or masculine-of-center. When those moments happen, we are forced to take stock.
We had one of those moments last month, when Madam Secratary introduced Kat Sandoval in her suit and tie, with her own version of a ring of keys, her just perfect pocket chain, in a photo heard throughout the queer world. We were gifted with another one of those moments last night, when Kat Sandoval came alive on screen in all of her dapper butch, nerdy, avocado farming, policy savant glory.
To be seen. Really seen. It’s a simple, but undeniably power thing.”
Brooklyn 99 Episode 509, “Game Night”
Rachel: “After being kind of outed by Boyle’s nosiness in the previous episode, Rosa decides to intentionally come out to her coworkers and, later, her parents. It’s established that while Rosa’s coming out to others is new, coming out to herself is not — she tells Amy she’s known she was bi since seventh grade. It’s notable how much this arc is focused on sexual orientation as a character trait rather than a plot point — the focus is never on Rosa’s relationship with this new woman (although I do want to know more about that!) but the fact that bisexuality is an important part of Rosa’s identity and always has been, something that’s refreshing to see. Parts of Rosa’s coming out are probably pretty relatable to all queer people, like Amy asking “when did you know?,” Boyle’s awkward overcompensating allyship, and the implication that Hitchcock was going to say something gross and sexualizing if given the chance. Especially in her interactions with her parents, though, Rosa’s coming out arc feels specifically and uniquely bisexual in a way I’m not sure I’ve seen on television before.”
Doctor Who Episode 10×1, “The Pilot” (before we knew what was gonna happen next)
Heather Davidson: “I’m 23 now, and the Doctor Who universe is more queer than ever. Class‘s Charlie Smith can live with his boyfriend while River Song talks about her wives and Bill Potts flirts with every other girl she sees. It’s not perfect – hell, the very exchange in which Bill first outs herself ends in a horrible fatphobic joke – but with Bill as the Doctor’s companion, the representation of humanity on a show that began when homosexuality was illegal in Britain is now a working class, lesbian woman of colour. Bill Potts is part of an explosion in LGBTQ representation in family and young adult focused media over the last few years; on the BBC alone, queer and trans youth can see themselves reflected in shows from Just a Girl to Clique. However, that representation is rarely diverse and frequently challenged – the broadcaster was forced to defend Just a Girl after accusations that it was “encouraging children to change their gender”. And LQBTQ stories everywhere, particularly for lesbian and bisexual women, are still so often made to end in tragedy. Slowly, though, more and more people are beginning to understand the importance of including good, meaningful queer representation in their work. Things are getting better.”
Fresh Off The Boat Episode 406, “A League of Her Own”
Heather Hogan: It’s a rare and wonderful thing to get to watch a Very Special Coming Out Episode that’s never been done before. It’s even more rare and wonderful when it makes you laugh and cry with it’s authenticity and good intentions. Nicole joining the Denim Turtles’ softball team, Jessica taking over coaching duties, Nicole’s dad’s flubbed reaction and recovery when he realized she’s gay: It was a perfect 22 minutes of TV.
Doubt Episode 104, “Clean Burn”
Natalie: “Nervous about her new kinda-boyfriend, Cameron (Laverne Cox) does what every other woman who’s ever been nervous about dating someone new does: she calls her girlfriends. Those girlfriends are two other trans women played by actual trans women (Angelica Ross and Jen Richards) and, suddenly, a normal conversation between three friends feels monumental. Beyond the tremendous step forward this scene represented for trans women, there was also part of me that wanted to pull up a chair to that table and share high-fives with Jen Richards and Angelica Ross, because the moment felt so familiar. It was the conversation I had with my friends when I considered getting into my first interracial relationship or the first time I thought about dating a woman who had previously identified as straight. It’s a conversation that Aziz Ansari’s character, Dev, has on his first date with Sona (Pallavi Sastry) on Master of None — when does dating one too many of one type of person cross the line into fetishizing? Anyone who’s ever been othered has had some version of that conversation and it’s a reminder of our shared humanity.”
Danger & Eggs Episode 113, “Chosen Family”
Mey: “My favorite character in the entire show is a young girl named Zadie, played by teen trans activist Jazz Jennings. First of all this kid is an adorable and precocious, recently-out trans girl who gets on stage at Pride (yeah, that’s right, this show has an entire episode that takes place at a Pride day celebration) with a cute haircut and equally cute dress and sings a song about her first day at school as the real her. Plus she’s super smart and explains chosen families to Phillip. This episode, ‘Chosen Family,’ serves as the season finale and is one of the best and most important episodes of any kids show I’ve ever seen. It’s super queer, super sweet and full of love.”
Halt and Catch Fire Episode 406, “A Connection Is Made”
Riese: “A Connection Is Made” is when Haley really steps into her own as a character, despite being present in some iteration since the series’ start. Particularly I think of the lunch scene with Joe, when Haley’s explaining to him what she likes about the then-new internet. It seemed boring at first, but eventually she realized it was also a space to be your authentic self. Joe’s interest is its own kind of rapture, it’s penetrating and flattering all at once, but Haley’s almost unfazed by it, because she’s a teenager and she’s good at her job so of course. When the waitress Haley’s obviously crushing on drops in to geek out over Bratmobile with Haley, Joe — who is bisexual, which posits him consistently as an outsider nobody can clock at first glance — sees exactly what’s happening here. And maybe in some way, grasps in that moment the power of the internet, too. Joe later sticks up for Haley to Gordon when he wants her off Comet until her grades get better, and in his care to avoid outing her ends up rupturing his friendship with her father. Everybody here is looking for their safest space, after all, be it real or virtual or a real space building a virtual space, and Haley is one mere episode away from acquiring an alternative lifestyle haircut.
Loud House Episode 215, “L is for Love”
Valerie Anne: “There’s a little girl out there who watched this, who will continue to see more and more cartoons with storylines like this, who will grow up to be like Wonder Woman in the patriarch’s world. No matter how evolved our culture becomes, there will always be people who try to tell her she’s wrong for liking girls. But her foundation of self was built on Saturday mornings when she was seven years old. Built on characters like Luna, whose entire family helped her get ready for what they thought was a date with a girl. She’ll barely hear the noise. It’ll be bullets pinging off her wrist cuffs. Instead of thinking ‘I can’t have a crush on a girl,’ she’ll say, ‘I’m like Ruby and Sapphire. I’m like Luna Loud.'”
Degrassi: Next Class Episode 406, “Facts Only”
Riese: “Never had I ever seen an episode of television attempt to tell the story of a teenager realizing that they are non-binary. I’ve read and heard and seen a lot of personal narratives, but there’s something special and different about how those stories are crafted in fictional visual storytelling. Apparently, Degrassi writers decided to tell this story after visiting a local high school’s queer-straight alliance to get ideas from their experiences. (This episode also contains within its walls a catastrophic boy/girl/girl threesome that later reveals itself to be part of Esme’s rising mental breakdown, but for a few minutes of “Facts Only,” the whole situation was new enough to still feel like it could be something more and also something very queer for Frankie and Esme, and I was pretty stoked about that ’cause I love a bad girl / good girl high school matchup I’ll tell you what!)
DC Crisis of Infinite Earths Crossover
Heather Hogan: Having the two queer women on Legends of Tomorrow and Supergirl fight together and drink together and sleep together during DC’s biggest TV event of the year is something I’m still not over. It’s not just that Alex and Sara hooked up; they had a story that helped Alex grow as a person and a lesbian! Their story was centered during a TV event in an industry that has historically been dominated by white men (and the dead women who fuel their manpain).
Transparent Episode 409, “They Is On The Way”
Riese: “This season more than any other resonated with me as a Jewish lesbian, poking and prodding at our cultural neuroses and political contradictions. Judith Light killed it this year as her overbearing Jewish mother was forced to take a messy personal inventory she’d hoped to avoid all her life, as familiar as it was painful and traumatic. As a people, we often refuse to leave well enough alone or to let each other be, which often leads to catastrophe at worst and hurt feelings at best, but this season the world turned its vigilant curious eye upon Shelly in a way that enabled actual revelation and beauty. Nowhere does that happen as much as it happens when the family hits up the Dead Sea in “They Is On The Way.” I cried through the whole damn thing.
One Mississippi Episode 206, “I’m Alive”
Heather Hogan: The entire second season of One Mississippi was a marvel, but the episode where Kate finally accepted that she and Tig are more than just a good team of platonic gal pals was a payoff for the record books. It was sweet and funny and sexy and I still swoon just thinking about Kate’s little coming out/I’m in love with you speech.
Honorable Mention For a Webseries Episode: Strangers Episode 106, “Getaway”
Heather Hogan: Who really knows where our TV will be coming from in five years. Maybe Facebook? The company unveiled Facebook Watch this year, and already analysts are predicting it will become more popular than YouTube. One of Watch’s original series’, Strangers, was a collaborative project with Refinery29 and it was gay as all get out. In fact, it was gayer in six episodes that most shows with queer characters are in their entire lifetimes. “Getaway” saw the main character, Isobel, and her first girlfriend enjoy all the swelling scores, well-lit sex scenes, and swoony kisses that are so common for straight couples but still so very lacking in the canon of queer representation.
Autostraddle’s Favorite and Least Favorite Lesbian, Bisexual, and Trans Women TV Characters of 2017
Click for more 2017 End of the Year Lists
2017 was the best of times and the worst of times. LOL JK it was the absolute worst of times. One of the only consistent reprieves from the perpetually horrifying and demoralizing news cycle was queer TV. There was a lot of it this year. Maybe more than ever before. And not just a handful of characters on a handful of teen shows. Lesbian and bisexual characters were everywhere: lighting up prestige TV, anchoring critically acclaimed streaming shows, filling in the cast on broadcast networks. Riese will be breaking the whole thing down soon, but until then, here are our TV writers’ favorite and least favorite lesbian, bisexual, and trans women TV characters of the year.
None of these write-ups are the Official Position of Autostraddle on any of these shows or characters; they are the individual opinions of our TV writers.
