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‘A Sharp Endless Need’ Lives in the Intersection of Sex and Basketball

When it comes to writing that’s defined my life, there are few artists more important to me than Mac Crane. It’s not something I say easily. The art I love holds a piece of my heart, and that isn’t something I’m quick to give away. But when I first read Crane’s debut novel, I Keep My Exoskeletons To Myself, I had no other choice. Their writing helped me redefine my relationship to my own shame and showed me the ways institutions use shame to validate systems of surveillance and marginalization. They wrote with an assurance of love in the face of evil that’s stayed with me for years. It revitalized my belief that the best way to fight those institutions is through community care. Yet somehow, I learned just as much from their second novel, A Sharp Endless Need, as I did from their first.

The novel is a first-person narration by Mackenzie “Mack” Morris, a high school senior and point guard living in small town Pennsylvania in 2004, facing the looming deadline of college signing. The year is laced with equal parts sorrow and desire, beginning with the death of Mack’s father. In dying, Mack’s father leaves behind an inescapable amount of credit card debt, shifting Mack’s future scholarship from a matter of pride to a matter of necessity. Losing their father also means that Mack loses the parent who sees one of the most essential parts of themselves: who they are as a player.

On the other side of that grief comes Liv, a transfer student who joins the team and tears into every aspect of Mack’s life. The two are drawn to each other immediately, sharing a chemistry on the court that jumps off the page through masterful description. They each hold an innate understanding of the mind and body of the other, pushing each other beyond the boundaries of what they were told was possible. This goes for both their athletic plays and how they’re allowed to see each other. In playing basketball, they are able to give space to their queerness before speaking it out loud into the universe. As Crane writes, “But we knew, in the deeps of our hips, that basketball was more erotic than dancing; it was collaboration, a mutual creation, a way of fucking without touching.”

One of the many things I love about this novel is the way it is able to highlight the intersection of sex and basketball. It’s the language of bodies. At their heart, great sex and great basketball rely on the same fundamental principles: trust, attention, collaboration, and a desire to create something with whoever you’re with.

The time Mack spends around Liv brings their queerness to center stage, something both beautiful and dangerous. Being a queer teenager in a red town in a red state in 2004 comes with heartbreaks. Mack lives in a world where they aren’t given the language they need to express their queerness fully. Both Mack and Liv must deal with mothers who want the most convenient versions of their children, not the children they actually have. Men are allowed to push into both of their lives because they are told it’s their right. Crane writes of all these experiences with a sharpness that cuts deep into the heart of the reader.

The most brutal scene occurs when Mack’s teammates start mocking Dani, a lesbian player on a rival team. It’s not just the hatefulness of these comments that hurts; it’s the fact that they are coming from the people who are supposed to have Mack’s back the most — the people with whom they are supposed to share a sacred teammate bond. That kind of betrayal has the highest potential for hurt, and it forces readers to look fully into the ugly jaws of shame externalized and internalized homophobia create. In these moments, Liv becomes a place of refuge for Mack: “I simply wished Liv would, somehow, against all sense, all understanding of the world and how it works, choose me.”

As the novel progresses, the pressure of Mack’s college signing builds. Scouts come from around the country to watch Mack’s team play, joining stands full of people watching and passing their judgments. Part of being an athlete, especially on such a high level, is putting on a performance and being judged for that performance. As Mack puts it: “It occurred to me that most spectators only like athletes for what they give them: money, pride, excitement, and entertainment. Otherwise, they’ll write them off faster than the time it takes AI to shake a defender.”

Through Mack, we experience the pressure and devastation of letting your team down in front of a crowd. But on the other end of that devastation, there’s a euphoric high, an ability to become a basketball god. The feeling can be intoxicating. It’s one that’s easy to conflate with love.

The pressure, stress, and grief of Mack’s life push them into substance use, drinking and doing whatever drugs become available to them. Addiction so often fills the space where care is supposed to be. It finds people when they don’t have the tools to have peace within their bodies and lives. One of the most common misconceptions I’ve heard around young competitive athletes is that they’re unlikely to use substances, much less struggle with substance abuse. A large part of that misconception comes from the morality complex people have around substance use. Moral purity teaches us to look down on athletes who fall into addictive cycles instead of asking why they ended up there in the first place. The world responds with punitive measures instead of love, care, and curiosity, making it incredibly difficult for young, vulnerable athletes to get what they need.

Obviously, not every athlete falls into addictive cycles, but selling the narrative that aspiring D-1 athletes are unlikely to struggle with substance use ignores the pressures they experience in their daily lives. In high-level athletics, there’s a thin line between ambition and self-destruction. It’s a line Mack has had to walk ever since they decided they wanted to play D-1. We live in a world where athletes are told they have a narrow window of value. Burn bright until you burn out. The arena we’ve created doesn’t give young players a full view of what their life can be beyond their glory on the court. That’s something Mack has to seek out on their own.

This novel asks readers to look unflinchingly into the most brutal truths of life. We force people to mirror the systems that hurt them in order to survive. Love is far closer to violence than most of us are prepared to admit. Addiction doesn’t exist in a vacuum and never has. Greatness will never be a substitute for love.

In sharing these truths, the novel also invites us to expand our imagination of what the world can be. This story operates like a sign wave: The dip of tragedy is paired with the inverse possibility of what love can do for us in the face of that tragedy. Crane gives us all of this in a novel that’s vibrant and grimy and hot and poetic and aching. Though this novel is a love letter to basketball, you don’t have to love or even understand basketball to read it. Within these pages basketball isn’t just a sport; it’s a way of speaking to the expansiveness of desire and the human condition. Though the depths of that condition can so often feel like they are beyond language, Crane’s more than up for the job.

A Sharp Endless Need by Mac Crane is out now.

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Gen

Gen Greer (she/her) is a dog lover, runner, and slasher enthusiast. Her work has appeared in Queerlings, Haunted Words Press, Black Moon Magazine, and elsewhere. You can find her looking for little tasks and on Instagram at @doloresneverlolita.

Gen has written 8 articles for us.

The Mid-30s Divorcées Who Once Built a Sex Throne

Sex/Life is a series all about the secret sexy business of couples, throuples, exes who still fuck for some reason, LDR darlings, polyculites, and any other kind of amorous grouping your perfect heart can fathom. We send them nosey questions, they record themselves answering them, and we transcribe that conversation for all of us to enjoy. All names have been changed and any identifying details removed.

Want to share the sex story of your relationship? Email [email protected] for details.

Riley is a 39 year-old dean who enjoys horseback riding, snowboarding, and her adorable 7 year-old son. Mae is 35, an avid runner who also teaches yoga and works in tech, and loves watercolor. They live in southern California, are both previously divorced, and have been together for two years (two-and-a-half, if you count the friend-zoning).

And this is how they fuck:

What was your sex life like when you first started dating?

Riley: Really hot. I don’t think that’s changed fundamentally, but there’s such an excitement at the start — exploring them with all that fun, sexy energy. Lots of late nights and early mornings. I was exhausted at work, but it was worth it.

Maybe the frequency has gone down, but the better we know each other and feel comfortable together, the better the sex is.

Mae: We check in about this a lot, which I love. I think there’s more variety, right? Even in terms of what we’re channeling. The emotion behind it.

Riley: Oh, yeah.

Mae: You know? I feel like in the beginning you’re insatiable.

Riley: Yeah. Lust.

Mae: And now we can just, you know, take our time. It’s evolved in a good way.

Riley: Agreed.

You don’t live together — how does that impact your sex life?

Riley: We were both recently divorced when we met. It was an interesting time in our lives, a lot of rebuilding and starting over. I have a son from a previous marriage, but after living closer to Mae for a while, the commute to his school and my work became too much. He needed to be near his friends and school community, which is 15 miles south of Mae. So due to my son, we’re taking our time with moving in together, being mindful about it. He’s a little guy with big feelings and it’s been kinda hard on him. So this transition has been underway for nearly a year, lots of moving and construction ups and downs.  Plus, you love your space in Long Beach. 

Mae: I do, I love my place in Long Beach. It’s everything I need: efficient, my projector to watch movies on, a balcony. It’s a nice, safe space.

Riley: I also feel like we do kind of live together, since we’re always together, right?

Mae: Correct.

Riley: So it’s kind of silly that you have a place, even though you love it.

Mae: Well, we get to live our single girl life there. It’s a nice crashpad, a deluxe apartment in the sky, where I’ve built my life and community. I think of us as in a little boat together, with our dogs, driving back and forth on the 405.

Riley: That’s how you know we love each other.

Mae: We pick each other up from LAX.

Riley: It’s really cute.

Mae: Yep. Even on a Thursday.

How has having a child impacted your sex life?

Mae: It’s just the nature of being a parent, that you have to put his needs first. And sometimes that means we get a little delayed!

Riley: This might be slightly off-topic, but I think it connects — my job also impacts things. I work in education, and it’s draining with the kids’ and parents’ needs. It’s like I’m pouring from my cup constantly, caring for other kids and then worrying about my own, and right now have a crazy commute. I often feel depleted, which’s unfair to you. And again, ‘cause he’s a little guy, I have to do a lot for him when he’s here: picking him up, managing his showers, making his dinner…

Mae: His oodles!

Riley: His oodles that he is obsessed with! So being a parent isn’t the only factor. I get really tired. I’m a sleepy girl, and is that because of my job or because I’m a Taurus? Not sure! [Laughs]

Mae: All that to say: she is eyes-closed by about eight o’clock.

Riley: Yeah. I’m so tired. His needs come first, so logistically, sometimes we can’t get it on because he’s around. But we do a good job of finding ways to be intimate, prioritizing that part of our relationship or acknowledging when it needs attention.

Mae: Yes. Sometimes we even just talk about affection, right? Like just the little touches when you pass by. It doesn’t even have to be very physically intimate. Like in the Esther Perel podcast when she says, “Foreplay begins after your last orgasm,” or something to that effect. We do sometimes look at the calendar and say we have to prioritize it. If we go too long, we get cranky and anxious, we need that reassurance. It’s just a moment of insecurity, but we need that reassurance. And sex is a good way to show, not tell.

Riley: Yeah, for sure.

Do you have a top/bottom dynamic?

Riley: Kind of yes, kind of no.  Mae, you tend to like to be the top. But it’s maybe 55-45. You also like it when I take charge. I think in my previous relationships,  I felt like I couldn’t be the top. I dated more masc-presenting people — and not that mascs can’t be bottoms, but these happened to be some pretty stone tops. So I got used to that. Part of why I like our relationship is we’ve uncovered a pretty intense top desire I have, and it’s fun for you too.

Mae: Yeah, I’d love to see you explore it! When we met, I felt like you preferred bottoming, but you just needed the chance to explore.  I feel like sometimes it’s 60-40, 65-35. It depends.

Riley: I disagree with those numbers. [Laughs]

Mae: Wow. Okay. [Laughs] Either way, it’s not like it’s ever a short affair for us.

Riley: No.

Mae. I mean it’s not all night long, but we do take turns a couple times, we’re very switchy.

Do you feel like your sex drives are well matched?

Riley: Yes. Yes. Yes. For sure.

Mae: Can’t see me but I’m nodding yes.

Riley: Effusively. Yes. Both of us.

Mae: Thank goodness. 

Riley: I know. 

Mae: Because there’s no real way —on the internet when you’re online dating, which is how we met — to like, come out and talk about it. Some people can, but — oh Riley made a cringe face.

Riley: I know. I don’t, I don’t mean to be judgy, but! If I saw that on someone’s profile —

Mae: Maybe that’s just where we’re at culturally, and what our upbringings molded us into!

Riley: It’s just, it’s presumptive! Like, I’m just going on a date with you. We can talk about this and figure it out.

Mae: ‘Cause who knows, right? Like even as we were talking just now, you used to feel like you were a lot more bottomy, so if you had to advertise, it doesn’t even leave you room to grow or explore.

Riley: Right, and then it sort of locks you into a situation. So, I don’t know, I feel bad that it was judgy! It’s not how I meant it. But yeah, I think we both have healthy sex drives.

Mae: Mm-hmm!

Riley: And I’m glad they’re matched.

Are there things you like to do together during sex, or don’t like to do?

Mae: Riley won’t slap me in the face.

Riley: [Laughs] I need to clarify! I don’t like anything in the face, that feels too personal and violent. Mae can never hit me in the face — I have trauma from breaking my nose as a kid. But yeah, I will slap your ass or anything else you want. I did it so hard one time, your dog whined!

Mae: Yeah, that rattled my bones a little bit. 

Riley: Well, you said harder. 

Mae: I did [laughs], so wish granted! It was very consensual, to be clear.

Riley: I think that that’s kind of our only — or my only off-limits thing. And by proxy yours. But we’re pretty experimental and open minded.

Mae: I agree. What about toys?

Riley: I’m super basic, I just love that one vibrator of yours — the Mod, I think?

Mae: Oh my god, what an OG.

Riley: That thing is powerful. Which is the one you like? The little sucker one?

Mae: I guess it’s called a Womanizer. I hate the name! They gotta change it! They’d sell more with a rebrand. But yeah, it was recommended to me by my sister and my friend, and it’s something else.

Riley: Yeah, you definitely enjoy that one for sure. [Laughs] I also love, love, [hums triumphant reveal music]: The glass dildo. 

Mae: The glass dildo, folks! A tip though, if you’ve never tried one: don’t take it in your carry-on, because under the TSA screen, it will look like water. It will look like liquid.

Riley: I don’t know, they can identify a dick.

Mae:  They pull you aside. It’s so humiliating. 

Riley: That’s the worst. 

Mae: Do you remember — wasn’t it LAX?  When we were coming back from Chicago. 

Riley: Yes!

Mae: Chicago didn’t care. LAX decided to make an example of me. [Laughs] The TSA agent goes, Ma’am, is there an adult toy in here? 

Riley: So awkward.

Mae: Then I go Yes, there is. Yeah. More than one! 

Riley: [Laughs] Oh my God. You can’t take us anywhere.

Mae: The one thing I won’t travel with through TSA, ever — I’ve brought dildos and vibrators, but I will not bring handcuffs. [Laughs] I won’t bring bondage stuff. I don’t want to be deemed unfit to fly. And mine aren’t actual handcuffs, ’cause those are uncomfortable, even with that little fuzz layer. It’s like a piece of felt.

Riley: Ours  are very comfy.

Mae: They’re true leather and fur-lined.  It’s hot, you’re just like, being held.

Riley: Wait, what happened on the way to Europe?

Mae: Oh, no, it was leaving Portugal. The TSA agent wasn’t wearing gloves and touched the vibrator. I was like, “Did you not know what it was? Or are you a creep?” It made me uncomfortable that he wasn’t wearing gloves.

Riley: Yikes. I was just like, “Oh my God, get me on this airplane.”

Mae: Yeah.

Riley: Like, keep it for all we care!

What are some things you’d like to try during sex?

Riley: I’m so giggly talking about this. I feel like we’ve kind of tried a lot. I’m interested in one of the pain wands. The violent wands.

Mae: She won’t slap me in the face, but she’ll zap me.

Riley: Yeah, I’ll electrocute you. I just can’t slap you. We do light bondage? We’d have to take it to the level of like, what is it? Shibari?

Mae: You said you knew some, right? You mentioned that like, pretty early on. We’ve been a little busy.

Riley: We’ve been too busy with our toys and glass dildo and going to Europe, exactly. I think there isn’t much left, unless we wanted to bring other people into it. But you know how I feel about that. [Laughs] 

Mae: Never. 

Riley: It’s a hard no from me.

Mae: It’s in the contract.

Or try again?

Mae: I mean, the glass dildo became one of those.

Riley: I know! I just, I like, love that! I’m really on a kick. Maybe we need to take it easy on the glass dildo for a while. I need help.  I feel like we could try anal again—

Mae: We do. Sometimes.

Riley: But it’s not actual anal. It’s like, a finger.

Mae:  Anal lite. Anal adjacent.

Riley:  Just a little button tap. I don’t know, Mae, is there anything you’d like to try again?

Mae: The Throne.

Riley: Ooh, the Throne. 

Mae: So a few years ago, I was in Cancun with family under sad circumstances. It was a last hurrah for my Mom, and Riley ended up coming down for a few days. She wasn’t there just to make love to me, she was there to fuck me. She came to Cancun to be dirty and party. So we did, and Riley set up a room chair, put towels over it, and Riley set up a pillow for her knees on the marble floor.

Riley: [Laughs] You make me sound old! I know I’m the older one, but come on! I can’t kneel on that. Not for as long as I want to, anyways.

Mae: Even on carpet, that wouldn’t be a good time. You’d get raspberries. So then Riley proceeded to eat me out.

Riley: And you were watching the Cancun sunset. 

Mae: It was after a long day at the pool, taking tequila shots. It was awesome. We hooked up, the toys came out, we moved to the bed. Later my sister and her husband were coming to meet us before dinner, and my sister called to say she was on her way — from just a few doors down — and we were like oh shoot, we need to put the toys away!  So I rushed, took all the vibrators and everything away, washed them so quick, then we hear a knock. My sister takes two steps in and points at the throne. 

We forgot it was there! It’s so obvious what it’s for!

Riley: Especially with the pillow in front. 

Mae: My sister was like, Nice throne, totally called us out. I got a little embarrassed but we started laughing hysterically and she was like No don’t worry about it. I love that. Love that for you.

How important are orgasms to your sex life?

Riley: Before I met you, one or two orgasms was like “wow ok, I really went for it.” With you — it’s six plus. It’s crazy. We’ve unlocked a level I didn’t know was possible! It’s wild. But there’s never any pressure if it doesn’t happen.

Mae: Sometimes nothing does happen, and that’s okay.

Riley:  I feel bad ’cause I have so many! They really do just keep coming. Literally. I keep coming.

Mae: [Laughs] One time, Riley — I’m not kidding — had an orgasm while she was orgasming. It was the wildest thing.

Riley: I really appreciate you saying that it’s okay if it doesn’t happen, ‘cause it matters to me that I’m at least trying to make sure you have a good time and feel good, even if you don’t orgasm. But it matters to me, and I hope that effort comes through.

Mae: It does. We differ in that way. I have some past sexual trauma, so it takes more for me to let go. It doesn’t always happen.

Riley: True, but I think you still do have them pretty often right?

Mae: Oh. To be clear, l get fucked within an inch of my life. I orgasm more with you than I ever have in my life, and more intensely, longer. The other night I spun off into another dimension.

Riley: I had to put my hand over her mouth because she was screaming so loud.

Mae: I didn’t even come to until your hand covered my mouth. I don’t even know where I went.

Riley: Hot though. I love that.

Mae: Oh, it was so intense and so good. We’ve discussed what if we physically can’t in the future, if one of us gets sick or something. It’s not all about that, there’s so many ways to show and experience intimacy.

Riley: Yeah. And I mean, this brings up kind of a broader question of — being queer, being a lesbian, defining what sex is outside of heteronormative sex, which is centered on penetration. What I consider sex you might not, or vice versa. We can fool around and then I’ll be like, okay, goodnight! And nobody’s mad.

What role does masturbation play in your sex life?

Riley: Not central, but I still masturbate. You?

Mae: Mm-hmm.

Riley: I love when we talk about it. It’s very hot to me when you tell me you what you were thinking about. Touching myself is good foreplay, too.

Mae: I agree. Masturbating while we’re having sex or when we’re apart and then telling each other about it builds momentum. It’s like it’s a tool for us.

Riley: Yeah. I’ve had exes who looked down on it, so it’s freeing that we’re open about it. I still have some shame around it, weirdly. Something I’m working through.

Mae: I’m here for it.

Riley: Thanks, baby. Also, and this is not a groundbreaking comment but, I think that it’s just so important to masturbate to understand what you like. It makes sex so much better.

Tell us about the most memorable sex you’ve had together.

Riley: We’ve tried to answer this question before.

Mae: The Orgasm-In-An-Orgasm was one of them. 

Riley: Definitely.

Mae: I think the Throne… Oh my gosh. No, but we didn’t even tell you the other part of The Throne!

Riley: No, no, no. This was after. The Dolphin? 

Mae:The Dolphin! 

[HYSTERICAL LAUGHTER]

Riley: The Dolphin was not Throne day, that was the next morning.

Mae: Was that the next morning? Oh, it’s all blending together. It was such a whirlwind!

[MORE LAUGHTER]

Riley: Basically in Mexico, the next morning — as Mae said, I was there for 48 hours and I came to get down to business: tequila and sex. I don’t know what we were doing differently, but it was just so good.

Also, sidenote: Mae mentioned we went to Mexico for a really sad reason. I won’t get into it, but what matters is that we were long distance then. You were in Chicago dealing with a family situation, and I was still in California.

Mae: Correct.

Riley: We were only seeing each other once a month. This was our monthly visit, so there was a lot of tension to release!  I missed you so much and being away was hard, and for a hard reason, too. So there was a part of me that knew I was leaving soon. Knowing I was leaving soon, I was anticipatorily sad, so we had some super hot sex and I don’t know what happened, but —

Mae: Riley squealed. Like— 

Riley: Like Mariah-Carey-level.

Mae: Whistle tone.

Riley: Almost unreachable to human ears.

Mae: I guarantee older humans didn’t hear it. You were communicating with the dolphins. She was echolocating.

Riley: It was so crazy. 

Mae: That was… yeah I don’t know that I wanna recreate that. [Laughs] It was wild. Every day’s an adventure for us. Not to say we don’t get into our routines — we know what we’re into at the moment and can get the job done.

Riley: Sometimes we just gotta be efficient about it.

Mae: Right, yes. But I think we’ve continued to evolve down to the detail, we keep exploring each other and seeing what feels good.

Riley: Wait, what was the question? Now I’m lost, thinking about it.

Mae: Memorable times! 

Riley: Memorable times! Yeah, there’s so many, that’s why it’s hard to pick just one. I mean, visiting you in Chicago and just hanging out and like, sorry to your dad. [Laughs]

Mae: Jeez, yeah. 

Riley: There’s just so much passion! We were just like, we couldn’t get enough of each other.

Mae: Well we missed each other! Our relationship has gone through a lot that’s not typical to experience early on. Our honeymoon wasn’t very long — but I’m glad I at least knew you as a friend before that. 

Riley: Yeah, I friend-zoned Mae for a while—

Mae: Six months, to be clear.

Riley: That was a whole thing. [Laughs] 

Mae: It was a whole thing. But that’s for a different… podcast.

Riley: Before we met, I was on kind of a slut spiral, if you will.

Mae: Oh, wow. 

Riley: I think you were dating people more intentionally. I mean, you were like definitely having sex with people, but I wasn’t as judicious. I was leaning in to being single and dating.

Mae: That’s why she friend-zoned me: she just wanted to be a party girl.

Riley: That’s not true! But yeah, I decided I needed a break. [Laughs] I was like, I can’t anymore. I can’t date anyone. I need to center myself. Maybe be celibate for a while and do some yoga and reflect. 

