Which Queer Poet Should You Read? Based On Your Favorite Track from ‘The Tortured Poets Department’

Contrary to popular belief, contemporary poetry is alive and well in the world — every year there are new and beautiful books of poetry to consume, both from established and emerging poets.

With the release of Taylor Swift’s eleventh album The Tortured Poets Department, poetry has been on the mainstream mind more than usual (which is pretty unusual). For most folks, Swift’s music is much more readily available than access to good poetry — with this post, I seek to remedy that! For those interested in Swift’s lyricism and arguable “queerbaiting,” I raise you out-and-proud queer poets with books that are revelatory, revolutionary, and/or just plain good. While I’m happy Swift has increased the use of the word “poet” in my life tenfold, which is hard to do, I don’t want the people in my life to only associate poetry with her album. There is such a ripe orchard of poetry by queer poets of all styles and backgrounds, and whose books are a much more worthy investment than four different vinyls with slight variations on a sad sepia portrait of a rich blonde white woman (I said what I said).

So, which queer poet should you read based on your favorite song from TTPD? Also known as, which queer poet should you read instead of listening to TTPD — whichever feels more accurate. Hey, I’m just the messenger.

Track 1: “Fortnight”

If you can ignore the cringey forced use of the word “fortnight” when she could’ve just said “two weeks,” and even more so if you enjoy this track’s humor laced with a sense of desperate reality, you may enjoy Chen Chen.

Chen, author of When I Grow Up I Want To Be A List of Further Possibilities and Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced An Emergency, as well as several fabulous chapbooks, is full of poetry that is as funny and light as it is cutting and grief-laden. Think of a sharp kitchen knife slicing into a decadent chocolate cake, and you have a sense of how it feels to read Chen: at once humorous, at once dangerous, altogether a naughty, joyful experience with no lack of honesty in the deepest sadnesses of a queer life.

Track 2: “The Tortured Poets Department”

Swift is right to say she is “not Patti Smith,” and while I’m unsure who is “not Dylan Thomas,” none of her past boyfriends fit such a bill. Whether or not you’d like Swift to go gently into that good night, one poet you may want to spend a long evening with is Tommy Pico.

The author of four books, each an epic poem, Pico’s work is deliciously referential, and engaged with romantic and sexual frustration. IRL, which hinges on the experience of sending a risky sext and then distracting oneself from potential rejection, and Junk, a breakup poem turned epic narrative, are two specific recommendations I would give to people also sick of faux art bros as Swift criticizes in this song. But Pico is more than levity and pop cultural references — his books are also meditations on the reality of living a queer Indigenous person in the contemporary United States. The wit of Pico’s references are by no means a cheapening of his words — if anything, it brings his compelling, rich world into robust color.

Track 3: “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys”

In his poem, “Meditations in an Emergency,” Frank O’Hara says: “Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous (and how the same names / keep recurring on that interminable list!), but one of these days there’ll be nothing left with which / to venture forth.” An idea Swift plays with in this track (and many others), O’Hara feels a natural suggestion. While O’Hara’s seminal Lunch Poems was published a mere two years before his death, it has left an undisputed mark on contemporary poetry. I have seen “Having a Coke with You” reposted on Twitter/Tumblr so often it is easy to forget how it made me feel the first time I read it. But I assert it is one love poem not even Swift could write a comparable emulation of.

Track 4: “Down Bad”

If you’re interested in (and potentially confused by) the tragic-love-affair-as-alien-abduction analogy used in “Down Bad”, you may want to read Franny Choi. Both Choi’s chapbook Death by Sex Machine and later full-length Soft Science play with the “alienness” of gender and race, often through a cyborg speaker. The works ask of us what does it mean to be a machine, and how is the body — as it struggles to navigate man-made societal conventions — both like and unlike the literal machines it seeks to dominate? With tender ruminations of intimacy and consciousness, specifically as they appeal to queer Asian-American femininity, Choi’s works are unlike anything I’ve read.

Track 5: “So Long, London”

Who among us has been unable to walk down a street, into a restaurant, or even fly into a city because of its associations with a past lover? Hell, after my last breakup I couldn’t look at a pair of clogs without crying.

While time heals all wounds, when you’re in that waiting period before the healing when it just hurts, a song like “So Long, London” might do the trick. And if that’s the case, I think you should read Alicia Mountain. While Mountain’s work is not all about breakups and cities, there is a reverence for landscapes and what they can hold of us. Her debut High Ground Coward, followed by her revelatory book of four sonnets Four in Hand, both concern themselves with queer ecology: how is the beloved like a rock, a stream, a “tectonic shift?” How is the queer body the space it occupies and the space it leaves behind?

Track 6: “But Daddy I Love Him”

A song less about a doomed love affair, and more about Swift’s complicated experience with fame (she really hates being famous, but she really loves being famous). Or rather, “But Daddy I Love Him” is about being perceived, being assigned a certain way of being by others without consideration for how Swift thinks of herself. What queer person is not familiar with being scrutinized and judged, and thrown into perceptions by others that do not feel that they fit?

I could put a lot of queer poets here, but the one I’ll choose is Eileen Myles — why? Myles is prolific in the literary scene, not only a poet but a fiction and nonfiction writer with numerous publications. All of Myles’ work, including their fiction, deal with a particular persona of theirs. Every piece of writing is told to us through a strong I, a speaker by the same name of Eileen, and so the blending of reality and fiction in their work is hardly ever distinguishable. Any point in their vast catalog is worthwhile, but when it comes to poetry, I recommend starting with their latest Evolution, or I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems for a more thorough exploration.

Track 7: “Fresh Out the Slammer”

I would be remiss not to mention Richard Siken and his pivotal Crush somewhere in this article. If you’ve been in any poetry Internet circles, the three poets you’ve likely been most subjected to are Mary Oliver (also a great one), Rupi Kaur (no comment), and Siken. Crush in many ways is a queer keystone to contemporary gay poetry — while oft-quoted and at times mischaracterized out of context, the work stands as a gateway drug of sorts for many into contemporary poetry. You yourself, dear reader, have probably heard lines from such poems as “Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out” and “Scheherazade” without even knowing. A collection deeply entrenched in gay longing and loss, I couldn’t recommend it more. Though I must say, Siken’s second lesser-known collection War of the Foxes, is just as compelling a work. And I anticipate his forthcoming I Do Know Some Things will solidify itself similarly as a Siken classic.

Track 8: “Florida!!!!”

I’m not sure how Taylor Swift managed to get Florence & the Machine on this track, but she elevates “Florida!!!!” from a simpler breakup song to an orchestral swamp ghost anthem. That being said, I’d use this song as an excuse to recommend K Iver.

While not a Florida native, Iver’s work is exquisitely and importantly Southern. Their debut book Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco catalogs a history, both literal and metaphysical, of the speaker’s old lover, a trans man who dies by suicide at 27. The poems follow the speaker’s own later-in-life trans journey, adjacent to this relationship and its influence years and years later. Situated in Mississippi, the influence of the South strengthens the vivid, gorgeous, sorrowful world of this book, where grief and gratitude dance a complicated dance.

Track 9: “Guilty as Sin?”

While Swift’s version of a sexy song is still very much aligned with heterosexual modesty (to each their own), the eagerness to engage with the illicit leads me to sam sax.

sax, admittedly one of my personal core poetic influences, is a strikingly prolific contemporary poet. In their three books and assorted chapbooks, they are consistently interested in the excavation of queer desire and intimacy, and the shame that often follows. From their book madness, which examines the history of homosexuality-as-mental-disorder, to PIG, which conceptualizes the pig as many things but specifically a stand-in for queer sexuality, they are no stranger to the shame and disgust that can come from existing as a queer person. Where Taylor Swift struggles to place herself in an unflattering light, sax has no qualms about dancing with the grotesque, the ugly, the grieving — that is, with all aspects of the queer experience, whether palatable or not.

Track 10: “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?”

Admittedly, I feel a strange resistance to assigning this poet to this song, because it almost feels insulting to stoop their work down to a Taylor Swift song comparison (no offense, Swifties). But I would be remiss to not include them in a list of essential queer poets. So forgive me, spirit of Audre Lorde — but I must recommend her work here.

If you’ve never familiarized yourself with Lorde’s work, first off, that proves you never took a Gender Studies class in college, and secondly, in a way I’m jealous you get to experience her brilliance for the first time. A pioneer in lesbian (especially Black lesbian) theory and writing, Lorde is an essential pillar to any engagement with queer poetry or activism. The book I most want to recommend is The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde, but given that that book is a veritable tome of 500 pages, and even I find that intimidating, instead I recommend The Black Unicorn, a beautiful, essential book of the Black lesbian experience.

Track 11: “I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)”

With a robust bibliography of poems that tangle themselves with longing, lust, spirituality, and mortality, Carl Phillips is, in my opinion, one of the contemporary greats. The first time I read his book Riding Westward in a graduate school course, I was blown away.

Described on Goodreads as: “What happens when the world as we’ve known it becomes divided, when the mind becomes less able–or less willing–to distinguish reality from what is desired?” Riding Westward — and much of Phillips’ work — engage with an abstract, questioning syntax, a speaker who is at once unsure and so certain. It’s hard to recommend just one book (similar to Myles), but if I had to pick, I’d also behoove you to read Reconnaissance, and/or Pale Colors in a Tall Field.

Track 12: “loml”

Forgive me, but at this point in the article, I must engage in what I can only call good faith friend nepotism — good faith in that trust me, just because this poet is my friend, doesn’t mean they’re not also a brilliant light in poetry. Matt Mitchell, an intersex bisexual culture critic and poet, may be a dear friend, but they are also one of the smartest people I know.

Mitchell writes beautiful poems with juicy cultural references, as well as meditations on masculinity, gender, sexuality, and home. However, they are also the head music editor for Paste Magazine (which may be a faux pas to include mention of, considering the current Swiftie political climate), where they have interviewed and reviewed artists as varied as Mitch Rowland, Girl Scout, Faye Webster, Bob Dylan, and more. Mitchell’s poetry, in particular, has been a personal and professional grace for me to engage with. While (for now) they have retired from poetry (we’ll see about that), their books Vampire Burrito and The Neon Hollywood Cowboy are still available for purchase.