FAVORITE
Riese, Editor-in-Chief
Devon, I Love Dick
Everything I knew about the Jill Soloway project “I Love Dick” suggested this was a very heterosexual affair. Like, the premise is this woman who goes to an artists colony in Marfa with her husband and falls so deeply in obsessive love with Dick (Kevin Bacon) that it consumes and nearly destroys her. But! Nobody told me about Devon, the butch Latinx artist and aspiring playwright living in the trailer behind the house where Chris and her husband are staying. Devon is a dreamy romantic, a dedicated artist with a compelling backstory and a unique perspective on the world. Also, she takes her shirt off a lot and I love her.
Niska, Humans
“[Thing] learns to love” is a trope as old as time — the beast, the android, the hermit — and it’s always heterosexual! But in the second Season of Humans, a sci-fi show that is basically another take on the “what if androids could feel” genre, Niska escapes the brothel where, as a “synth,” she’s been basically imprisoned and forced to work, and eventually lands in Berlin, where she falls in love with a girl. But Niska is so otherwise intriguing, too, and I think Humans is the most underrated show of the year, so there.
Svetlana and Veronica, Shameless
I should’ve done this last year but I wasn’t caught up yet, so this is my late-add, and they’re both still on the show even if they’re not in a thruple anymore, so, it’s still valid. Sometimes I read AV Club recaps and all the commenters are straight cis men who found that whole storyline totally absurd which like, okay thanks STRAIGHT CIS MEN what do you know about poly queers anyhow!?!! But I screamed through the whole entire thing (so did Erin, me and Erin screamed together). It was so fun and hot and fresh! Plus, they’re just incredibly smart hilarious capable alpha bitches who run shit and I’ve always loved that about both of them.
Rachel, Managing Editor
Rosa Diaz, Brooklyn Nine-Nine
In the haze of late 2017, Rosa’s still-recent coming out arc still feels like it was a dream or a maybe light hallucination experienced while staring into the fluorescent lights in line at the DMV. And yet it was, apparently, after months and months of fan daydreaming and Stephanie Beatriz coming out herself, a real thing that occurred! I wrote about this a bit when it happened, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a coming-out storyline that so specifically and authentically engaged with uniquely bisexual experiences; it was heartbreaking and affirming to see my own anxieties and experiences reflected on screen. I also loved how this revelation about Rosa’s identity deepens and complicates the writing of her character — she’s always been incredibly private and reluctant to share anything even remotely personal with others, and when we see how her worst fears of losing the modicum of closeness she has with her parents are realized because she shares something about with herself, Rosa as a person makes so much more sense. It meant so much to get to see two hyper-independent and closed-off characters in Rosa Diaz and Raymond Holt, whose personalities and affect have been heavily informed by their queerness and repercussions for it, get to bond and be a little vulnerable together over identity. I’m so excited for the future of bisexual Rosa Diaz, who will not die on our televisions!!!
Heather Hogan, Senior Editor
Tig, One Mississippi
One Mississippi‘s second season was my second favorite thing on TV this year. I can’t say why any better than Riese did in her review. I love comedies that are rooted in something deeply sad, where the characters we learn and love find reasons to laugh even though they’re trudging through life’s bleakest moments and darkest days. (Which is why my first favorite thing on TV this year was Grace and Frankie which apparently wasn’t canonically gay, so.) Tig Notaro is a masculine-of-center middle-aged lesbian, which is something we never get to see on TV for starters, and we get to see her navigate falling in love and actually getting the girl. The series is so heartbreaking and it’s so sweet and it filled me with so much hope, which was a real feat for any piece of art in 2017.
Nicole, Fresh Off the Boat
Last summer The Hollywood Reporter talked to openly gay Fresh Off the Boat showrunner Nahnatchka Khan about telling stories networks usually shy away from. She said, “You want to do the material justice and the area justice but you also want to make it funny, you always want to not be preachy.” I thought about that a lot as I was watching Nicole’s coming out story unfold this season because Khan just kept doing it such justice in exactly the way she wanted. I know a lot of my attachment to this story comes from the fact that I was actually Nicole’s age in 1997, so all the callbacks to the gay stuff going on at the time, and the pop culture touchstones, make me nostalgic and allow me to imagine a world where I could have come out to my friends and family and plotted a date with the cute barista when I was in high school. But also it’s just really great TV. All of Nicole’s coming out moments are cute and hilarious, and her coming out episode — which takes place when she joins the local lesbian bar’s softball team — is one of the best I’ve ever seen. But it didn’t stop there! In last week’s Titanic-themed Christmas episode she fell for a girl and her friends helped her get the girl’s number. When they smiled their tender gayby smiles at each while Jessica crooned “My Heart Will Go On” my heart grew three sizes, and also I choke-laughed.
Denise, Master of None
“Thanksgiving” was my favorite episode of TV in 2017. It’s smart and it’s romantic and, of course, the whole thing is just revolutionary. To see a black masculine-of-center lesbian character played by the black masculine-of-center lesbian who wrote the episode and know she ended up accepting an Emmy Award in a full tux for it is — well, it’s basically the opposite of how nearly everything else in 2017 made me feel. I’ve probably watched “Thanksgiving” ten times, and I’ll keep going back to it for years to come. It will become go-to holiday viewing for me, and I’ll always remember the way it launched Lena Waithe into superstardom. And how she turned around and proposed to her IRL girlfriend on Thanksgiving!
Alex Danvers, Supergirl
Alex Danvers is the only character on my best-of list who wasn’t conceived and written by a queer woman, but I’m choosing her because she’s cultural progress personified. Five years ago, there’s no way a network superhero TV show would’ve written Alex as a lesbian. At best they would have given her three episodes to fall for and kiss another girl and then never mention it again and GLAAD would have been forced to keep counting her on their Where We Are on TV report. Two years ago, if the actress who was playing Alex’s love interested decided to leave the show, she’d have been dead on-screen faster than you can say Schechter (and probably Alex would have gone back to dating men or not dating at all). Supergirl‘s writers have taken such care with Alex. They didn’t just tell a coming out story. Or a falling in love story. They’re telling a queer life story, and it feels more real to me than anything that ever happened on The L Word. Alex and Maggie’s break-up was heartbreaking, for sure, but it was written tenderly and without tripping over any tropes or creating any unnecessary villains. Alex’s drunken leap into the bed with Sara Lance in the Crisis of Infinite Earth crossover was also legit, and so was the part where Alex woke up heartsick over Maggie, still, but with a new queer pal to lean on.
Natalie, Staff Writer
Elena Alvarez,One Day at a Time
Television has a habit of linking coming out with romance, as if your identity isn’t your own without someone else there to affirm it, and while that might make for great TV — who doesn’t love a love story, after all — the conflation of those two things has always struck me as a bit problematic. I didn’t expect One Day at a Time, the reboot of the 1970s Norman Lear multi-cam sitcom, to be the show challenged that convention, but it did.
When Elena comes out to her family, it’s about her. It’s not about some girl that’s waiting in the wings, equally smitten with her — though, in Season Two, that should totally happen because she’s adorable — it’s about Elena and this realization she’s come to about herself. Coming out is the moment we turn quiet revelations — borne, in Elena’s case, from countless hours of binge watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, staring longingly at Kristen Stewart and kissing the wrong people — into public pronouncements and One Day at a Time gives Elena the space to own that moment.
The show, guided in part by two queer writers, allows Elena’s coming out to be a season-long triumph, not a byproduct of feelings she has for someone else, but a product of her fully accepting and loving herself. That version of coming out is the reality of so many people — there’s no Maya or Maggie or Adena spurning them towards acceptance and admission, there’s only them, owning their truth — and I was so grateful to see that version of the story told.
Cameron Wirth, Doubt
In and of itself, there is nothing remarkable about the love story, Doubt crafts for Cameron Wirth. Gorgeous defense attorney falls in love with a charming prosecutor with boyish good looks? Been there, done that.
But then, you add the fact that Cameron Wirth is a trans woman, that she’s a trans woman being played by an actual trans woman, that she’s a black trans woman, that she’s a black trans woman with trans girlfriends also played by actual trans women, and all of a sudden, the mundane becomes extraordinary. And the fact that all of this is happening in primetime on the most watched and (arguably) most conservative and least diverse network on television? Well, that’s a damn miracle.
When the first season (and only) season of Doubt concluded, I described Cameron Wirth’s story as a fairytale, a beacon of hope for trans women — and trans women of color, in particular — at a time when hope was in short supply.
Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya, Staff Writer
Adena El Amin, The Bold Type
The Bold Type allowed Adena’s life as a Muslim, lesbian, feminist artist be complicated without making it tragic. She challenges Kat in really beautiful ways, but she stands on her own as a character, too. And as a mere surface-level detail: Nikohl Boosheri and Aisha Dee are just really good at on-screen kissing.
Rosa Diaz, Brooklyn Nine-Nine
We’re only at the beginning of Rosa’s bisexual journey, but I can’t wait to see how it all plays out throughout the rest of the season. I couldn’t not say something about her in this list, because it truly feels like we have all been not-so-patiently waiting for the moment when she says “I’m bi” for the entirety of the show’s existence. I’m so happy she says it outright. Sometimes, there’s power in naming something.
Valerie Anne, TV Writer and Social Media Co-Editor
Waverly Earp, Wynonna Earp
Waverly Earp was my favorite new character last year, and this year in Wynonna Earp’s second season, my love for her continued to grow. She is the perfect combination of strength and kindness, fear and passion, brains and heart. She went through Some Shit™ this year but it’s been such a gift to watch her fight and cheer and sing and make mistakes and learn and grow and love. (Shout out to Nicole, Rosita, and Shae, the other badass queer women in Waverly’s life.)
Alex Danvers, Supergirl
Speaking of people who have been through Some Shit™…I know the show itself has had its ups and downs, but I have loved watching Alex’s journey. She came out last year, and this year she fell in love, got engaged, got her whole heart broken, fell into bed with Sara Lance, and started to put the pieces of her heart back together in one of those relatable and honest storylines I’ve seen on TV in my adult life. I look forward to seeing where Alex’s journey takes us.