But I mean, sex is always good and, largely, having sex with other women, lesbians, queer people, is wonderful. I think what makes our relationship so good is the feedback loop. We have great sex, and because we have such great sex, our relationship is really good. And then because we’re so in love, we have really great crazy transcendental sex. So yeah. It’s special in that way.

Mae: Love you. 

Riley: I love you too!

Sex/Life is a series all about the secret sexy business of couples, throuples, exes who still fuck for some reason, LDR darlings, polyculites, and any other kind of amorous grouping your perfect heart can fathom. You can join them by emailing [email protected]! (No writing experience necessary.)

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Join AF+!
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Sex/Life

A series that gives readers a backstage pass into the sex lives of queer couples (and throuples, polycules, etc) around the world. To share your own story, email [email protected].

Sex/Life has written 3 articles for us.

‘Talking About Sex Gives Me Literal Hives’

Q:

I’m in a new relationship where I’m trying really really hard not to repeat the patterns of my last relationship. The short version: I find it nearly impossible to talk about sex and ask for what I want. My sexual shame was not THE reason me and my ex broke up after two years together, but it certainly contributed to our issues. She did everything she could to create a safe environment for me and I just couldn’t do it.

Now I’m in a new relationship, have had some therapy, though I can’t afford to continue. And I’m having the same problems. I cannot talk about sex or ask for what I want sexually. It literally makes me break out in hives. I’d rather say nothing and keep having sex that is fine even if not exactly what I want. I don’t think I even deserve what I want if I can’t ask for it right? I’ve only been seeing my girlfriend for a few months and I’ve talked to her a bit about my talking about sex issues. She’s super kind and understanding but I just feel like it could create issues in the long run. I’m fine with her talking about what she likes and wants during sex but when it comes to myself I find it nearly impossible. Like I’m interested in some things I’ve never really had the courage to ask for like anal and stuff. But when I try to put it to words I shut down and get SWEATY it is not cute.

I’ve tried so many things. Closing my eyes while talking. Getting drunk (I know that’s a bad solution). I just can’t get there. I guess I’m just wondering if there’s any last ditch strategies anyone has or if anyone can relate or if I should just give up trying all together and accept that this is the way life has to be.

A:

Hi! First I just want to say, everyone deserves the sex they want to have, full stop. You shouldn’t punish yourself here. If talking about sex is too hard for you, that’s totally understandable — and relatable! Once upon a time, I really struggled here as well. I may not have had all the physiological side effects you describe, but it still felt like a total block. And I also sometimes relied on alcohol to ease me into these conversations. You’re right; it’s not a great or healthy solution by any means, but it’s an impulse I understand and do not judge you for.

It sounds like there could be some underlying trauma here. At the very least, there’s a heavy layer of shame. It’s good you’ve sought out therapy for this in the past, but I’m also sympathetic toward the fact that that is no longer financially viable, so I won’t push that as an option too much. But it does sound, of course, like some self-work needs to be done here but also like it has perhaps happened in some capacity already. As far as short term solutions go, I have an idea of something to try out: writing.

I did notice something about your letter: You wrote that you want anal. That’s specific! You wrote it! And submitted it to me, another person, to read. With also the understand that other people would read it. Sure, it’s anonymous and sure I’m not your partner, but that’s huge! You do know what you want or want to try, and you’re able to express it, just not verbally. I think we talk a big game about open and honest communication here in this advice column, but I think it’s easier said than done.

Hear me out: What if you tried writing down your desires? This can be an incredibly liberating practice, even if it’s just done privately. You don’t detail the kinds of things you’ve tried already, but if this isn’t one, give it a whirl. Keep a sex journal. Do it just for yourself at first. Write down what you want, what feels good, what you haven’t tried but want to. Explore that on the page and see how that feels.

Then, see if you’re able to let your girlfriend in through writing too. You could show her passages from your sex journal or writer her a letter or even write her an email. I’m serious! That may sound impersonal and awkward, but it doesn’t have to be. This was a strategy I used when I was younger when it came to talking about mental health with my parents and other people in my life. I could not do it verbally, but I could be super super open in a written form. I think having a conversation with your girlfriend ahead of time — not about sex itself but about the fact that you have things you want to express pertaining to sex over email/in a letter/etc — could lay safe groundwork to communicate in this slightly non traditional but still totally valid way.

I want you to be able to ask for what you want, because again, I think everyone deserves this. But if you have to find an alternative way to communicate, that’s totally fine, and I encourage you to at least try. Maybe this process will help you eventually be able to communicate verbally. But that also doesn’t have to be the end goal right away. The end goal should be you self-advocating for pleasure, however that might look for you!

You can chime in with your advice in the comments and submit your own questions any time.

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Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya

Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya is the managing editor of Autostraddle and a lesbian writer of essays, fiction, and pop culture criticism living in Orlando. She is the former managing editor of TriQuarterly, and her short stories appear in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Joyland, Catapult, The Offing, The Rumpus, Cake Zine, and more. Some of her pop culture writing can be found at The A.V. Club, Vulture, The Cut, and others. When she is not writing, editing, or reading, she is probably playing tennis. You can follow her on Twitter or Instagram and learn more about her work on her website.

Kayla has written 1023 articles for us.

2 Comments

  1. I was also going to suggest writing (especially after they named some specific desires in the letter). I too find it much easier to express myself in writing, also because it means I don’t have to be hyper-aware of my response (or my facial reactions) versus having an in-person conversation.

    I know she already verbalizes them, but writing can also be a way for your girlfriend to share desires or interests or preferences… it doesn’t have to feel like a one-way, like you are unloading some big secret you’ve kept locked up.

    Maybe reframing this not as a problem to be solved but as finding new/different ways to communicate about this will take some of the pressure off (it seems like it is weighing on you a lot, LW). And I wonder if there a way to make it feel more playful? Like, if writing things out in a narrative like a letter feels too overdetermined, maybe you two can text about it while not being in the same space? Or leave little notes for each other and pass them back and forth?

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GLAAD’s 2025 Social Media Safety Index Is Bleak — So What’s Next?

When Elon Musk changed Twitter to X, I vowed not to honor his chosen name. Now, nearly two years later, I’ve accepted that I was in denial. Twitter is gone. All that’s left is X.

The internet is broken. This is abundantly clear to me not only as a queer person but as the editor for one of the few remaining online publications not owned by a media giant. While I finally stopped “tweeting” from my personal account last month, it hasn’t been an easy platform to abandon. The mix of bots and subscribers under almost every post say horrid things or they comment @grok?? asking Elon’s AI bot to give them misinformation in exchange for poisoning the air. Every time I’ve logged on over the past two years, it’s made me feel terrible — and not in the jokey way we used to describe. And yet, it’s still the largest social media platform to share written work. Even in its current form, it boosts traffic for this site, getting our hard work out to readers new and old. I’ve stopped posting from my personal account, but the Autostraddle account still plans to use that terrible place to share our articles. There’s nowhere else to go.

GLAAD’s 2025 Social Media Safety Index was released this morning and their findings are brutal. Using their Platform Scorecard, GLAAD’s team assessed X, Meta (Instagram, Facebook, Threads), TikTok, and YouTube. The only company to receive over 50 (out of 100) was TikTok coming in at a whopping 56. However, as GLAAD notes, “TikTok should show greater transparency around the wrongful removal and demonization of LGBTQ-related content.” Is it the safest social media platform because it cares about queer people? Or is it the safest social media platform because it attempts to remove queer people altogether? How does it affect queer people if the only platform not full of hate speech encourages them to write things like le$bean to avoid shadowbans and forces sex workers to call it corn?

And yet, it’s understandable why the puritanical TikTok might be more appealing than Meta and YouTube after both companies’ recent policy changes. Facebook and Instagram received scores of 45 with Threads receiving a 40, stating that the company “revised its ‘Hateful Conduct’ policy this year to expressly allow and encourage hate, harassment, and discrimination against LGBTQ people.” YouTube, with a score of 41, made a similar change removing “gender identity and expression” from its list of protected characteristic groups. GLAAD notes, “The company has claimed that the policy has not changed, however it is an objective fact that the gender identity protection is no longer expressly present.”

These policy shifts are part of an overall cultural shift as the pathetic creeps who run these tech companies and our world grovel at the feet of Donald Trump and his colleagues. Project 2025 explicitly called for “deleting the terms of sexual orientation and gender identity” and that’s what these platforms are starting to embrace — while their supporters take a more confrontational approach with their own chosen terms. Some of these men are probably just trying to earn favor from the current administration, others are likely thrilled to no longer have to pretend to care about us, either way the results are the same.

As an advocacy organization, GLAAD includes recommendations in their reports, recommendations that are likely to be ignored. They also state they are expanding their reach “by providing stakeholder guidance to additional tech and AI companies.” It helps no one to be cynical, so I feel genuine gratitude toward GLAAD for continuing this fight within the system. At the very least, it can’t hurt for these companies to know they are being watched even if it merely provides an annoyance as they march along toward their larger goals.

But as a journalist, a queer person, and someone who has been very online since my days as a lonely closeted teen on random forums, I’m unsure how to meet this moment. I feel like I’m in mourning for the virtual spaces that have provided community, education, and entertainment for most of my life. I’m grateful that many of these spaces have since led to IRL connections I can now lean on, but I feel sad for younger generations who won’t have that same opportunity. And, to be honest, I don’t know how to get all of you to read pieces like this.

It’s not just the social media platforms. Google is broken too. AI has made the search engine much less effective and it buries useful journalism, challenging art, and important information. I love the idea that we can go back to a more analog world, but unless people are about to start subscribing to daily newspapers, I don’t see how that’s possible.

What the GLAAD report makes clear is it’s not as easy as simply wading through the bullshit to continue using these social media platforms. The plethora of hate speech would take a toll on those with even the strongest constitutions. And their proliferation of misinformation is ensuring that the hate spreads even further.

For many years, these social media platforms have profited off of agitation and conflict. But, for awhile, their most horrible instincts were balanced with people who made it feel worth it. I feel that less and less. I still check Instagram sometimes, I still do my nightly scroll of animal videos, hot takes, and hot people on PG-rated TikTok, and I’ll even scratch the itch to tweet on Bluesky, the social media equivalent of watching MSNBC with my mother. Alas, none of this feels worth it or sustainable. And none of this is going to get people to read this article about queer people in international long distance relationships under Trump that I spent weeks reporting on and that a few years ago would’ve been shared widely on the app formerly known as Twitter.

So what’s the answer? I guess GLAAD will continue fighting for these tech companies to consider me a human being. Meanwhile, I’ll try to remember that back in the day connecting with even a hundred people on Tumblr felt like a miracle.

Read the entirety of GLAAD’s 2025 Social Media Safety Index here.

Before you go! Autostraddle runs on the reader support of our AF+ Members. If this article meant something to you today — if it informed you or made you smile or feel seen, will you consider joining AF and supporting the people who make this queer media site possible?

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Drew Burnett Gregory

Drew is a Brooklyn-based writer, filmmaker, and theatremaker. She is a Senior Editor at Autostraddle with a focus in film and television, sex and dating, and politics. Her writing can also be found at Bright Wall/Dark Room, Cosmopolitan UK, Refinery29, Into, them, and Knock LA. She was a 2022 Outfest Screenwriting Lab Notable Writer and a 2023 Lambda Literary Screenwriting Fellow. She is currently working on a million film and TV projects mostly about queer trans women. Find her on Twitter and Instagram.

Drew Burnett has written 708 articles for us.

With Its Queer Storyline, ‘The Righteous Gemstones’ Encouraged Christians To Listen to Their God

One of the last Sunday mornings I showed up for altar server duties, a young, newly-ordained priest was giving that morning’s mass as part of a trial-run to see if he’d be the one to replace our parish priest. Aside from meeting this Father, the time before mass was fairly normal: The rest of the altar servers and I showed up an hour early to make all the necessary preparations, we put on our albs, and Travis and I fought for 10 minutes about which one of us would take on the coveted responsibility of ringing the bells. Then, mass proceeded as it always did — that is until we reached the homily. Perhaps emboldened by the liberal-appearing atmosphere of South Florida or maybe hoping he’d finally find a parish with similar views as his own, the new priest encouraged the congregation I’d known since I was born to welcome gay and lesbian people into the arms of the Church just as they are, without forcing them to change.

No one there knew, not even the old parish priest who took my confession every two weeks, that I was harboring a lascivious secret. For two years prior to the new priest’s homily, I’d spent every moment I had alone in my family’s living room fast forwarding our VHS of Alien to the part where Sigourney Weaver’s Lieutenant Ripley strips down to nothing but too-low white panties and a white tank top that I wanted so badly to be see-through. I wasn’t sure I was I gay because I barely understood what that meant, but I knew I wanted her in the same way my middle school friends wanted the Backstreet Boys and Freddie Prinze, Jr. And I knew that, at least once a week, I was sinning boldly and unrepentantly right in front of God.

As the new priest delivered his message, I kept my composure. I didn’t want anyone to know I felt entirely relieved — even justified — about who I was becoming and the deviant behavior I couldn’t stop myself from repeating.

When mass ended, I stayed quiet as the other altar servers speculated over whether or not the new priest was a “fag” while we disrobed and cleaned up the sacristy. In the parish hall where they served coffee and donuts for free after mass every Sunday, I listened as members of the congregation gossiped about the new priest. They questioned his authority and his interpretation of the scripture. They made comments about the way he talked, the way he walked back and forth across the altar as he spoke to us, the way his smile never seemed to diminish, and how he held his coffee. They joked that he “must be Dutch” (because at the time, the Netherlands was the only place where same-sex marriage was legal). They said he wasn’t old enough or experienced enough to serve as our parish priest. They asked each other what God would make of his homily.

I went home and told my mom I wasn’t going to sign up for serving duties anymore after I finish out my schedule at the end of that month, and she was too delighted by the fact that she didn’t have to wake up extra early anymore to ask me why.

It wasn’t the first time I heard openly anti-gay comments at church. But I believed the new priest when he said it was possible we were misunderstanding what scripture was trying to tell us, when he said we were all God’s creations and it wasn’t up to us to decide who was made correctly and who wasn’t. Not just because it excused the intimacy I was sharing with Lt. Ripley when I had the house to myself, but because something within myself was begging me to trust that my nature was fully in God’s purview. And the new priest’s homily finally granted me permission.

The new priest never got invited back to deliver another homily, and I spent the next decade distancing myself from the Church, making jokes about my (minor) religious trauma to my friends who share similar experiences. I became the kind of person that my congregation feared most.

When we first meet the Gemstone siblings in the very first episode The Righteous Gemstones, they are grieving the recent loss of their beloved matriarch and verbally ripping each other to shreds. In the show, the Gemstone family has a significant presence in the South Carolina Evangelical Christian community, throughout the U.S., and around the world. The patriarch Eli (John Goodman) and his late wife Aimee-Leigh (Jennifer Nettles) built their ministry, televangelist, and megachurch empire from nothing while raising their three children, Jesse (Danny McBride), Judy (Edi Patterson), and Kelvin (Adam Devine). Aimee-Leigh was hoping for children who were as equally devoted to the Lord as she was, but they ended up becoming the embodiment of some of the greedier tendencies Eli tries so hard to tamp down. Before we’re even shown exactly what makes the siblings such “bad” Christians, their brief interactions with each other prove they are some of the most hilariously entitled and egotistical characters ever put to screen.

Jesse is the clueless yet cocksure older brother who, with the help of his “smoke show” wife Amber (Cassidy Freeman), is priming himself to become his father’s “rightful” successor despite not having the leadership qualities (or intelligence). Judy is a stereotypical middle child constantly vying for equal responsibility in the family’s empire, but she’s also overtly sexual, can “rip” better than her two brothers ever can, and has a dirtier mouth than all of the characters combined. And Kelvin, the youngest Gemstone, doesn’t quite know where he fits in with his siblings or with his parents’ church at large though he’s certain he deserves to reap the benefits of the Gemstone name.

In that first episode, Eli, Jesse, and Kelvin are returning from a mission trip to Chengdu, China where they managed to baptize 5,000 people even though they completely screwed up the baptism event. It’s obvious from the beginning, especially to knowing eyes, that something is off about Kelvin, something is a little fruity about him even, but no one in his family seems to pay much attention to that. From their private airport, Judy and a caravan of security guards take Eli, Jesse, and Kelvin back to the Gemstones’ sprawling compound where Eli and each of the siblings has their own gigantic estate. At Eli’s estate, he’s greeted by a team of housekeepers and cooks who seem genuinely happy he’s home. Jesse arrives at his estate and is met at the front of his house by Amber, who embraces him, congratulates him on the success of the mission trip, and calls him her “King.”

Kelvin returns to what we think is an empty home with a look of sadness on his face. As he’s settling in to being back, he’s startled by Keefe (Tony Cavalero), an ex-Satanist who Kelvin converted to Christianity and subsequently took under his wing. From the moment the two set eyes on each other, there’s palpable tension between them. Kelvin and Keefe have a brief conversation, then as Keefe is explaining he needs to go home to soak in a “very hot” tub for a while, Kelvin tries to convince him to stay to play video games and eat Pixie Stix all night.

Knowing and loving Danny McBride’s other HBO projects, Eastbound & Down and Vice Principals, I expected this church family story would, at some point, be imbued with as much homoeroticism as McBride’s other work. But I can’t say I entertained the possibility of him and his showrunners writing a queer character into any of his shows, especially this one about the absurdity and hypocrisy of bourgeois, Southern Evangelical Christianity. As Kelvin and Keefe stumbled over their words and then awkwardly hugged as they said “night night” to one another, I was gripped with curiosity and a stream of emotions — both celebratory and anxious — about what they might have in store for Kelvin and Keefe in the future.

Aside from the fact that they’re both Christian religions, Catholicism and Evangelicalism are more culturally and theologically dissimilar than they are alike. Catholicism, for its part, seems to sometimes forget there’s also an Old Testament in the Bible. It focuses heavily on the role of Mary in Jesus’s life and his eventual sacrifice and has a huge pantheon of saints who work as spiritual messengers and providers to whoever invokes them. Within Catholic lore, it’s the only church that was actually started by Jesus Christ himself before his death when he told his twelve apostles how to carry on his work and appointed Saint Peter as his successor. Meanwhile, Evangelical Christianity is the culmination of several theological movements that were sparked by the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century. Although they share a deep commitment to hierarchy and church law, the structure of the Catholic Church feels more governmental in its approach while Evangelicalism is organized like a series of intramural sports leagues following their own rules and regulations wherever they are. Regardless, they do share one important belief: Acting on homosexual desires is one of the gravest sins a person can commit.

In my household and in the Catholic communities we belonged to, anti-queerness (and anti-transness) wasn’t a pillar of our Christianity in the way it’s become the number one issue for far-right Christo-fascists since 2016. Queerness was discussed in my Catholic catechism classes and, eventually, in my Catholic high school theology classes occasionally, though it was mostly brought up as a reminder that being queer wasn’t part of “God’s plan” for us. But that knowledge, combined with the often open and excusable homophobia of the early 2000s, was enough to keep a specter of shame and guilt hanging over me as I got older and realized I probably wasn’t going to be able to keep my burgeoning queer sexuality contained. The new priest’s homily offered me another perspective, but it would take a few more years before I could fully integrate his worldview into my own.

For the first two and half seasons of The Righteous Gemstones, that specter haunts Kelvin in an even more intense manner than I experienced. Being a Gemstone means you’re expected to uphold the values — at least publicly — of Evangelicalism, and Kelvin knows this. Similar to what I experienced, anti-queerness isn’t explicit in the show save for a few times where people are homophobic and quickly reprimanded for it, such as whenever Jesse’s son Pontius (Kelton DuMont) uses the word “faggot” and is quickly reminded that Jesse has “homosexual friends” who wouldn’t appreciate the use of that word. Anti-queerness isn’t present in their sermons or in their private discussions about religion as a family. No one is telling Kelvin he has to stay in the closet. And yet he knows from growing up in the Evangelical community his parents constructed that he doesn’t have the choice to explore his feelings.

This approach is not particularly shocking to anyone who’s engaged with McBride’s work in the past. But given the state of Christianity in this country over the last 10 years, the choice to present Kelvin’s dilemma absent of any explicit anti-queerness from his family and community gave the show an opportunity to interrogate (and satirize) this issue in a unique — and often heartening — way over the course of its four seasons.

Throughout the majority of the first three seasons, we watch as Kelvin hilariously and misguidedly attempts to figure out his role in the family’s business and to find outputs for his ever-intensifying crush on Keefe. The first season focuses heavily on getting Jesse and the rest of the family out of harm’s way from a blackmailing operation, but throughout, Kelvin’s ability to assist Jesse is heavily dependent on Keefe being part of their plans. It solidifies Kelvin and Keefe’s relationship in ways only serious family drama can. Keefe’s integration into the family — as Kelvin’s closest friend, of course — is much smoother than Judy’s fiance BJ (Tim Baltz). I wouldn’t call Judy and BJ’s relationship heteronormative but in the eyes of the Gemstone family, it’s more appropriate than a queer relationship and yet they never treat BJ with the kind of respect they do Keefe. Even if they are a little suspicious of what Kelvin and Keefe’s closeness might mean, they don’t interrogate him or chastise him for it.

When the second season begins, something has shifted in Kelvin and he seems truly ready to stake his unique claim in the Gemstone empire. His new project “The God Squad” — a weight-lifting focused ministry that pokes fun at the tenets and traditions of Muscular Christianity — gives him the opportunity to be in charge of a ministry he “invented” and to hang out scantily-clad with Keefe and other jacked men all day. As “The God Squad” grows larger and takes on more dedicated members, the power of running this ministry and the constant repression of his feelings for Keefe turn him into an absurd caricature of himself. This culminates in him having to prove his strength to the Squad (in the most ridiculous way possible) and realizing his and Keefe’s efforts are more successfully utilized in the Youth Ministry where they began.

That’s where we pick up with Kelvin and Keefe in the third season: running the Youth Ministry and an anti-porn, anti-premarital sex project called “Smut Busters” where they go to local sex shops to buy out all their products and have them destroyed. Here again, we see Kelvin and Keefe coming up with schemes to try to perpetually prove their “innocence” — how can anyone think they’re gay (and more specifically, gay for each other) when they’re always trying to prevent people around them from acting on “impure” thoughts? Much like The God Squad, the Smut Busters project comes to an immediate halt after parents of the young people in the Youth Ministry express concern for what Kelvin and Keefe are doing and confront the men about some “rumors” that have been swirling around regarding their relationship. This is the first time in the whole series either of them are shown their facade isn’t working as well as they think it is. And given that it’s the parents of their “students” leading the charge here, it’s also the first time we see the series calling direct attention to how Christianity is being weaponized in our real world.