Track 13: “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart”

Again, another friend of mine, but again, yet another voice you should be reading if you want the next breakout thing in contemporary queer poetry. In this track, Swift laughs that she’s “miserable, but nobody even knows!” And that through her devastating misery, she can still accomplish what many of us can only dream of. When I asked my friend, the poet Rob Macaisa Colgate, what song he’d claim, he picked this one, saying “It’s literally me having a psychotic episode, taking a deep breath, and opening the Zoom link.”

Colgate has dedicated his writing not only to the queer experience, but to the Filipino and disabled experiences — what does it mean to move through a world that is not built for you thrice over? His brilliant work can be read all over the internet, and his debut play My Love Is Water and debut poetry collection Hardly Creatures are both set for publication in 2025.

Track 14: “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived”

Swift’s martyr complex jumps out in dazzling colors in this track (“I would’ve died for your sins / Instead, I just died inside”… is certainly something a person can say). Whereas for Taylor Swift the most essential danger is a “small man,” for Jericho Brown in The Tradition, danger is a mutable force within everyday life as a Black queer American. According to its publisher Copper Canyon, “beauty abounds… despite and inside of the evil that pollutes the everyday.” The Tradition is one of those rare books that demands to be read slowly, so one can take in the entire wealth of emotional complexity of a human spirit in its minute stanzas. Brown’s formal, technical skill is outstanding, and his control of the body and its images even more so.

Track 15: “The Alchemy”

“The Alchemy” was a hard song to find a good poet to recommend for, because, well, the song is bad. However, there is a silver lining: while Swift seems unironically to elevate the all-American good boy and girl-football-Super Bowl narrative to a nauseating degree, another poet dismantles such ideas expertly and deftly.

In an interview published in Guernica, Morgan Parker says, “My work is focused on Americana. But I also hate it, and it hates me back.” The Black American experience is taken apart and put back together by Parker in her work, and her books There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce and Magical Negro are particularly some of the most captivating poetry collections you could get your hands on.

Track 16: “Clara Bow”

And finally, we’ve reached the last track on the album (because I refuse to acknowledge the second half of the release in this article, I might go bonkers if I do), a track in which Taylor Swift laments the inevitability of her star waning, as happened with Clara Bow and Stevie Nicks. She fears which young starlet will enter into the space Swift leaves, however involuntarily. Who to put here? Well, as a song deeply concerned with one’s self and being seen as a star, I would like to plug: me.

Okay, okay, a little silly, but in the spirit of Swift’s entrepreneurial #girlboss spirit, how could I not plug my own work? If you’re interested in reading my lesbian poetry, I have two chapbooks: Soft Obliteration and Love Me With the Fierce Horse Of Your Heart, and have several poems published in various literary magazines. You can find them on my website gabriellegracehogan.com.

If you’ve made it to the end of this article, congratulations! You are now privy to 15 amazing, essential, and/or just plain good names in poetry (and my one shameless self-promotion). Whether you think The Tortured Poets Department is pop music’s saving grace, or a fall from grace, you’re sure to find at least one poet on this list that will remind you that poetry is alive and well, and very, very gay.

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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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 7 articles for us.

Lily Gladstone Tops Riley Keough in a Bar Bathroom in ‘Under the Bridge’

The third episode of Under the Bridge, ““Blood Oath,” moves the story out of unknowing — a space where the worst thing could be true but isn’t true just yet, a space where hope and fear can exist in equal measure — and into a tragic certainty that opens up a whole new set of questions. Reena’s body has been found, and her heartbroken mother confirms that the body in the morgue is her daughter. The autopsy reveals that the confirmed attack on Reena under the bridge was only the first of two, that she was later beaten again and drowned, although the injuries suffered during her second beating could have killed her if the drowning hadn’t happened at all. Josephine’s claim that she killed Reena is proven false, and by the episode’s end, we find out who did kill Reena, and get a pretty solid idea of who specifically saw it happen.

Then, amid all of this, there is Riley Keough and Lily Gladstone hooking up in the bathroom of Connie’s Bar, a bar that only serves one kind of gin and apparently doesn’t play music unless you put a quarter in the jukebox, at which point the dance floor gets immediately lit. It can feel a bit weird to care so deeply for obviously very intellectual reasons about this relationship but it’s not incongruous to the entire narrative, and gives the story a light charge without taking away from the overall vibe. This relationship between Cam (Gladstone) and Rebecca (Keough) is unfolding itself from the complicated past they share, seemingly as lovers and as friends. Their relationship is already full of mess and grief and broken trust, just like everything else in the story.  But this bathroom is where despair and grief and physical urgency and confusion and ghosts can all exist together at the same time and where for a minute, desire can drown everything else out. For a minute, what we have is a scene that is simply quite hot, and my lord Lily Gladstone!!!!!!!

Cam and Rebecca make out in the bathroom, caption reads [heavy breathing]

To rewind a bit — “Blood Oath,” like other episodes, contains two timelines, one in the present and one several months before the murder. In the before-times, we watch Reena embedding herself with Josephine, Kelly, and Dusty. While her relationship with Dusty is sweet and innocent (we learn so much about who they are from that brief scene of them together without Kelly or Josephine), Josephine and Kelly are cut from a different cloth and it’s a very bad cloth. I wrote last week that Josephine reminds me of Scar in The Lion King, and this episode, Kelly reminds me of Shenzi, Banzai and Ed. The closer Reena gets to being accepted by Josephine, the more frustrated she is with her parents, who open the episode by removing the door from her room, and end it with #1 Dad Manjit insisting she bring her new friends over for dinner so they can meet her new friends.

We also get more background on the “CMC” “tattoo” Reena has on her hand — it’s Josephine’s gang, which is formed in the flashback episodes, wherein Josephine aims to make a gang unlike all other gangs, one that’ll “keep shit tight” like the mafia, and, according to Kelly, will murder people and chop their heads off like the Mexican drug cartels. So they call it the “Crip Mafia Cartel.” Reena and Dusty aren’t allowed in yet, but Kelly’s Josephine’s first member. “Live by the gun, die by the gun,” they say and then Kelly and Josephine cut their hands and then shake their hands so they literally have blood on their hands.

In the present, Josephine’s frantically attempting to keep control over her story and maintain her badass reputation while also plainly confused about how Reena ended up dead. Samara’s growing suspicious of her baby-faced boyfriend Warren’s involvement in the beating and Reena’s death, while Warren is preoccupied by all that and also by the fact that, clearly left adrift by his parents, he’s got nowhere to live, eat or do laundry. By the episode’s end, Josephine spots Reena’s boots, caked in mud, in Kelly’s closet, and Kelly tells Josephine she did it all for her.

Then we have Cam and Rebecca. Rebecca is eager to tell Cam about Josephine’s confession, but Cam’s already ruled Josephine out based on the timing of the security camera footage and the distance from the bridge to Seven Oaks. Inside, out of uniform, with a glass of whiskey, in a white t-shirt, with her hair pulled back, Cam is very hot, by he way.

“You know this is an active homicide, right?” Cam asks.

“Yes, I know, and I’m trying to help you,” Rebecca insists.

“Help me do what exactly? My job? You hate cops.”

“Yeah well, I like one cop.”

Cam’s building walls quickly. She’s finally working a case that makes her job feel worthwhile for reasons unrelated to impressing her father or wanting a ticket off the island, and she fears Becca fucking it up for her. We learn that Rebecca left the island suddenly and Cam’s still hurt over it. But Cam pushes too hard when Rebecca brings up how tough it was for her to see a girl’s body pulled out of the water and Cam is too caught up in pushing her away to remember why that is, that once Becca saw the same thing happen to her brother. The regret is immediate and eventually brings us to Connie’s Bar, where Cam apologizes and then so does Rebecca — for leaving so abruptly and for losing touch.

“We didn’t lose touch, Rebecca, you fell off the face of the earth,” Cam corrects her.

“Yeah well I was a kid, and i was going through a lot when Gabe died, and you shouldn’t have had to take care of me or… give anything up for me.”

“I didn’t give anything up,” Cam counters.

They poke at each other a bit, about Rebecca getting Raj’s number at the memorial (for journalism!), about Cam seeming a little jealous to hear it. Cam says Raj won’t talk to them because he doesn’t trust cops. (It’s a benign detail here — of course a person of color living on a very white island in Canada doesn’t trust cops — but we find out later that Raj has a personal reason to distrust cops. Manjit’s got a (now-expunged) criminal record for something he didn’t do. Raj is also frustrated, knowing the cops are more interested in finding a family member to blame than in grilling the multiple teenagers talking freely about their own involvement in the murder.)

Under The Bridge -- “Blood Oath” - Episode 103 -- Upsetting news shakes the small town of Victoria, and as rumors surface, Rebecca and Cam reconnect. In the past, Reena enters Josephine’s mafia fantasy world. Rebecca (Riley Keough) and Cam (Lily Gladstone), shown. (Photo by: Darko Sikman/Hulu))

Photo by: Darko Sikman/Hulu)

But then Rebecca’s pushing back her own ghosts — she wants to dance. She puts “The Passenger” by Siouxsie & The Banshees into the jukebox and starts hopping around with her arms in the air, feeling so free for a moment, yanking Cam in to her orbit but playfulness quickly turns into sexual tension. Cam breaks away, leaves the dance floor, heads for the bathroom. It’s the ’90s and they’re queer so Rebecca knows exactly why she left, and where she’s going, and what will happen there.

Cam’s eyes are low and dim in the mirror when Rebecca comes in, and then their foreheads meet and finally their mouths and then my girlfriend, sitting on the couch next to me, went “oh my god,” and clutched my arm and I said “yes,” because I had already seen this scene and was inspired to see it again.

There’s a fiddling with the belt and there’s a pause where Rebecca says, “it’s okay to feel that” and I’m not sure what she means, if it’s literally something Cam can feel or if Rebecca is telling her it’s okay to feel things, in general. Then Cam’s eyes get low again, foggy, like okay, I’m going to top you so hard you’ll forget everything.