Sara Lance, Legends of Tomorrow
When Legends of Tomorrow started, I thought it would be this throwaway show I watched for the rare glimpse of Caity Lotz punching a dude. And during Season 1, it mostly was. But this year, the back half of Season 2 and the first half of Season 3, this wonderful shift happened. They realized Sara Lance should be in charge, and the whole tone of the show changed. Caity Lotz has grown as an actor so much since she started back in Season 2 of Arrow, and Sara Lance has gone from preppy rich girl to traumatized assassin to badass vigilante to feral zombie to the captain of a time-traveling band of weirdos hell-bent on saving the world. It’s so wonderful to watch, and the show itself is so fun and wonderful and never ever shies away from Sara’s bisexuality.
Cosima Niehaus, Orphan Black
I loved a lot of TV this year, but I would be remiss if I didn’t take this final opportunity to give love to Orphan Black for giving me what will probably remain one of my all-time favorite queer characters for the rest of my life. Cosima once said, “My sexuality isn’t the most interesting thing about me,” and she continued to prove that time and time again. Her relationship with Delphine is the only romantic pairing that survived the series, and hell, SHE survived the series, against all odds.
Carmen, Staff Writer
Mary Charles “M-Chuck” Calloway, Survivor’s Remorse
I’m including M-Chuck, but this is basically a “Lifetime Achievement” award. Survivor’s Remorse was cancelled this fall, making 2017 her last opportunity to be included in a year-end list. That’s incredibly unfair! M-Chuck is hilarious, and in full ownership of herself, and a joy who brightens up the screen. Survivor’s Remorse aired in relatively short seasons; it’s hard to pinpoint a singular one as her “best” work. But taken collectively, they created a multi-layered character who uses sex and comedy as her armor, but also had her own haunting traumas and the world’s biggest, deepest heart. I’d sincerely argue that M-Chuck is one of the most well-rounded, best written lesbian characters in television history. Actress Erica Ash’s embodiment of her was a sight to behold. I’m going to miss her dearly.
Elena Alvarez, One Day at a Time
Looking around this roundup, Elena is definitely (and deservedly) the MVP of this year’s list; I won’t take up your time once again explaining her brilliance. I will say that as a former teen Latina feminist, raised by my Latina single mother, in a Caribbean Latinx household (though Puerto Rican, not Cuban)- watching Elena and her family last season was a singular experience not like any other I’ve had.
I made the commitment to watch One Day At A Time with my now 60-year-old mom, so I didn’t get to binge it like many others in the Autostraddle community. We went at her pace. And we went through so many boxes of tissues. We’d take breaks, talk, laugh, and then cry some more. It was intimate, but also gave us perspective. We saw ourselves, and I think we saw bits of each other, too. That’s probably a strange endorsement for a sitcom, but there you have it. Spending that time with my mother, watching this story unfold, is one of my most cherished memories of 2017. It reached beyond television.
Anyway, Elena Alvarez is a freakin’ superhero among teenagers. Get ready, she’ll be back on our screens when the new season of One Day At A Time drops on January 26th!
Cotton Brown, Star
Cotton is a trans woman on television like few that I’ve had the pleasure of seeing — particularly on network tv. Yes, she’s poor and she’s black and in many ways disenfranchised, but she’s also self-determined, ruthless, unapologetic, and lets no man stand in her way. Star is a chaotic love letter to young women, especially young women of color, who are unafraid to do the ugly work required to make their dreams come to life. I sometimes think I’m the only one watching, but I don’t mind banging the drums! The first season in particular was delightfully juicy hot mess of a soap opera and Cotton is an antihero I love rooting for. She’ll do whatever it takes to survive. I admire her strength, her steely resolve, her bravery, her grit. When it comes to peeling back those layers, actress Amiyah Scott puts in hard character work and really shines. Cotton hasn’t been utilized as much as I’d like in Star’s second season. But we’re less than halfway through, and I’m hopeful that her arc is ramping up for a strong finish! She deserves it.
Ofglen, The Handmaid’s Tale
Ofglen is the resistance. The Handmaid’s Tale was a nightmare of a television show to watch. I don’t mean that in terms of quality — the show is obviously exquisite — I mean it’s literally made up of the stuff from my nightmares. I am still surprised that I made it through to the end. But amidst all of the horror, Ofglen was a beacon. She was not merely placeholder for the torture that these women, and particularly queer women, were put through (though Oh My God there was also that). She was also a bright reminder the feral strength of women’s spirit. I had no idea that Alexis Bledel had this in her. When I look back at 2017 in television, it’s Ofglen’s wild, defiant eyes that burn back it me. She reminds me that I am no one’s property other than my own. It’s better rather go down fighting — always fighting — then lay down at all.
Mey, Trans Editor
Davina, Transparent
Each year Transparent has done a great job of highlighting some of its trans characters played by trans actors. In past seasons we’ve seen Hari Nef and Trace Lysette shine, and this year, like in Season One, it was Davina’s turn. Davina is an HIV-positive Latina played by legendary trans actor Alexandra Billings. We got to see her deal with her abusive boyfriend, reminisce about her past in the ballroom scene, talk about her regrets and she had a groundbreaking nude scene. She’s one of the best actors in a show full of great actors and we got to see her really shine this year.
Waverly Earp, Wynonna Earp
I had gotten behind on this show, but thanks to my girlfriends I got back into it. Waverly is amazing. She’s so precious and tender and bright and fun and wonderful and she looks amazing in a cheerleader uniform, she looks great waving some sticks around, she looks great even when she’s messing up the whole universe by helping an evil witch just in order to save her girlfriend. I wanna be like Waverly.
Rosa Diaz, Brooklyn 99
I started watching this show when it first premiered and since way back then, every queer woman in the fandom has wanted for Rosa Diaz to be bi. This call from the fandom only got a thousand times louder when Stephanie Beatriz, who plays Rosa, came out as bi. Rosa is a beautiful, badass, leather-clad Latina who manages to be eternally charming even when she’s speaking in a monotone voice about how she hates everything. And recently she came out to fellow detective Charles Boyles as bi, and told him that she’s dating a woman. This was what we were waiting for. This is what we were hoping for. This is what we were cheering for.
Elena, One Day at a Time
This was such a freaking great Latina-specific coming out story. It’s not just about “how do I tell my family I’m dating a girl, what if they reject me?” it’s also about “how will my die-hard Catholic abuela react?” “what do I do about my date for my quinceañera?” “what do I do about the dress I’m supposed to wear for my quinceañera?” This was the type of coming out narrative that queer Latinx teens can relate to, and that they need to have in order to be able to see this kind of possibility for themselves. When she walks out in that suit, I cried. Plus, I love the Autostraddle shoutout.
NEXT PAGE: Our least favorite characters
Autostraddle’s Very Scientific and Unbiased 2017 Emmy Predictions
When this year’s Emmy nominations were announced, we felt a thrilling shock of good fortune, which was nice because the shocks we’ve been receiving lately have all been mostly been shocks of outrage and despair. But the Emmys nominated a record number of queer humans and people of color in 2017 and, honestly, we deserve it. We deserve one night to watch our gay favs walk down the red carpet and endure excruciatingly stupid questions from Ryan Seacrest and hoist gold trophies in the air. This Sunday, Carmen Phillips, Natalie, and Heather will be live-blogging the Emmys right here on Autostraddle dot com. We’ll also be unveiling your winners each category, which you can vote for right here!
Our own writers voted just yesterday and came up with some very obviously unbiased and scientific predictions for who’ll be victorious on Sunday night. Our picks are surely in line with all other media outlets.
Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series: Lily Tomlin, Grace And Frankie
Written by Rachel
To be clear, I would watch Lily Tomlin in a high school re-enactment of a bad SNL sketch; I think she should receive Emmys for things like brushing her teeth or checking her local garbage pickup schedule. BUT that said, she is especially transcendent in Grace and Frankie. It’s a very cute and warm show, while at the same time being inherently about having your whole entire heart broken and learning to be a person again after it while still having a lot of jagged edges. In the hands of a lesser actor, it would be a role that’s really raw and moving while occasionally being acerbic and funny, and it would still be good! The way Lily Tomlin plays Frankie, it’s a lot on the dry side, as her characters (and actual self) often are — but what we don’t get in heaving sobs we get in these really heartbreaking little moments of fragility and loss (I think about Frankie sitting in the wrong car, like a child trying not to cry after being picked up from school, after the funeral in Season One) that are more so for coming through in a character who’s eye-rolling and breezy 95% of the time.
Frankie is a weird hippie white lady who burns sage and paints giant portraits of her own vulva; it’s hard to imagine sometimes how she can not be a caricature of herself, but the way Lily Tomlin plays her she’s childlike and immature but wise at the same time, even when she’s at her most petulant and flagrantly wrong. (Our own Kayla wrote once that “Tomlin… makes a lot of lines work that shouldn’t, elevating lazy jokes into little treats.”) It wouldn’t be fair to say that she carries the show — Jane Fonda is so masterful at playing someone brittle and hurt and on the edge, and I’m obsessed with June Diane Raphael — but Tomlin’s understanding of someone who’s lived through a lot with enthusiasm and yet still has so, so much growing up to do is really beautiful. Give her an Emmy please! Thank you very much.
Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series: Kate McKinnon, Saturday Night Live
Written by Carmen
In addition to being the queer girl’s home team favorite, most critic prediction pools have out actress Kate McKinnon leading by leaps and bounds in this category. She’s as close to a locked win as someone could get. Let me say this: If you’ve seen none of Kate’s other SNL performances last year, please take three minutes to enjoy her impression of Hillary Clinton singing Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” In her new political autobiography What Happened? Clinton specifically references this performance, which originally aired the Saturday following her election defeat, as an emotional release. I can personally attest that it reached into the most beaten parts of me at a time when my depths of darkness felt insurmountable and instead lit a match. It’s a masterfully multi-layered sketch, simultaneously paying homage to Cohen during the week of his passing, giving deference to Clinton, and seeking to comfort those of us grieving in the audience. Ten months later, I still cannot hear the song without imaging McKinnon, at the piano, in Hillary’s signature pantsuit, telling me to never give up.
Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series: Master Of None, “Thanksgiving”
Written by Natalie
Thanksgiving is a story of friendship, family and the progress towards acceptance, told over a series of holiday meals. It breathes new life into the stale coming out episodes and was, unsurprisingly, a near unanimous pick to win among Autostraddle’s staff. With the win, Lena Waithe would become the first black woman (and just the second woman of color) to win an Emmy for comedy writing.
Outstanding Comedy Series: Master of None
Written by Carmen
There is so much to be said about Master of None, and in particular its famed “Thanksgiving” episode. And yes, that standalone episode is simply breathtaking. And yes, I desperately want to see our celebrity girlfriend/ heartthrob Lena Waithe take the stage for putting forth such an intensely personal episode that was probably the best 30 minutes of storytelling I watched last year. That said, Master of None as a whole is an incredibly skillfully executed comedy. Aziz’s commitment to the detailed contours of the honest, at times vulnerable, humanity of his characters strikes a chord. I watched Season Two, Episode Six “New York, I Love You” completely frozen. I was enthralled as Aziz laid bare everything that I love about people, about New York City, and about the randomness of life’s path that connects us all. When I was trading “Treat Yo’Self” memes during the peak of Parks and Recreation, I never would’ve guessed that this deeply reflective comedy would be in Aziz Ansari’s future. (Plus, more Lena Waithe forever and always, thank you. Amen.)
Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series: Viola Davis, How To Get Away With Murder
Written by Heather
When Viola Davis won her first Emmy in 2015 I screamed — not yelped, legitimately screamed — so loud my cat bolted from the room and didn’t come back out for hours. Do you remember that? The way she threw her hands up and then Taraji jumped into the aisle and they sway hugged so tight? Taraji never even sat back down. “In my mind, I see a line. And over that line, I see green fields and lovely flowers and beautiful white women with their arms stretched out to me over that line, but I can’t seem to get there no-how. I can’t seem to get over that line.” It was Harriet Tubman, but then Davis added her own experience and this truth: “The only thing that separates women of color from anyone else is opportunity.” She was right and she’s still right. Viola Davis is one of the greatest living actors in the world, and the fact that we get to see her play a brilliant, glorious, complicated, tortured, triumphant, broken, beautiful bisexual woman every week on broadcast network television is frankly unbelievable. In lesser hands, How to Get Away With Murder wouldn’t have made it a full season. She carries it all and elevates it to a place beyond anything written on a page or suggested by a director. She has deserved every award she’s ever been nominated for, and plenty that she hasn’t, and that includes this one. There are some h*ckin’ talented women in this category, but this trophy belongs to her.
Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series: Samira Wiley as Moira on The Handmaid’s Tale
Written by Heather
Samira Wiley’s name is on the wind. Orange Is the New Black wasn’t the same show without her and The Handmaid’s Tale wouldn’t have been either. So much of what makes Moira’s narrative so viscerally crushing is seeing and knowing the light that has been extinguished from her life, and if you’re going to tell that story you sure are lucky to find an actress who can shine as bright as the sun. Samira Wiley is the first openly gay Black actress to play two openly gay characters, and watching her second turn manifest itself in a nomination for the industry’s highest honor is so astounding it makes me giddy. Also, geez, she’s such a heartthrob and her smile is like Christmas morning. Let her smile, Hollywood!
Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series: The Handmaid’s Tale, “Offred”
Written by Raquel
“I know this must feel very strange. But ordinary is just what you’re used to. This may not seem ordinary to you right now, but after a time it will. This will become ordinary.”
This deeply chilling quote, taken straight from the Margaret Atwood novel it’s based on, exemplifies the strength of The Handmaid’s Tale and its first episode. It’s rare that a film adaptation succeeds in capturing the original work, much less adds to it. But “Offred,” Episode One of the Hulu series, shows a canny eye on the part of the writers for what to keep, what to change, and what to show. The quote is disturbing in the novel — this suggestion that one of humanity’s strengths is to accommodate ourselves to any situation, even our own dehumanization — and it’s brought to full strength when uttered by Ann Dowd as Aunt Lydia.
There’s a note by John Ciardi at the beginning of his translation of Dante’s Inferno that says, “When the violin repeats what the piano just has played, it cannot make the same sounds and it can only approximate the same chords. It can, however, make recognizably the same ‘music,’ the same air. But it can do so only when it is as faithful to the self-logic of the violin as it is to the self-logic of the piano.” In much the same way, a good adaptation of a written work succeeds best when it is true both to the self-logic of the writing as the self-logic of television.
That’s the genius of this episode: for the most part, the writers truly thought about what to show, when; what parts are even more meaningful when shown — the wall of dissidents, for example, which gave me a deep, uneasy chill, and the opening where she’s running for her life, we do not know yet from what, desperate and fractured and panting like a hunted animal, precious child in tow — and what parts are best left to the words and our imaginations. The whiplash effect of Offred’s return to her theocratic, controlled reality from her memories—both those harsh and terrifying and quietly sweet — is amplified by the episode’s quick scene changes and tight focus on the women’s faces (another venue of meaning not afforded us from the novel).
The only moment that betrayed this for me was the Salvaging, which in the novel highlighted Offred’s ambivalence, caught between wanting to release the valve of universal, righteous revenge while also feeling uneasy at the animalistic, monstrous violence of it. In the novel this scene is deeply tied to unfolding events and her relationship with Ofglen; in the episode it feels more like an opportunity for shock-value, sensational TV violence.
Nevertheless, the writers were also clearly aware at how contemporary, how uncomfortably near the story is encroaching to our everyday realities. (The best reminder is the line “Fucking Uber” in one of Offred’s flashbacks — placing it disturbingly near our own timeline.) Luckily, they refrained from being too heavy-handed on this point, letting the specificity of the story speak to the universality of the experience of being dehumanized, and acculturated, to deny your own true self.
Outstanding Drama Series: The Handmaid’s Tale
Written by Creatrix Tiara
It’s easy to say that The Handmaid’s Tale is remarkably prescient, but as Margaret Atwood said about the original book, everything that happens in the story has already happened in some way shape or form in the real world. Sex slaves, the reduction of women to breeding stock, stolen children… none of this is new. What we need now are models of resistance, of fighting back and making change – and I deeply appreciate how the TV series is much more forthright about this than than book. Having Offred be a mostly passive observer like in the book would have been too depressing; her very early rebellion, from the moment she says “My name is June”, as well as the pockets of resistance from Ofglen, Moira, and even Ofwarren, shows us that we DON’T have to just let things be. That even as we face immense subjugation, there are still ways to fight back, to assert our own dignity. The Handmaid’s Tale is a dystopia, yes, a genre that seems a little too real right now. But it’s also hopepunk: people are fighting, people are building support systems, people are making change. Change IS possible.
Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited Series or Movie: Nicole Kidman, Big Little Lies
Written by Stef and Molly
Once upon a time, a powerful being took a thread of gold and spun it out, making it finer and longer and stronger than anyone had ever seen. That being then took this amazing thread and spooled it this way and that, into a puddle that began to take shape. “G’day,” the shape said. “I am Nicole Kidman, and I am here to bring you great joy.” From there, she (for the shape identified as a she) took on various other shapes and roles, her eyebrows emblazoning themselves as the most important characters in many shows, especially Moulin Rouge. Nicole Kidman then took on a role Big Little Lies, the HBO hit, and is now up for a small gold being of her very own for her turn as Celeste Wright, whose life looks perfect from the outside but is in fact a horror show of pain and violence on the inside. There is not a more perfect vessel for this role, a being made of gold and china on the outside but steel and fury on the inside, a being so great she could abandon her American accent halfway through an HBO show and no one said a thing to her except, “Thank you for your work; you are a gift to the world.” And Nicole Kidman will hear this and smile, for she knows she’s a gift; she’s the one who spun the thread in the beginning after all.
Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Limited Series or Movie: Laura Dern, Big Little Lies
Written by Jenna
I never read the 2014 novel that Big Little Lies is based on, so I went into the miniseries pretty much just thinking: damn, this cast is stacked. And I was right. The show is full to the brim with fantastic performances, but Laura Dern, as on-the-edge-of-unhinged suburban mom Renata Klein, is an absolute scene stealer. Renata, self-absorbed as she seems, could easily be read as a one-dimensional villain, an annoyance more than anything. Dern, however, manages to deftly balance Renata’s wrath with an undercurrent of self-assured righteous conviction. At one point, she actually threatens Reese Witherspoon’s character with the line, “I’ll even get Snow White to sit on your husband’s face.” If that’s not Emmy-worthy, I don’t know what is.
Also, I am here to make sure everyone knows that this Instagram account exists. You’re welcome.
Outstanding Limited Series: Big Little Lies
Written by Valerie Anne
I read the book Big Little Lies, and it was such artful storytelling, I thought for sure that there was no way the show could do it justice, and/or there’s no way I would enjoy it, having already been through all the plot twists, already knowing the answers. But I’ll be the first to admit when I was wrong, and hoo boy I was wrong. The show was beautiful, funny, heart-wrenching, and powerful, with epic performances by epic women throughout. And knowing how it ended didn’t end up taking from my enjoyment at all; in fact, I think it added to it. (If you never read the book, you should go back and watch the series again knowing what you know.) I think they succeeded in a way book adaptations rarely do, and deserves the recognition for it.
Outstanding TV Movie: Black Mirror: San Junipero
Written by Valerie Anne
“San Junipero” should win an Emmy because it was a beautifully crafted story about finding love in a hopeless place. Both within the universe created by the episode itself, and also within the often-bleak universe(s) of Black Mirror as a whole. While still packing the show’s typical existential punch, San Junipero was filled with light, love, ladies, and so. many. amazing. outfits. It was the the epic, cross-dimension love story and the happy ending we rarely get, in the last place I expected to find it; heaven truly is a place on earth.