The Smut Busters project is canceled and it leaves Kelvin and Keefe in limbo, trying to make sense of how they’ve failed to hide themselves and where they’re supposed to go from there. At the end of season three, Kelvin and Keefe finally give into the feelings by sharing an impassioned kiss in front of the Gemstone siblings and their partners. And the family reacts not with disdain, disgust, or anger, but with brief, celebratory glee. By the end of the series finale, Kelvin and Keefe have taken their rightful spot among the rest of the couples on the show when they receive a warm welcome as they join their family on the compound to take turns driving Jesse’s monster truck. Eli gives them a thumbs up, the final seal of approval the two of them wished for so badly, and Aimee-Leigh’s ghost looks in on everyone with a smile on her face.

There are two actual years and seemingly two TV years between where season three leaves off and where season four begins. Kelvin and Keefe are, of course, still together, only now they’re running a ministry called PRISM, specifically designed to help integrate LGBTQ+ people into the Gemstone’s version of Evangelicalism. PRISM, unlike so many of the other Gemstone family church businesses, is actually raking in cash through their PRISM-edition Bibles and high levels of attendance at their services. For the most part, it appears that the rest of the Gemstone church community has embraced Kelvin and Keefe’s relationship, as well as their work with PRISM. There are no protests, no snide comments, no demands to stop the forward-thinking progressivism of the church. In fact, Kelvin is nominated by a society of regional Christians for a yearly prize called “Top Christ-Following Man of the Year.” And this is where this uproariously funny, mostly unserious show does some of its most important work.

Given the success of PRISM and Kelvin’s nomination, you can imagine how little the Evangelical community-at-large, outside of the Gemstone churches, wants to ride this wave of change happening right in front of them. A rival megachurch pastor, Vance Simkins (Stephen Dorff) — who, funnily enough, also gives off closeted Christian vibes — simply can’t handle this new, more open-minded version of Christianity the Gemstones are selling, and he takes it upon himself to try to bring down Kelvin. He embarrasses Kelvin on TV during a “Top Christ-Following Man” debate, claims that Kelvin’s nomination is an example of tokenism, and then takes his condemnation even further by insisting that Kelvin shouldn’t have been nominated in the first place, what with homosexuality being against God’s law and all.

If these events were to happen in the reality of 2025, I’d imagine they’d go something like this: Kelvin’s family would insist he drops out of the race, he’d be forced to go back into some version of the closet, and PRISM would come to a swift end. But in the Gemstones’ world, the opposite happens. Kelvin’s siblings — particularly Jesse, who is forced to overcome his jealousy regarding Kelvin’s nomination in the first place — rally around Kelvin, insist that he stay in the running, and take Simkins down once and for all. On the nominees’ “Night of Testimony” that leads to open voting by the faceless regional Christian community of South Carolina and beyond, Kelvin delivers a testimony that brought me right back to the feelings I had when I heard that new priest’s homily:

Truth. You see, that’s actually what I want to talk about tonight. See, I was the youngest member of my family to become a preacher…at age 12. They said I was special, but I just felt different. I spent my whole life trying not to be. Until I realized…God sees the real me. In fact, he made the real me. And if the real me is good enough for God, then it’s good enough for everyone. Different is awesome, the proof of God’s work, the range of his talents. So I came here tonight not to grovel for accolades but to tell the truth about who I am and what I’m about. My name is Kelvin Gemstone. And I’m a… a different kind of man. A beautiful man. A gay Top Christ Following Man. And if that’s not good enough for this award, then I don’t need it.

It’s an incredible moment for the series, only bested by the series finale concluding with a beautiful wedding ceremony on the family’s compound for Kelvin and Keefe, with Eli officiating their union in front of everyone they love and, really, God himself. But before we even get there, both Jesse and Eli manage to harass and embarrass Vance Simkins out of their Christian community altogether — a defeat reminding us that the real Christians, the real followers of Jesus’s teachings, shouldn’t and can’t allow the dogmatic bigots to keep their stranglehold over the word and will of God. With these final parts of Kelvin and Keefe’s storyline, McBride and his team provide an exhilarating funhouse mirror to the way Christianity is operating in our society. Kelvin and Keefe’s story could’ve gone anywhere and the jokes still would’ve flowed. But it didn’t, it went here, to a place of complete acceptance and — more importantly — unfettered jubilation in the face of a vocal and powerful minority of people who wish nothing more than for queer and trans people to disappear out of public life forever.

In a show about how “bad” and hypocritical Evangelical Christians (and Christians, in general) can be when they’re given as much power and authority as the Gemstones, McBride and his team made bigotry the ultimate sin. This was the one infraction in the eyes of God that you can’t easily be forgiven for and it helped bring to life an imagining of the way things could and should be in the church and in our culture. Like the new priest I met shortly before I stopped going to church forever, The Righteous Gemstones uses Kelvin and Keefe’s relationship to implore everyone to think more broadly about what it looks like to truly be faithful. You can have your God, you can have your church, but you should listen to him, too. You should love everyone as he loves you. You should trust that he knows exactly what he’s doing. You should believe we’re all here because he made us this way. If what the Bible says is true, you won’t get to heaven any other way.

All four seasons of The Righteous Gemstones are now streaming on Max.

Before you go! Autostraddle runs on the reader support of our AF+ Members. If this article meant something to you today — if it informed you or made you smile or feel seen, will you consider joining AF and supporting the people who make this queer media site possible?

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Stef Rubino

Stef Rubino is a writer, community organizer, competitive powerlifter, and former educator from Ft. Lauderdale, FL. They're currently working on book of essays and preparing for their next powerlifting meet. They’re the fat half of the arts and culture podcast Fat Guy, Jacked Guy, and you can read some of their other writing in Change Wire and in Catapult. You can also find them on Twitter (unfortunately).

Stef has written 144 articles for us.

1 Comment

  1. Loved this summary and loved this show!! I was so pleasantly surprised with how much work the final season did – I was whacking my partner in the arm as the show approached the engagement. So good!

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Every Lesbian Movie That Played at the Cannes Film Festival Ranked

The 78th Cannes Film Festival begins today and, like many cinephiles world-wide, I’ll be observing from afar as some of the best new movies — and some tragic disappointments — make their debuts. I’ll also be on the look out for any lesbian films.

This year, Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke’s Honey Don’t plays Out of Competition and Kristen Stewart’s directorial debut The Chronology of Water plays in the Un Certain Regard section. But I’m also expecting some films In Competition to be queer. See, the artsier the film festival, the more likely a movie that’s not marketed as a Lesbian Film™ will in fact be a lesbian film. Or at least have some homoeroticism. There are so many ways for movies to be queer that don’t fit into our cultural idea of what counts as LGBTQ+ cinema.

While we wait to hear what this year brings, I decided to go back through history and rank every lesbian movie that’s played in competition at Cannes. I first put this list together last year but have expanded it with films from last year and some films I missed.

NOTE: I use lesbian movie to basically mean any movie about or featuring queer women. As I just said, a lot of French movies are randomly a bit gay, so if I missed anything on this list, let me know!

35. Emilia Pérez (dir. Jacques Audiard, 2024)

I think it’s so beautiful that the bar has been raised (lowered?) for bad lesbian cinema at Cannes. Powerful stuff.

34. The Neon Demon (dir. Nicolas Winding Refn, 2016)

Not even predatory lesbian Jena Malone can save this one for me…

33. La Pirate (dir. Jacques Doillon, 1984)

Jane Birkin and her brother play lovers and that might not even be the craziest thing about this movie. But bonkers doesn’t always equal great! And apparently director Jacques Doillon is a violent creep so this is an easy one to skip.

32. Benedetta (dir. Paul Verhoeven, 2021)

This has its defenders and maybe I need to rewatch. As I said in my review, I just expected even more blasphemy from Verhoeven.

31. Love Songs (dir. Christophe Honoré, 2007)

I love a throuple movie and this musical is fun enough in a French filled with grief sort of way.

30. Thieves (dir. André Téchiné, 1996)

Hot queer mom philosophy professor Catherine Deneuve makes this worth a watch even if its fractured heist tale doesn’t quite come together in the end.

Cannes lesbian movies: Catherine Deneuve holds Laurence Côte with a hand on her cheek

Catherine Deneuve and Laurence Côte in Thieves

29. Paris, 13th District (dir. Jacques Audiard, 2021)

While certainly better than his other film on this list — I’ll credit co-screenwriter Céline Sciamma for that — this movie’s weakest plot line is its gay one due to a very baffling portrayal of sex work. Worth watching for Lucie Zhang and I wish they’d just let Noémie Merlant be gay with her instead.

28. Basic Instinct (dir. Paul Verhoeven, 1992)

This one has been reclaimed by the queers for a reason, but it’s still maybe my least favorite of Verhoeven’s classics.

27. House of Tolerance (dir. Bertrand Bonello, 2011)

A stylish and bleak portrait of the economics of sex work. I admire the form and intent — as well as the great cast — but I can’t help think Lizzie Borden’s Working Girls does it better and with more subtlety.

26. Replay (dir. Catherine Corsini, 2001)

Years before Catherine Corsini made the sensual and romantic Summertime, she made this twisted tale of a toxic friendship/relationship. I kind of love it even though I’ve maintained some objectivity with its placement here.

25. The Nun (dir. Jacques Rivette, 1966)

Starring French film icon Anna Karina, this is a properly dour portrait of Catholicism with a range of repressed, manipulated, and/or sinister nuns, including one horny lesbian.

24. Symptoms (dir. José Ramón Larraz, 1974)

Like Psycho for cis lesbians. Do with that what you will.

23. Crush (dir. Alison Maclean, 1992)

An unpleasant film repulsed by its own eroticism, a sickening swirl of guilt and trauma and abuse. But also starring a very hot Marcia Gay Harden as a bisexual nightmare.

Marcia Gay Harden in a red jacket looks at Caitlin Bossley in a baseball cap, a river behind them.

Marcia Gay Harden and Caitlin Bossley in Crush

22. The Divide (dir. Catherine Corsini)

Another film from Catherine Corsini, this one follows a bickering lesbian couple stuck at the emergency room on the first day of the Yellow Vest Protests. It’s like what if a TV medical drama was about the gap between bourgeois liberals and angry populists.

21. Knife+Heart (dir. Yann Gonzalez)

One of the few neo-Giallo films that actually captures the magic of the genre.

20. Bacurau (dir. Juliano Dornelles, Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2019)

Part drama, part action movie, part real-life horrorshow, this is a striking work of postcolonial rage that features Sônia Braga as a very cool lesbian doctor.

19. Blue is the Warmest Color (dir. Abdellatif Kechiche, 2013)

For some, this movie would be at the bottom. For others, at the top. I’m putting it in the middle!

18. Clouds of Sils Maria (dir. Olivier Assayas, 2014)

Finally, a movie that understands the homoerotic tension that can exist when running lines with an actor. And also when Juliette Binoche is your boss. (I imagine.)

17. Julieta (dir. Pedro Almodóvar)

I think this is among Almodóvar’s most underrated films. It may be a bit fractured, but its many pieces are divine.

16. Another Way (dir. Károly Makk, 1982)

This list is filled with some very bleak movies, but this one is really worth the misery.

15. BPM (Beats Per Minute) (dir. Robin Campillo, 2017)

And speaking of misery, this portrait of AIDS activism in France doesn’t shy away from the pain of the moment, but it also finds hope in political solidarity… and dancing at the club.

Adèle Haenel wearing an Act Up Silence=Death shirt walks through a hallway with a group of men behind her.

Adèle Haenel in BPM (Beats Per Minute)

14. Maps to the Stars (dir. David Cronenberg, 2014)

It’s been ten years. We now all agree this is great, right?

13. Showing Up (dir. Kelly Reichardt, 2022)

Kelly Reichardt loves people with such frustration and depth. This movie fills my soul as an artist and a person trying my best.

12. Kinds of Kindness (dir. Yorgos Lanthimos, 2024)

Hot take: This is my favorite Yorgos Lanthimos movie. And, yes, it counts for this list due to the sex cult.

11. Beyond the Hills (dir. Cristian Mungiu, 2012)

This an exorcism story grounded in reality — the only devils are the Christians who confuse queerness with possession. A devastating real-life horror movie.

10. Titane (dir. Julia Ducournau, 2021)

There are so many movies in this one movie and I love all of them.

9. Anatomy of a Fall (dir. Justine Triet, 2023)

It’s pretty fucking cool that two of the last four Palme d’Or winners were queer movies directed by women! Even cooler that they’re both masterpieces.

8. Crash (dir. David Cronenberg, 1996)

A movie that is at once completely visceral and completely intellectual. I think about it all the time. I feel about it all the time.

7. The Inheritance (dir. Márta Mészáros, 1980)

I don’t know if the homoeroticism here qualifies it for this list, but I’m including it because Márta Mészáros is one of the most underrated filmmakers of all time and this is one of her masterpieces. The best narrative Holocaust movie ever made.

Cannes lesbian movies: Isabelle Huppert kisses Lili Monori's cheek in a close up.

Lili Monori and Isabelle Huppert in The Inheritance

6. All About Eve (dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950)

One of those movies that really is as good as you remember. I just wrote about its take on lesbianism.

5. The Handmaiden (dir. Park Chan-wook, 2016)

An inspired adaptation. So fun, so sexy, so beautifully crafted.

4. Carol (dir. Todd Haynes, 2015)

Did you know you can walk around New York listening to the Carol score and it will give any activity the homosexual gravitas you deserve?

3. All About My Mother (dir. Pedro Almodóvar, 1999)

A tribute to women: actresses, transsexuals, lesbians, mothers, and any and every combination of those words.

2. Mulholland Drive (dir. David Lynch, 2001)

Silencio.

1. Portrait of a Lady on Fire (dir. Céline Sciamma, 2019)

There are many ways for a film to be radical. Within the subgenre of lesbian cinema, a romantic period piece about two cis white women may be an unlikely recipient of the word. But from the unique voice of Céline Sciamma, this is an explosive film, a reinvention of cinematic language through a uniquely lesbian gaze. It’s a masterpiece that grows richer with every passing year, every viewing, every time one of its images crosses my mind.

Cannes lesbian movies: Adèle Haenel and Noémie Merlant cry by the sea with their heads together and Merlant's hands on Haenel's face.

Adèle Haenel and Noémie Merlant in Portrait of a Lady on Fire

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Drew Burnett Gregory

Drew is a Brooklyn-based writer, filmmaker, and theatremaker. She is a Senior Editor at Autostraddle with a focus in film and television, sex and dating, and politics. Her writing can also be found at Bright Wall/Dark Room, Cosmopolitan UK, Refinery29, Into, them, and Knock LA. She was a 2022 Outfest Screenwriting Lab Notable Writer and a 2023 Lambda Literary Screenwriting Fellow. She is currently working on a million film and TV projects mostly about queer trans women. Find her on Twitter and Instagram.

Drew Burnett has written 708 articles for us.

16 Comments

  1. RIP to anyone who decides anatomy of a fall on a gay data solely based on the fact that it’s on the list XD that being said Portrait of a Lady on Fire changed my relationship to art so, you are correct.

    • Nothing better for a gay date movie than flirting with a woman and then (not?) killing your husband.

  3. Hi Drew,

    I’ve been reading autostraddle for a longtime and never commented on anything before, but reading that a movie from Jacques Doillon is in this list without any warning whatsoever was a bit alarming to me.

    As a French cinephile working in the industry, that reads the news, there has been a huge opening of speech for the last few months. The actress Judith Godrèche – but also others, like Isild Le Besco – started openly speaking for the 1st time about what they lived as child-actresses who have been seriously abused by directors. One of those directors is Jacques Doillon, you can find a Variety article about it:
    https://variety.com/2024/film/global/judith-godreche-rape-complaint-jacques-doillon-1235902019/

    It would be much appreciated if you didn’t “promote” his work. I’m not saying this in an accusing or condenscending way, as I know that it’s kinda recent news and maybe too niche to reach everyone in the world. But it feels like there is a huge French cinema- and others – metoo comeback since the beginning of the year, and it has been both apalling (to see any form of abuse so systematically anchored) and amazing (to watch – mostly women – speak openly about what they’ve kept hidden for so long and how it feels like most people want change). There is really no more place for directors like Jacques Doillon in any “top” list whatsoever, but especially on a website that talks so much about women rights, film culture etc.

    • I had no idea, so thank you for letting me know! For what it’s worth this isn’t a top list, but a ranking of every lesbian movie to play in competition at Cannes. Since the movie is at the bottom, safe to say I wouldn’t promote the film even separate from the director’s violent behavior. But I’ll still add a note!

      • Thank you Drew! I understand it’s a ranking and trying to be exhaustive. But I’m actually in Cannes right now and it still such a vibrant subject that I had to let you know.

        If you want to add another one, I believe Heart + Knife was in Official Selection as well? which is probably much more enjoyable either way :)

  4. Seeing them in a shared list like this has me thinking; would I have put The Handmaiden above Carol? Even though i LOVE Carol? Maybe!

    Excited to watch my way thru the top ten or so!

    • I forgot about the lesbianism in Julieta! I love that movie.

      And I’ll be sure to watch Paris, 13th District ASAP!

      • Oh, and The Divide/La Fracture (2021) is about divorced lesbian exes fighting during a yellow vest demonstration

        • Some more Cannes competition titles with lesbian elements:
          Beyond the Hills
          Bacarau
          Oh, Mercy!

          • You’re the best!! Thank you!!

            I shall be updating this as I watch.

          • Thank you again for all your suggestions! Super helpful for this year’s update. The only one I couldn’t watch was Oh Mercy (for some reason it’s not currently available in the US or Canada??) but I’ll try to track it down before next year.

  6. Yay! Thanks for the update!
    Also, in competition this year, ‘The Little Sister’ is a lesbian coming-of-age story. And hopefully there will be others like you said.

    • Ooo thanks for the tip! I’ll have to watch Hafsia Herzi’s previous films while I wait for that one.

Comments are closed.

Aca-Scuse Me, It Appears Actress Anna Camp Has a Girlfriend

Over a week ago, a TikTok video posted by Mr Big USA (“Documenting the thoughts & beliefs of people in this Era!”) surfaced on FauxMoi reddit. Shot in the Atlanta area, the clip showed deeply beloved Pitch Perfect actress Anna Camp clutching arms with a young woman companion, being asked by a bearded man in a scarf, “What do you expect from a guy on the first date?”

“Well,” Anna responds, laughing, “I don’t expect anything from a guy anymore, because I [cuts out here] and it’s great.” Her companion, sporting both a flannel shirt and a canvas tote bag, agrees, “yeah, same same.”

The captions on this video claim the cut-out part is Anna saying, “I like women now,” but it’s difficult to verify. She is gesturing at Jade, to indicate the person she is dating, and it’s possible she’s saying, “I have a girlfriend now” or “I’m with her now.”  I suppose anything is possible, if you really think about it.

The companion has since been identified as 24-year-old Jade Whipkey, a writer and stylist living in Los Angeles who has worked on projects with talent including KeKe Palmer, Destiny Rogers and Lena Waithe.

The full cut of the video exists on Mr Big USA’s resplendent TikTok feed. Anna and Jade call each other “babe” and appear to be glowing with affection for each other. The aforementioned clip apparently was part of a question regarding their “worst date ever.” Jade shares the story of the only date she ever went on with a boy, who kept calling her “fucker.”

In another Mr Big USA video, the host asks the duo to share their Biggest Conspiracy Theory. “That to be happy you have to be married to a guy with children,” Anna answers, laughing.

“That was deep, babe!” Jade responds.

In recent days, further materials have been posted to the world wide web suggesting a girlfriendship between Anna Camp and Jade Whipkey. For example, they recently participated in an activity labeled “Date Night,” as per Camp’s instagram stories:

picture of jade drinking wine with "date night" written on it

Jade has also been pictured at Bar Cecil in Palm Springs with Camp in an instagram slideshow of happy moments, and the two share witty banter in instagram comments.

Today, self-declared #1 agatha harkness defender @bridgetshahn posted a pic of the two in costume for the Renaissance Pleasure Fair, also snagged from Instagram stories, in which Camp labeled Jade, “My Lord, My Love.”

Shortly thereafter, on Lesbocine declared Camp officially in a relationship with a woman.

When Valerie shared the story in our team slack this morning, it was met with much fanfare, including Gabbie Hogan declaring, “this means a lot to me fr.”

“17 year old me is freaking out,” added Motti. “Tt makes so much sense bc of course a gay woman married and divorced Skylar Astin.”

“Slowly but surely all those Barden Bellas will come out (and/or play gay),” Valerie predicted.

Pitch Perfect was an important event, cinematically, for younger millennials, especially the gay ones. As a franchise, it launched a lot of fanfic and also a lot of queers. Singer/songwriter Ester Dean, who played lesbian character Cynthia Rose, identifies as gay. Rebel Wilson came out in 2022 and Anna Kendrick has expressed an openness to sexual fluidity. Wilson and Camp are currently working together on upcoming rom-com Bride Hard, where we imagine they probably have a lot to discuss!

Camp has been married twice previously: she and actor Michael Mosley got engaged circa the autumn of 2008, married in 2010, and then filed for divorce in 2013, at which point Camp began dating her Pitch Perfect costar Skylar Astin. They married in 2016 and divorced in 2019.

Camp’s career has been long and illustrious, and she entered many queer hearts through True Blood and The Good Wife. In a recent interview with Marie Claire, Camp revealed that her first-ever on-screen role was in an Olive Garden commercial, playing “a waitress delivering endless salad and breadsticks” (aka me in the year 2000). She’s currently starring in the final season of You, playing twins, to much acclaim.

On that note, Camp recently appeared on Podcrushed, a podcast hosted by Penn Badgley, Nava Kavelin and Sophie Ansari wherein celebrity guests talk about their teenage years.

In a clip from that episode, Camp reflects on how she’s changed in her forties, declaring, “I was raised to please other people, I’ve been in relationships with men before because I didn’t want to upset them. I’ve stayed longer because I didn’t want to upset them. I didn’t want anyone to be mad at me. I’ve had these moments where I’d be sitting in my room and the door was closed and I’d just go, something doesn’t feel right, something is off, just get up and go downstairs and say you don’t wanna do it anymore. But instead, I’d get up and I’d give them a hug.”

She concluded, “I finally decided I’m never doing that again, and I’ve never been happier.”

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Riese

Riese is the 43-year-old Co-Founder of Autostraddle.com as well as an award-winning writer, video-maker, LGBTQ+ Marketing consultant and aspiring cyber-performance artist who grew up in Michigan, lost her mind in New York and now lives in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in nine books, magazines including Marie Claire and Curve, and all over the web including Nylon, Queerty, Nerve, Bitch, Emily Books and Jezebel. She had a very popular personal blog once upon a time, and then she recapped The L Word, and then she had the idea to make this place, and now here we all are! In 2016, she was nominated for a GLAAD Award for Outstanding Digital Journalism. She's Jewish. Follow her on twitter and instagram.

Riese has written 3315 articles for us.

2 Comments

  2. im so happy for her and can’t help but to think I manifested this when I was fifteen

Comments are closed.