Cam nurses a hangover the next day at work. Her brother got Manjit’s criminal record, which you can see for him is all the evidence he needs to close this case. Cam’s skeptical. Now it’s her going to Rebecca’s, asking if maybe she can try to get a bigger picture from Raj.

“Do you wanna get dinner later?” Rebecca asks.

“I don’t know if I wanna sit through a whole meal with you,” Cam says, looking fine as hell. She gets up and puts her hands on Rebecca’s waist. “But um… eh, if you wanted to come over after.”

They both smile. “Deal.”

Like I wrote last week, Cam is a new character who isn’t present in Godfrey’s book, but this relationship is integral to how the show is telling its story. They were both once girls “in trouble” themselves in this place, and now they’ve grown up and out of it but have been pulled back into that headspace by a death so close to home. Everybody in this story is full of regret and confusion about the past and will be mired in it as they piece through what remains. Without ignoring or neglecting that reality, Cam and Rebecca’s storyline offers something else: a place where past pain can be reconciled and transformed. (Also they are very hot together)

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Riese

Riese is the 41-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 and has a cute dog named Carol. Follow her on twitter and instagram.

Riese has written 3186 articles for us.

3 Comments

  2. As someone who grew up in Victoria when this happened, it is very difficult to want to watch this series but then they made it gay with Lily. I don’t know if I will ever bring myself to watch this but I’m glad to read the updates on their storyline.

  3. It’s a pity that this beautiful love story is not real.
    I had a question, please answer if anyone knows.
    Was Godfrey queer and single or married in the real world?

Comments are closed.

Sophia Bush Comes Out as Queer and In Love With Ashlyn Harris

Feature image of Sophia Bush and Ashlyn Harris by Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Elton John AIDS Foundation

Following the intense speculation about their relationship last fall, neither actress/activist Sophia Bush or soccer player Ashlyn Harris spoke publicly about to confirm or deny their relationship or its timeline, but they were appearing in public together, here and there, and Ashlyn made it clear on her on social media that she’d not cheated on her wife, Ali Krieger. Today, in a classy as fuck move from Sophia Bush, Bush appeared on the cover of Glamour Magazine to discuss her divorce, her rebirth, finding love again and being a part of the queer community.

In an intro from the magazine, they write that following the unconfirmed news that Ashlyn and Sophia were dating, “the internet seemed to be foaming at the digital mouth for a scandal, but to those who knew her, it was clear she’d never been more herself.” (I hope someone wins a Pulitzer for “foaming at the digital mouth.”) The essay, written by Sophia Bush, does a masterful job of gently moving her relationship with Ashlyn out of the realm of scandal and into a much different story about two women connecting over their respective breakups during an extremely painful time for Bush.

Bush writes eloquently about her own marriage to Grant Hughes, which she describes as mostly unhappy and cloaked in unease so thick she nearly called the whole thing off before it happened. But she didn’t. She got married, and then began what was ultimately a physically and emotionally painful fertility journey that didn’t end in having a child but did end in her realizing she’d made a mistake to marry the man she’d married. She took a theater job in London to get away from it all, but found herself deteriorating physically once there, spending multiple nights in the hospital until she simply couldn’t take it anymore.

In the summer of 2023 she returned to L.A.. She and her husband separated and she was preparing to file for divorce. She began connecting with a group of women also going through breakups, a kind of support group. Amongst them was Ashlyn Harris, who she’d known since 2019. And then it started happening:

I didn’t expect to find love in this support system. I don’t know how else to say it other than: I didn’t see it until I saw it. And I think it’s very easy not to see something that’s been in front of your face for a long time when you’d never looked at it as an option and you had never been looked at as an option. What I saw was a friend with her big, happy life. And now I know she thought the same thing about me.

Mutual friends noticed the connection between Ashlyn Harris and Sophia Bush before Bush did, and the two went on their first date, a four hour dinner that became “one of the most surreal experiences of [her] life thus far.” She cites their connection and their love as something that set her free and made her happy in a way she hasn’t ever been before, and that it was painful to whether accusations like “the idea that [she] left [her] marriage based on some hysterical rendezvous” or that she was a “home-wrecker” or that she left her ex due to a sudden realization that she liked girls, insisting “my partners have known what I’m into for as long as I have.” She recalls the transition into this relationship as one that was making a concerted effort “to be graceful with other people’s processing, their time and obligations, and their feelings.”

She didn’t want to respond to the haters but she’s happy, now, to tell her own story, to be open about her relationship and her sexual orientation: “I think I’ve always known that my sexuality exists on a spectrum. Right now I think the word that best defines it is queer. I can’t say it without smiling, actually. And that feels pretty great.”

WEST HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA - MARCH 10: Stephanie Nguyen, Sophia Bush, Bobby Berk and Ashlyn Harris attend Elton John AIDS foundation annual viewing party with Tequila Don Julio at West Hollywood Park on March 10, 2024 in West Hollywood, California. (Photo by Vivien Killilea/Getty Images for Tequila Don Julio)

Stephanie Nguyen, Sophia Bush, Bobby Berk and Ashlyn Harris attend Elton John AIDS foundation annual viewing party with Tequila Don Julio at West Hollywood Park on March 10, 2024 in West Hollywood, California. (Photo by Vivien Killilea/Getty Images for Tequila Don Julio)

In the “love is love” era, it is refreshing to have Bush, a person who has long been an advocate for LGBTQ+ rights, to also understand the value and impact of coming out. In a Glamour podcast released today tied to the cover story, Bush reflects “I would’ve liked for a lot of things to happen a little differently, but at the end of the day I have nothing to apologize for. The bonus of this whole journey is that I spend every day around a person that being close to is like, getting shone on by the sun. I want that for all of us. I want people to find the right room.” Reflecting on where she’s at now, Bush says, “I feel like I’ve been wearing an 80 pound weighted vest, for probably a decade? And I finally just fucking put it down.” So many queer people who have gone through their own coming out journeys will know exactly what that profound relief feels like. 

The reaction on social media has been largely positive, including props and love from former Queer Eye cast member Bobby Berk and actress Brittany Snow, while other fans cite enormous and longstanding girl crushes on Sophia.

“I really love who I am, at this age and in this moment,” Bush writes in her essay. “I’m so lucky that my parents, having spent time with Ash over the holidays, said, ‘Well, this finally looks right.'”

You can read the entire story at Glamour Magazine.

 

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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Riese

Riese is the 41-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 and has a cute dog named Carol. Follow her on twitter and instagram.

Riese has written 3186 articles for us.

6 Comments

  2. I just find it interesting that they started connecting while Ashlyn was “Separated from her wife” but her wife was simultaneously posting to instagram about how much she couldnt wait for Ash to come home from Cannes to their two kids. Seems like Ash could have told her wife they were separated before telling Sophia…. But who knows, Ash may have misled Sophia as well.

  6. I found this essay absolutely beautiful! I don’t think we have solid evidence they cheated and even if they did, we’re all just complex human beings. I’ve never cheated on anyone myself but I can see how that might happen even with the best intentions in a relationship. I don’t think it’s our place to judge others because you don’t really know their specific situation. Their love makes me happy and hopeful. =)

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We Won — Sex Is Back On-Screen

When I first became an editor at Autostraddle back in September, I announced my presence with a piece titled “We Need More Sex Scenes.” I wrote about the history of sex on-screen and why the trend away from sex and sexuality in film and television was troubling.

Well, seven months later, I’ve returned with good news. We won. Sex is back on-screen.

There were hints of it last summer with Passages, Ira Sachs’ fabulous tale of toxic bisexuality, but one independent film shot in Europe felt like a mere exception. The real excitement came from a group of films during awards season that centered sex for a variety of purposes: Saltburn, Poor Things, All of Us Strangers, and May December.

These four films alone show different possible uses of sex on-screen. Saltburn is a work of pulpy delight where fluids represent power. Poor Things frames sex as discovery, a way to lose one’s innocence and learn about the world. All of Us Strangers has sex as romance, a sultry reprieve from the melancholy of life and death. And May December centers around sexual abuse, its moments of sexuality a twisted response — and attempt to make sense of — that violence.

While it may have been snubbed at awards season, May December was still noteworthy for being a Hollywood film that approached sex and sexual violence with compassion and complexity — something usually reserved for films abroad such as the British film How to Have Sex released this year and the French film Last Summer coming out in June.

And we haven’t just seen an increase of sex on-screen as a way of grappling with serious subject matter. This year, we’ve also seen sex scenes used for fun. And the best part? Most of it is queer.

Tricia Cooke and Ethan Coen’s Drive-Away Dolls was a full-blown sex comedy with sex scenes ranging from comic to romantic. It’s a film all about sex and sexuality and dildos. Then, of course, there’s Love Lies Bleeding, Ross Glass’ delicious Kristen Stewart-starring neo-noir that pulses with eroticism. It has toe biting, protein shake licking, and so much desire.

A lot can be done with explicit sex scenes, but, ultimately, the sexlessness of 2010s cinema wasn’t just a matter of nudity and penetration. It was a lack of sexuality, sensuality, and chemistry. Tomorrow Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers comes out in theatres and it’s noteworthy for being one of the sexiest films I’ve ever seen while not having any explicit sex scenes. It’s a film conscious of its withholding, the most delicious foreplay with tennis as its payoff. It, too, is part of this trend — even if most of its nudity is just in the locker room.

Most of the sex on-screen has moved back to the cinema, but there are also exciting developments on TV. Mary and George felt like a throwback, a costume drama filled with all kinds of sex and sexuality. And the recent series Baby Reindeer — largely directed by Weronika Tofilska, the co-writer of Love Lies Bleeding — examines how sexual abuse impacts its protagonist’s sex life. It includes the important representation of encounters that are not abusive — and are even tender — but are heavy with the echoes of abuse.