Outstanding Reality Competition Program: RuPaul’s Drag Race
Written by Carmen
Despite its popularity in the gay community, RuPaul’s Drag Race’s relationship with queer feminists has been more fraught, due in no small part to the show’s history with transmisogyny. Even though I’m a massive fan of drag as an art form, I quit watching after the fourth season, never intending to come back. That was, until I received a text from a friend ahead of Season Nine: “They finally cast Peppermint!”
So many of my most cherished memories involve my friends and I piled together in a tangle of limbs on a couch in the backroom of Barracuda nightclub, waiting for Peppermint’s midnight performance. I was infinitely confident in her talent. But, I also knew that she came out in 2013, and was terrified to see what the show would do with a black trans woman contestant.
To my utter surprise, they stepped up. This season Drag Race took time to have difficult discussions, not only about trans rights, but also the effect of the Pulse shooting on queer Latinx communities, body dysmorphia and eating disorders, the ongoing persecution of gays in Russia, all of which were done with tenderness and compassion. They also continued to be the hardest-working, campiest, fiercest competitive reality show on television. Peppermint ended the year as Runner Up, becoming the first out trans woman contestant to last until the final lip sync! If you watch Drag Race to revel in bitchy gays sniping at each other, then this season admittedly wasn’t for you. But, I’ve always been more invested in watching the show’s artists dedication to their craft. No one else is in their league.
Outstanding Variety Talk Series: Full Frontal With Samantha Bee
Written by Heather
Samantha Bee is fucking furious. She is fucking furious at Bernie Bros and Trump supporters and the conservative punditry machine and the Religious Right and white people and men and men and men. Her rage is incandescent and 2016 is the year she stopped trying to mask it. There is a special kind of catharsis in watching the only woman on late night TV brutalize the hypocrisy and racism and sexism and just plain fucking stupidity of so many Americans with her unrelenting wit. The angrier she gets the better I feel. I want her to win for so many reasons, one of which is I can’t wait to see what she’ll say on that stage.
Outstanding Variety Sketch Series: Drunk History
Written by Mey
Here’s my thing about Drunk History: It’s always been a tremendously funny show that does a great job of highlighting diverse and often forgotten figures from history. This year they had one of their best episodes ever when Crissle West talked about the Stonewall Riots with Alexandra Grey playing Marsha P. Johnson and Trace Lysette and her jumpsuit playing Sylvia Rivera. This is not a joke: a show where comedians get drunk and tell stories from history has maybe the best single episode of TV for trans representation. Also we got to see Aubrey Plaza and Alia Shawkat as Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton. That deserves an Emmy by itself.
Summer 2017 Gay TV Preview: Some Lesbian, Bisexual and Queer Characters For Ya
Summer used to be a lackluster season for television, but that was before we were gifted with ten thousand channels, streaming services and otherwise-notable methods of viewing television programs. Now, summer is full of popsicles, climate change, and solid television programs, including many with queer women characters. Not as many as there could be, but quite a few!
Here’s our list of every show we’re aware of that premieres/d between April 23rd and August 31st that contains lesbian, bisexual or queer female characters. Let us know if we missed anything!
Sundays
Mary Kills People // Season One // Lifetime (April 23rd)
This Canadian import is a female-driven production about an ER doctor with a popular side business as a practitioner of assisted suicide. Mary’s daughter, Jess, is in a romantic situation with Naomi, the daughter of Mary’s ex-husband’s current girlfriend.
American Gods // Season One // Starz (April 30th)
Based on the best-selling Neil Gaiman novel that I for some reason cannot seem to get through, American Gods tells the story of Shadow, a convict given early release from prison following the death of his wife who is immediately enlisted by a strange man named Wednesday to assist him on a cross-country road trip that turns out to be the project of gathering all the old gods to confront the New Gods. Nigerian actress Yetide Badaki plays Bilquis, an Old Goddess of Love, who feeds herself by having sex with both men and women, except that “having sex” means swallowing them with her vagina! Also look out for two Muslim gay male characters and appearances by Gillian Anderson and Kristen Chenoweth. (Read 25 fun facts about American Gods at Black Nerd Problems.)
Twin Peaks // Season One // Showtime (May 21st)
David Lynch will not tell us anything about this reboot, but it seems David Duchovony will be returning for at least one episode as the transgender detective he played in the original. Also, Laura Palmer is kind of bisexual, right? Laura Dern stars and look out for appearances from Stephanie Allyne, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Ashley Judd, Amanda Seyfried, Alicia Witt, Naomi Watts, Charlene Yi and Madeline Zima.
Claws // Season One // TNT (June 11th)
Y’all I could NOT be more excited for this one. Claws, a dark comedy starring the always-delightful Niecy Nash, follows a group of five Florida nail-salon employees who end up part of a pill-mill money laundering scheme. Judy Reyes plays Quiet Anne, a former party girl and mother-of-two, who Reyes describes as “a lesbian [and very tough] as I created her. This was a wonderful opportunity to go against anything else I had played.”
Game of Thrones // Season Seven // HBO (July 16th)
Heather’s girlfriend Stacy is confident that Yara Greyjoy and Daenerys are going to make out this season.
Mondays
Still Star-Crossed // Season One // ABC (May 29th)
This new Shondaland series is listed as an LGBT-themed program on Wikipedia, but we have no idea why! After two hours of research we had to give up and trust the goddesses will reveal everything to us in due time. This adaptation of Melinda Taub’s YA novel is set in Verona diectly after the deaths of Romeo and Juliet, and charts the Montague/Capulet drama that ensues. Obviously our money is on the Nurse as the gay character, but it’s bound to be damn good television regardless.
Stitchers // Season Three // Freeform (June 5th)
Camille Engelson is a bisexual computer scientist involved in a relationship with Linus, a male main character. Her bisexuality has not been explored past a mention, but I was told to include this show in this preview so here we all are together looking at that nice photograph.
Tuesdays
Queen Sugar // Season Two // OWN (June 20th)
The talent behind this show, which features Rutina Wesley as bisexual journalist Nova Bordelon, remains just as impressive as the talent in front of it. The Ava DuVernay project is bringing legendary Black lesbian filmmaker Cheryl Dunye and Mosquita Y Mari writer/director Aurora Guerrero onto their Season Two all-female directing team. Also we have somebody on board to write about it for Boobs Tube, bless us all.
The Fosters // Season 5 // Freeform (July 11th)
What will happen in Season Five of The Fosters! I guess we’ll find out on July 11th!
The Bold Type // Season One // Freeform (July 11th)
Hey remember Karma from Faking It? She got a new job, working at Scarlet Magazine, in this show inspired by Cosmpolitan and its former editor-in-chief Joanna Coles. Nikohl Boosheri plays recurring character Adena El-Amin, a Muslim lesbian feminist photographer who becomes close friends with Scarlet’s social media director.
Wednesday
The Handmaid’s Tale // Season One // Hulu (April 26th)
Is this the year’s best new television program? It just might be! This chilling dystopian feminist drama has given us the gift of Samira Wiley playing a feisty lesbian angel again and has turned Ofglen, a straight character in the book, into a lesbian played by Rory Gilmore. But be warned that the terror is very real, the queer persecution is visceral and terrifying, and it will almost certainly give you nightmares.
Younger // Season 3 // TV Land (June 28th)
Younger is a pretty fun, pretty feminist show that has, on occasion, written some radical storylines for its lesbian character, Maggie. She’s TVLand’s first original queer character. Your grandparents could fall asleep watching Everybody Loves Raymond at 9:30 and wake up watching Maggie organizing a lesbian orgy at 10:00, just for one example. On the downside, Maggie often gets lost in the shuffle. She’s Liza’s roommate and best friend, the keeper of her secret (that Liza’s not really in her 20s), and so she doesn’t fit into the larger storylines that circle around the publishing company where Liza and the rest of the main characters work. But there’s a lot to love about this show anyway. It’s about women and their relationships with each other and their careers, and a dumb boring straight love triangle that Sutton Foster somehow makes less annoying than it sounds.
Friday
Wynonna Earp // Season 2 // Syfy (June 9th)
Your favorite snarky, sexy, reluctant gunslinger will be back soon to fight more demons (literally and figuratively). Joined of course by her sister, Waverly, and Waverly’s bulletproof-vest-sporting girlfriend, Nicole Haught. And a mysterious (but certainly queer?) location called Pussy Willows.
Saturday
Orphan Black // Season 5 // BBC America (June 10th)
“We came to love each other, joined together, and vowed to protect each other,” the clones announce in the intense Season Five trailer. Then, Sarah: “And now we fight.” BBC has released synopses of the first several episodes, which include Cosima reuniting with Delphine.
Streaming
Dear White People // Season One // Netflix (April 28th)
This smart, funny, politically conscious program based on the critically acclaimed film is must-see TV… if only its queer female characters were as good as the rest of it. Nia Long plays Neika, a lesbian-identified professor engaged to her girlfriend Monique and also having an affair with a male student. Cool!
Sense8 // Season Two // Netflix (May 5th)
Sense8, produced by the Wachowski sisters, has a trans woman played by a trans woman in a lesbian relationship with a Black woman, which is pretty f*cking great. Of the differences between Seasons One and Two, Jamie Clayton told NewNowNext, “The biggest difference the fans are gonna see is that it’s a lot bigger. There’s 16 cities, a lot of new characters. You’ll meet other Sense8s. For us that meant it took longer to shoot, and involved a lot more traveling. But you get find out the origins of BPO [the Biologic Preservation Organization] and what they’re doing. Now that the eight of us know what’s going on more, Season 2 really takes off with a bang.” Season Two also sees the entire cast in Brazil for Sao Paolo pride.
Master of None // Season Two // Netflix (May 12th)
Season Two of Aziz Ansari’s semiautobiographical dramedy sees its protagonist living in Italy and living the dream of learning how to make pasta. There was not a lot of kickass black lesbian character Denise, played by Lena Waithe, in the trailer, but we’re holding out hope!
Orange is the New Black // Season Five // Netflix (June 9th)
Season Four fucked up and broke our hearts. Season Five will take place in the immediate aftermath of that fucked up moment when the prisoners rise up against Litchfield’s conditions.