‘The Last of Us’ Episode 205 Recap: In the Air Tonight

and

This recap will have spoilers for Season 2, Episode 5 of The Last of Us, “Feel Her Love”

Hello and welcome to this The Last of Us recap, in which Nic and I (Valerie Anne) discuss the most recent episode through a queer, nerdy lens as lovers of both the original games and television in general. As always, we will compare/contrast the game to the show, but we won’t spoil future aspects of the game, and we ask that you do the same in the comments!

Last week on The Last of Us, Ellie and Dina made it to Seattle and started plotting their way to find the Wolves and, specifically, Abby & Co, the people who came to Jackson to kill Joel, Dina found out Ellie is immune to the infection that plagues their world, and the two of them finally admitted their feelings for each other by way of many kisses.

This week, we open with Hanrahan and some Wolves at the hospital. Hanrahan specifically asks a Wolf named Park about what went down that caused them to lose some men and weld the door to the basement shut.

The Last of Us 205: Hanrahan and Park sit across the table from one another

This scene had so much tension considering it was just two women talking across a desk.

And boy did we learn some things here.

Valerie: While I obviously love the scenes with “our” people most of all, I do love these little snapshots of “Elsewhere in the Apocalypse.” It not only gives us information that Ellie and Dina don’t have to keep us stressed, but it also just shows that everyone is doing their best to survive out here. Some people’s methods are…different than others, but no one (that we’ve seen so far, anyway) is completely unscathed by the horrors of this pandemic. Even the big bad Wolves encounter dangers they’ve never seen before, and lose loved ones to it. No one — not even Ellie — is immune to the trauma of this world they live in.

The way this scene unfolded was also so good. Before we ever see a glimpse of the cordyceps on the walls or the spores in the air, Park paints us a word picture. The B1 floor being empty of everything including rats. The B2 floor being so bad Leon and his crew asked them to seal them in. And the mystery of what that means about B3. Then the final punch at the end when Hanrahan reveals what we’d all been fearing: Leon was Park’s son. Brilliant storytelling, as always.

Also this is neither here nor there but Hanrahan has a bit of a gay strut to her step if you ask me.

Nic: Ha! I had the same thought about Hanrahan’s strut! What a strong cold open. First of all, catch me eating my hat re: Hanrahan being the leader of the WLF! I’m unclear where we are in the timeline, but since we didn’t get an on-screen marker I’m going to assume it’s pretty close to real-time. It seems like Isaac is the de facto pain-causer of the WLF which, everyone has a particular set of skills, I guess? Anyway! We do get some really unsettling information here: The cordyceps virus is in the air. IN THE AIR, VALERIE. We’ve got spores!! And the way we learn this information is as unsettling as the information itself. Shout out to Hettienne Park on slaying this scene! Hanrahan’s reaction to learning Leon was among those who sacrificed themselves was so sobering. And that final line revealing that Leon was Sergeant Park’s son? CHILLS.

Time for Seattle: Day Two! We first see our girls in the theater, Dina mapping their best route to the hospital and Ellie exploring the building.

The Last of Us 205: Ellie watches Dina triangulate

This reminded me of the scene in Barbie where Barbie told Ken to take a walk so she could figure out how to get home. (The only thing this clip is missing is the moment two seconds later when she says “don’t go far!”)

Let’s talk about it!

Valerie: First up, I want to talk about the marquee, because you texted me about it and were unsurprised I had looked up 2003 movies and saw there was one with “Sick” in the title but it didn’t seem to be a perfect fit…then I realized I was an idiot and that it wasn’t a movie theater, it’s a regular theater, so I paused on the marquee and made out the word “Habit” and realized it’s promoting the band The Sick Habit, a fictional band whose set list you can find as a collectible in the game. THIS SHOW.

Nic: They’re SO GOOD.

Valerie: ANYWAY, inside, Dina sitting there with the walkie and the map drawing lines with the magazine of her gun?? Next time someone asks that icebreaker “who would be on your apocalypse team,” I’m picking her first. Ellie feeling useless because her skills are more…physical in nature was also very cute. And I love that they’re still using their classic non-verbal communication skills with their little smiles and hearteyes at each other. I also loved when Dina was telling her about the “long-ass building” that’s a gap in the Wolves’ line of defense and Ellie wonders aloud why they’re not patrolling it Dina just waited a beat for her to get to the answer on her own: There’s probably infected inside. Dina continuing to prove her brilliance by also knowing exactly where Nora is and also figuring out that probably the “Scars” don’t use modern technology?? No wonder Ellie is in love.

Nic: Hey thanks for calling it a magazine, because I no joke had in my notes “Dina’s using a round (?! I don’t know gun words) to mark up the map.” I love this scene because we get to see more of Dina and Ellie just being themselves together with the addition of adorable smiles and longing glances at each other. Plus Dina knowing how to triangulate is weirdly hot? She’s deeply into math in the same way Ellie’s into space facts and I love their special interests so much! They’re so stinkin’ cute!!! After they joke around about Ellie not being school-oriented, Ellie leaves Dina to her math and explores the theater. The shot of her from behind approaching the stage was gorgeous, and I was so caught up in the beauty and the admittedly improbable amount of pristine guitars that I didn’t realize what was happening until it happened. As she sang the opening lines of “Future Days” — “If I ever were to lose you…” — her mask slipped and she was visibly jolted back into her purpose: getting justice for Joel.

When Dina explains the gap in WLF patrols and how careless they are with their communication, I totally agree with you, I love the way she doesn’t immediately answer Ellie’s question about why they’d leave a whole ass building unguarded and lets her answer for herself. They’re learning from each other and you love to see it! I also appreciate that Dina identifies their plan as reckless, yet it doesn’t stop either of them.

On the way to enact their plan, Dina and Ellie chat so Dina doesn’t throw up from nerves. Dina does, however, throw up from seeing more dead Seraphites, which leads to a conversation about whether or not Dina should go with Ellie to find Abby at all.

The Last of Us 205: Ellie holds Dina's face lovingly

“So I’m gonna love you like I’m gonna lose you. I’m gonna hold you like I’m saying goodbye.” 🎶

So obviously we need to chat about their chats.

Valerie: Once again a perfect scene to encapsulate the depths of Ellie and Dina’s characters, and also the range of Bella Ramsey and Isabela Merced’s acting skills. They start off being silly and talking about baby names, they see dead Seraphites and Ellie starts spinning out about whether or not she should be letting Dina come on this mission, and then Dina goes into the most heartbreaking story. I almost asked you last week if we knew Dina’s backstory, because I was worried she had a family member turn and that’s why she was so harangued by potentially having to kill Ellie, but it turns out it was a raider. You can hear guilt in her voice when she says she went out to play by herself despite her mother telling her not to, but you can also hear the acceptance and anger in her voice when she says she didn’t make it back in time “because I was fucking eight.” She swiftly sidesteps the question about how she got to Jackson (which I do hope we learn eventually) and says she would have hunted that man down if she hadn’t killed him that day. Dina is often so smiley and bright that it’s easy to forget that she’s been through it, same as everyone else. She has the same darkness inside her, the same pain. She’s just better at hiding it. Broke my whole heart.

Nic: BIG OUCH, Valerie, sheesh.

The Last of Us 205: Ellie has her hand on Dina's face, she closes her eyes into the gentle touch

“And you’re tied together with a smile, but you’re coming undone.” 🎶

Valerie: And then Ellie putting a hand softly on her cheek!! When Dina says she’ll do whatever Ellie wants, keep going or go back to Jackson, it’s almost like Ellie knows what her answer is but she also isn’t sure if it’s the answer Dina wants to hear. Or like she tries to consider going back but she can’t even fathom not following through. Dina saying “If I die, it won’t be your fault” as if Ellie would ever forgive herself was also sweet. She wants Ellie to make this choice for herself, not for Dina, and she knows Ellie’s mind is made up. So off they continue, together.

Nic: Ellie’s comment about not trusting Seattle made me realize that Grey’s Anatomy didn’t premiere until 2005 which means the world of The Last of Us never experienced the numerous tragedies that befell the staff of Seattle Grace Mercy West Grey Sloan Hospital for Improbable Events. Imagine how little they’d trust Seattle if they knew about people cutting LVAD wires willy nilly! I’m sorry, I’m stalling because this scene had me in my feelings big time.

I love how quickly Dina and Ellie can go from joking about baby names to Ellie crashing out over not making Dina go back to Jackson. That image of the dead Seraphites is so haunting. Something that keeps standing out to me is the use and different meanings of “feel her love” depending on the context. When Seraphites use it with each other, it’s meant to be comforting; but last week in the TV station, it’s painted on the wall almost as a threat; and now the Wolves are using it as a joke right back to the Seraphites.

Valerie: You know, the WLF claims to be anti-Fedra, but that “feel this, bitch” graffiti felt an awful lot like Josh Peck’s attitude. Seems like the WLF isn’t all that different than the oppressors they claim to hate.

Nic: As usual, I’m going to shout Isabela Merced’s praises here for her delivery of Dina’s story about the first person she killed. It’s the apocalypse, so everyone has a tragic story, but that doesn’t lessen the impact of imagining a tiny Dina shooting the man who killed her mother and sister. Her delivery of “because I was fucking eight” punched me in the gut. And as she tells Ellie that it wouldn’t matter who started the conflict because she still had to watch and if it had been different, if he had gotten away, she would have hunted him down. In her way, Dina is letting Ellie know that she isn’t wrong for wanting to keep going after Abby; that if she were in Ellie’s shoes she’d make the same decision, so pregnancy or not, Dina’s going to follow Ellie’s lead. I’m glad they had this conversation because again, Dina’s reminding Ellie that she has agency and Ellie isn’t responsible for her if something bad happens. These two are going to murder me, I swear; because the way Dina leans into Ellie holding her face, it’s filled with so much love and trust.

By nightfall, Ellie and Dina arrive at the mysteriously unguarded factory.

The Last of Us 205: Ellie and Dina head into the darkness of the factory floor

This is the kind of part in a video game where I stand at the door and whine for three minutes because I know nothing good is waiting inside.

Let’s discuss the events that unfolded there, both in the main office, and on the factory floor.

Nic: There were so many game mechanics from here to the end of the episode. I was absolutely LIVING! First up is Ellie and Dina hitting that crouch into stealth mode. And once they were inside the factory, they kept stopping to enter listen mode. A+! I think my favorite moment in this entire episode was Ellie checking out the next room and describing it as “haunted, but empty” and Dina responding with “huh, just like us” because it reminded me so much of how we (and our whole friend group, tbh) would act in an end of the world scenario.

Valerie: I totally agree — that’s absolutely the kind of interaction you and I have all the time.

Nic: As they strategize, sweet Dina emphasizes the importance of shooting being the absolute last resort so as to not alert WLF soldiers and she VERY accurately clocks her girlfriend’s propensity for shooting first and asking questions later. And among the gentle ribbing, Dina drops that Ellie’s crazy is one of the reasons she loves her, as CASUALLY as Ellie said she would die for Dina last week. SOMEBODY SEDATE ME THEY’RE TOO CUTE, VALERIE!

Valerie: When Ellie seems offended that Dina is accusing her of shooting from the hip (literally and figuratively) but Dina says she’s a little crazy and that’s one of the things she loves about Ellie??? Ellie’s FACE in that moment, the immediate shift from defensiveness to hearteyes. And then when she tries to respond and Dina just smirks like “oh, I know.” THEY’RE THE CUTEST AND I CAN HARDLY STAND IT. What if we live in this moment forever and never go on the factory floor???

Nic: PLEASE!!

The Last of Us 205: Split screen of Ellie and Dina looking at each other with heart-eyes when Dina admits she loves Ellie

The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love (In the Apocalypse)

Nic: Unfortunately, the cuteness is cut short by not one, not two, but SO MANY stalkers waiting for them to make their first move. Each camera pan to more and more stalkers was absolutely terrifying. Also terrifying? The stalkers ripping apart the fencing from the cage Dina was hiding in. When Jesse came to their rescue, it kind of reminded me of the moment in the pilot when Joel and Sarah think they’re about to get shot by that soldier, but Uncle Tommy comes out of nowhere to kill the soldier first.

Valerie: Two things I hated right off the bat: 1) the horrible realization I had when Dina didn’t hear any clickers, well, clicking, which surprised her and terrified me, 2) the choking sob sounds the stalkers occasionally make. This whole sequence was so terrifying, from the one stalker crouched on machinery looking like a twisted version of X-Men’s Nightcrawler, to the realization that they were surrounded, to Dina looking legitimately terrified, to Ellie being the one to come up with a plan this time. The desperate kiss Ellie gave Dina in case it was their last! My heart! The one stalker distracting Ellie so the other could attack her?? TOO SMART. No thank you! They are SO lucky Jesse found them when he did, and before the Wolves did. And Dina jumping to Ellie’s defense about her not getting bit? I could FEEL the desperation in Dina’s voice, begging Jesse to trust her that Ellie is fine. She’s probably still reeling from the trauma of thinking she was going to have to kill Ellie herself, the thought of Jesse killing her probably practically stopped her heart. STRESS.

In a true out of the frying pan and into the fire moment, they escape the factory just to run directly into Seraphite turf.

The Last of Us 205: Ellie and Dina look at Jesse in the park

Do you think Central Park would look like an entire forest if it were this overgrown?

Time to cover this traumatic turn!

Valerie: This whole episode had been different enough from what I remember about the game that I wasn’t thinking about the game at all, just enjoying the show. But the second I heard that whistle and saw that torch in the park?? I was rocketed directly back to gameplay. I have visceral memories of sneaking around in those trees and trying not to get caught by those whistling assholes.

Jesse is pissed, and when he says they’re going to meet up with Tommy in the morning and then go home, Ellie says no, and Dina looks legitimately surprised. This was enough to shake her confidence that they can do this quest together, just the two of them. If Jesse hadn’t come…Ellie may be immune to getting infected, but she’s not immune to getting her insides ripped out, which Dina almost watched happen.

Nic: It feels odd to say that I liked scenes that involve such intense violence, but what I liked was that throughout the last two episodes, we’ve gotten to see that in this perpetual cycle of violence there’s no clear “good” or “bad”, “right” or “wrong.” Neither the Wolves nor the Seraphites are innocent in this war and they’ve both committed heinous attacks against the other group. I found it really tough to watch the Seraphites torture the WLF soldier in the name of their Prophet; because of course they think it’s what she would want. While Ellie, Jesse, and Dina hide, we learn that Jesse and Tommy left the night after Ellie and Dina did and I honestly had the same reaction that Ellie did: initial indignation leading to resignation that it’s a damn good thing they followed.

Valerie: As if the stress levels weren’t high enough, Dina gets hit with an arrow on the leg – too close to the femoral artery for my liking, as someone with a degree from Seattle Grace Mercy West Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital for the Dramatic and Traumatized — and then they SPLIT UP. This seems to be Ellie’s go-to plan idea and I DON’T LIKE IT. And of course Ellie can’t resist going to the hospital on her own. Of course she can’t! I wonder if she would have thought of it if she hadn’t seen the sign. If she had run the other direction, would she have found her way out of the park and followed the plan to meet back at the theater? Or would she have always gone ahead, mission-oriented, restless to find her quarry? I’m not sure, to be honest.

Nic: When Dina got an arrow to the leg, I legitimately yelped because I didn’t expect it at all. But once they separated, I had a feeling Ellie was about to make some… Decisions.

Ellie decides to sneak off to the hospital instead of going back to the theater to meet back up with Dina and Jesse.

The Last of Us 205: Angry Ellie, bathed in red

“Seeing red” indeed.

Let’s talk about what Ellie found there.

Nic: I’m like a broken record at this point, but I love the way the show seamlessly integrates “ripped from the game” moments with original moments. The previous scene is so different from the game but as soon as I saw the hospital and WLF base, it felt like I could pick up a controller and have Ellie army crawling through the tall grass. Once we moved inside, I was on edge from the second Nora started disinfecting the medical supplies. Watching Ellie here was like that moment in the theater when she started singing “Future Days.” Something in her activated when she was faced with someone who had a hand in Joel’s death, and she became singularly focused: find Abby at any cost. And when Nora started talking, I thought maybe she was making an empathy play but NOPE! She doubles down on Joel deserving what he got, and then the chase ensues!

Valerie: Speaking of things yoinked directly from the game: the dog named Bonnie, hey girl. And the infamous running-after-Nora scene. My memory is notoriously not the best and I played this game YEARS ago, but as soon as I heard Nora’s name this season, I remembered chasing her down. It’s one of those things that didn’t have to be in the show! There’s no story reason for there to be a chase — though they added a pretty cool one. So it felt weirdly satisfying to see Nora sprinting through the halls and having Ellie hustle after her. (With more skill than I performed with in my personal playthrough.)

And then when Ellie gets down to B2?? You see why they found a way to keep the chase in. We needed to see this. It’s absolutely stunning, and, not for the first time, I am hoping the set design team gets awards for this season. And Ellie seeing Leon Park, becoming one with the cordyceps, breathing out spores?? Haunting! Also haunting? When Ellie first dives down the shaft to follow Nora, you can hear the WLF soldiers who had been chasing her stop in their tracks, yell about the shaft being open, and ordering the hallway to be sealed.

Nic: Once they get down the elevator shaft and we realize that they’re in the previously sealed off basement, everything from the visuals to the music shifts. I love the decision to take a break in the middle of the chase to remind us why we’re here in the first place: cordyceps. And I’m with you, it’s weird that it’s tragically beautiful to see the way it’s infected every surface — the walls, the floor, the body of Leon Park.

The break is short lived though because as soon as Ellie switched on that red light, I knew what time it was. Masterful work on Bella Ramsey and Tati Gabrielle’s parts here. Nora thinks they’re both doomed, but Ellie’s not coughing and it slowly sinks in that there really is an immune girl. Which to her, makes what Joel did even worse because maybe there could have been a cure. And as she makes a last ditch effort to sway Ellie with the knowledge of Joel’s actions in the hospital, it does nothing because our girl doesn’t look shocked at all. She knows what went down and she doesn’t care.

The Last of Us 205: Nora looks up at Ellie with a dash of fear, a bit horrified

Tati Gabrielle was INCREDIBLE in this episode.

Valerie: When we see a darkness settle in over Ellie?? Epic. Nora doesn’t make this easier on herself, like how she called Joel a “little bitch” upstairs, by saying they would have made a cure “from you” which sounds icky to me. Not “from your DNA” or “by studying you.” FROM you. Yikes. And also she reveals this like she thinks she’s a D&D big bad giving their final speech. But there’s no surprise on Ellie’s face. The way Ellie says, “I know” gave me chills. So powerful. Also the way she keeps repeating, “Where’s Abby,” over and over. And the hatred in her eyes isn’t just for Abby; she has reasons to hate them all. Owen just watched when he was probably the only one strong enough to physically stop Abby if he wanted to. Mel drugged Dina. Manny kicked her in the ribs. And Nora? Nora’s the one who held her down. Nora made her watch.

Nic: I loved showing Ellie holster her gun as a nod to Dina accusing her of just shooting no matter what. She drags this out the same way Abby dragged out Joel’s torture and murder. With each swing of the pipe on Nora’s body, Ellie starts to release every bit of rage she’s kept inside for the last three months, and while it’s really hard to watch, it was inevitable.

The Last of Us 205: Ellie crouches menacingly at Nora

And just like that, Ellie becomes an anti-hero.

Valerie: When Ellie walks up to Nora, who is helpless on the ground, she squats down to talk to her exactly like Abby did to Joel. Ellie picks up a golf-club-shaped pipe and hits Nora over and over, just like Abby did to Joel. In her pursuit of revenge, Ellie is becoming the very monster she is hunting.

And last but not least…

The Last of Us 205: Ellie smiles a soft, sleepy smile up at Joel

The stark contrast between the Ellie in the last scene and this scene, though!!

The flashback.

Nic: AND IN CASE WE FORGOT WHAT WE LOST… they hit us with a “Hey, kiddo.” Are y’all kidding?! Also Ellie doesn’t have her tattoo so WHEN ARE WE?!

Valerie: MY SHAYLAS. This scene was like 30 seconds and 3 words long and it SHATTERED ME. Ellie in her own bed, Joel smiling from the doorway in Dad Pose, saying “hey kiddo,” Ellie’s soft, sleepy, happy little “hi.” SMASH MY HEART WITH A LEAD PIPE WHY DON’T YOU, SHOW. I was hoping we’d get more glimpses into what happened during the five-year time jump between seasons, but now I’m not sure my heart is ready for what’s in store.

Before you go! Autostraddle runs on the reader support of our AF+ Members. If this article meant something to you today — if it informed you or made you smile or feel seen, will you consider joining AF and supporting the people who make this queer media site possible?

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Valerie Anne

Valerie Anne (she/they) a TV-loving, video-game-playing nerd who loves reading, watching, and writing about stories in all forms. While having a penchant for sci-fi, Valerie will watch anything that promises a good story, and especially if that good story is queer.

Valerie has written 640 articles for us.

Nic

Nic is a Senior Product Manager at a major Publisher and lives in Astoria, NY. She is way too attached to queer fictional characters and maintains that buying books and reading books are two very different hobbies. When she's not consuming every form of fiction, you can find her dropping it low on the dance floor. You can find Nic on twitter and instagram.

Nic has written 90 articles for us.

5 Comments

  1. First of all, thank you Nic and Valerie for these recaps that are so insightful and positive. This is really the only thing I consume about the show outside of the official HBO post-show podcast because the nastiness about Bella Ramsey hurts my heart too much. There is so much thoughtless, uncritical talk about this show—I mean uncritical in the academic sense—that fails to consider the intricacies of adapting source material and the constrains/limitations of different genres. So, great work here. I appreciate it.

    Speaking of the official podcast: In the latest episode, Druckmann explains that Sick Habit comes from the title of a website that he made in the 2000s. The “sick habit” being the need to create. Not majorly important information, but a nice little tidbit, I think.

    I have watched clips of the games but never sat downed to play the games, so my main understanding of the infected comes from the show. I can’t really compare the two versions accurately. The show’s depiction of them, at least, has made me to tear up repeatedly. In another show, they might just be monsters, but they’re something more here: a kind of body horror that sits with me for a long time after I watch an episode.

    The stalkers and the people who have been turned into spore factories are spectacularly heartbreaking. The stalkers especially as they seem to still have a lot of their human faculties. They make human-like noises, similar to people being tortured. It is as if there is still a conscious human trapped inside. They remind me of other horror stories where the body is taken over but the mind is still functional. I was actually shaking watching them on screen this week. The spore people too. They still have eyes that look alive and their faces are frozen in screams. Like the stalkers, they make sounds like moans of pain as they breathe out the spores. To become a mindless zombie is bad enough, but to be conscious and trapped in your body, watching it do things you don’t want it to do… that is pure horror.