Some of this sex is hot, some of it is painful, some of it is both. I’m just happy to see all these different expressions of sexuality on-screen. But I’m not writing this piece to gloat — I’m writing it to get greedy. Because the other notable aspect of Baby Reindeer is that one of the characters in some of its sex scenes is a trans woman played by trans actress Nava Mau. These moments are focused on her partner’s attempts to work through his PTSD and shame, but they’re still a welcome exception. The fact is, even as varied queer sex increases on our screens, there’s still a void of sex involving trans people.

Since trans people make up a small percentage of the population, this might feel inconsequential. But it’s worth noting that trans porn is among the most popular porn categories — and its popularity is ever-growing. I love porn and I’m hesitant to place it in contrast with “real” movies. It’s just that most trans porn is being produced for cis people and has a very skewed idea of our sexuality. Of course, different trans people fuck in all sorts of ways — including the ways most frequently represented in porn — but there’s something insidious about trans sexuality only being framed one way and only being viewed by many in the shadows of their homes.

I want more work like Isabel Sandoval’s Lingua Franca and Theda Hammel’s Stress Positions, movies where trans women filmmakers show our sexuality to be sensual and comical, romantic and complex. I want to see that even more in an independent space and I want to see it on an even larger scale.

There is always more work to be done. But for now let’s celebrate these victories. Go see Challengers in theatres and remember: As fun as it is to get turned on alone, it’s even more fun to get turned on together.

For more, check out our series Anatomy of a Queer Sex Scene.

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 522 articles for us.

How To Kill Lesbian Bed Death

Lesbian bed death! A hot topic in our community! Perhaps you don’t really think it’s a thing or believe it isn’t a problem localized to lesbians. Perhaps you fear it or find it funny. We’re not here to necessarily debate its meaning or legitimacy. We’re here because you are perhaps no longer having sex with your partner or your partner is no longer having sex with you. You’re stressed, sad, confused, horny, not at all horny, or any combination of these things. I know you are not alone, because the whole reason I’m writing this post is because there has been an uptick recently in people writing into Autostraddle’s You Need Help column regarding lowered libidos or sexless relationships. So I decided to put together a lesbian bed death survival kit of sorts. This can be a starting place to work through periods when sex drives have dipped in your relationship (by the way, this advice isn’t just for lesbians! Lesbian Bed Death is just an easy shorthand here). Read about other couples experiencing similar issues and the advice we’ve given them over several years of fielding these questions. Reading this article isn’t going to change things overnight, and I’m not a couples counselor or sex therapist — two types of professionals who your situation might benefit from! But hopefully by reading this, you’ll feel a little less alone and like you have some resources to guide you toward solutions that might work for you.

While the details of the situation vary, there are thematic throughlines in the questions we get from folks who aren’t having sex anymore with their partners. Partners who want to be having sex but aren’t often feel undesired by their partners as well as guilty for feeling like they’re “pressuring” their partner to have sex. Partners who aren’t as interested in sex often feel guilty for not fulfulling their partners’ needs and frustrated with themselves. Both can feel a sense that they’re stuck and that the relationship is doomed. We typically receive more advice questions from the former partner rather than the latter, but I think no matter what, if you’re the person with the higher sex drive or the lower sex drive in the relationship — or if you and your partner both have low or no sex drive at the moment — going through this toolkit can be useful for everyone involved.

Let’s dig into some of these feelings and the questions lesbian bed death can sometimes bring up while also looking at the options for working through it.

How to identify what’s causing the lesbian bed death

You obviously will struggle to work through a problem if you’re not able to identify what’s causing it. Lowered libidos can happen for a whole slew of reasons: depression, going on anti-depressants, the fade of new relationship energy, codependency, shifting desires, dysphoria — just to name a few! The reason you’re not having sex can provide a lot of information as to how to proceed with fostering intimacy again. It can also be key to figuring out if mismatched sex drives is a true dealbreaker.

In My Partner and I Aren’t Having Sex — How Can I Still Foster Intimacy?, the advice seeker identified a clear reason for why their partner wasn’t having sex with them: Their mental health was impacting their libido. They knew this was a reason outside either of their control, but it made them sad. A crucial thing I wanted to make sure this person knew was that their relationship wasn’t inherently broken and neither party was wrong for their feelings:

Both of these things are true, too: Your partner is not a bad person for having a lower libido (something that’s obvious and I know you already know). But you are also not a bad person for feeling sad about this change. Both of these feelings and experiences are valid, but that’s what makes it all so hard.

You often have to kill lesbian bed death at the root. If your libido has lowered recently, why? Are there things your partner could be doing to make you feel safer? Sexier? More motivated to initiate sex? Does the same person initiate sex every time? Should that change? Maybe the sex you were having is no longer right for you, and so what changes would you like to explore? It’s easy to stop having sex when sex starts to feel boring or obligatory. I know I’m out here constantly advising people to keep a journal, but I really feel like journaling helps us access feelings and questions in ways we otherwise can’t. So do it: Make a lesbian bed death journal.

How exactly do you identify the problem if it isn’t already obvious? Well…

You have to talk about it

I’m sure you saw this coming. Communication, communication, communication is basically our anthem over here in the advice world of Autostraddle. But it’s true! Lesbian bed death and not having sex in relationships in particular are relationship problems that tend to go un-talked about. It’s almost like people are afraid that acknowledging it makes it more real. Well, it’s already real! You’re already here reading a post on how to combat bed death, and it doesn’t get more real than that! By talking about it with your partner, you aren’t worsening the problem. You’re getting closer to fixing it, to making a change.

In My Girlfriend Doesn’t Want To Have Sex, the person seeking advice had an initial conversation with her girlfriend about a change in how much sex they were having, but when the problem persisted for longer than anticipated, she wondered if she should bring it up again. The short version of my answer was yes!

The hardest part of this is having to accept that the conversation could lead to really tough choices and considerations. It’s possible you might have to redefine/restructure your relationship in some way that works for both of you. It’s also possible she really does just need some time. But you’re never going to know without asking open, honest questions or without talking about your own feelings about sex and intimacy in a relationship. Addressing all these things as early in a relationship as possible is really important and will make it easier to have tough conversations down the road.

It also isn’t enough to just say you have to talk about it. That communication has to be healthy, productive, honest, and safe. Sometimes lesbian bed death can lead to arguing about sex, which can then make it so that we associate sex with conflict, deepening the issue. In Am I Being Unreasonable for Feeling Undesired by My Girlfriend?, there’s an emphasis on non-toxic and open communication about desire, sexual needs, and consent as a means for working through a dwindling sex life.

How to foster intimacy in ways other than sex

Sometimes, depending on the reason for your bed death, sex just truly is off the table for now. This is especially true in instances where there’s a medical or mental health reason for the dip in sex. But it’s possible to foster physical and emotional intimacy in ways other than sex, and sometimes this can also be like baby-stepping your way back into hot sex with your partner. Give each other massages. Make a point to kiss each other more often. Try sexting or sending each other nudes. That last one can be especially fun, because it often evokes the early stages of a relationship when people tend to sext more.

When does mismatched sex drives mean incompatibility?

This is a tough question to answer! It really comes down to how much sex means to you and what your priorities in a relationship are. While I want to be clear that not having sex in a relationship doesn’t mean you’re barreling toward a breakup, it is also important to accept that it can signal a deeper incompatibility. Often, we can ignore red flags or interpersonal conflicts at the beginning of a relationship when the sex is good and frequent. But what does that mean when the sex part stops?

In So Your Girlfriend Never Ever Ever Wants To Have Sex, really great and empathetic advice is given to someone who might not be in a relationship that’s working for them. Of course it is always okay for someone to turn down sex for whatever reason. But if you want to have sex within your relationship and you’re being refused that every time, it would not make you a bad person if you want to leave. I find that sometimes the insistence that relationships are about more than sex can have the unintended effect of making people feel bad or guilty for prioritizing sex in relationships. It is not bad to want sex, and if anyone makes you feel bad for it, then it’s worth having further conversations to see if this really is the right fit for you. Truthfully, no one should be making anyone feel bad in these situations; that’ll only make it worse!

This also comes up in Am I Being Unreasonable for Feeling Undesired by My Girlfriend?:

Part of being able to name and also sit with your own wants is recognizing when you need to take action and take responsibility for fulling those wants yourself. If you’re not getting what you want out of a relationship, and that’s becoming a deal breaker for you, then you can also say the relationship is no longer working for you, end it as kindly as you can, and instead look for one where you feel more desired and have your sexual needs met. That’s also completely valid.

What if you’re okay with lesbian bed death?

You’re not alone! In Is ‘Lesbian Bed Death’ Really So Bad?, a reader wrote in with an alternative view of lesbian bed death, namely that it actually kind of works for them! They don’t identify on the ace spectrum, but chronic pain and mental illness has sometimes made sex not a priority for them, and they’re on anti-depressants and so is their partner, which as aforementioned can impact libido. Does lesbian bed death mean your relationship is inherently doomed? No!

Again, this is just a starting place, a lesbian bed death greatest hits archive of advice we’ve given through the years. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution here, but perhaps even just knowing you aren’t alone in these struggles can help assuage feelings of shame, guilt, confusion, sadness, and loneliness that bed death can garner. Your welcome to share advice of your own in the comments or just share your story. Periods of no sex happen in most relationships! And not just for lesbians, obviously! The worst thing you can do is pretend the problem doesn’t exist. Face it head on the same way you would with other issues in a relationship that leave you feeling out of tune with each other.

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, short stories, and pop culture criticism living in Orlando. She is the assistant managing editor of TriQuarterly, and her short stories appear or are forthcoming in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Joyland, Catapult, The Offing, and more. Some of her pop culture writing can be found at The A.V. Club, Vulture, The Cut, and others. You can follow her on Twitter or Instagram and learn more about her work on her website.

Kayla has written 818 articles for us.

2 Comments

  1. Also KaeLyns old piece “How We Survived Lesbian Bed Death”, is just everything. Required reading

  2. Lesbian death bed is a myth and ur suppose to keep it quiet the straights can never know
    We fuck!

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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 understanding 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.