G.L.O.W. // Season One // Netflix (June 23rd)
This ensemble comedy from Jenji Kohan has so many women in it that if one of them isn’t at least bisexual I’m quitting my job. G.L.O.W. is based on the real story of the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling, a pro wrestling troupe founded in the mid-80s that toured and had a self-titled show that ran until 1990. The story is focused on Ruth Wilder, a struggling actress who takes her last shot at stardom by joining G.L.O.W. At least one man on one message board on one website on this internet has said, “Expect lots of lesbians and make outs.”
Also
Broad City – August TBD
Broad City debuts this August on Comedy Central, although I’m not sure when. But Ilana will remain bisexually oriented, I’m sure of that.
Read A F*cking Book Club: Let’s Talk About The Handmaid’s Tale
Welcome back to Autostraddle’s book club, where we pick a book and read it together and then talk about it. This month, due to its terrifying relevance and to keep up with the discussion of the Hulu series, we’re reading Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.
I don’t need to tell you that The Handmaid’s Tale is everywhere (but the following is your internet reading guide just in case). It’s crushingly relevant. It’s been at the top of bestseller lists since the election. It acts as a warning to conservative women. If you grew up in a fundamentalist cult, it feels very familiar. People are evoking it at protests and a symbol of resistance in contemporary America, but it’s important to remember that it’s an extremely marginalizing one. “Patriarchy is the logic of a system.”
As literature, The Handmaid’s Tale pays attention and investigates power and how it is wielded, while most literature right now prefers to look away from power and toward the self (forgetting that the self cannot escape power). It uses language to subvert and take control of meaning. But it “ignores the historical realities of an American dystopia founded on anti-Black violence.” It is only one vision of American catastrophe. Regardless, “Atwood is a buoyant doomsayer.” Here she is writing on what her novel means today and on watching her dystopia come to pass. And here she is stating what should be obvious: actions have consequences.
The Handmaid’s Tale has been adapted a few times over the years. No one remembers the 1990 movie. The new audiobook features contemporary updates from Atwood, including a warning on trading “liberty” for “safety.” Arguably, the most pressing adaptation is not the television show but one “of another text, one that is even closer to my heart: the life that I am living right this second.” Finally, in her discussion of the Hulu series, Riese writes: “I don’t think we’re at risk of becoming Gilead, or that lesbians are at the top of Trump’s chopping block, but sometimes a story feels real not because of its facts but because of its emotional truth. It was so close, too real, impossible, familiar, not enough, and everything, all at once.”
Discussion Questions:
When reading The Handmaid’s Tale, approximately how many times did the icy chill of recognition wash over you?
When reading The Handmaid’s Tale, approximately how many times did you check Twitter or the internet or the news or your carrier pigeons and discover something you were reading about had started to come to pass?
When reading The Handmaid’s Tale, approximately how many times did you have to stop reading The Handmaid’s Tale, get up, go and set it gently, carefully, in another room, and take a hot shower, face turned up under the stream, while weeping messily for a future that already seems lost?
Which part(s)?
What line kept getting stuck in your head, if any?
How long did it take before you could finish reading it?
Do you identify The Handmaid’s Tale most as feminist dystopia, historical realism, or waking nightmare?
Did reading The Handmaid’s Tale make you want to go have sex or masturbate or otherwise claim agency over your own body and sexuality in a way, as countless high school English departments have feared, or make you want to go do whatever the opposite of sex is?
To what degree do you think The Handmaid’s Tale can function as a symbol of or shorthand for contemporary reistance (like in the Texas abortion protests)? To what degree does its erasures and marginalizations prevent it from being effective in that way?
Do you think some folks are drawn to it as a symbol because it’s old enough to be readily available and probably already read, because it’s old enough to make its resonances seem all the more chilling, because it’s shallow enough and plausible enough to seem real, because it speaks to emotional truths, because contemporary literature looks more at the self than at the world and this is old enough to look at the world?
The Handmaid’s Tale was first published in the 1980s, and — whether or not it is feminist — is arguably rooted in at least some second-wave feminism. Does considering it in that context change your reading of it at all?
Did the framing device of the conference impact your reading of the narrative? Does seeing Offred as a narrator remembering and retelling a story instead of living it live, as we are given to believe for most of the novel, affect her credibility? What about in the context of academic dudes interpreting and translating and mediating her words?
Do you think you’ll ever sleep again?
“The Handmaid’s Tale” Is Finally Here, Super Queer, as Horrifying as You’ve Heard
The trick to creating a truly terrifying dystopia is showing us exactly how we got there. Sure, almost anyone can imagine a future gone mad with its own ugliness. But to tell us why, well, that’s where the real horror lies.
Hulu’s new original adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale is a startling reminder that what we as a society will accept as normal can and will change when the circumstances are right. Margaret Atwood’s dystopian feminist masterpiece may be more than 30 years old, but decades have done nothing to dull its sharp, merciless edges.
The new series has been called timely and topical and anti-Trump. Given your perspective, it could indeed be seen as all those things. But it is also timeless in the weary way that human’s ability to commit untold atrocities against other humans is timeless. Alas, misogyny, homophobia, and zealotry still remain ever-present unworthy foes.
The Handmaid’s Tale tells the story of Offred (played by a magnificent Elisabeth Moss), a woman who serves as a childbearing concubine to the ruling class in a world plagued by infertility. Among her friends and fellow Handmaids are not one, but two gay women – Moira (Samira Wiley) and Ofglen (Alexis Bledel) – whose lives also play prominently.
Authoritarian religious militants have taken over what used to be the United States and rule it with puritanical zeal and lots of machine guns. And to get there, to no one’s surprise, their first step was to strip women of their rights. Our right to own property. Our right to have bank accounts. Our right to work. Our right to autonomy over our own bodies. Stop me if you’ve heard any of this before.
The new nation Gilead is a patriarchal (because, of course, it’s always patriarchal) system forged with devout totalitarianism and forcible piousness. All the Handmaids must wear plain crimson dresses and robes, which in public are punctuated by white, blinder-like bonnets to keep them from seeing and being seen.
The rest of the country’s barren women are divided by specific purpose: the Marthas (who cook and clean), the Aunts (who command other women), and the wives (who marry commanders and raise the children the Handmaids bear as their own). Those women with no purpose or those women labeled “Gender Traitors” (that would be us queer folk) are sent to clean toxic waste in the colonies and die.
What makes The Handmaid’s Tale so striking isn’t just this world where all the pretense of female equality has been stripped away, but the ordinariness of such oppression even today.
Sure, we might not label women Handmaids or Marthas or Gender Traitors – just yet. But we do have states passing laws forcing doctors to lie to women about abortions. And we do have congressmen incensed that men should have to pay for women’s prenatal care. And we do have a president who openly bragged about being able to grab women by the pussy. So, there’s that.
In Moss, the series has found its perfect Offred. While the actress has no need to prove herself, Mad Men and Top of the Lake did that for her, she puts on a master class in restraint and under-the-surface everything – rage, sorrow, disbelief, despair, et al. Most of her dialogue is delivered via internal monologue voiceovers – as Handmaids are not to be seen or heard, just fucked for procreation in nightmarish sterile rituals called “the ceremony.”
We see Offred’s before and after as the series unfolds. Now, as a Handmaid, and then, in flashback as a book editor with a husband and a child. Before her best friend was Moira, a seemingly carefree lesbian played by the always winsome Wiley of Orange Is the New Black fame. After she walks daily to do errands with Ofglen, a seemingly dutiful fellow handmaid and secret lesbian played by Bledel of Gilmore Girls fame.
Bledel is a quiet revelation here. Sure we knew she could banter with the best of them and look utterly adorable. But nothing prepared us for the haunted torment those big baby blues could convey. In the first three episodes released to the press, Ofglen’s story deviates most from the books (giving her a wife and child) and making her sexual orientation integral to her past and present – as it should be.
By amplifying the queer character’s voices – and indeed making them essential to building empathy in the audience – Hulu’s adaptation has taken things a bold step further than its source material. We care for Ofglen and Moira because they are people caught in a monstrous scenario where their entire existence, in fact even the word “gay,” has been outlawed.
This is something LGBTQ viewers will feel intrinsically. For all the strides we’ve made both legally and societally, our fight is never far off. Sure, we’re not rounded up and arrested in bars anymore. And, sure, we aren’t banned from marrying the people we love anymore. But so-called “Religious Freedom” laws and bathroom bills keep trying to legislate away our very lives. Progress is all too fragile all too often.
Rounding out the show’s supremely talented female cast is The Leftovers veteran Ann Dowd (as the Nurse Ratched-like true-believing Aunt Lydia who directs the Handmaid indoctrination centers) and Chuck star Yvonne Strahovski (as the Commander’s wife with the supremely paradoxical name of Serena Joy).
The Handmaid’s Tale is not easy to watch, yet mesmerizing in the way it depicts some of its most upsetting imagery in hushed tones. Just as stunning is its rich, visual language. The blood-red of the Handmaids’ robes. The agean coldness of the wives’ frocks. The first three episodes are directed by Reed Morano – the female cinematographer behind Frozen River, Kill Your Darlings and Beyoncé’s Lemonade – and it shows. Shots taken from above exemplify one of Gilead’s creepiest (because, trust me, they’re all creepy) religious maxims, “Under his eye.”
The best dystopian stories remind us, even in their most fantastical hyperbole, that the human capacity to accept the unacceptable is nearly boundless. It is only rivaled by our desire to find convenient solutions to complex problems. Cling to dogma. Assert your superiority. Blame the other. Lather, rinse, repeat.
The essential question The Handmaid’s Tale poses then is whether, when faced with the unspeakable, we look away or stare ahead. Whether we comply or we resist.
Hulu’s Handmaid’s Tale Is Queerer Than It Ever Was and Closer Than I Knew
I had English 239 first thing that afternoon and I’d slept in after staying up late, reading The Handmaid’s Tale, already in hot pursuit of my inevitable distinction as the most vocal participant in classroom discussions. I woke up drowsy with dystopia but unalarmed by it, mostly. I was a chronically unhappy person, but the world itself, on a macro level, did not regularly terrify me.