    I could go on forever, but I’ll end with one last thing that I can’t stop thinking about. The visuals have been fantastic this season. Using red as a signal of not only physical danger but of emotional danger, of the danger of losing oneself in rage, has been fantastic. I love the use of it at the end of this episode to show Ellie making a major shift. She’s well on the road to losing herself here, to becoming like the WLF and the Seraphites, who mindlessly deal death back and forth, and are callous and cold about it (“Feel this, bitch”). The red light also just does this great thing to Bella’s face. It makes their face look more severe than it really is and also the red makes their eyes look black—a small detail, but very impactful.

    • Jessica, thank you for this comment and your kind words! I’m so glad this can be a space for you to debrief about the show away from the cesspool of negativity that exists on the Internet. Your comments about the infected really resonated with me too; in the game, the player is so focused on eliminating the threat in front of them, be it WLF, Scars, or infected, that there really isn’t time to sit with the idea that the infected were people first. It’s something the show does an incredible job showcasing. It’s kind of always present, but back in season one they brought it to the forefront when Sam got bit and asked Ellie if he would still be him after he turned into a monster. What an innocent and terrifying question from a child!

      Also agree about the red!! They’re doing such masterful work with visuals this season!

      • You’re welcome! I just have to give acknowledgement when it is due. Insightful commentary is rare and deserves to be amplified. I got so used to reading only academic literary commentary when I was in grad school that I really struggle now with the absolute toxic wasteland that is the internet.

  2. Dina, my girl, not even one ounce afraid for herself, but getting scared for Ellie!

    Never was I this relieved in my life to see a guy save Ellie from stalkers. Thanks Jessie (was it the same in the game, mind’s in tatters!)

    Ellie, my girl, going on a rampage. I would say this was the moment in the game, and now in the show, where she becomes someone else for me. I think, it was not my most favourite part back then. Because it’s you as a player pushing that controller button (was there even a choice to let Nora live?) Here, it seems equally inevitable. Code red!

    The set design was amazing, horribly so with the visuals and sounds, eek.

    I loved the ending! And I’m so not ready for the flashbacks to come 💜

  3. I hate how nasty fans are about Bella. They seem like such a sweetheart and are really talented too. I hear people say the creator is a Zionist. Is that true? I know Pedro and Bella have been very outspokenly pro Palestine. People have said Isabela is a Zionist too but I can only find one vague both sides thing she posted and then pro Palestine stuff so I’m confused?

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What Do Dreams About Snake Bites Mean?

Cowboy Clairvoyant is a members-only newsletter and series by Autumn Fourkiller featuring dream interpretation, tarot answers, and more ventures into the Beyond. Today, Cowboy Clairvoyant interprets dreams about snakes, owls, and exes.

Dear Dreamers,

Howdy, and welcome (or welcome back). Each time I have sat down to write this introduction this week I have found myself bereft of what to discuss. I haven’t had a bad week, actually, far from it, I’ve read a lot, talked to multiple friends on the phone, and had a lot of exciting writing thoughts. I’ve been thinking about fishing and about gender and about the possibilities of love. I did two private in-depth readings, one planned and one impromptu, and felt good about what the seekers left with. I’ve decided to switch to an old timey alarm clock instead of using my phone, and I met a new friend, a writer also from Oklahoma, for delicious vegan donuts, pretty good soy milk iced vanilla lattes, and just mid non-vegan breakfast sandwiches.

We talked about her brief pit stop in Oklahoma, this state we both love and hate and are tied to for a myriad of reasons, and our resistance to dating anyone exactly our age, and what the future holds for both of us. Then, I came home and sat in the backyard talking to my friend Sean in a shirt Stef Rubino sent me, reading to her from what I was reading, but mostly listening, basking in that comfort you only can when you know each other so well. Thank God I will never be the person I was at 22 again, I told her recently, and she said no seriously, me too. I could feel us both thinking about ourselves and the other at that age, and I, at least, mentally shuddered.

Well, I finally said, I’d do it all again just to meet you. And I would.

Yours in Just One of Those Weeks,
Cowboy

a dream door into an owl

I’m napping on my couch and wake to a white owl at my feet. It’s eating purple berries and then my cat also wants the purple berries so they’re play fighting for them. I clap my hands and tell them to stop because I know the owl could hurt my cat, in the dream I see its claws vividly, but it’s not an attack more like if it’s two normal cats play fighting. They stop, the purple juice from the berries goes on my couch and starts fizzing or bubbling. Like it’s a chemical reaction. Then I run with my girlfriend who just appears out of nowhere to clean the purple juice before it stains my couch. The stain is gone. The owl and my cat go away. I wake up. I had a dream about a white owl 2 weeks ago, but I can’t remember the details, only that I saw the owl from a distance.
– Anonymous

Dear Anonymous,

Thank you for the gift of your dream. I won’t lie to you here, culturally (for me), owls are a well… bad omen. Or they can be. Really what they are is a powerful omen. But, of course, what owls mean to me and what owls mean to you are two totally different things, something we must take into consideration before we dive into your dream whole cloth.

First of all, I do not see any ruin in your future, and I think I can provide more clarity to this dream, for this dream is telling you something, so don’t fret. In this dream inside of a dream, we are presented with a stunning image of wildness vs. domesticity in your cat vs. the owl, though they aren’t so much fighting as they are sparring, as they are playing. This is important to remember. You are more worried than your cat is, and your anxiety colors how you perceive what is happening. Just because there is “conflict” does not mean that it needs to be smoothed over. Then, suddenly, the thing they were “fighting” over is gone, leaving only a stain, one that is quickly cleaned up by someone you love.

Well, what does all this mean for you? Even if you had not told me that you wanted to seek a new job in a new sector, and that the anxiety regarding your current job keeps you awake at night, I would have pointed you in this direction, or at least near it. You fear the conflict that leaving your current employment will bring, but you cannot stand the anxiety that it is giving to you day after day. You are at war with smoothing things over or bringing out your claws, but what the cat and the owl tell you, here, is that it will be better once it is over. That the stain left by your decision is easily cleaned up, and that you must be sure to allow the ones closest to you to aid in this, in the cleansing, and also holding you while you do so.

I think the important lesson here for all of us to remember is that of impermanence. While a decision may feel life changing, there is always a more manageable bridge for us to cross, even if the current is fast underneath us. Your next choice of employment can be wholly temporary, just enough to hold you up as you take a breath, regain your strength, and look for a choice you can live with.

See you on the Other Side,
CC

a dream door into a hotel in Prague

I’m in Prague at a hotel bar. My ex is there but they are drinking and partying with their new girlfriend and friends somewhere else in the hotel. My Ex’s brother sits next to me and asks me to go home with him. I say no (I’m a lesbian in my dreams, too) and he says that I should at least let him walk me back to wherever I’m staying. I say I’m staying at this hotel, he tells me that actually, I’m not. He walks me back over the Prague cobblestone and we talk like we’ve known each other for years, we run from the police for some reason, and I wake up before we make it back to my hostel. 
– Acadia

Dear Acadia,

Thank you for the gift of your dream. What a strong opening, in Prague at a hotel bar. I can picture it. Before we begin in earnest, though, I’d like us to introduce some powerful context regarding this dream, to orient us all. The facts: you don’t like your ex’s brother, and you had this dream the night your ex hard launched their new girlfriend.

And yet, despite this dislike, you let him walk you back to the hotel, wherein he upturns your plans once again, but this time, delightfully. You walk and talk like you’ve known each other for years, get into a wildly ’50s sounding run from the police, still together, and then you wake. A simple enough dream, were it not for the facts.

In your questions to me, you asked: Is this dream about my ex or about their brother? To which I can say, quite decidedly, that it is truly about your ex. Your ex’s brother, here, is simply a stand-in for a person you had a long and intimate relationship with. Your ex, and their new lover, are present here, but you can no longer access them, they are as removed from you as any other guest in the hotel. So, the brother then, taking their place, but he can never really be them. I do not mean to suggest that this dream means you are still hung up on your ex, but rather that the ending of this dream means that while you still have some work to do regarding your hurts there, and while it may take longer for you to “move on,” that you will, and it will feel as though you were always meant to, eventually.

We all must sit with one of the worst feelings to experience, which is that of rejection. Think of this rejection not as a rejection of you and who you are, but rather a gift in disguise — better to know now than never, and better to seek out someone who can hold all that you are than someone who cannot.

See you on the Other Side,
CC

a dream door into a person in the woods

Standing in a dark, foggy field, I recognize it as my old home in rural California. I’m holding my cat, Winnie, and set her down in the dark. She reacts, crying, and I pick her up to find she’s been bitten by something on her belly. My mom and stepdad are standing in the dark with us. I flash a light on the ground and see cobras coiled up every five feet, they cover the earth as far as my light can touch. I see their hoods. I feel a bite on my ankle and a cobra bites me. I show my mom Winnie’s bite, I ask her to look, why are we here? We’ve been bitten. But she throws her hands up, defensive, like she can’t acknowledge the harm. We step into my mom and stepdad’s “house,” atmospherically the opposite. White floors, bright sterile lighting. The floor is clear except for the occasional smashed bodies of cobras. I sense that they keep the house cobra free by smashing them to death. 
– juji

Dear juji,

Thank you for the gift of your dream. And what a dream it is! You and I have rurality in common, and I, too, have had many dreams set in a dark, foggy field, so I can picture this easily. Among being one of those weeks, this week’s set of dreams is also one of omens — for snake dreams, in Cherokee and Yuchi cosmology, are deep and powerful omens, especially if one is bitten.

The bites are what drew me in at first, as I knew I had something to tell you about them, but also the imagery, you and Winnie and your mom and stepdad in the dark, and yet you and Winnie being, seemingly, the only two creatures who are vulnerable to a field of snakes.

A brief aside here, though I know what snakes mean symbolically, I have no biological basis on which to assert if there are even any cobras Indigenous to California or not, nor if there were if they would be “deadly,” so I had to figure that out before I could really let this dream simmer. Spoiler alert: There aren’t, though there was, apparently, a Los Angeles Cobras football team that played a grand total of one season in the ’80s. Curiosity settled, and now that I knew I could evaluate this dream on purely a spiritual/psychological/etc. basis, things took on an immediate clarity.

So, both you and your beloved Winnie are bitten, and yet your mother, whose field this is, cannot even tend to your hurts, indeed, she thinks, what can I do about it? You are the one who stepped into a field of snakes. This speaks to a trend, I’m sure, in your waking life. You express to your mother a hurt, and she immediately takes it personally. I’m sure there are many among us who feel this way, our mothers on the defensive when it comes to our thoughts and feelings, and I wish there was an easy way around this, a quick fix, but it is dirty work. Much like smashing cobras to death to keep a house that is, in the waking world, the complete opposite of “clean.” I think your senses here are correct, dear juji, and I think you know, too, that the cobras here are emotions. Emotions that you would rather not have. Emotions you feel would disrupt your sense of the “domestic” symbolized here by Winnie, and that your mother, too, wishes you wouldn’t have.

But, as we all should be told once in our lives, we were not put on this earth to “be easy” (Southern speak for behaving, being relaxed, going with the family flow). The only way to, metaphorically, suck the poison out of our wounds is to acknowledge those hurts, those emotions. Hold the wounds up to the light, and to the light of others, even if they flinch away. Yes, the bite may leave a scar, and yet you are capable of carrying on, even “marred.”

See you on the Other Side,
CC

Submit your dreams and tarot questions to Cowboy Clairvoyant. You can also leave a comment on this article describing a dream to be interpreted.

Before you go! Autostraddle runs on the reader support of our AF+ Members. If this article meant something to you today — if it informed you or made you smile or feel seen, will you consider joining AF and supporting the people who make this queer media site possible?

Join AF+!
Related:

Autumn Fourkiller

Autumn Fourkiller is a writer and mystic from the “Early Death Capital of the World.” She is currently at work on a novel about Indigeneity, the Olympics, and climate change. A 2022 Ann Friedman Weekly Fellow, her work can be found in Atlas Obscura, Majuscule, Longreads, and elsewhere. You can follow her newsletter, Dream Interpretation for Dummies, on Substack.

Autumn has written 16 articles for us.

1 Comment

  1. this is random but there is often fog in my dreams!!!! what it mean

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The American Academy of Pediatrics Isn’t Complying With Trump’s Bogus ‘Report’ on Trans Youth Healthcare

feature image photo by Spencer Platt / Staff via Getty Images

This is Trans News Tracker, a biweekly Autostraddle roundup and analysis of the biggest trans news stories.

Feels strange to start this by saying “Welcome back to Trans News Tracker,” but here we are. About a week ago, I expressed some weariness to a friend regarding how closely I’ve been paying attention to all of the highs and lows of what’s going on when it comes to our survival. They reminded me of something I often express:

We’ve always found a way to keep living and we’ll continue to. 

I thought I’d share that with you all before we begin again here.

American Academy of Pediatrics Calls BS on Trump’s Bogus Trans Youth ‘Report’

The American Academy of Pediatrics is standing up to President Trump and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) scientifically inaccurate report on gender-affirming treatment for trans youth.

At the beginning of this month, the HHS put out a 400-page report — absent any authors’ or professionals’ names attached — explaining new “guidelines” for medical professionals who treat trans children called “Treatment for Pediatric Gender Dysphoria: Review of Evidence and Best Practices.” In the “report”, the HHS makes several unverified claims about the efficacy of trans healthcare, especially for trans youth, and orders medical professionals to ignore the guidelines put out by almost every major medical association in this country. Since then, independent journalist Erin Reed has comprehensively fact checked the claims made in the report and proved them entirely false per actual scientific evidence.

Susan J. Kressly and American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) — which, according to their website, represents “67,000 primary care pediatricians, pediatric medical subspecialists and pediatric surgical specialists dedicated to the health, safety and well-being of infants, children, adolescents and young adults” — immediately released a statement refuting the report. The statement states clearly that AAP nor any other reputable medical associations were consulted in the creation of the report. Crucially, the statement also says medical professionals in the AAP will keep administering gender-affirming care to their patients.

Kressly writes:

“This report misrepresents the current medical consensus and fails to reflect the realities of pediatric care. As we have seen with immunizations, bypassing medical expertise and scientific evidence has real consequences for the health of America’s children. AAP was not consulted in the development of this report, yet our policy and intentions behind our recommendations were cited throughout in inaccurate and misleading ways. The report prioritizes opinions over dispassionate reviews of evidence. Patients, their families, and their physicians—not politicians or government officials —should be the ones to make decisions together about what care is best for them based on evidence-based, age-appropriate care.”

In a moment where many organizations are leaving trans people, especially trans children, to the sadistic whims of this administration, this represents a sharp departure — one we’ll likely see developing further in the coming months — and an important reminder that organizations do not have to comply with anything this administration says or does.

Some Good News For Once

At the University of Texas at Austin, a day of drag and defiance. In response to a UT System Board of Regents ban on any of the universities in the UT system hosting drag performances, a group of students at UT Austin found a creative way to resist and build community at the same time. Students participating in the Day of Drag initiative showed up to class in drag, getting makeup done by drag performers on campus on their way to class. While this might not change anything immediately, the students there have reported that it helped build a broader organizing community that they plan to leverage in future actions.

The state of Maine continues to defeat the Trump administration in new ways in the battle over trans athletes. After Maine Governor Janet Mills stood up to the Trump administration’s orders that their school districts must comply with Trump’s executive order on trans youth in school athletics, the Trump administration responded by freezing U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) funds that contributed to school lunch funding in the state. The state sued the USDA and won their funds back. When Mills told Trump she’d “see him in court,” she truly meant it.

Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs vetoes anti-trans bills, chides GOP for attacking Arizonans. If you know anything about the complicated (and often convoluted) nature of Arizona politics, this is actually quite a historic and interesting win for both trans people in the state and the future of the state’s politics. I also appreciate how sick of everyone’s shit Gov. Hobbs seems in her response to the bills they expected her to sign into law.

Sam Nordquist to be added to the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor. I wrote about Sam’s life in February, and although it’s difficult for me to be thrilled about a “national” anything, even I can admit this news made me tear up quite a bit. Considering that people in power are trying their hardest to erase trans people from public life, I think it’s incredible he’s being memorialized this way.

An immersive play at Compton’s Cafeteria, where trans women rioted in 1966. As Nastia Voynovskaya points out in this review, “To younger generations, the ’60s may seem like ancient history. But it wasn’t very long ago that dressing in gender-nonconforming clothing or dancing with someone of the same sex were arrestable offenses. We’re lucky that some of the people who lived through it are still here to tell the tale. With trans rights under attack once again, these elders and their perspectives are precious. We can all learn from them.” I wish I was in San Francisco to see this.

News I Wish I Didn’t Have to Report

Trump DOJ erases trans people from crime data surveys. Not an entirely shocking development but, considering that violence against trans people keeps increasing, it is a startling reminder that we need to continue to organize more intentional communities and learn how to keep each other safe.

Two cis women kicked out of a Boston hotel bathroom after one was ordered to “prove” sex. Although this happened to cis women, this story is a good example of how trans panic is manifesting at every institutional level. The women involved have filed a discrimination complaint with the Massachusetts Attorney General, so it will be interesting to see what happens as a result of their legal pushback.

Texas House votes to strictly define man and woman, excluding trans people from state records. In Gov. Abbott and the Texas GOP’s never ending quest to one-up all the other anti-trans politicians in the country, they’re trying to make it so trans people in the state are forced to identify themselves on all legal documents with the gender they were assigned at birth. Another horrifying reality for trans people in the state, but as the article discusses, trans people and their allies are already rallying to try to prevent this from happening.

Republicans seek more state laws on transgender people, putting Democrats on the spot. Most Democrats are doing absolutely nothing to ensure trans people aren’t continually persecuted by this administration — or they’re in support of these highly oppressive new measures. A reminder that even though people want to believe so badly that Democrats are well-meaning, they are just another arm of fascist control.

Transgender issues are a strength for Trump, AP-NORC poll finds. Despite his wildly low approval ratings on almost everything else, it appears that according to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll, four out of 10 Americans think Trump’s administration is handling trans issues “well.” We, uh, have a hell of a lot of work to do here.

News I Have to Include Even Though I’m Against the U.S. Military-Industrial Complex as a Whole

US to begin immediate removal of up to 1,000 trans military members. According to a directive ordered last week, “The Pentagon is removing the 1,000 members of the military who openly identify as trans, and giving those who have yet to openly identify as transgender 30 days to remove themselves.”

Last Bits

We published some wonderfully written and reported pieces on trans inclusion in sports and the horrors and difficulties of being a trans person traveling out of and into the U.S. last week.

Cole Escola is nominated for a Tony Award for their role in Oh, Mary!. They deserve this, and I love how I couldn’t help hearing their voice in my head as I read this brief interview.

Wrestling with his gender identity, a former Marine finds himself and works to empower trans youth. As noted above, my relationship with the U.S. military-industrial complex and the people who are/were part of it is complicated, but I appreciated this story and the spotlight it puts on Harbor Camps, a sleepaway camp for trans and nonbinary youth.

‘Trans history gives me the confidence to change the world today.’ A quick read on something I’m always harping about on this website: the importance of studying trans and queers history.

Liev Schreiber opens up for first time about trans daughter Kai: ‘It’s important that she goes, “I am trans, look at me.”’ Another celebrity that parents of a certain age range (50 to 75) love a lot coming out in support of his trans child in a big way. Let’s keep this rolling.

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Stef Rubino

Stef Rubino is a writer, community organizer, competitive powerlifter, and former educator from Ft. Lauderdale, FL. They're currently working on book of essays and preparing for their next powerlifting meet. They’re the fat half of the arts and culture podcast Fat Guy, Jacked Guy, and you can read some of their other writing in Change Wire and in Catapult. You can also find them on Twitter (unfortunately).

Stef has written 144 articles for us.

There’s Nothing Wrong With Being a Third Wheel

Fresh off a break up, I attend a queer prom-themed party with a couple as my dates. When I use the term “couple” to describe them, it causes excessive shifting. But that’s what they are. And I am, happily, their third wheel.

We pay a twenty dollar cover. A friend of a friend who is responsible for rallying a vast majority of the attendees through a queer, Black film cooperative, says hi. She is glowing in the center of a circle of women who are all actually dancing. (Rare!)

“If you think any of my friends are attractive,” she whisper-screams to me over the music, “Tell me.” They are attractive. Partly in the way they make me feel short — a rarity for my 5’11 self — but mostly in how they move so freely. “Thank you,” I scream-whisper in response. “But I think I need a little time.” She shimmies backwards into the metallic circle of joy that awaits her, calling out: “I respect that.”

I return to my dates. I remember being scolded by a man at 4am in Berlin: “If you aren’t moving your feet you aren’t dancing.” We unironically move our feet. We ironically fist pump to early 2000s deep cuts. The DJs are two beautiful lesbian couples — the masc halves spin while the femme halves step-touch off to the side in stilettos. My friends cling on to one another, whispering. I turn out to face the partiers, giving them privacy, but they pull me back when they notice. My friend of a friend reappears, “If you start to feel like a third wheel, come dance with us.”

A “third-wheel” implies exclusion. A stray left out of the main dynamic of the couple. People feel bad for all that this person is missing out on. However, as a lifelong third-wheel, all that I’m missing out on is my favorite part. You can blame it on avoidant attachment or being a Sagittarius, but exclusion can be incredible.

I love being friends with couples. My whole life I have. For anyone interested in converting to the lifestyle, I suggest choosing the functional ones and becoming close with both parties. Two of my closest friends met three years ago at a Halloween party. I had a front row seat to all of it: from my friend discovering her sexuality to the push and pulls of monogamy negotiations to where we (I mean they) are today – a beautiful studio apartment in Greenpoint.

I’ve always felt this way. Even as a teenager, my two best friends were a straight couple. We would eat fries and gossip and take naps together. A popular girl pulled me aside senior year and asked, “So what’s it like to be a third wheel?” I responded, “Oh. I don’t see it that way. If anything, he’s the third wheel.” The couple loved that response. After their relationship disintegrated, I wanted to take him to the prom. This resulted in her returning my house key through a third party. Even though she’d helped me come to terms with my sexuality and knew we’d be going as friends, it was still a betrayal. It was a betrayal of the friendship the three of us shared.

Couples are a soft place to land. You can get super close with them and trust that they have their own separate dynamic to get back to. You are merely a welcome addition! It’s clear cut. They are a fully functional unit without you, so when you’re added it is simply because they want you there. This is not the case for all other friendships. As I get further along in my twenties, I see female friendships all around me combusting due to jealousy, resentment, you name it. One of the biggest reasons I hear for friendships ending is that the relationship was “circumstantial.” I hear people say, “I wouldn’t be their friend if we hadn’t met at work.” Or at school or at the dentist. But couple friends are not circumstantial. They are going out of their way to share their dynamic with you.