Fellow fan of mommy issues art Drew Burnett Gregory has been tapped for some of the brief blurbs below. Many of the books on this list also have full Autostraddle reviews, because apparently our team loves books with mommy issues which surely says nothing at all about our own relationships with our mothers.

Don’t worry — I’ll do a queer books featuring daddy issues list, too. And hell, some of the books below might appear on both.

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.

Mostly Dead Things by Kristen Arnett

I am biased here as I’m married to the author, but my wife Kristen Arnett’s debut novel brims with both daddy issues and mommy issues. It’s about Jessa Lynn, a lesbian who takes over her father’s taxidermy shop after he commits suicide. Shortly after his death, her mother Libby starts making pornographic taxidermy art. Her second novel, With Teeth, also is arguably a mommy issues book in that it’s about bad gay moms. Also, here’s a little plug and teaser: Kristen’s upcoming third novel (out spring 2025!) might be her most mommy issues book to date.

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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Related:

Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya

Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya is the managing editor of Autostraddle and a lesbian writer of essays, short stories, and pop culture criticism living in Orlando. She is the assistant managing editor of TriQuarterly, and her short stories appear or are forthcoming in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Joyland, Catapult, The Offing, and more. Some of her pop culture writing can be found at The A.V. Club, Vulture, The Cut, and others. You can follow her on Twitter or Instagram and learn more about her work on her website.

Kayla has written 818 articles for us.

4 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.

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Marrying a Divorced Person Awakened Unexpected Insecurities in Me

When you’re dating over the age of 30, the odds of dating someone who is divorced are pretty high. I didn’t mind the idea of dating someone who was divorced. I had been in a long-term relationship that felt almost like a marriage, so I would look like a hypocrite if I wasn’t open to the idea of dating someone in a similar position. Ironically enough, I only dated one divorced person, and I ended up marrying her. My wife’s divorce was never a problem in our relationship (except how long it took), but I was caught off guard about the insecurities it awoke in me.

I’m not a jealous person, but insecurity is definitely something that takes up a supreme amount of my brain space. Admittedly, I don’t think I’m all that great or special as a person, so it’s hard to see or understand why people care about me or want to be close to me, whether it’s friendship or romance. Surely there has to be someone funnier, smarter, prettier than me out there. Usually, I don’t make my insecurity the problem of other people. I keep it all swirling around in my own mind where it can’t bother anyone else.

When my wife and I met, she and her ex had been separated for almost a year. They started dating in college and had been together for almost 20 years. I found comfort in the fact that we had each only ever been in one serious relationship. Even though hers had been significantly longer than mine, it felt like we were on a more level playing field. Actually, I had been single longer, which kind of gave me an advantage over her in some ways. Our relationship that was only supposed to be casual escalated quickly, but it felt good.

It took a few months before the insecurities started slowly creeping in. My wife was so open about the insecurities she had about my past that I tried to do the same, but I hated the way I sounded, so I kept them from her and mainly unleashed them on my besties instead.

One of the things that was the hardest for me was how present her ex was. Even though they were no longer in contact, she still felt like she was looming over me. Whether it was the fact that we look similar or constant presence in my wife’s memories and photos, I started to feel like there was no way I was ever going to live up to this stranger. My ex and I may have shared a child together, but she and her ex shared a life.

Because they started dating when they were so young, her ex was quickly embraced and folded into the family. Over the years, she formed her own relationships with my wife’s family, and even after their separation, those bonds remained. I wasn’t jealous that she had relationships and I didn’t — our lives are at different places, and I have complicated feelings around family anyway. But every time I’d see on social media that her ex had spent time with her family, it hurt me pretty deeply. It’s still a sticky subject for us, and it’s hard for me to articulate what exactly about it hurts, but it does.

I know her ex and I are so vastly different that it feels weird to be insecure about our differences, but I am. I have a big personality, and I’m constantly worried that it’s off-putting. I’m loud, flashy, brash, combative, and can have a bit of a mean streak. My wife has never been anything other than wholly accepting of my personality — in fact, she says it’s one of the things she loves about me, which I find mindboggling. Every time I lose my temper, I immediately think to myself I bet she regrets being with such a loudmouth. If we argue, I fear she misses her less confrontational and combative ex.

After some soul searching, I’ve finally figured out what my biggest insecurity is: What if I’m bad at being a wife? I had been a girlfriend before, and it was something that I felt comfortable with and knew I was good at. But it’s different when you’re a wife. You have more responsibilities when you’re someone’s wife. Some things feel easy — I have no doubt in my mind that we’ll be together forever. But how do I show up for her the way she needs even when I’m feeling like I can’t? Can I learn how to be a little less big? Do I even want to? I’m a caretaker, and I take on a lot of our family’s emotional load, even when I can’t. What if it’s not enough? I’ve wanted to be a wife, her wife for so long, what if I totally suck at it? When I’m feeling particularly low or vulnerable because of other things in my life, these feelings come back, flying around my brain like a bunch of gnats that I just can’t seem to kill. Yes, I’ve talked to a therapist about this, before anyone makes that suggestion. I can’t help these thoughts.

There is one thing I know for sure though. The relationship I have with my wife is the best relationship I’ve ever had. We have so much love and respect for each other. When other insecurities flare up, I never feel insecure about the way she feels about me. As for the rest, I’m working on it.

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Sa'iyda Shabazz

Sa'iyda is a writer and mom who lives in LA with her partner, son and 3 adorable, albeit very extra animals. She has yet to meet a chocolate chip cookie she doesn't like, spends her free time (lol) reading as many queer romances as she can, and has spent the better part of her life obsessed with late 90s pop culture.

Sa'iyda has written 117 articles for us.

4 Comments

  1. I am set to marry my once-divorced fiance in August! Reading your story sounded SO familiar – she had been separated from her ex for roughly a year when we started dating, and I went with her to the courthouse when the thing was finalized. Her ex was (in her words) “the smartest person she knew” and was/is also a successful lawyer making six figures while I am a bleeding heart bohemian artist working a low-wage non-profit job. And that (similar again to your story) is what makes me the “heart” of this relationship, doing the emotional lifting and navigating complicated feelings. But OF COURSE insecurities remain about whether I can “take care” of my wife, if I’m interesting enough, if she thinks my interests are juvenile or “low brow.”

    What I take comfort in (besides regular therapy and THC/CBD) is the idea that we complement each other. We’re very different people, and I am very different from her ex, but she’s not looking for that person anymore – that’s why they divorced. She was looking for me. And your wife was looking for you!

  2. Thanks for this, this line leapt out at me: “my biggest insecurity is: What if I’m bad at being a wife?”
    I’m divorced and if I were ever to remarry I think I would first have to overcome the feeling that my divorce, and the marriage that preceded it, kind of proved that I am bad at being a wife! I’m part way there, knowing that it was this circumstances, with that person, which didn’t work, but there’s a lot of unpacking for everyone involved in a divorce I guess. Thanks for this perspective, really interesting and helpful.

  3. Wife of nearly 7 years (together 11 next month) here….
    Wanting to be a good wife is probably half of the battle. Her ex clearly wasn’t the right wife – that’s why they’re not together. She picked you. So, as hard as it seems – stop focusing on why you might not be good enough and start focusing on being good enough and figuring out what that means to her. I feel like my capacity to be good at it as grown over the years as we have successfully navigated the crises of life. We did do couples therapy to gain more tools (with an awesome queer therapist) and that helped, but often times being a good wife to my wife looks like:
    – making her tea every day
    – buying her the odd little treat (like coming home with her favourite type of ham)
    – celebrating her wins, and making her feel seen and worthy
    – listening to her when she’s having a tough time and asking what my role is – am I fixing, or just listening?
    – telling her why she is awesome
    – And, I suppose – being ok with talking about my emotions and needs (I do not like doing this but turns out, I always feel better) so she doesn’t have to guess what’s going on, because of course she can tell something is going on. Then we can approach it together

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Billie Eilish Wants Her “Face In a Vagina,” Has Loved Girls Her Whole Life, Hates Whales

In a feature story for Rolling Stone Magazine that debuted today, deeply beloved musician and child prodigy Billie Eilish, an icon of gay pop who empowered me to return to my essence by wearing clothes that are four sizes too big for me, spoke in more detail about her upcoming album “Hit Me Hard and Soft,” her evolution as an artist, her mental health struggles, her concerns for the environment, swimming, and her sexuality.

billie eilish with a red background

Photo by Arturo Holmes/Getty Images

Last week we lost our minds over Eilish’s new track “Lunch,” which she sang at Coachella to much acclaim, and in the interview, Eilish plays the song for journalist Angie Martoccio, who describes it as “a sexy, bass-heavy banger where Eilish is crushing on a girl so hard she likens sex with her to devouring a meal.” She explains to Martoccio that she wrote some of “Lunch” before even hooking up with a girl, and some after.

“I’ve been in love with girls for my whole life,” she says. “But I just didn’t understand — until, last year, I realized I wanted my face in a vagina. I was never planning on talking about my sexuality ever, in a million years. It’s really frustrating to me that it came up.”

She spends time in the piece reflecting on the hullabaloo around all that — the speculation, the Variety interview in which she said she was attracted to girls “for real,” and the subsequent red carpet follow-up question about if she’d intentionally come out in that interview. Following the red carpet interview, Eilish chastised the reporter-in-question for asking her if she’d come out intentionally, likening the question to “outing [her] on a red carpet at 11 a.m..” She tells Martoccio that she now classifies that instagram post as an overreaction, explaining, “Who fucking cares? The whole world suddenly decided who I was, and I didn’t get to say anything or control any of it.” But Eilish eventually concludes, “I know everybody’s been thinking this about me for years and years, but I’m only figuring out myself now. And honestly, what I said was funny, because I really was just saying what they’ve all been saying.”

There’s many relatable sentiments in the Rolling Stone interview about her sexuality, but also about Billie’s mental health struggles and agoraphobia. She gets deep into remembering how she dealt with sudden fame at such a young age by retreating internally, hiding from the world in hopes of  emanating the aura of “this mysterious, cool person.” But eventually she realized that doing this was preventing her from enjoying life and making friends, and so she decided to turn it all around and start accepting social invitations and going to Chipotle.