I woke up in a small room in a house I shared with six other Michigan undergraduates: a single mattress on the floor, a small desk with a flip-top like the ones we used in grade school, a floor lamp.
My phone reported a series of voicemails, all from an ex in New York. Something about buildings blowing up? It felt weird, like a joke.
But then I drifted into the living room, where the teevee was on and my roommates were standing around it, agape, as those first initial reports about the planes that flew into the World Trade Center came in. I heard the name “Osama Bin Laden” for the first time.
Something had changed; was changing.
Classes were cancelled. I showered and walked to my best friend Becky’s sorority house. It was a beautiful fall day (my Rabbi would dwell on this point in his Rosh Hashanah sermon the next week, how beautiful it was that day) and everything felt strange, potentially dishonest, like anything could happen.
I wished English class hadn’t been cancelled. I still wanted to talk about The Handmaid’s Tale. It nagged at me all day like an intellectual earworm.
At the sorority house, a dozen or more girls from New Jersey and New York were pacing on the terrace, cell phones up, trying to reach family members back home. I was thinking about Offred on the phone with Moira: Look out, here it comes. When it was all said and done, those girls and their families and I were all fine. We were lucky, privileged, some mixture of both. I asked one of the girls, who was in my English class, if she thought it was jarring to be reading The Handmaid’s Tale now, in light of all this, but she hadn’t done the reading yet because she was cooler than me.
So Becky and I went out for lunch, to our favorite Greek diner that made salads with shredded lettuce, and that night I worked a dinner shift at The Macaroni Grill, which largely entailed answering the phone to confirm that we were open, and serving sad pasta to sad people. My friend who’d come over from Lebanon a few years prior spent the evening reminding us how lucky we were, that this didn’t happen more often.
A lot of things changed after that, in the U.S., but nothing as severe as we’d read in The Handmaid’s Tale. By the time the Bush Administration bombed Iraq and passed the Patriot Act, I’d long forgotten Offred’s warning: Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it.
But every time The Handmaid’s Tale came up in conversation, after that, I’d say I was reading that book on 9/11, even though I barely remembered it. But because of that bizarre timing, this story has always carried a specific, frozen weight to me. A book I’d felt mostly indifferent to on the 10th of September felt suddenly relevant the next afternoon, though I wasn’t sure why.
I think I know, now. At that age, I already knew that anything could happen on a small, person-to-person level. I knew the death of a loved one could rocket in straight out of nowhere, and that heartbreak could land swiftly and without mercy. But this was the day that I learned that anything could happen on a huge, National level, and that it would happen suddenly, literally rocketing in, straight out of nowhere.
“Having been born in 1939 and come to consciousness during World War II, I knew that established orders could vanish overnight,” Margaret Atwood writes in a New York Times essay about the impetus behind the novel. “Change could also be as fast as lightning. “It can’t happen here” could not be depended on: Anything could happen anywhere, given the circumstances.”
This weekend, in an interview with The Los Angeles Times about the upcoming Hulu adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale, which debuts April 26th and is why I am writing about it today, Atwood noted, “MGM and Hulu started making this television series really well over a year ago, and they started shooting in September, before the election… and then the election happened, and the cast woke up in the morning and thought, we’re no longer making fiction — we’re making a documentary.”
Margaret Atwood on the set of “The Handmaid’s Tale”
I hadn’t picked up The Handmaid’s Tale since 2001 until last week, which I did in order to capably review and evaluate the series. I’d seen the first set of three episode screeners for the first time in February, with my roommate Erin, in the living room where an “APOCALYPSE” banner still hangs, left over from our Inauguration Day Funeral Party. We pressed play on the two episodes that followed the first like masochists consenting to more helpings of something irresistible but inevitably harmful, like another shot of tequila or a movie you know will give you nightmares, which I guess is what this was. At the time both of us were basically measuring our happiness levels on a scale where 1 represents “dark come soon” and 10, the ascribed peak, was “got out of bed today!”
I don’t think I really slept last night, I told her in the kitchen the next morning.
Nope, definitely was not happening for me. I think I got maybe… two hours?
Yeah it was like, have a nightmare, wake up from nightmare, fall back into a nightmare.
Just nonstop, just gettin’ those nightmares in!
Me, a few hours later: I can’t stop thinking about the Handmaid’s Tale.
Yup, scarred for life.
Either of us, the next day: Maybe I’ll never sleep again?
The final scene of the third episode — and I won’t tell you what happens in it, I won’t spoil you — was the most haunting, the one I kept seeing when I woke up between nightmares. The last ten seconds or so of that scene just stuck inside me. Maybe because it’s shot so well, like the entire series (which one of the most, if not the most, visually stunning television shows I’ve ever seen), but also maybe because it features a gay woman — called “Gender Traitors” in the world of The Handmaid’s Tale — alone in a room. In the Hulu series, the bodies of gay people are shifted from the wings, where they resided in the novel, into center stage.
I didn’t know this, going into it. I didn’t expect it, because we never expect an adaptation to have more lesbians than the story it was based on. I mean, we never expect anything on television to have lesbians at all, really.
I kept remembering a story Kate wrote for us in 2012, about the season of American Horror Story where Sarah Paulson played a lesbian journalist trapped in a psychiatric asylum, subjected to barbarous conversion therapy. Specifically, I remembered her headline: The Lesbians of American Horror Story: For Us, The Scary Parts Are Real.
Samira Wiley as Moira in “The Handmaid’s Tale”
This week, we will all experience this together: this dystopian story, coming — coincidentally! — at a potentially dystopian time. The novel has returned to best-seller lists, and a new audiobook edition, narrated by Claire Danes, came out this month. The audiobook includes bonus content, composed by Margaret Atwood, that answers the novel’s closing line, “Are there any questions?” with an actual scripted Q&A between academics and the presenting professor, read by actors. A 30-second trailer during the Super Bowl got a lot of buzz. This past weekend, buzz has been focused on a really disappointing panel at the Tribeca Film Festival and a viral marketing campaign at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.
The first three episodes of Hulu’s adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale debut April 26th and you should watch them because they are incredible, and so queer, and so feminist, no matter what noted Scientologist Elizabeth Moss says about “humanism” and regardless of and/or because Ilene Chaiken is apparently somehow obliquely involved in this production. The first three episodes were directed and executive produced by Reed Morano, who creates a chilling radical feminist aesthetic that resonates like her work on Beyonce’s “Sandcastles” and the gay TV series Looking. We’ll be publishing Dorothy Snarker’s review of the first three episodes on the 26th.
But right now I wanna talk about this queer feminist story and where it might land in your gut.
A recent profile of Atwood by Rebecca Mead in The New Yorker argues that similarities between the story and our present moment exist, but are not exact parallels. Donald Trump, thrice married, is not a model for traditional family values, and his religious affiliations seem mostly politically strategic rather than heartfelt; he prefers golfing on Sundays to church-going. To those differences I’d add another, more obvious one: Gilead has been structured in response to declining Caucasian birth rates and increased infant mortality, the result of chemical contamination, sexually transmitted diseases, contraceptives and feminism. Although birth rates have been in steady decline in the modern era, too, it’s hardly an emergency — we’re actually suffering from overpopulation. This is alarming in a different way: all those environmental factors that destroyed babies in Gilead are destroying the land and resources our abundance of babies need in the modern world.
But, as Mead points out, “what does feel familiar in The Handmaid’s Tale is the blunt misogyny of the society that Atwood portrays.” The bodies of the women of Gilead are owned and regulated by a male power class for whom reproductive rights and sexual freedom are framed as concepts that inevitably harm women, and from which men are permitted to “protect” them.
Atwood’s novel was written in the early ’80s, and she committed to creating a world comprised only of events that had actually happened and technology that already existed, although the novel is speculated to have been set around 2005. Regardless, the novel remains trapped in what seemed possible then, and the TV series yanks us into the modern day, which is one of many deviations it makes from the source material, some of which are related to diversity.
In the book, some women of color serve as “Marthas” — housekeepers, basically — and the entire African-American population is “resettled” to the Midwest for vague purposes. We eventually learn that at least one boatload of Jewish people who chose the “emigrate to Israel” option ended up just dumped into the ocean, which raises some questions about the fate of the Black population as well. In Bitch Magazine, Priya Nair notes that “Although Atwood dedicates just two lines to the fate of Black people in Gilead, the structures of oppression that Offred, the novel’s narrator, and the other white Handmaids face are taken largely from the experiences of enslaved Black women in America.” Thankfully, this is not the case in the series, in which Black women are handmaids, too. Executive Producer Bruce Miller said of the choice to cast black actors in the roles of white book characters, “what’s the difference between making a TV show about racists and making a racist TV show? Why would we be covering [the story of handmaid Offred, played by Mad Men‘s Elisabeth Moss], rather than telling the story of the people of color who got sent off to Nebraska?” Miller decided that in his Gilead, “fertility trumps all,” even racism.
Thus, in the series, Offred’s radical lesbian best friend Moira — political, rebellious, outspoken — is played by out Black actress Samira Wiley, who, as she did with Poussey in Orange is the New Black, plays Moira with world-worn light. In the book, Moira’s a freckle-faced white girl with an alternative lifestyle haircut and purple overalls. When every woman’s bank account is frozen, Offred recalls, “[Moira] was not stunned, the way I was. In some strange way [Moira] was gleeful, as if this was what she’d been expecting for some time and now she’d been proven right.”
It’s a cruel and certainly untrue observation, and perhaps speaks to the unconscious homophobia Offred doesn’t realize she still harbors towards even her best friend (earlier in the novel, she matter-of-factly recalls, “there was a time when we didn’t hug, after she’d told me about being gay; but then she said I didn’t turn her on, reassuring me, and we’d gone back to it.”) Likewise, any “glee” Offred sensed was likely affirmation; Moira’s awareness that the ideologies her best friend ignored before can no longer be dismissed or mocked, that now everything is on the table, and now they can finally address it. For me, it was one of the book’s most resonant passages, speaking to an outsider’s increased awareness of impending doom, reminding me of how many people of color reacted to white liberal surprise that a racist idiot had won the presidential election.