For me, a sacred aspect of the third wheel role is its platonic nature. I’m curious about my monogamous romance with the idea of monogamy. Mostly in theory. And because I keep being asked to be curious about it. But my friendships have always been so far removed from that. My friends’ relationships all fall somewhere along the spectrum of monogamy, so the beauty of this dynamic, and in 99.9% of my friendships, is their complete removal from sex. There’s such joy in knowing that this person (or these people) are only sticking around for the sake of friendship.

I’m a gatherer. I love hosting. I love having my friends meet my friends. I’m also so aware of the dynamics of everyone around me at all times. With a couple, you don’t need to be. Because of the private nature of their relationship, I’m not checking in to see if anyone has to pee or needs another drink or loves that song. They have each other for that. I don’t think twice about calling my uber or taking a lap or talking to the bartender. I hope my friends are having a good night but, truly, I have no idea. I’ll probably find out in the morning.

I offer an emotional buffer to couples that doesn’t really exist in one-on-one dynamics. I’m a natural caretaker and love being my friends’ point person. But in this case? Their partner is their point person. So whether my friend has to pee is none of my business. What is my business, you ask? My friendship with them. Both of them.

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Hope Cassandra

Hope Cassandra is a comedic actress and writer based in NYC. Hope holds a BFA from NYU Tisch and has trained and performed with Second City Chicago, UCB, and BCC. Hope wrote, performed in, and produced the play Obsessed. — a dark comedy about celebrity worship, chronically online Gen-Zs (complimentary), and power imbalance — which had a one off at Soho Playhouse and subsequent sold out run at Under St Marks Frigid in 2025. She can be seen on Paramount+ in Blues Big City Adventure playing the role of "twenty something" which she also plays day-to-day. In her "spare" time, Hope enjoys performing with friends in her improv group Bob, teaching yoga, and talking in the third person. Upcoming shows: Passive Income: Side Hustle, duo sketch (BCC, May 18th) and Dance, Bob, an improv show (BCC, May 14).

Hope has written 1 article for us.

6 Comments

  1. I love this article. I am in a couple that has historically had a third platonic BFF around through long periods and it can be such a great dynamic if everyone is on the same page. Thank you for talking about an underappreciated aspect of queer culture.

  2. Best cohousing arrangement of my life (including both past and current long-term partners… sorry, loves!) was with a couple with whom I had/still have this dynamic. As a fiercely independent introvert, I loved loved loved living with intimate togetherness available but without the responsibility of being primary point person. This piece was really lovely!

  4. This beautifully captures the underrated magic of third-wheeling — not as an outsider, but as a cherished constant in a dynamic full of trust, warmth, and platonic intimacy. There’s something so freeing about being close without pressure, present without responsibility, and loved without conditions.
    Digital Dopamine

  5. Years ago, also fresh off a breakup, I went to a diner with two couples. When the server asked about check splitting, the partners grabbed hands and raised them. So I held my own and put them up, saying “I’m the fifth wheel”

    One of my friends emphatically stayed “you’re not a fifth wheel; you’re the point of the Star!”

    She and her wife are two of my dearest friends and honestly that was a big part of it.

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The Best Queer Books Featuring Mommy Issues

I’m here with a very important book list that could have easily been co-authored by everyone in my main group chat: queer books featuring mommy issues! Gays really are out here having complicated relationships with our mothers and then writing whole books about it.

For the purposes of this list, I’m working off of an expansive definition of “mommy issues,” not limiting us to only the Oedipal interpretation of the term or only featuring books with age gap relationships (that could be its whole own list!). There are many ways to have mommy issues, and what the books on this list ultimately have in common is a complicated, often conflict-laden mother-child dynamic. The titles include nonfiction as well as fiction, and the mommy issues range in scope and intensity. Primarily memoirs and literary fiction are featured, since including romance felt like opening a whole massive canon of mommy issues.

Fellow fan of mommy issues art Drew Burnett Gregory has been tapped for some of the brief blurbs below. Many of the books also have linked Autostraddle reviews in the blurbs because, apparently, our team loves to review books with mommy issues, which surely says nothing at all about us.

This list was originally published in April 2024 and has been updated for Mother’s Day 2025.

Alice Sadie Celine by Sarah Blakley-Cartwright

Alice Sadie Celine by Sarah Blakley-Cartwright

Self-serious Sadie has never really liked her wild Berkley women’s studies professor mother, Celine, a dynamic which becomes uhhhh a lot more complicated when Celine starts sleeping with Sadie’s longtime best friend Alice. Alice Sadie Celine covers decades and alternates perspectives between the titular characters.

Good Girl by Aria Aber

Good Girl by Aria Aber

God I love when poets write novels!! In this one, protagonist Nila is wholly consumed by the grief of losing her mother, a character who while not technically physically present takes up so much space in this novel, which follows Nila into the underbelly of Berlin’s art and techno underground.

Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel

Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel

Between Fun Home and Are You My Mother?, Bechdel’s oeuvre is the pinnacle of filial investigation. In this graphic memoir, she zeroes in on her mother and her mother’s artistic ambitions, yielding a poignant and humorous work of mother-daughter storytelling.

Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde

Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde

If it seems like we include Zami on a lot of lists here at Autostraddle, it’s because it really is such an important fixture of lesbian literary canon. In it, Lorde traces the lineage of women who have shaped her life, including her mother, who appears throughout the genre-defying work of personal writing. The end in particular provides a striking portrait of her mother’s strength.

Ordinary Girls by Jaquira Dí­az

Ordinary Girls by Jaquira Dí­az

Dí­az’s memoir is a gorgeously lyrical exploration of Puerto Rican history, the author’s personal struggles with mental health and depression, and a complicated and often violent relationship between Díaz and her mother, who has schizophrenia. In an interview with LA Times, Díaz said the following about these parts of the book: “My story wasn’t unique — somewhere there is a teenage girl with a mother who suffers from mental illness and addiction, just trying to get through the day. Maybe seeing herself in this book will make life a little bit easier.”

Diary of a Misfit by Casey Parks

Diary of a Misfit by Casey Parks

Casey Parks simultaneously digs into her own family history as well as the lost history of a trans stranger named Roy in Diary of a Misfit, a stunning work of nonfiction on queer life. She digs into her fraught relationship with her mother, who initially shuns her for being gay.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

Ocean Vuong’s lyrical debut novel is structured as a letter from a first generation Vietnamese American son to his single mother who cannot read. The letter digs into his mother’s history and his memories, painting an intimate and breathtaking portrait of mother and son against the backdrops of the Vietnam War and its lasting impact, the American opioid crisis, and more.

City of Laughter by Temim Fruchter

City of Laughter by Temim Fruchter

City of Laughter concerns four generations of women, so there are multiple combinations of fraught mother-daughter relationships in this book about the silences and secrets kept within families.

Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One by Kristen Arnett

stop me if you've heard this one by Kristen Arnett

Version 1.0.0

I am biased here as I’m married to the author, but my wife Kristen Arnett’s entire oeuvre is filled to the brim with mommy issues (and, in the case of her debut novel Mostly Dead Things, combination mommy/daddy issues). Her second novel With Teeth is arguably a mommy issues book in that it’s about bad gay moms. But her most mommy issues book to date is her recent third novel, Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One, in which clown protagonist Cherry is gay and also has a gay mom. She also has a thing for MILFs and pursues a much older magician Mommi named Margot the Magnificent.

Ma and Me by Putsata Reang

Ma and Me by Putsata Reang

In her searing memoir Ma and Me, Reang wrestles with her desires to be a good Cambodian daughter and her queerness, constantly at odds with her mother’s expectations.

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson

A true classic in the lesbian mommy issues literary canon!

Memorial by Bryan Washington

Memorial by Bryan Washington

While I’ve focused mainly on mother-daughter dynamics on this list, gay men of course have their fair share of mommy issues, too, and one of the protagonists of Memorial, Benson, finds himself in a strange living situation when his boyfriend Mike leaves the country and his boyfriend’s mother Mitsuko moves in.

Milk Fed by Melissa Broder

Like all of Broder’s work, this is a freaky little book with sentences that’ll make you laugh til you choke. Milk Fed is about Rachel, who inherits a calorie counting obsession from her mother, from whom her therapist encourages a detox from. Rachel becomes obsessed with Miriam, who works the counter at the froyo shop Rachel frequents. For Autostraddle, Kate Gorton writes: “This book has everything: lesbian sex, mommy issues, eating disorders, frozen yogurt, plus-size golems, Jewish mysticism, weirdly specific fantasies about coworkers, a fat chick as the love interest, and a whole lot more.”

We Do What We Do in the Dark by Michelle Hart

We Do What We Do in the Dark by Michelle Hart

Not every age gap lesbian relationship is a product of mommy issues, but in Michelle Hart’s beautifully layered We Do What We Do in the Dark, that’s at least part of the genesis. Ostensibly a book about an affair, the novel finds its greatest moments in flashbacks between the protagonist and both her own mom and the mom of her best friend. – Drew Burnett Gregory

Native Country of the Heart by Cherríe Moraga

Native Country of the Heart by Cherríe Moraga

This memoir touches on so many threads of Moraga’s life and Mexican American diaspora and is ultimately at its heart a mother-daughter story. By telling her mother Elvira’s story, Moraga excavates so many layered histories.

Exalted by Anna Dorn

Middle-aged lesbian and bad mom Dawn, one of the two chaotic and unreliable protagonists of Exalted, likes sleeping with younger women and self-sabotaging in spectacular ways. Here is a mommy issues novel from the perspective of the mother.

You Exist Too Much by Zaina Arafat

I am truly obsessed with this novel about a Palestinian American queer woman navigating love addiction and her queerness. The title actually comes from something the mother in the novel says to the daughter. The protagonist often engages in affairs that scream mommy issues.

A Good Happy Girl by Marissa Higgins

A Good Happy Girl by Marissa Higgins

A Good Happy Girl is more overtly a daddy issues novel, the protagonist’s distant relationship with her mother rumbles underneath the surface of every moment. After all, some gays simply have parent issues, and this gay deals with that by entering a complicated throuple with an older woman and her wife. – Drew Burnett Gregory

Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison

Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison

Here’s another classic in the literary canon of fraught mother-daughter dynamics, Allison’s beloved novel and portrait of the American South centers young girl Bone, who has an abusive stepfather and complicated relationship with her mother Anney, who had her out of wedlock as a young teen.

Here Comes the Sun by Nicole Dennis-Benn

Here Comes the Sun by Nicole Dennis-Benn

Dennis-Benn’s debut novel tells the stories of two sisters and their mothers, three Jamaican women. Delores is a complicated mother to both sisters but especially to queer protagonist Margot. A case could also be made for Dennis-Benn’s Patsy making this list, too.

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson

Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal?

Winterson is the only author with the distinguished honor of being on this list twice, and that feels right. Her memoir details her journey to find her biological mother.

Matricide by Carla Tomaso

Matricide by Carla Tomaso

The title says it all. Many queer books may dabble in mommy issues, but Carla Tomaso’s underread Matricide makes them its primary subject. Read it to laugh, read it to cry, read it to get turned on, and read it to think hmm I guess my mom isn’t that bad. – Drew Burnett Gregory

And what a note to end on! Literal matricide! This is far from an exhaustive list, so feel free to shout out your favorite queer mommy issues books in the comments!

Before you go! Autostraddle runs on the reader support of our AF+ Members. If this article meant something to you today — if it informed you or made you smile or feel seen, will you consider joining AF and supporting the people who make this queer media site possible?

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Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya

Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya is the managing editor of Autostraddle and a lesbian writer of essays, fiction, and pop culture criticism living in Orlando. She is the former managing editor of TriQuarterly, and her short stories appear in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Joyland, Catapult, The Offing, The Rumpus, Cake Zine, and more. Some of her pop culture writing can be found at The A.V. Club, Vulture, The Cut, and others. When she is not writing, editing, or reading, she is probably playing tennis. You can follow her on Twitter or Instagram and learn more about her work on her website.

Kayla has written 1023 articles for us.

7 Comments

  1. really cannot recommend a good happy girl enough. it’s been a long time since I blushed reading something, and this book made me squirm. it’s also wonderfully narrated if you’re more into audio books!

  2. My favorite book genre, some of my favorite books of all time are on this list (Milk Fed, Exalted, Zami, You Exist Too Much). I’ve put library holds on the rest of the list!! I would also include as a B list to this genre:

    Your Love is Not Good by Johanna Hedva
    Alice Sadie Celine by Sarah Blakeley-Cartwright
    Patsy by Nicole Dennis-Benn (when the mother and daughter meet again I cried for hours)

  3. Love this list and many of the books on it! Jeanette Winterson’s memoir is one of my all time favourite books and I am always flabbergasted to remember the title is something her (adoptive) mother said to her when she told her that living with a woman made her happy.

  4. My To Read list just quadrupled! Fantastic.

    It’s good to see Zami here! I love that book.

    I’d like to recommend Detransition, Baby! by Torrey Peters, a novel about three people – a trans woman, her ex who detransitioned, and his cis girlfriend – who are considering whether to become parents. It’s absolutely brilliant in the way it explores these characters’ very different perspectives on motherhood.

  5. Not a big audiobook listener but do highly recommend the audiobook of Alice Sadie Celine –– ready by Cherry Jones!

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Quiz: Which Lesbian Mom Are You?

Well it is Mother’s Day for those who celebrate. But there are so many types of mothers out there, aren’t there? Sure there are lesbian mothers who have children. However, there are also Mommis. There are, too, Mothers. There are Dog Moms, and Cat Moms. There are Daddys. There is the lesbian polar bear mom on Peppa Pig. With so many Moms out there, it’s time to figure out — which one are you?

Which Lesbian Mom Are You?





















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Riese

Riese is the 43-year-old Co-Founder of Autostraddle.com as well as an award-winning writer, video-maker, LGBTQ+ Marketing consultant and aspiring cyber-performance artist who grew up in Michigan, lost her mind in New York and now lives in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in nine books, magazines including Marie Claire and Curve, and all over the web including Nylon, Queerty, Nerve, Bitch, Emily Books and Jezebel. She had a very popular personal blog once upon a time, and then she recapped The L Word, and then she had the idea to make this place, and now here we all are! In 2016, she was nominated for a GLAAD Award for Outstanding Digital Journalism. She's Jewish. Follow her on twitter and instagram.

Riese has written 3315 articles for us.

13 Comments

  1. Gay Auntie: Is your life constantly in transition? SURE. Do you lose track of time a lot? Of course! Does that stop you from taking especially good care of everybody and everything that you love? (Including everybody else’s cute babies?) It does not.

    This was the goal the whole time

  2. I got Mother Earth which makes A LOT of sense but I would’ve also settled for Trader Joe’s mommi if that were an option (ie crunchy, goes to Trader Joe’s right after the gym, would absolutely make homemade snacks for her children and pets)

    • how much time of her wild and precious life does the average trader joes mommi spend trying to navigate the trader joes parking lot do you imagine because i bet its a lot and mommis deserve rest!

  4. I am a cat mom!!!!!!! This is true I love cats so so so so so so so much. When I took this quiz I had a cat sleeping on my arm under the blanket and as I’m writing this comment the same cat is sleeping on my stomach. Genuinely excited to never date again but just fill my life with cats. Also what is it with Autostraddle quizzes just giving the most delicious evocative food descriptions?? I thought this was a Kayla thing but here I am getting all hungry again! 😱

    • well kayla is the true foodie but also i decided to become a cook last year to Do The Cooking For the Family so now i’ve become very interested in menus and recipes! sometimes if i can’t think of something just from my own head I will think of where I think this specific Result might go out to eat and then look at that place’s menu and mash something up from there.

      also i am v happy 4 u and your CATS

      • omg wishing you all the best in your journey of Doing The Cooking For The Family!

  5. I got cat mom , which I’ll take, even though my last cat died 10 years ago.

    The first half of this is eerily accurate:

    “You’re a cozy-ass b*tch who loves to nest and craft and plan little parties and you would not say no to a rescue kitten and you will always say yes to cats!!! YES CATS“

    If we’re self reporting, I’d say I’m a plant mom with a gay auntie wing.

  6. I got Mommy polar bear from Peppa Pig! I was not expecting this and had forgotten about her This is so amazing! We both wear glasses too!

  7. LOL, I’m a cat mom. 100% accurate as I watch my two fur kids sitting next to me while I work. 😸

  8. “Daddy? You’re hot. You’re a grown-ass adult. You don’t fear vulnerability. You are calm, cool, collected, and the master of your domain. (In a hot way)”

    Did not expect to get this, particularly as I hit my I just turned 40 crisis of what am I doing with my life, but I’m glad fake it til you make it is maybe still working for me even as my mind feels like it’s melting?

    Those food descriptions were so specific and enticing, I DO want a kale salad with pepitas, pomegranate, lemon vinaigrette and a side of crusty bread, damnit!

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12 Queers on Where We Fall on the Polyamory/Monogamy Scale

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For many, polyamory or monogamy are not fixed modes of moving through dating and relationships. These things can change over time, fluctuate depending on partners, and look like a lot of different things to different people. Some people consider themselves monogamous but allow space for flirting or kissing outside of the relationship. Non-monogamy can take a lot of different shapes, too, and can often be so personal. Discourse around polyamory and monogamy sometimes flattens these realities. To demonstrate the wide range of possibilities, we asked our team to describe where they fall on the polyamory/monogamy spectrum. What’s your own relationship to polyamory and/or monogamy? Has it changed over time? Let us know in the comments!

Before you go! Autostraddle runs on the reader support of our AF+ Members. If this article meant something to you today — if it informed you or made you smile or feel seen, will you consider joining AF and supporting the people who make this queer media site possible?

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Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya

Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya is the managing editor of Autostraddle and a lesbian writer of essays, fiction, and pop culture criticism living in Orlando. She is the former managing editor of TriQuarterly, and her short stories appear in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Joyland, Catapult, The Offing, The Rumpus, Cake Zine, and more. Some of her pop culture writing can be found at The A.V. Club, Vulture, The Cut, and others. When she is not writing, editing, or reading, she is probably playing tennis. You can follow her on Twitter or Instagram and learn more about her work on her website.

Kayla has written 1023 articles for us.

the team

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5 Comments

  1. I have a friend who says she’s polysaturated with one partner, which is a nice way to think about monogamy.

    • I think with the polyamorous/monogamous scale you are completely missing lots of other stuff like fuckbuddies, promiscuity, and so on. The sapphic way of non monogamy is controlled, discussed, organised and love/relationship centered. Thats not so much the case in other parts of the world. For example gay non monogamy is more community/group based, anonymous, non verbal, sex and spontaneity centered. No judgment, just saying that you have a blind spot here.

  2. This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot for myself recently, so I really appreciated reading this! Drew’s, Stef’s and Nico’s answers especially resonated with me.

  3. I don’t polyamory is an oppressed identity, with widespread housing, employment, and other discrimination

    but it’s true that many of the legal mechanisms of claiming someone as family are not readily available to people with more than one partner or more than one co-parent. the implications of this for monogamish people are few, but in north american jurisdictions you can’t be legally married to more than one person, and in most of north america you can’t put more than two people on a birth certificate. as gay people, the issues that arise from a lack of legal recognition as someone’s kin should be very familiar to us. you could make the argument that for many people, polyamory is a choice while queerness isn’t, but I don’t think the liberty we’re fighting for should be contingent on claiming that we’re only doing so as a concession to people for whom there are no alternatives. if love is love and love wins, then surely the number of people who are mutually loving and caring for each other should not matter

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AF+ Crossword Has Joined a Fantasy League

and

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Kate Hawkins

Kate Hawkins is a city-loving Californian currently residing in New Hampshire with her wife and toddler, where she's currently enjoying sports that require unwieldy pieces of equipment (kayaking! biking! cross country skiing!) and grilling lots of corn. She's stoked to be writing puzzles for Autostraddle and hopes you enjoy solving these gay puzzles!

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Rachel

Rachel is a queer crossword constructor, writer, and bioethicist.

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1 Comment

  1. I did not understand the theme at ALL but am delighted by this crossword nonetheless. Got it in 4:34, pretty pleased w/ that!

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How Dare ‘Hacks’ Be This Good?!

The following is a recap of Hacks season four, episode six, “Mrs. Table” written by Carolyn Lipka and directed by Paul W. Downs.

This season of Hacks keeps blowing me away. Every week, I text my friends in awe about this fourth season, about how the series has never really run out of steam, even as it’s technically repeating the same big beats over and over again. Ava and Deborah come together, are driven apart, come back together, are driven apart, and so on and so forth, like two star-crossed lovers fated to repeat the same cycles and constantly be in want of something the other can’t give. That tension, that repetition, none of it would work without dynamic writing and nuanced performances, which of course Hacks has in spades.

Specificity in the various subplots of course also keeps things feeling fresh, but those alone aren’t where Hacks‘ magic lives. It almost has more in common with a series like Mad Men than with other streamer comedies. Mad Men always managed to make agency shakeups and the constant rotation of names into and out of Sterling Cooper thrilling even as they were technically hitting the same beats repeatedly. Hacks, similarly an exploration of power, ambition, and work, also maintains consistent dramatic tension and intrigue in its central power struggle and the back and forth of Ava and Deborah’s careers. Am I saying Ava is the Peggy to Deborah’s Don? I think I am! It’s not a perfect parallel, but it does work on some levels.

We’re a little over halfway through season four, and we’re thrust into a different part of Ava and Deborah’s toxic cycle. After pushing each other away and being at each other’s throats all season, the tides change. They’re moving toward each other again.

But they really have to reach their breaking points to get there. Midway through this episode, Ava has a spectacular mental breakdown. Hannah Einbinder is phenomenal at portraying Ava on the brink. She screams, she throws an entire grilled branzino at a window, she drives full force through a security gate on the lot like a woman not just on the edge but already falling off of it.

Ava is understandably pushed to this point by the events that precede it in the episode. It all starts with the news that Ava’s ex Ruby, star of Wolf Girl, will be a guest on the show (others will argue Einbinder deserves awards for many other parts of this episode, but I personally think she deserves them simply for her line reading of “I almost married her, in my opinion.”), prompting Ava to get an unhinged makeover and generally spiral in Ruby’s presence in her attempts to seem Totally Cool and Put Together. She even manages to deliver the news she’s dating a couple in the most awkward way imaginable. Ruby, a consummate professional, assures Ava she’s fine being interviewed by Deborah, despite Deborah and Ava’s unhealthy attachment to Deborah contributing to their breakup.

Ruby does keep it professional, but Deborah makes it personal. She asks, on camera, for Ruby to share the story of the ring, intentionally mortifying Ava. This would be diabolical under any circumstances, but the fact that it seems so premeditated makes it that much worse. Previously in the episode, Deborah rejects all of the writers’ jokes for a desk bit for the episode, forcing Ava to frantically come up with a slew of more alts. (This is such a physical episode for Einbinder, and watching her crash into people as she runs down the hallway to deliver the alts is just one of many physical comedy feats she pulls off in the episode.) Deborah rejects those, too, and says they’ll just have to extend Ruby’s interview to fill the space. I think this means Deborah was planning to pull the ring and failed engagement story out of Ruby this whole time.