Eilish also talked about how she decompresses through exercise, but also through sex. “I basically talk about sex any time I possibly can,” she told Rolling Stone. “That’s literally my favorite topic.” For example, she really loves masturbating, which she says is an enormous part of her life and a “huge help” for her “as somebody with extreme body issues and dysmorphia that I’ve had my entire life.”

Finally, Eilish does in fact speak on a contentious topic many fans were hoping she’d address — the ocean. She explained that she has traumatic memories of learning to swim as a child, which led to a tenuous relationship with water. Simply thinking about swimming made her heart race, but she has since grown and changed and is now okay with being underwater. However, she takes a hard line against whales, pointing out: “How can anybody just accept that a whale exists, y’all? Those things are enormous. The noises they make. That shit is terrifying to me. Terrifying.”

You can read the full interview on Rolling Stone.

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Riese

Riese is the 41-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 and has a cute dog named Carol. Follow her on twitter and instagram.

Riese has written 3186 articles for us.

3 Comments

  1. Billie Eilish penning a song about eating box was always an inevitability. It couldn’t get any gayer unless she puts Kehlani on the remix.

    Also, that last paragraph is amazing. 10/10 no notes.

  2. So the accusations where she was “queerbaiting” were sort of accurate after all – not at all intentional (she identified as straight at the time, and her *conscious* intention was to celebrate female friendship, even if it accidentally had lesbian vibes) but somewhat ironic in hindsight.

    • For the term “queerbatiting” to constitute an accusation, it needs to imply intentional deception.
      Seeing as Billie is sharing with us that she’s been discovering all of this herself in the past year, any perceived signaling wasn’t intentional.
      I personally wouldn’t call the process of self-discovery “queerbaiting”, even in retrospective.

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Why Are So Many Trans Mascs Pups?

Of course there are the trans masc stereotypes everyone knows about — the names we pick, the button downs we wear, the platform shoes that most of us under 5’6 own. Then, there are the unexpected ones I discover myself.

When a couple trans masc friends turn out to be into pup play, it’s a coincidence. When half of the trans men I know are into it, it’s a pattern. And when it shows up on other trans dudes’ Feeld profiles three times within one night of swiping, it’s officially worth an investigation.

I began to mentally set up a Pepe Silvia-style bulletin board with red string to solve one question: why are so many trans mascs pups?

Let’s Start at the Beginning: What Is Pup Play?

In academic terms, “pup play (also known as puppy play) refers to a form of role-play in which adult humans adopt characteristics that mimic the behavior of young dogs. Normally framed as a kinky sexual activity, individuals tend to adopt a submissive role, imitate the posture of a dog, and wear a collar and other ‘gear’ associated with owning a dog.”

Basically, it’s a kink thing, and it’s exactly what it says on the label. No, the people who are into it obviously don’t think they’re actual dogs, but more on that later.

Why Am I Writing About This?

Am I into pup play? That’s a reasonable question to ask a man who spent weeks of his life researching and conducting interviews about the subject. While I like behind-the-ear scratches as much as the next guy, I am not part of the pup community. But as one study on the psychology of pup play put it, “the attitude of a society which is hegemonically heteronormative toward sexual subcultures which are perceived as ‘deviant’ or queer has a well-examined tendency to push members of those subcultures together.” To translate: as a trans person, almost any community that gets called freaks just for existing is my ally.

What Research Has Come Before Me?

The first place I turned to was academic research. As expected, there’s not much research into the pup community. But to my pleasant surprise, it wasn’t nothing. I primarily worked off of three studies that interviewed pups: one from 2017, one from 2019, and one from 2022.

Arranging my bulletin board to solve why so many trans men are pups started here.

In the 2019 study from the Archives of Sexual Behavior, researchers Darren Langdridge and Jamie Lawson set out to answer a similar question to mine: What attracts anyone to pup play? They identified five “themes” behind people’s desire to participate: “(1) sexual pleasure; (2) relaxation, therapy, and escape from self; (3) adult play and vibrant physicality; (4) extending and expressing selfhood; and (5) relationships and community.”

This was where I saw my first clues. Those last two themes of expressing selfhood and community so inherently overlap with transness.

But Studies Weren’t Enough…

These studies mostly centered cis gay men, so if I wanted to find answers on transness and pups, I’d have to expand my search for experts. I looked to my own community. I interviewed four pups, three of whom identified as trans or nonbinary, to get more perspective on their pup experience. And because my rabbit hole hadn’t gone deep enough yet, I also interviewed Caryn Sherbet, LMSW (they/them), a queer nonbinary sex therapist who specializes in working with queer and trans clients.

With all my sources and the five themes in place, it was time to start attaching red strings to the bulletin board.

Extending and Expressing Selfhood

The connections between transness and expressing selfhood are obvious. Being trans is the ultimate expression of the self — we’ve come to understand this part of ourselves so thoroughly that many of us change our lives to become who we know we are.

One of the pups I interviewed, Mick (they/he), also saw this connection between the trans and pup communities. As they said, “it’s all about shaping your world and how you’re perceived, as you desire. Both communities throw the rule book out to a certain extent and focus on playfully exploring all the weird, unconventional parts of you and celebrating it.”

Being a pup lets everyone experiment with gender expression, not just trans pups. With the freedom to be whoever you want (even a dog) comes the freedom to question everything. In the words of the Archives of Sexual Behavior’s 2019 study, “the key is how the puppy role enables the participant to explore… a new aspect of selfhood, try it on for size, or express some personal perception of the ‘real me.’”

Even the one pup I interviewed who identified as cis, Lavender (he/him), said being a pup helped him explore gender. “It has also allowed me to play with my gender identity, like is my pup-sona a boy or a girl? I tried both, but what seems to feel best is it allows me to be more of a femboy pup.”

Just like being trans, the ways to express one’s pup identity are endless. As a pup I interviewed named Maverick (he/they) said, “we’re all just looking for ways to express our authentic selves. Just like there are as many genders as there are humans on the planet, there are as many ways to be a pup as there are pups on the planet. It’s simultaneously so simple and so complicated.”

By the Way, No, This Form of Expression Doesn’t Mean Pups Think They’re Actual Dogs

The difference here between pup-ness and transness is that trans men are men, but pups are not dogs. They know they’re not. This isn’t your grandpa’s worst nightmare of “kids identifying as animals” coming true. It’s a kink thing.

The 2019 study stated, “participants were clear to explain this was not a delusional practice: they do not believe they actually are puppies, but instead a serious creation of a play space in which they may lose themselves in a moment of role-play through physical exertion, joy, and a vibrant physicality that is apparently unavailable to them in other ways in their lives.”

And because they’re not dogs, this is in no way bestiality. One participant in the above study put it best: “It’s ludicrous. It’s people. If a horse puts on a hat and dresses up as a man, they can’t get a job.” Just like putting on a pup hood doesn’t make someone a dog.

Caryn, the sex therapist I spoke with, said “I think people who misunderstand pups [as bestiality] are probably just quite dumb, honestly, and you can quote that. But I think with a lot of kink stuff, what you see on the surface is not necessarily what’s happening emotionally underneath. And taking that into account is really important.”

Relationships and Community

My personal favorite part of being trans is the community it comes with, and the sense of community that being a pup provides its enthusiasts is no different. As the 2019 study noted, “for the vast majority of participants, puppy play involves deep and meaningful relationships with a number of potential others: other pups, packs, handlers (where either of those exist), and crucially the wider puppy community locally and around the world, in person and online.”

In this study, one pup named Bruno is quoted as saying, “it’s the relationality between the way I feel internally and also the way people then treat me, see me, and then that encourages it more and more and more. I find it much more difficult, say, when I’m by myself to feel that same kind of connection.”

This feels true to how being with other trans friends affirms my gender — yes, we exist as ourselves outside of anyone else’s perception of us, but being in a space that perceives us as who we want to be is nourishing.

One of the pups I interviewed was also a handler. The 2022 study described handlers like this: “Much in the same way that a pet dog has an owner, these participants described the role of a handler as acting as a care-giver and protector.”

For the handler I interviewed, Pup SAZ (he/him), the role is even more supportive than that, “I get to be a safe space and a voice for people that don’t feel like they have one, or wish to strengthen their voice… When you’re first starting out, sometimes you need a gentle nudge and someone to help you navigate the space. And I’m very honored and happy to do that.”

I’ve had a similar experience with transness. Friends who have been in the community longer were there to give me a gentle nudge and help me navigate.

What About the Other Three Themes?

Even the points that didn’t immediately jump out at me from Langdridge and Lawson’s five themes ultimately still had connections to trans masc identity. I continued to put red strings on the board, but this is where things get a little more complex.


Escape From Self

I would argue that “escape from self” applies, but not because transness is about escaping the self — rather, being trans requires so much effort to become yourself, that an escape from self can be like a little vacation.

The 2019 study wrote more about the pup headspace that participants aim for, saying that “temporality is key here as the focus is intensely in the present, with worries about past or future stripped away.” The past of gender is scary; you were someone else then, and you didn’t feel quite right yet. The future of gender is scary, too; will you ever become who you want to be? As a pup, this isn’t a factor. You just get to exist, no further complications.

Every single person I interviewed referenced that escape as a core part of being a pup — not just an escape from the self, but an escape from responsibilities and expectations.

Maverick said that “being a pup allows me to take a break from expectations that pull me in every different direction on any given day, whether it’s related to work, school, or my relationships. Not only that, but pups don’t know anything about the horrors of capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, puritanism, colonialism… so there’s a bit of escapism that pup play allows for in that way.”

Caryn’s main theory on why so many trans mascs are pups centered on an escape from expectation and needing to be taken seriously. They walked me through their thoughts:

“I think trans mascs specifically have to spend so much of their lives fighting to be taken seriously… If you have any experience in girlhood, you are sort of always fighting to be taken as seriously as cis men are. And I feel like if you then [transition]… there’s a very specific kind of power and privilege that comes with masculinity. But in order to actually have access to that power and privilege, you have to really embody masculinity in very specific set of narrow ways… if you’re someone who has spent their entire life only seeing their value in relation to their seriousness, getting to be a pup means getting to be valuable while being completely unserious.”