Moira serves an interesting function, then: she’s connected to a less institutionalized, more battle-worn network of other outsiders who’ve never trusted or relied upon the government to care about them, let alone take care of them. Later in the book, she’ll reference a destroyed mailing list of allies and how the women in her collective took on memorizing different pages of it. This concept could potentially resonate even more deeply with Moira as a Black queer character — Black Americans are uniquely aware that The State is not on their side, Black queer people, doubly so. With the series set more squarely in 2017, it also makes more sense for Moira to be Black, because a white lesbian might not have the same oppressive experience in pre-Gilead Massachusetts that Atwood imagined for Moira in 1984. Unfortunately though, so far at least, this increased resonance isn’t really explored, nor is the fact that in the series, Offred’s husband and daughter are Black, too. I won’t say more ’til I’ve seen the entire season, but… well, I just hope it plans to go beyond the mere casting of actors of color into fleshing out those intersectional margins.
Having another opportunity to witness Samira Wiley playing a lesbian on a critically acclaimed feminist-minded television series — dayenu. But the show blesses us again: Ofglen, Offred’s daily walking companion who has ties to a growing resistance, played by Alexis Biedel, is now also a lesbian. She had a wife, and a five-year-old son, from before.
We’ve all witnessed how lesbian motherhood and marriage has enabled many queers to regain status and value with their own formerly homophobic parents or other family units as well as in society at large, and in Gilead, that process takes on a new form. Although Moira references a “dyke roundup” and male homosexuals are regularly executed, it seems some lesbians are permitted to exist as long as they are capable of bearing healthy children, via a bizarre “Ceremony” that, although involving sexual intercourse and human bodies, is basically artificial insemination.
This increased attention to queer narratives is welcome, and appropriate because homophobia against lesbianism specifically is such a powerful example of political, cultural and interpersonal misogyny. Lesbianism dares to assert that men are unnecessary, which the patriarchy finds troublesome. In most (but not all!) cases, lesbian relationships cut practitioners off from traditional pathways to reproduction. In a world where reproduction is seemingly a woman’s sole purpose, gay men are worthless, but gay women are seen as malleable. Plus, due to the mechanics of cisgender sexual intercourse, a woman’s lack of sexual attraction to men is seen as irrelevant to the sexual act, male sexual disinterest in women is more, I guess, “problematic” to Gilead’s goals.
As Kate wrote about American Horror Story‘s unexpected queer horror five years ago, “What is so difficult and simultaneously interesting about this narrative is that it is not a far-fetched horror story.”
Elizabeth Moss as Offred, Alexis Bledel as Ofglen
I’d forgotten, I guess, that Moira was a lesbian in the book, too. That’s why I re-read it in the first place, ’cause I thought, watching the screeners, that all the queer stuff was entirely new, but another editor told me it wasn’t, so I went back to the source text.
It seems like a weird thing for me to forget — the kind of thing I’d usually notice, even back then when I still identified as straight but slightly bi-curious — but then again, I forgot nearly everything about the book besides its basic conceit and the scene where Offred’s debit card is shut off, and that I was reading it on 9/11. I guess that’s what stuck with me because that was the moment, as Atwood said, when “anything could happen anywhere.”
The Handmaid’s Tale will be, then, always something that surprises me with its immediate relevance. Back in 2001, it was a book I expected to tell a good story and turned out to resonate with the present moment, which even the teacher hadn’t planned on. Now, it was a show I expected to resonate with the present moment, but it turned out to also contain new stories about my community, and to be a genuine piece of queer women’s media. It will raise questions about how we fit into oppressive anti-female political paradigms, about intersectionality, about the importance of building our own inter-community support networks and restorative justice practices rather than relying on the all-too-fickle State. I don’t think we’re at risk of becoming Gilead, or that lesbians are at the top of Trump’s chopping block, but sometimes a story feels real not because of its facts but because of its emotional truth. It was so close, too real, impossible, familiar, not enough, and everything, all at once.
Remember how I told you about that moment near the end of the third episode, the one I found so haunting? When I re-watched the screeners last week, the moment I remembered so well I couldn’t forget it wasn’t there at all. I’d remembered how it felt. But I’d already forgotten how it was.
The Handmaid’s Tale debuts on April 26th on Hulu and the novel is our pick for this months’ Read a F*cking Book Club.
Read A F*cking Book Club: The Handmaid’s Tale
Welcome to Autostraddle’s book club, where we pick a book and all read it together and then talk about it. This month, due to its crushing relevance, we’re reading The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood.
The Handmaid’s Tale is a 1980s nightmare feminist dystopia where white men are in power, reproductive capabilities have slowed, women are forbidden to own property and ranked based on fertility and compliance, queer people are executed, and Offred, the protagonist, is one of a class of women who function as womb outsourcing for Commanders’ wives.
(It’s also a 10-episode series on Hulu coming April 26, featuring Elisabeth Moss and Samira Wiley.)
In the New York Times, Atwood writes on what her novel means today:
“Back in 1984, the main premise seemed — even to me — fairly outrageous. Would I be able to persuade readers that the United States had suffered a coup that had transformed an erstwhile liberal democracy into a literal-minded theocratic dictatorship?”
With the US turning into Gilead, the answer is “yes.” (Here’s Atwood at Lit Hub on watching her dystopia come true.) And part of that regime, like any repressive regime, is the control of women and childbirth.
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
The novel incorporates book burning, public executions, slut shaming, slavery, forced reproduction, concentration camps and essentialism, for starters. It’s an exploration of state control of women’s bodies. And it’s also an exploration of language: its evolution, its threat, its potential for resistance.
Atwood writes that “Offred records her story as best she can; then she hides it, trusting that it may be discovered later, by someone who is free to understand it and share it. This is an act of hope: Every recorded story implies a future reader.” And she concludes:
“In the wake of the recent American election, fears and anxieties proliferate. Basic civil liberties are seen as endangered, along with many of the rights for women won over the past decades, and indeed the past centuries. In this divisive climate, in which hate for many groups seems on the rise and scorn for democratic institutions is being expressed by extremists of all stripes, it is a certainty that someone, somewhere — many, I would guess — are writing down what is happening as they themselves are experiencing it. Or they will remember, and record later, if they can.
Will their messages be suppressed and hidden? Will they be found, centuries later, in an old house, behind a wall?
Let us hope it doesn’t come to that.”
Get The Handmaid’s Tale from your local bookstore, get it from Amazon, borrow it from your library or your Canadian friend who has the copy she read in high school, and we’ll meet back here in a month to talk all about it.
Pop Culture Fix: Subversive Lesbian Handmaids, Award-Nominated Lesbian Handmaidens and Other Maiden Stories
Welcome to your weekly pop culture fix, featuring important news from the last week in pop culture. Surprise!
The Teevee
+ It was announced last week that Alexis Bledel will be playing a subversive and dangerous lesbian in Hulu’s much-anticipated adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale. You can read about this and so many other lesbian and bisexual characters in the 2017 Winter TV Preview I published this morning. GLAAD says Samira Wiley is ALSO planning a lesbian so actual dreams will be coming true.
+ Broadly went behind-the-scenes of our new favorite show One Day At A Time and talked to 24-year-old queer television writer Michelle Badillo:
As a queer person working in mainstream entertainment, do you have other reservations, or hopes, about portraying queerness on TV?
My hope is that people, especially young people, have something to look at that makes them feel okay. As a teenager, I googled, “Am I a lesbian?” and “Am I a psychopath?” in the same day. If I had any context for lesbians, I might have known I wasn’t fundamentally broken. My other hope is that it normalizes queerness for people, but that’s my reservation too. I have a fear that instead of queer culture widening the scope of the mainstream, the mainstream will narrow the individuality of queer culture.
+ The Black Queer & Trans Representation In Star Is Everything
+ Netflix’s The OA weaves a gentle queer narrative
Film
+ ‘Moonlight’ was named Best Picture by National Society of Film Critics but Guy Lodge of The Guardian wonders if Moonlight shows that gay cinema has to be sexless to succeed.
+ Lesbian film The Handmaiden leads in nominations for the Asian Film Awards.
+ Indiewire is getting stoked for Sundance 2017 with a list of the films they’re looking forward to. Pretty much all of them look fantastic. Highlights relevant to your interests include:
- Horror anthology “XX” is made entirely by women, including Annie Clark
- Marti Noxon of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “UnReal” tells the story of a young anorexic doing “out of the box healing” in “To the Bone”
- “Noviate” looks at America’s postwar relationship with religion from inside a convent, featuring actresses like Melissa Leo and Dianna Agron.
- A documentary about the Gawker saga: “Nobody Speak: Hulk Hogan, Gawker and Trials of a Free Press”
- Strong Island, a documentary from William Ford about the murder of his brother, Yance, who was shot by a 19-year-old white mechanic who claimed self defense against Yance, who was black and unarmed.
- Dee Rees of Pariah and Bessie is getting lots of buzz for “Mudbound,” an epic period drama set in the post-WWII South.
+ The story of the 1964 murder of lesbian Kitty Genovese was the subject of a documentary film, “The Witness,” last year. Today is was announced that lesbian producer Christine Vachon’s production company Killer Films is heading up a narrative adaptation of the documentary.
+ Kenzo Pays Homage to Queer Safe Spaces in Powerful New Mini-Film
+ With “Discovery,” Star Trek Has Opportunity to Meaningfully Include Queer Identity In Series
+ “I Am Not Your Negro” Should Be Required Viewing For All Americans: On the James Baldwin documentary.
+ Lovesong stars Riley Keough as Sarah, who is dissatisfied by her husband and heads off on an impromptu road trip with her buddy Mindy, played by Jena Malone. Eventually, sexual tension builds and queer shit goes down, and it’ll hit theaters February 17th.
Etc.
+ Syd the Kid dropped a new single called “All About Me.”
+ Cheryl Dunye: This Is the Most Important Time to Make Queer Art