And why? I believe it’s because of her encounter with Ava at the end of last episode, when Ava icily told Deborah the couple she’s dating haven’t seen the show yet because she told them to wait until it got good. I really do think Deborah is petty enough to want to embarrass Ava as a form of emotional revenge. She has proven to be just that wicked over and over, and there’s a certain pleasure she always takes in tormenting Ava, one of the people who sees and understands her the most.

Ava heads to the couple’s house, quite literally interrupting their cozy night in with a jumpscare. In Ava’s mind, her arrangement with the couple has been perfect. She’s too busy working to really be a steadfast and emotional presence in a relationship, so they can provide that for each other and she can just have really hot sex with both of them whenever she wants, as we see her do in last week’s episode in, indeed, a VERY HOT sex scene. The couple doesn’t feel the same way though. They feel used for sex and like Ava doesn’t want to actually get to know them. This wasn’t what they were looking for. I’m so into the turn here, because it isn’t really like any storyline about polyamory or open relationships I’ve seen on television before. Often with other portrayals, it’s the third who feels used, or the couple bring a third in to deflect ongoing problems. But Hacks delivers something more interesting and expansive here; this couple wants Ava to be a more equal part in the relationship than she currently is. They want the emotional intimacy from her, too, something Ava mistakenly assumed wasn’t part of the arrangement at all. And so now, she’s dumped, another excruciatingly awkward moment as Ava’s expectations deviate wildly from reality. It takes her far too long to realize she’s being dumped, and even as she’s about to leave, it’s like she thinks they’ll change their mind. But they only ask her to stop so she can return her key, not to beg her back like perhaps she was hoping for.

Freshly dumped and pissed off about the interview with Ruby, she delivers a big “fuck you” to Deborah before she gets to the branzino that breaks the bisexual’s back. She has been so obsessed with trying to be a good boss to her writers, perhaps subconsciously trying to prove she isn’t the kind of boss Deborah is, but she has overcorrected. She’s too nice. She has been subsidizing their lunches when they go over the studio caps, but her writers have been taking advantage of her, using her lax policies to get away with things like claiming getting a tooth gem is a reasonable mental health excuse to show up late for work. They’re also adding extravagant food orders to their lunch deliveries for “Mrs. Table,” the title of the episode and the fake name they use when they want to order something “for the table” like, for example, a $72 whole branzino. Ava has been subsidizing their luxe add-ons. This is, indeed, enough to bring Ava to a breakdown that has been building for some time as she has struggled to adjust to the realities of the very difficult new job. She has her aforementioned branzino breakdown (god, Einbinder’s voice breaking on “living wage”…I know I’m fawning over Einbinder’s performance and delivery a lot in this episode, but it’s so extremely warranted)

screams that she quits driving away in rage.

Deborah, meanwhile, receives a comedy award that’s mostly a publicity stunt. Rosie O’Donnell is here, playing herself, apparently an old friend of Deborah’s. Rosie asks how all this happened, Deborah’s recent success and thrust into the comedy limelight again. Did she do ayahuasca perhaps? Deborah gives some pat answer about hard work, timing, luck. “No, you got better,” Rosie says. “You don’t just get better. Comedy is like sports. Nobody starts dunking at 60 years old.” Deborah says she just found her voice. She’s doing her Deborah thing of thinking only about herself. She’s feeling sorry for herself about this fake award and about all the stupid lifeless video content she has been forced to create throughout the episode, like pretending to catch a bag of Fritos thrown by Mariska Hargitay. And feeling sorry for herself means she isn’t thinking about the people around her who make her great, who have helped her start dunking late in life. (As a side note, I love this apt comparison of comedy to sports as a writer-athlete myself — there’s so much overlap between the two, and creative pursuits require just as much discipline as sports, even if they aren’t always valued on the same pedestal as athletics are by society. Like when people suggest AI can replace writers, I wanna be like CAN AI REPLACE YOUR FAVORITE ATHLETE, BITCH?!)

Deborah comes home from her award ceremony to an empty house. Damien is away retrieving bear piss to combat the coyotes. Josefina is gone to help DJ deliver her baby, a reminder that even when it comes to the role of motherhood, Deborah is constantly hiring out the labor of her life. It’s just her and her corgis. Only, just one corgi greets her at the door. Earlier in the episode, Josefina reminds Deborah to close the doggy door so the dogs can’t get out while she’s away, given the coyotes. I knew that couldn’t just be a throwaway line. Deborah sees her other dog on her security footage, having a standoff with a coyote. She runs out and throws her award, scaring off the coyote and scooping up the dog, who seems alright, but it was a close call. “I should have protected you, I should have protected you,” she echoes, prompting me to shout at my screen: WELL, YOU BETTER GO SAVE AVA NOW.

And indeed, that’s exactly what she does. Jimmy and Kayla are also on the lookout (“Have you seen a lesbian ginger?” Kayla asks a random person at The Americana). Deborah decides to drive around Silverlake looking for, I don’t know, an Ava-coded establishment? Well, she finds one! It’s Girl Twirl: a night of queer line dancing at El Cid, and Deborah’s asks a bunch of LA gays in line if they’ve seen this woman, flashing a photo of Ava. They have not, but one helpful queer suggests Deborah use the Find My app to locate Ava. Of course they have each other’s locations.

The app brings Deborah to the ocean, where she spots a red head walking out to sea. Deborah thinks it’s Ava, who cannot swim, and swims out to save her. The image of Deborah Vance diving headfirst under a wave in a fur coat will forever live with me. It’s not Ava though, just some girl going on a chilly night swim to train for the polar bear plunge. Ava is on the shore, walking on the beach.

“Yeah, I’m not suicidal, I just wanna die,” Ava tells Deborah in yet another great line reading from Einbinder. “I’m not actually gonna self-harm, okay?” she continues. “And if I was going to kill myself, I wouldn’t do it Virginia Woolf-style and walk into the freezing ocean. I’d do pills or wear a suicide vest on Watch What Happens Live,” Deborah finishes the last part of the sentence in unison with her, suggesting this topic has come up before.

The two sit together at a seaside seafood shack, and Ava explains that she just got in the car and drove after her freak out, ending up at the beach, which she admits is very “first thought” during a breakdown. She tells Deborah she quit, but Deborah says she can’t. She’s the youngest head writer in late night history. In an industry full of ups and downs, she’s up right now, and she has to stay there. But Ava feels like she sucks at the job, like Deborah was right, it was never going to be the right fit for her. Deborah assures her that the only reason she’s failing is because Deborah set her up to fail. She wants another change, even though she knows she doesn’t deserve one. She promises to make it up to Ava, prompting this emotional exchange:

Ava: Don’t say that, please don’t say that, because when you say that I want to believe you, but you always let me down.
Deborah: I won’t this time.
Ava: I can’t trust you.
Deborah: I understand why you feel that way, but I’m begging you. What do I have to do? Run back into that ocean? Because I will.
Ava: Even if I did come back, I don’t know if I can do the job. I don’t even know your voice anymore.
Deborah: You are my voice.

Finally, the thing Deborah was too up her own ass to say to Rosie comes out. You are my voice. Deborah could not have gotten late night without Ava. She could not have revitalized her career or grown from her offensive comedy past without Ava. The intimacy of this declaration, that Ava is inextricable from Deborah’s voice, is difficult to define. While I don’t pretend to believe Deborah and Ava would ever become explicitly romantic or sexual in their relationship, I also don’t want or need that, because what they do have is far more compelling and complex, a relationship that’s hard to put into words in the way mentor/mentee relationships (a favorite dynamic of mine, especially when it skews toxic) often are, especially in creative fields. Deborah and Ava’s relationship might not be explicitly romantic, but it contains all the intimacy, intensity, and layers of a romantic relationship, just expressed through a different mode.

And yes, I burst into tears after “you are my voice,” the second time this season has made me openly weep. It doesn’t help that the music cue right after “you are my voice” is the same as the one where Deborah looked out into her studio stands and saw only Ava.

They haven’t patched things over perfectly of course. That isn’t really possible. Ava hates Deborah now, and says as much. But Deborah points out that makes her a part of a vibrant community of Deborah Haters. Most importantly, they resolve to actually work together again, to have fun, something neither of them have been having since the show started. They’re not going to go broad anymore; they’re going to make the show for themselves.

Ava retrieves the bottle of Krug she bought at the end of last season from her car. It tastes like shit now, but it’s still powerfully symbolic of this coming together. Deborah once said the only time she’s lonely is when opening a bottle of Krug. Here they are, sharing it, both still lonely in the lives they’ve constructed for themselves and the ways they’ve put their careers ahead of everything, but together in that loneliness at least. And hopefully this is just the beginning of them starting to make good shit together again.

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Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya

Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya is the managing editor of Autostraddle and a lesbian writer of essays, fiction, and pop culture criticism living in Orlando. She is the former managing editor of TriQuarterly, and her short stories appear in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Joyland, Catapult, The Offing, The Rumpus, Cake Zine, and more. Some of her pop culture writing can be found at The A.V. Club, Vulture, The Cut, and others. When she is not writing, editing, or reading, she is probably playing tennis. You can follow her on Twitter or Instagram and learn more about her work on her website.

Kayla has written 1023 articles for us.

6 Comments

  1. I think the thing that made me scream was realizing “you aren’t over your last relationship. She really hurt you” was about Deborah and not Ruby

  2. “We’re a little over halfway through season four”

    this was awful to read, I kind of feel like the series just got started? like I’ve loved all the episodes so far, but I realized I’ve just been holding my breath waiting for Ava and Deborah to not totally hate each other. I can’t wait to see what happens next, and also for the writing for Deborah on the Late Night episodes to actually get as funny as the rest of the dialogue

    • THIS i am ready for them to start working TOGETHER again. this episode was marvelous and i can’t wait to see what happens next.

  3. This show continues to deliver in every way!!! Love seeing Hannah Einbinder’s comedy and acting chops grow as Ava’s character develops.

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Isabela Merced and Bella Ramsey’s Real Life Queerness Deepened ‘The Last of Us’

HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA - MARCH 24: (L-R) Isabela Merced and Bella Ramsey attend the Los Angeles premiere of the HBO original series "The Last of Us" Season 2 at TCL Chinese Theatre on March 24, 2025 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Amy Sussman/GA/The Hollywood Reporter via Getty Images)

Photo by Amy Sussman/GA/The Hollywood Reporter via Getty Images

The Last of Us Episode 204’s Queer Scenes Brought To You By Two Queer Actors and a Queer Director

If you thought that just because I write a weekly recap of The Last of Us with Nic means I don’t have anything more to say about it, you’d be mistaken. FOR EXAMPLE, this week, Isabela Merced did an interview where she talked about the love scene between Ellie and Dina, and she said it felt as tender as it looked to us as an audience. She said, “Bella and I were just so comfortable with each other. And also, we both have experience in queer relationships — you can just tell when a girl hasn’t kissed a girl before. You can just feel it.” And I think that’s really true. This comfort and understanding shone through the scene, and Isabela said they even added some extra kisses and moments while they were filming, which added to the natural feel of the whole episode.

Now, I don’t think you HAVE to be queer to play queer characters; I think especially for characters who having a coming out arc, sometimes the “straight” actors who feel drawn to that role should take it, because they might end up realizing they’re queer themselves, e.g. Dom Provost Chalkley, Kat Barrell, Chyler Leigh. But I DO think when you have two characters who are meant to show physical comfort with each other, especially right off the bat, having queer actors does elevate the scenes. While Dina wasn’t necessarily all-in on her queerness from the jump, she was physically and emotionally comfortable with Ellie, and that’s clear from Isabela’s performance. Queer people being involved also makes it feel a little more special, to me at least. Even though there are plenty of straight actors who have given us truly epic queer scenes on television in the past, there IS something undeniably special about the fact that these Ellie and Dina scenes were created by two queers actors and a queer director (Kate Herron), because they get it, they understand the importance and meaningfulness and nuances of it in a way that not even the most well-meaning straight person could.

And Kate Herron does get it and spoke to Out about episode 204 and how she loves working in the sci-fi genre and finding relatable stories amidst unrelatable worlds.

About the music store scene specifically, Herron says, “The Last of Us world is very harrowing. It’s very violent and you don’t get many moments, even just them finding a music shop where there’s no infected. It’s like we just get to be normal people just for this little moment in time, which I think is very beautiful.”

And don’t we deserve a little beautiful?

More News to Click(er) On

+ Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson will star in Jane Schoenbrun’s new film, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

+ Ella Purnell and Ariana Greenblatt to star in a slasher comedy called Hot Ted, written by queer screenwriter Grace McLeod

+ The official trailer for Honey Don’t has Aubrey Plaza in a plain white tee leaning on a door jamb and dear god I got gayer just watching it (also her seemingly naked in a bed but for some reason the leaning got me)

+ Ts Madison has a new podcast called Outlaws that will spotlight powerful voices from the LGBTQ+ community, including Chappell Roan

+ Actress Martha Warfield talks about coming back to comedy and acting and returning to the screen out and proud in her 70s

+ Lily-Rose Depp and 070 Shake spent a date night at a Lakers game last week (and it always makes me laugh when we use people’s stage names in sentences like this but, alas, tis the job) https://people.com/lily-rose-depp-070-shake-date-night-lakers-game-11727155

+ Lorde is reading “a lot of queer writers” and is feeling her “gender broadening a little bit”

+ ICYMI, check out what the queer folks were wearing at the Met Gala

+ Related, Megan Thee Stallion snuck her phone inside and gave reviews of the food served at the Gala

+ To follow up on last week’s Pop Culture Fix about Airyn De Niro, Laverne Cox saw that she mentioned her as a woman that has inspired her over the years, and was very honored

+ I’ll leave you on this: meet the “lesbian Mr. Rogers” of TikTok

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Valerie Anne

Valerie Anne (she/they) a TV-loving, video-game-playing nerd who loves reading, watching, and writing about stories in all forms. While having a penchant for sci-fi, Valerie will watch anything that promises a good story, and especially if that good story is queer.

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2 Comments

  2. Delta Exploits is a tool that enables users delta executor to run specific scripts, enhancing customization and control within Roblox. This flexibility has made Delta highly popular among gamers. In Roblox, players often face limitations in movement speed, gameplay options, and overall control. Delta addresses these restrictions by offering a simple way to bypass them, allowing users to modify various aspects of the game. As a result, players can freely alter game elements to better suit their preferences and play style.

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Please Stop Telling My Older Girlfriend Not to Date Me

Cage Match: Is it anyone’s business how old your adult girlfriend is?

Q

Hello all. I’m 24 and my girlfriend is 36. I’ve always been mature for my age, always dated older people, had older friends, not really related to people my own age very much. My girlfriend has never dated someone younger before me, I had to pursue her very hard to convince her to even consider me an option! Okay so recently she saw a TikTok that was like “unpopular opinion but I think it’s really fucked up for full adult women to date women under 25” or something like that. Of course the comments were in full agreement, she shared it with me, and now she is seemingly on this side of TikTok forever…. the side that is making her paranoid that she’s a pervert for being with me?

I guess what I am maybe asking is like, help me convince her that it’s ok for her to date me? I am starting to feel disillusioned with queer community in general. Everything feels so black and white these days, strangers making blanket statements about what’s okay or not for all relationships. Like aren’t we supposed to be full of nuance? How would someone on TikTok know more about my relationship than I do? Why are we deciding what is okay for other consenting adults to do like why is it anybody’s business?? Is this even an advice question?

A

Summer: I’ve found the turn against age gap relationships among young people to be really puzzling. Sizable age gaps were the default for most of human history. They often originated in an environment of hegemonic patriarchy and unequal access to resources, but an age gap isn’t inherently indicative of harm in relationships. But I’m sure you know this.

This… honestly sounds like your girlfriend, a 36 year-old is somehow letting her TikTok scroll erode her ability to think rationally about her situation. That’s not what I’d expect from someone of her age, but the endless barrage of repetitive, polarizing content that apps like TikTok supply are enough to erode anyone’s sanity.

This is destabilizing your relationship and I think you should address it. I’ll recommend the classic: a serious sit-down conversation where you discuss the issue and its consequences. Preferably with some evidence or support that isn’t TikTok dreck. If she’s not the kind of person who responds well to that kind of thing, I’d consider supplying her with nuanced (even entertaining) counter-perspectives from other online media. YouTube videos exploring this issue as it relates to queer people perhaps? Essays? We have some work on this site about the topic.

Before I go on too long, I wonder if there’s something else at play in your girlfriend’s psyche. People who are in a good space emotionally don’t flip their views this hard based on TikTok content when it may jeopardize their relationships. When people act out, they’re often trying to preserve their relationships, not develop misgivings. This may be a manifestation of a deeper issue and it’s just appearing as uncertainty about the age gap. But that’s out of my paygrade.

Valerie: I think a lot of people’s hesitancy with age-gap relationships is that very often, there’s a power imbalance at play, and the younger person is being taken advantage of and they don’t even realize it. So people generalize, and they stereotype, and they assume. Only you and your girlfriend know your situation, and if your actual friends and family and people who know you best aren’t raising any red flags, then it’s really none of TikTok’s business. It sounds like these videos are playing on some of your girlfriend’s insecurities and like Summer said, you should talk about how she’s really feeling and why these videos are affecting her. For me, the “ick” I feel about gap relationships aren’t actually ever about age, but about life stage. I’m much more likely to find red flags in boss/employee, student/teacher, adult/college student, or even famous person/fan relationships than in the actual numbers. I have a feeling that’s what people on TikTok also feel – on top of the psychologically egotistical “I am not attractive to people x age, so therefore I cannot fathom anyone else is” – but nuance is dead and empathy is dying. So I would just have this conversation with your girlfriend, reassure her that her age doesn’t bother you, and borrow her TikTok to watch videos of carpet cleaning or lesbians chopping wood to cleanse the algorithm.

Nico: TikTok is so toxic. It’s an algorithm that rewards having strong opinions (or what someone might have once called a hot take), and I agree, there is a lot of black and white thinking these days that isn’t going to help anyone. Also, TikTok can amplify insecurities because the more someone pays attention to a certain topic, the more the app is going to show it to them. I recommend that when you talk to your girlfriend, that you ask that she consider taking a break from TikTok.

Age gaps have been a normal part of queer relationships for a long time. There are fewer queer people than straight people and the dating pool is smaller. Sometimes, when queer dating, someone you have a lot in common with has some interesting and striking differences — age for example — that might be considered more unusual in a relationship by mainstream, more hetero standards. Another great example of this is the tendency for queer people to date long-distance as necessary, because sometimes someone you’re really into lives hours away. These are things that happen in relationships in our community. With an age gap in a relationship, the power gap is the most important thing. If you feel you two are on equal footing and no one is being taken advantage of, like you’re going to be taken seriously when you have this conversation, for example, then the age gap is probably not the issue. You don’t mention in your question, but is there anything else going on with your girlfriend or with you? It might be good for you to take a look at the landscape of your relationship and lives overall and try to identify where there might be pressure points that are contributing to your girlfriend’s sense of unease.

Riese: I have some empathy for your girlfriend’s paranoia — TikTok has that effect, especially if she’s someone who doesn’t always trust her own instincts for whatever reason. I think when you’re deviating from the norm, or what you’re used to, you often ask for outside opinions and are easily impacted by them as well. (Once upon a time, and even still today, this applied to queer relationships in general.) Unfortunately TikTok just delivers unsolicited outside opinions to us we didn’t ask for!

Listen — there are nearly always going to be power differentials in relationships.  Age gaps are easy to put parameters around — and it’s an easy thing to moralize about — but it relies on vast assumptions about where people are in life and generalizations around maturity levels, when there are so many things in relationships that contribute to power imbalances. Stay in regular conversation about the ways in which the age gap is challenging or complicated for you both — as you should for any power differentials. Don’t be afraid to press her on this, you’ll come out stronger or at least have more clarity on the other end.

Passover has… passed (and is now over), but still: What if your gay brother’s political line in the sand with your parents is driving you nuts?

Q

I’m gay and so is my brother, and since the election he’s gone no contact with my parents because they voted for Trump, which he says is voting against his rights because he thinks Trump is coming for gay people and will take away our marriage rights. I get it but I don’t feel like white gay men are really the population in the most danger right now, sometimes he drives me crazy with this shit because stuff is ALREADY HAPPENING to trans people and that’s what is scary TO ME but he is on some other planet of hypotheticals.

Like I am mad at my parents for voting for Trump because of what Trump is doing to trans people, because I have so many trans friends. But okay that’s not even actually what I am upset about, that I’m writing about today.

I am upset because okay, so we are all Jewish. My parents are very VERY pro-Israel Zionists. And I have been fighting with them about this for a long time now to the point where I have wanted to cut ties at times, but didn’t because as my BROTHER POINTED OUT TO ME, it was good to stay in dialogue with them about it so at least SOMEONE in their lives is speaking up for Palestine. Also I feel guilty because they paid for my college and grad school and they’re old and my dad is sick.

But like I want to strangle him for opting out of the family over the election? Passover is coming up so we got in a huge fight about how he didn’t want to come to Passover but now that means I definitely have to come to Passover, they can’t have neither of us at Passover? He said finally that he would go if I INSISTED that he go, but he really doesn’t want to. It’s kosher for me to insist, right?

Who’s the asshole? It’s my brother, right?

A

Summer: This sounds like you and your brother both experiencing valid and understandable emotional stress due to the current administration’s stance on… everything. I resent the fact that people who are ostensibly on the same team are in conflict when we are all being threatened by a greater source of hostility. Like arguing over dinner reservations on the Titanic.

But look, if your brother has allowed himself to go no-contact and has done so successfully, why can’t you do it too? You’ve got the same parents. His parents are old and sick too. They paid for his upbringing. And he went no-contact. If anything, his ‘success’ at this unpleasant task should be a precedent that it’s possible for you to do so as well. No, I don’t think it’s fair that he’s asking you to stay in contact after he already bailed.

The bottom line is that this decision is yours to make. To me, it’s rather hypocritical that he’d ask things of you that he wouldn’t do. So no, you’re not the asshole here. I can understand that your brother has a tempest in his mind about many current events. I don’t think what he’s doing is seriously immoral, either. But it’s not fair. And isn’t that what so many sibling disputes come down to?

Nico: So he’s gone no contact and won’t be going to Passover, and that makes you feel like you have to go to Passover? That’s just not the case. You can make your own choices, just like your brother made his. Plus, if dialogue hasn’t worked yet, maybe it would be okay for your parents to realize that their actions have costs for them, too, not just for other people.

That said, it seems that your brother is someone who you could really have a dialogue with. He’s already concerned about, well, everything we’re living through, and you could probably get through to him that, yeah, we aren’t dealing with hypotheticals and that many people are already actively being harmed and in many cases, killed. It sounds like your brother expects labor from you that he isn’t willing to give himself, too, that he thinks you should be the someone to dialogue with your parents, for example. That’s not a fair expectation and I think you should feel free to address it.