Adult Vibrant Physicality

At its core, being a pup is just another form of adults playing. As Pup SAZ put it, “what D&D, cosplay, and RPG is for some adults, pet play is for others. And it’s one of the sweetest most wholesome things I am honored to be a part of.”

Mick, one of the other pups I interviewed, specifically saw parallels between masculinity and the form of play that being a pup involves. “There’s something really boyish about being playful the way you do in pup circles. The tussling around, the innocence, the messiness of it, almost feels like you’re recreating a childhood as a boy that you never got.”

The benefits of embodying a different physicality can be especially important for trans people. In the words of the 2019 study, “not only is there an escape from the self in psychological terms but also a sense of being able to step back from a person’s bodily inhibitions and enjoy and embrace their physicality.” The appeal is understandable for trans people who may feel that the body they currently have is limiting.

One of my favorite tidbits of information from my academic pup research is from the 2022 study: of the pups that identify with an individual breed of dog, “the most favored breeds are for large dogs — perhaps speaking to the intersection of masculinity with kink.” Because big dog = masculine, obviously, just like all dogs are boys and all cats are girls.

Maverick brought up one breed of dog in particular, specifically as a masculine stereotype. “I think a great example of non-toxic masculinity is the ‘golden retriever boyfriend,’ and I don’t think that comparison is coincidental. It’s so hard to navigate masculinity as a transmasc person, and leaning into this innocent, playful, curious energy that dogs — but especially golden retrievers — are known for [feels] not only approachable, but enticing for me as a safe, contained way to explore and externalize an unfiltered masculinity that bypasses intellectualization.”

Maverick continued, “I also get to express myself physically, embody a softer masculinity, and show affection and receive it in a way that feels contained, safe, and intimate.” That softer masculinity brings up a point that I kept coming back to throughout my research: dogs don’t know human masculinity, they just know good boy, and that’s a type of masculinity in itself. Because of its softness, that masculinity may feel more accessible to trans men.

Sexual Pleasure

And now for the last theme. Does sexual pleasure overlap between transness and pup-ness? That’s complicated.

Being trans is not a kink, despite other people’s attempts to fetishize us. When I asked Pup SAZ if his gender identity affected his experience of being a handler/pup, he said, “I have been very fortunate to say that it hasn’t. However, in the kink community, sometimes it has. I have definitely had cis men say to me before ‘I’ve never slept with a trans man before [and] I want you to break my gold star’ or ‘trans is my kink.’ Being a bisexual trans nonbinary man, I’ve heard a lot of things I shouldn’t hear.”

That’s where the complication comes in —as trans people, getting to untangle the kink from our gender identity isn’t always an option, when some cis people MAKE our gender identity a kink. Sure, trans people often report better sex lives once they start transitioning, but that’s not because they’re turned on by the transition, it’s because they’re more comfortable in their bodies.

Caryn acknowledges that there can be overlap between kink and gender affirmation. “Kink can be super, super gender affirming for people because at the end of the day, what you’re playing with is power, presentation, [and] existence in your body or outside it. You are breaking down and getting to handpick which of the human psychosomatic experiences you want to have and which ones you don’t. And so it can be really, really empowering and [give] a ton of room for exploration gender-wise to get to play.”

Also, as it turns out, being a pup isn’t always sexual. How sexual being a pup is varies from person to person. As Mick put it, “It’s a kink that can be more aligned with lifestyle, or can be highly sexual.” Studies agreed with the gray area. The 2022 study reported that “participants were asked the extent to which pup play was sexual and/or social, on a five-point scale from [purely] social to [purely] sexual. The mean response was 3.02, with the majority rating their style of pup play as equally social and sexual” — aka, right down the middle.

So, Why ARE So Many Trans Mascs Pups?

Taking a step back to look at my red string-covered bulletin board, I don’t see one answer to why so many trans mascs are pups — I see many.

Maybe it’s that transness and pup-ness come with community and self-expression, but the list of all things that come with community and self-expression is infinite. Relationships, escapism, unconditional acceptance, and affirmation that you can be whoever you want to be can be found in many ways other than just being a pup.

Maybe it’s not a new thing, but instead has just become more visible. As the 2017 study notes, “diverse forms of sexual desire and identity have become highly visible in the internet age, potentially rendering sex less shocking and resulting in a ‘democratization of desire.’”

Maybe it’s because newer generations are just more down for whatever. The 2022 study found that “there is a positive association between being younger and identifying as a pup.” And according to Pew Research data from 2022, “adults under 30 are more likely than older adults to be trans or nonbinary. Some 5.1% of adults younger than 30 are trans or nonbinary… This compares with 1.6% of 30- to 49-year-olds and 0.3% of those 50 and older who are trans or nonbinary.” If more young people are trans, and more young people are pups, it makes sense that there would be some overlap.

Maybe it’s because if you’re willing to accept transness, you’re more open to other possibilities. Caryn said that “I think with both kink and gender, just conceptually, once you start breaking both of these things down to really granular levels, it’s like, what does anything mean? If you’re someone who is spending their free time being a pup, your gender is kind of whatever in the sense that this is not linear at all.”

Ultimately, I think having more overlap between trans communities and ANY communities is a good thing. As Pup SAZ said, “trans pups are amazing and more and more are coming into the community which is greatly needed. Trans handlers included… We still coexist in spaces with the older generation that wants to learn and better their knowledge to be better allies and defenders. So the more trans advocacy and education we have, the better.”

For My Hours Upon Hours of Research and Interviews, My Answer Seems to Be Another Question: Why Is Anyone Into Anything?

If anyone would know, it’s a therapist, so I asked Caryn if that’s even an answerable question. “My instinct on that is no. Sometimes you have a situation where it’s pretty easy to look at the etymology of a specific person’s specific kink… There’s a reason that a lot of people who tend to flock to kink are people who have had really specific restrictive experiences in their lives, whether that’s sexuality, religion, family, whatever. [Sometimes we can] understand how [the kink] got here, but sometimes people just discover stuff and are like, huh, new thing unlocked. And it’s kind of just that.”

And hey, if you’re trans masc and reading this unlocked a new thing, there’s a whole community of pups out there that’s just like you.

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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Max Gross

Max Gross (he/him) is a trans writer and comedian based out of Brooklyn. His writing can be seen in The Onion, Reductress, Slate, and now, wherever you're reading this.

Max has written 4 articles for us.

2 Comments

  1. Fascinating! Pup play isn’t my thing but it is SUPER popular in my city/area so this was an interesting opportunity to learn more.

    Also anyone who liked this article might also enjoy the podcast Why Are People Into That!

  2. max this demands a followup article on all the trans girls being cats and a critical exploration of the construction and reinforcement of the dog/cat binary

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No Filter: Let’s Hear it for Chappell Roan’s Coachella Looks

photo of Chappell Roan by Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Hello and welcome back to No Filter! This is the column where I tell you about the goings on and such of the famous queers of Instagram! Fun, no?

Niecy really said “copy paste” w/r/t her daughters, huh? It’s giving punnet square!

Reneé’s comment I—

Golda was always meant to be a Queen as far as EYE am concerned!

Madam your set took the very breath from me, of course Coachella loves you!

Yes this is motivating or whatever, but honestly I was distracted by her pristine hair!

Quarterly King Princess photo dump has arrived!

The white borders on those first two images begs me to ask: Where are famous people getting their images, and why are they always lightly janky?

I do not know why I find this image so funny, but I do! I think babies on ice is funny, generally?

Ohooo Katy’s blazer might be an intrusive thought for the REST of my day!! I must have it! Gimme!

Easily my fave Coachella look from Chappell, it’s so stunning!!

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Christina Tucker

Christina Tucker is writer and podcaster living in Philadelphia. Find her on Twitter or Instagram!

Christina has written 282 articles for us.

Mini Crossword Is Coincidentally Also a Scorpio Rising

Add spring water.

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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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!

Kate has written 46 articles for us.

Lily Gladstone Is Gonna Be Gay In ‘The Wedding Banquet,’ Their Third Gay Role Of The Year

Lily Gladstone‘s resume keeps getting gayer and gayer and we are so here for it! Today it was announced that Gladstone would star as “Liz” in Andrew Ahn’s The Wedding Banquet, a remake of the 1993 romantic comedy from legendary Taiwanese filmmaker Ang Lee. Kelly Marie Tran, a comic and actress who made a notable impact on gay history by suggesting that Raya, the part she voiced in Disney’s Raya and the Last Dragon, is gay, stars as Angela, Lily’s partner.

The story centers on Min, whose proposal to his boyfriend Chris (local favorite Bowen Yang) is turned down. Still determined to secure his green card, Min persuades his close friend Angela (Tran) to marry him, while promising to cover the costs of IVF treatment for Angela’s partner, Liz (Gladstone). Their plan for a discreet city hall wedding takes a dramatic turn when Min’s grandmother arrives in Seattle, intent on throwing them a lavish Korean wedding banquet, disrupting their lives in unexpected ways.

Living legend Joan Chen is also slated to star in the remake. Previously, Chen’s contributions to the LGBTQ+ cannon included playing a widowed mother in beloved lesbian rom-com Saving Face, having a lesbian sex scene with Anne Heche in The Wild Side, a movie that was so bad, even an Anne Heche/Joan Chen sex scene couldn’t save it,appearing in the queer-inclusive Thanksgiving comedy What’s Cooking? and popping up in last year’s A Murder at the End of The World, starring Emma Corrin.

Youn Yuh-jung, who won an Academy Award for Minari, will play the grandmother, but details on Chen’s role remains a mystery. Casting for the lead role of Min is still underway.

Andrew Ahn previously worked with Bowen Yang on Fire Island.