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4 Comments

  1. “How would someone on TikTok know more about my relationship than I do? Why are we deciding what is okay for other consenting adults to do like why is it anybody’s business??”

    Because there are hundreds, and maybe thousands, of young women in the world who dated someone much older when they were young, and really enjoyed the relationship at the time (thought they were ‘mature for their age’) only to hit the age their partner was when they started dating (or maybe just like, late 20’s, or 30) and realized how taken advantage of they were or all the ways in which that relationship was fucked up that they couldn’t see at the time. And many of those women are desperate to try to prevent others from having that experience, because it cause lots of serious damage, so they talk about it online.

    So, I think there are some good reasons for the skepticism around age gaps, and I would probably encourage you to do some therapeutic introspection around this issue, but! All that being said!! If you have done lots of introspection about this issue, if no one else in your life has any concerns about this relationship, and if you feel you can talk through this stuff with your partner openly, then great, awesome. I definitely think that queer relationships make this issue much more complicated, and that they are, as is pointed out in the answers here, much more common historically for queer people, and they don’t have the damaging/dangerous connotations that heterosexual relationships have (for good reason).

  2. Q1: social media is a place composed of black and white. It doesn’t do shades of grey, the nuance you are after. While there is something to be said for an accessible platform from which to share horror stories and warnings, in the hope that readers will avoid learn from the bad experiences of others, social media can also become an echo chamber reinforcing simplistic assumptions and censorious judgement. Yes, an age gap relationship has the potential to contain power imbalances, but this is not fait accompli. Getting off TikTok and searching for healthy age gap relationship stories (there are some on Autostraddle) sounds like a good call for you & your gf. Trust me, they are real.

  3. Age gap:
    Very good point about small community that creates the need for age gap and long distance relationships.
    That said, as someone who has been on the other side of that age gap, and who has also been the persued- i want to draw attention to that fact:
    If you had to persue her, she was probably unconfortable with that age gap from the start, and tictoc just enforced that.
    Being much older in a relationship can give you a really creepy feeling that cannot be overcome by the partner “being old for their age”. Because there is also the physical body reality that your partner perceives constantly. Even if they look young to you, as many queer people do – You look even younger to them. Imagine yourself being persued by a 16 year old.
    And there is another factor apart from financial or power inequality: Experience inequality.
    It might be different nowadays, but many queer people used to start dating much later than straight people, as in early 20s versus 14 or 15 years. So this can also add to the huge gap in experience that can feel like dating a person who is an additional 5 years younger than they are.
    So while I’m totally not a fan of tictoc activism and hate the smug black and white thinking, i find your partner’s behaviour very understandable. If the younger partner is below 25-ish, and the age gap is 10+ years, the above listed factors are objectively there and might strain or break the relationship.

  4. This is interesting to me, this question 1. I could have been your girlfriend. My ex was 9 years younger pursued me, and I didn’t take her seriously at first. Because I was older. I am also a bit of a loner. She was so gregarious and popular. I had just moved to where she had lived all her life. She knew everybody there. She was full of energy. I was flattered by her interest. She had been living on her own since she was 16. I had just been in a 5-year relationship with someone my own age who had been living with their (wealthy) parents for a while and was struggling to find direction. There wasn’t anything wrong with that, but I think that is part of why the younger girl; seemed older to me, because she had her own place. She was in graduate school.

    We were together for around a year, eventually we broke up because she cheated on me. Was that a result of her age? I couldn’t tell you. When I hear people talk about these age gaps now, I do look back and think, was I doing something wrong? Was it wrong of me to date someone so young? Sometimes it did feel like what she really wanted was a reliable mother, and sometimes I felt like I was in that role. She said she preferred older women. I never preferred younger women, but she made me open to it. I did have a financial foothold that she did not. I think, maybe, we should have discussed that more, openly. To tell you the truth, I didn’t feel like I had power over her at the time, because she was so outgoing and popular and physically attractive, and was always getting hit on. I think in society; the way we are socialized as women; is to see youth as power. Not age. But of course; nothing is that simple, is it?

    Well, these always do give me a lot to think about.

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Without Poetry or Queerness, I Do Not Exist

I used to joke, when I was single, that it was meaningless to tell the people I dated that I’m a poet, because every lesbian is a poet. The same way “every” lesbian owns cats, doesn’t know how to flirt, and drinks iced oat milk lattes even in winter (unfortunately, all of these are also true of me). I’ll admit part of that refusal came from a sense of pretension: sure, everyone could write poetry, but I was a real poet, because I was getting a master’s in it and publishing and going to — *sexy, serious gasp* — conferences. I wasn’t like some of these Target aisle poetry books; I was working on real stuff.

I’m not above admitting that this superiority complex of mine is one I’m still working on. Now that I’m older, though, I recognize why I had that much bite when it came to the genre: I was protective of it. For me, poetry is not just a way of stacking words on a page; it’s a vocation, nearly religious. I’m Benedetta having visions (and kissing girls) in the nunnery. It is, genuinely, the most important thing in my life. It’s the reason I’m still here to live that life.

I first wrote poetry as a teenager, in the least serious way possible: My high school had a student-run literary magazine, little more than pages from the library printer stapled at the thin spines, issues churned out as we ate up the ink meant for test papers and AP History essays. I ended up editor of the magazine as the years moved forward, but as a freshman, I was just eager for the glamour of my work in print. I’d written as a kid: unfinished short stories and a comic strip that was clearly a plagiarized collage of Garfield, Calvin & Hobbes, and whatever else I read. None of those things felt appropriate or ready for the magazine though, and so I made the pivot to poetry, because it was shorter. That’s it. The art form I have now spent 15 years of my life honing was selected for me in the briefest moments of my teenage ego and laziness.

The first poems I wrote were thinly veiled Glee fanfiction arranged into stanzas, and the magazine took them (if you can imagine, it was slim pickings for a high school literary magazine). That was such a thrill: to share what I wrote, to see it in ink. Since then, I’ve written God knows how many poems and have, of course, developed a much deeper love for it beyond its mere length. Size isn’t everything.

There are a lot of different reasons people take up the pen, the brush, the camera, etc. Some people are bored; some are driven. Some want a career out of that art; some just want to pass the time. I want a career out of poetry, even if the definition of “career poet” may look a lot different in 2025 than it did in 1650. But to call poetry a “career ambition” feels too watered-down. I’m not in it for money or fame (though I’d never say no to either). For me, and so many others, poetry has always been about finding understanding.

“You do not have to be good” — the opening line to Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese” — has found a funny afterlife as a meme, bumper sticker, sarcastic comeback, etc. Other lines like “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life” and “You only have to let the soft animal of your body / love what it loves” have found similar Internet fame. But other than unintentional meme-maker, Mary Oliver was a Pulitzer Prize winner, a neo-Transcendentalist, a lover of nature and solitude, and a lesbian. Oliver fell in love with the photographer Molly Malone Cook, and they lived their lives out together on Cape Cod before Cook’s death in 2005. While she rarely spoke outside of her poetry, preferring her privacy, finding this fact out about Oliver let me into another layer of the world.

“Sentimentality” is considered one of the worst grievances you could lobby against a poet’s work. To be labeled sentimental is to be labeled tawdry, cheap, melodramatic. In my MFA, we were taught to be emotional without being sentimental, to portray deep feelings without being cloying. A (white straight male) professor of mine once sneered as he said you should never put a heart in a poem unless “you’re talking about the literal organ.” It’s no surprise female poets are more likely to be victims of this critique than their male counterparts and certainly no shock that queer female poets don’t even make it to the conversation. Before discovering Mary Oliver, any lesbian or queer female poet I read I had to find myself, except for Emily Dickinson. Of course, going to a Catholic all-girls high school, discussion of Dickinson’s sexuality was never a part of the curriculum. But I was still enamored of her for her dedication to the craft of poetry, the following poem especially:

I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose –
More numerous of Windows –
Superior – for Doors –

Of Chambers as the Cedars –
Impregnable of eye –
And for an everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky –

Of Visitors – the fairest –
For Occupation – This –
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise –

Many observations of the poem decree it is Dickinson’s ode to poetry, that it is a far better genre than prose to explore one’s imagination and world. It reminds me, though, of another poet’s words: Ocean Vuong, author of Night Sky with Exit Wounds and the novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. In an interview with the writer Bryan Washington for A24, Vuong said:

Queerness in a way saved my life…Often we see queerness as a deprivation, but when I look at my life, I saw that queerness demanded an alternative innovation from me, I had to make alternative routes. It made me curious, it made me ask, ‘Is this enough for me?’

When Emily says “I dwell in Possibility – ” I have the same reaction as I do to Vuong. Poetry and queerness both exist as innovations on form. Rather than the expected trajectories, both engage in what it means to play with what you’ve been given. Rather than setting a scene in a block of text, why not break up your words and sentences in stanzas, emphasizing individual sounds and textures? Why not put the lyricism of your words before their meaning, in order to emphasize said meaning? And in turn, why not question the intricacies of gender and sexuality, why not question what makes you feel more in your body as opposed to adhering to a code prescribed upon the body you have?

Is this a “sentimental” thought? Yeah, maybe. How could it not be? And how could you shrink the orbit of one’s emotional landscape to such a simple, ill-meaning word? I have been told to be less sentimental in poems. I have too been told to be “less gay” in public spaces, or private friend groups. I have been the victim of such reductions — but in the literary and queer worlds of my life, I have also found the strength to defy such lessenings. Growing up a woman, without queerness or poetry, I lament how easy it may have been for me to fall into patterns wrought by others. Being a poet drew me to seeing the world in the vigilant, yearning way of poets: I will come to a dead stop on a sidewalk to stare at a snail make her slow journey from one end of the grass to the other, or I will watch the way a stranger’s hand lightly grazes the elbow of someone they are with and may love, and I can’t not write page after page about it.

This is not to say non-poets can’t do these things — but in my life, it’s been poetry that’s opened the world to me. For me, poetry is the thinnest barrier between abstraction and emotion. Queerness, too, has allowed the world to let me in: the unbridled joy of a people who have been shunned by the rest of society is like nothing else. When society has refused you, there is nothing left of society we must adhere to; instead, we can have the world beyond that, birds and trees and rivers and ice cream and kissing and parties and whatever bangs the gong of our hearts so fiercely we think I should write a poem about this.

Although memoir is allegedly the genre of truthtelling, in poetry I find a more honest way to be. Who am I when I am doing nothing else but spilling my own thoughts out, my own observations, and as spare as a few lines on the page, nothing to hide behind, nothing to keep out of sight. That is what queerness is for me, too. I can’t hide behind it, and because of that I may as well go full-throttle through. When “I dwell in possibility,” it is not just about my creative flow; it is about reckoning with the directions I can take my life, even if I have to fight for those directions.

All I can think to end on here are the ending lines of “Wild Geese”:

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

With my poetry and my queerness, when I write, when I kiss my girlfriend, when I read Carl Phillips, when I do poppers at the club, all of these things are me announcing my place in the family of things. Poetry and queerness are the two most central pillars of my life. I cannot exist without either one, and they cannot exist without each other. And I would never ask them to.

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Gabrielle Grace Hogan

Gabrielle Grace Hogan (she/her) received her MFA from the University of Texas at Austin. Her poetry has been published by TriQuarterly, CutBank, Salt Hill, and others, and has been supported by the James A. Michener Fellowship and the Ragdale Foundation. In the past, she has served as Poetry Editor of Bat City Review, and as Co-Founder/Co-Editor of You Flower / You Feast, an anthology of work inspired by Harry Styles. She lives in Austin, Texas. You can find her on Instagram @gabriellegracehogan, her website www.gabriellegracehogan.com, or wandering a gay bar looking lost.

Gabrielle has written 27 articles for us.

5 Comments

  1. Maybe it’s because I just binged Dickinson, or maybe it’s just the truth evident in your heartfelt words, but this one moved me to tears.

  3. As another “real” poet who came into it sideways (got the Outlaw Bible of American Poetry during that rebellious post-high-school phase) and ended up doing it all the way to grad school (where I ended up taking workshops from one of the poets in said book) and *also* having fallen into it because it’s shorter, I’m just doing a knowing nod. Without poetry, queerness, or queer poetry (Federico Garcia Lorca, Jack Spicer, and Maggie Nelson in my case), I don’t think I’d still be here. I wouldn’t have seen myself, found myself, or formed myself without it. I wouldn’t be able to see the world, let alone tolerate it.

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Everyone Deserves Sports

Julie, the American Girl of 1974, is motivated by a desire to play basketball. Her school doesn’t yet have a girls’ basketball team, but with the recent passage of Title IX banning sex-based discrimination in schools, Julie advocates for herself to join the boys’ team. Reading Julie’s story taught me about Title IX, Billie Jean King’s Battle of the Sexes, and some of the lengths women have had to go to be treated equally in areas as simple as school athletics. Her (fictional) story has stuck with me as I’ve watched the proliferation of women’s professional leagues and bans against transgender athletes alongside navigating my own journey of queer athleticism.

I had a childhood dream that I would be the first woman to play Major League Baseball. This dream was thwarted fairly early; my parents worked on Saturdays, which meant they couldn’t take me to Little League. I’d have to wait until I was older to start playing, and by that point I’d be out of the running for professional play. Despite not playing then, it bothered me that girls and boys were eventually split into softball and baseball. Most other sports split on gendered lines, but the idea that girls had to play an entirely different sport left a sour taste in my mouth, especially as I watched MLB games and had no idea if there even was major league softball.

Around fifth grade, my parents put my brother and me in judo classes. There were far more boys in the dojo than girls, but there was always another girl in the locker room with me. Although I did not yet have an understanding of my gender or sexuality, I was repressed by a sense that I should keep to myself in the locker room; look down and away, face the other wall, change into the corner. No one ever told me to behave this way. All of my embarrassment was coming from myself, and besides the general excuse of modesty, I couldn’t say why I felt so mortified. Practices were not split by gender, but tournaments were, leading me to a number of first place trophies that felt less valuable because only five people were competing for them.

In middle school, I started fencing. There were two stages of getting dressed for fencing. The first — putting shorts, a sports bra, and t-shirt on in the locker room — I did with as much discretion as I had in judo. The second — putting on my fencing socks, pants, and jackets — was done in the small cafeteria room where we had practice. Everyone from the girls and boys teams got dressed together. Unlike the locker room, which still felt shameful and dangerous, this part of changing felt communal. We laughed and talked and asked other people to fence during the upcoming open bouting. Changing at this point in the routine was about getting ready to compete, and my woes about my body were pushed aside.

There was a cute girl on the fencing team. She was in my grade and thought I was cute too. Suddenly, I had my first girlfriend. I slowly came out as bisexual, more by holding her hand and kissing her cheek in public than by making a big declaration. Especially since I had started dating a teammate, the mandate to keep my eyes to myself in all locker room situations seemed to grow. No one ever said anything to me, since I was lucky enough to go to a liberal New York City high school, but I wanted to stop the rumors before they had a chance to begin.

Fencing was a spring sport, which meant I was never able to play school softball, which had the same season. I played a few games with my mom’s work team, but it just wasn’t the same as being with peers. Softball is certainly the more stereotypical baby queer sport, but I had made a commitment and found a community in fencing. So I kept with it.

gay softball league

My first girlfriend and I broke up. My second girlfriend and I broke up. I had my first real boyfriend around tenth grade, at the same time as I started to wonder whether “girl” was really the right word to describe my experience of the world. I was pretty sure I wasn’t a boy, but being a girl didn’t feel right either. I asked my online friends to start calling me a new name and started using new pronouns, which felt closer to right.

Around this time, I learned two things that would upend my childhood perceptions of women in sports. First, I watched A League of Their Own with my mom and was mesmerized by the idea of the All American Girls’ Professional Baseball League. Although still no woman had played in MLB, there had been a women’s professional league — a big one. When Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, and other stars of men’s baseball were off fighting World War II, Philip K. Wrigley founded the AAGPBL to give America some of its national pastime. As in the factory and the home, American women stepped up to fill gaps left by men going to war. The league dissolved in 1954 due to waning interest and the return of MLB play, but the seed of women’s professional sports in America had been planted.

My second revelation was that Billie Jean King was and is a lesbian. The 2017 film Battle of the Sexes depicted King’s relationship with Marilyn Barnett, which eventually led to King being outed in 1981. This was my first proof that queer women had been in professional sports for as long as those professional sports had existed. More proof would come with the 2020 documentary A Secret Love about the relationship between AAGPBL player Terry Donahue and her partner Pat Henschel. Historically, queer women and sports went together.

But what then to do about the question of my gender? Mack Beggs, a trans boy from Texas, was being required to wrestle in the girls’ division, while simultaneously being seen as a danger to the girls due to his testosterone prescription. No one had an answer on where Beggs belonged, and the question of trans athletes’ place in sports was growing every day. There were only two locker rooms at my fencing club: boys and girls. I kept using the girls. I wrote my college admissions essay about being bisexual in theatre and sports and not feeling like I totally fit in anywhere. The admissions department must have liked it, because I got into college. My fencing coach got a banner printed with all of our names and where we were going to school. I hadn’t said anything about my new name. It felt too late and too soon.

College was a natural fresh start. I went by my birth name for only June before emailing my peer advisor to change my name. She and my peer group graciously and easily did so. I was starting college as the person I was becoming: Pallas, they/them.

Although I was a long way from varsity, I wanted to keep fencing in college. I went to one or two practices of the club team, but my attention and interest fizzled. I was studying theatre and wanted to focus my energy on student productions rather than fencing practice. Perhaps more importantly, fencing felt like it belonged to a very straight and gender-segregated part of my life. Although I had loved being on the team while I had fenced, I was not sure I could keep going with my new self-knowledge. I turned instead to theater, to the school newspaper, and to impromptu trans gatherings held at peers’ apartments. We sat on hardwood floors, as hardly anyone had enough seating for all of us, and celebrated the ways our university was making strides for trans inclusion. My roommate and I lived in open-gender housing our sophomore year. Things were getting better, in small ways.

The COVID-19 pandemic started, I graduated college, and I moved home to NYC. I missed athletics. In doing half-hearted Googling, I found a queer softball league. I went to a recruitment day and was added to a brand new team. I was finally playing the sport I’d loved my whole life. I was by no means a softball prodigy, but in my new league I could be with other trans people and queer women and enjoy a good game of my favorite sport.

gay softball league

After a long simmer, the national question of trans people in sports was boiling over. Caster Semenya, a cis woman who had already undergone sex testing, would be required by the IAAF to take medication to lower her testosterone levels. In her case before the Court of Arbitration for Sport, the court ruled that discriminatory rules were necessary to preserve women’s athletics. The case proceeded to the European Court of Human Rights, which ruled that Semenya’s human rights had been violated, but World Athletics’ regulations remained in place.

Riley Gaines and Lia Thomas were freshmen in college at the same time as I was, but I had graduated a year early. During their senior year, Thomas, an openly trans woman, tied with Gaines for fifth place. This tie enraged Gaines to the point of becoming an advocate against the inclusion of trans women in women’s sports. The panic spread from college to high school, from swimming to chess. While some outlets, such as PinkNews pointed out that believing trans women have a biological advantage at chess is equivalent to believing that cis women are dumb, the transphobic rhetoric pushing removal of trans women from women’s sports continues on high octane. Trump, with the support of Riley Gaines, has issued an Executive Order threatening to revoke federal funding for any educational institution that allows trans girls and women to play on the teams that match their gender identities, misusing Title IX to push this agenda.

Different governing bodies have set forth various rules about trans athletes. The LPGA requires trans women competitors to have transitioned before beginning puberty; the NCAA has cowed to the Trump Administration and allows only people assigned female at birth to compete in women’s sports. Notably, most of the outrage has been around trans women; besides Mack Beggs, few trans men athletes have made the news, and policies about trans people in sports utilize the language of protecting women’s spaces. This erasure is ultimately just as transphobic, as the underlying assertion is that trans people cannot escape their assigned gender.

I don’t pretend to know what the perfect solution to integrating trans people into gendered sports is. A number of trans thinkers I follow have proposed different ideas, and the personal and individual nature of transition makes one general solution unlikely.  I do know that we cannot pretend trans people have not been athletes, and we cannot deny trans people access to this important sphere of life due to bigotry. Athletics are one of the most profitable ventures in America. But they are also a core part of the human experience. Athletics have always reflected the people we want to be. Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby integrated baseball as the whole country grappled with post World War II civil rights questions. Billie Jean King and golfer Babe Zaharias showed the world that women can play with the men. Hopefully, we will one day celebrate Mack Beggs and Lia Thomas in the same way.

I look more masc than I ever have. I have a barbershop haircut and wear suits to fancy events. I should probably just throw out all the makeup I bought in college that I haven’t worn since. As much as I would like to live in my bubble of queer sports in NYC, that is not much safer. Last year’s Lezvolley, a Fire Island volleyball tournament, was cancelled on the day of competition due to mishandling of a trans competitor. The Brooklyn Tennis League was criticized for kicking out a trans woman after a cis opponent complained about losing to her. The panic about trans athletes, a mere screen over a panic about trans inclusion in daily life, has spread from professional athletics to casual play.

As long as trans people continue to play sports and transphobes continue to oppose that, this conversation will continue. I am hopeful that leagues like my own, which is actively discussing the most inclusive language for all players, can lead the way in trans inclusion. I’m happy to have the community I’ve built through sports, and I hope young people can experience the euphoria of sports regardless of their gender.

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Pallas Gutierrez

Pallas M. Gutierrez is a New York-based writer, teaching artist, and stagehand. They are currently studying creative writing at the University of California, Riverside's Low Residency MFA. Pallas received their Bachelors in Theatre at Northwestern University. Outside of writing and work, Pallas enjoys crafting and volunteering in their community.

Pallas has written 2 articles for us.

4 Comments

  1. Loved this write-up. Although team sports and any sort of competition are completely irrelevant to my personal life, this is just a microcosm of society, isn’t it? I constantly struggle to figure out where I belong, what role I should take, whether I should aim for being seen as a man or as a woman (there is really no other way of passing where I live if I want, y’know, a job). It’s like there is no “solution” to our existence (if you’ll excuse the deeply unfortunate wording).

    Also can I just say I am ECSTATIC to see another person named Pallas?? Every time I introduce myself people are like “..huh?” even though I think it’s a fairly normal name!? Can everyone start naming their children after Greek mythological figures already and get with the program please?!?!

    • i will admit that i’ve gotten so used to seeing your name in the comments (in a VERY GOOD WAY) that when I saw another Pallas in my inbox, it was a delight! great name!

      • <3 !!! I can't believe I got a good grade in commenting AND a compliment on my name!

  2. Roller derby, friends. Any trans folks reading these comments, if you want to play a sport and join a league where you will never have to worry about being included or not, where you will never have to worry about being unceremoniously kicked out, where you will never have to worry about a cis asshole complaining about you, find your local roller derby league.

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