The original Wedding Banquet was Ang Lee’s second feature film, and his first to earn a theatrical release when it debuted in 1993. It starred Winston Chao in his debut acting role as a gay man who marries one of his tenants, a mainland Chinese woman (May Chin), in order to placate his parents and get her a green card. But then his parents show up in the U.S. determined to plan his wedding banquet, putting his relationship with his gay partner (Mitchell Lichtenstein) in a very awkward position. Wedding Banquet performed well at the box office for its budget and earned accolades at various film festivals as well as Oscar, Independent Spirit and Golden Globe nominations. It was a risky film to make in 1993, and it’s pretty fucking cool that they’re making it again and even gayer this time.

a group of wedding participants and guests sitting at the tabel

The Wedding Banquet (1993)

As a community, we are specifically thrilled by the news that Lily Gladstone will be playing gay, and doing so opposite Kelly Marie Tran.

Last week I wrote about Under the Bridge, a fantastic true crime drama now on Hulu in which Lily Gladstone plays a lead queer character opposite Riley Keough. Earlier this month, it was announced that Apple Original Films would be releasing Fancy Dance, a 2023 Sundance favorite from Native American filmmaker Erica Tremplay, in which Lily plays a “queer 30-ish scammer” who’s tasked with her 13-year-old niece’s care after her sister Tawi disappears from the Seneca-Cayuga reservation in northeastern Oklahoma. That film will open June 21 with a limited theatrical release and premiere on Apple TV on June 28th. Gladstone also played a queer role in 2016’s Certain Women, which came in at #29 on our 50 Best Lesbian Films list. We can only continue to hope and pray that this streak of queer roles will continue forever.

Kelly Marie Tran became the first woman of color to have a leading role in a Star Wars movie when she appeared in Star Wars: The Last Jedi in December 2017, which also landed her on the cover of Vanity Fair, the first Asian-American woman to do so. Tran played queer in the Facebook watch series Sorry For Your Loss, which I really thought I’d written about for this website at some point but cannot find evidence of having done so. She’s generally badass and we are very excited to see her and Lily be a couple on the big screen!!!

The Wedding Banquet will begin filming in Vancouver next month.

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Riese

Riese is the 41-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 and has a cute dog named Carol. Follow her on twitter and instagram.

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2 Comments

  1. I feel like I was among 5 people that watched that show but I loved Kelly Marie Tran’s character in Sorry For Your Loss! Easily the best part of the show for me and I can’t wait to see her in this.

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‘Appropriate Behavior’ Says F*ck Your Coming Out Arc

In “Lost Movie Reviews From the Autostraddle Archives” we revisit past lesbian, bisexual, and queer classics that we hadn’t reviewed before, but you shouldn’t miss. This week is Desiree Akhavan’s Appropriate Behavior.

One of the best indie queer films of the past decade, Appropriate Behavior debuted at Sundance 10 years ago and remains, frankly, unparalleled in its excruciatingly real portrayal of queer post-breakup chaos. Directed by, written by, and starring Desiree Akhavan, she is indeed the film’s north star. Appropriate Behavior was her striking feature length debut as writer-director, and it cemented her particular brand of queer storytelling: one marked by nonlinear narratives, discomfort comedy, and dykes fucking and flailing their ways through life.

Appropriate Behavior begins with a breakup. Shirin (Akhavan) is moving out of girlfriend Maxine’s (Rebecca Henderson) Park Slope apartment. Almost immediately, Shirin tells her deadpan best friend Crystal (Halley Feiffer) she wants her back. She moves in with new weird roommates, takes a job teaching filmmaking to literal kindergarteners in Brooklyn, and tries to stitch back together her life by fucking her way through it. She goes on bad dates, has a bad threesome, Akhavan always letting these moments linger long beyond discomfort. We don’t cut away from Shirin’s awkwardness or blunt outbursts. Akhavan has no problem making us stay close and personal. Shirin holds people at a distance, but Akhavan’s approach to filmmaking is intensely intimate.

Along the way, Appropriate Behavior jumps back to Shirin and Maxine’s relationship leading up to its dissolution. We get the stoop-set meet-cute when they initially bond over, essentially, being haters. But the problem with bonding over cynicism is that cynicism is likely to turn in on each other eventually. Shirin and Maxine fight as compellingly as they fuck, sometimes even fighting about fucking itself. The whole film a masterclass on structure, nonlinearity, and airtight editing. Scenes move fluidly between Shirin’s present and vignettes of her past, often triggered subtly by a person, place, or thing that sends Shirin spiraling backward to Maxine. It doesn’t feel like a spiral though. It feels like we’re moving back and forth on one straight line. There are no sound cues that send us backward; there’s no visual or stylistic differentiating between the past and present. These flashbacks do the thing so many flashbacks strive for and yet fall short of: they feel authentically like memories.

It’s clear right away that Shirin has romanticized the relationship, as we all often do. Indeed, Maxine and Shirin’s shared sardonic sense of humor and tendency to loathe things makes for shaky foundation to build a relationship on. But Maxine becomes Shirin’s entry point to queerness, and Shirin becomes Maxine — who’s estranged from her parents — chosen family, and well, there are all sorts of reasons we suddenly find ourselves in super serious, all-encompassing relationships with people we’re not good fits for. Appropriate Behavior‘s sex scenes embody so many different kinds of sex, bad and good and in between. When the lust of new relationship energy wears off, Shirin and Maxine don’t even seem like a great fit sexually, a hilariously odd roleplay situation where Maxine commits a little too seriously to the bit of being Shirin’s tax preparer underlining some of their differences of desire. Akhavan is so good at capturing discomfort without actually reproducing the cynicism of her characters. Yes, there’s cringe, but there’s charm, too.

Many of the thorny themes that would later be sharpened in Akhavan’s brilliant (and forever underrated) limited series The Bisexual are planted here in Appropriate Behavior: casual and persistent biphobia in the lesbian community, the internalized biphobia that fosters, and tensions in intercultural relationships. With that last one, Appropriate Behavior really excels, Shirin pushed and pulled by three different selves: the self her parents want her to be (a good Persian daughter), the self Maxine wants her to be (based on Maxine‘s idea of queer life and community), and the self Shirin actually wants to embody, the self she’s still trying to figure out.

It has what I’d call an anti-coming out arc. It’s a movie that understands well the reality that coming into one’s own queerness extends far beyond coming out. In one of the film’s best fights (though picking a favorite fight from the movie is like picking a favorite sex scene from it, which is to say difficult), Shirin and Maxine go at it about their different familial behaviors. Maxine is, understandably, frustrated by Shirin’s refusal to acknowledge their relationship to her traditional wealthy Iranian immigrant parents. Shirin is, understandably, frustrated by Maxine’s pressures, which in Shirin’s mind dismiss the cultural differences. Maxine calls Shirin’s relationship with her parents codependent, creepy. To her, it is wrong. Shirin calls Maxine’s estrangement from her family an abandonment on Maxine’s part, a choice. To her, it is wrong. They’re both being unreasonable and yet completely comprehensible. It can be so easy to seek points of connection in an early, formative queer relationship, to feel seen and understood by another when perhaps we haven’t experienced that in our intimate relationships before, but by hinging our understandings of our own queerness on another person, we run the risk of ignoring key differences. We project, and we fall into the false narrative often thrust upon us that there’s a one-size-fits-all way to be queer, to come out.

When Shirin tells her parents it’s actually completely normal and platonic for her to live with Maxine in a one-bedroom apartment with only one bed in it (“Also, in the movie Beaches, these two best friends shared a bed, and it was very inexpensive,” Shirin rationalizes in one of my favorite lines from the film), it’s intentionally absurd. Of course they know. Shirin’s mother is merely content with denial. Her brother thinks if she likes men, too, then she can just choose that. Maxine is appalled by what she sees as Shirin living a double life when she accompanies her to a Nowruz party in Jersey. But just like the film resists linearity in its structure, it resists a monolithic approach to its characters, especially Shirin.

Akhavan creates queer character that aren’t just unlikable; they’re unpleasant. They’re not just messy; they’re nasty, self-destructive. When Shirin and Maxine fight while drunk, they accuse each other of cheating, of hitting, and both are alcohol-induced embellishments, but you believe their perception of things, because above all else Akhavan imbues her writing, filmmaking, and performances with emotional truth, even among the quippy jokes. This is a simple story but a deceptively complex film. It feels very much like just one zoomed-in snapshot of a queer person’s life rather than a sweeping journey, and that intimacy is ultimately more revelatory than a grander arc might be. As far as breakup films go, it’s one of the best, reminding at times of a 21st century Brooklyn version of Sarah Schulman’s novel After Delores. And ten years later, it still stands out as an indie queer gem.

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Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya

Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya is the managing editor of Autostraddle and a lesbian writer of essays, short stories, and pop culture criticism living in Orlando. She is the assistant managing editor of TriQuarterly, and her short stories appear or are forthcoming in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Joyland, Catapult, The Offing, and more. Some of her pop culture writing can be found at The A.V. Club, Vulture, The Cut, and others. You can follow her on Twitter or Instagram and learn more about her work on her website.

Kayla has written 818 articles for us.

The History and Future of Trans Women in Action Movies

When you leave an action movie, some topics immediately arise for post-screen conversation. Perhaps there was an especially sick bit of fight choreography nobody can get over. Or maybe a witty one-liner to be repeated ad nauseam between you and your friends. But one thing that’s not likely to emerge in the glow of immediate post-action movie discourse? Praise about the feature’s trans representation. If there was any mention of trans folks in the action movie, it likely results in a hesitant, “Boy, that was uncomfortable, huh?”

Action movies haven’t been a domain where trans women have fared especially well. That’s what makes Dev Patel’s directorial debut Monkey Man such a welcome outlier. Unfortunately, the general history of representation (both in front of and behind the camera) in the action movie realm can be incredibly frustrating. But does that mean all trans-based hope for the future of the genre is lost?

Cinema has often reflected mainstream capitalist values of a gender binary and reaffirmed the notion that there are specific ways each gender “behaves.” Because of this phenomenon, action movies, like R-rated comedies, have often reinforced conventional portraits of masculinity. That’s not because fight scenes and other staples of the action movie are inherently “for men.” Instead, it reflects this genre’s usage to (either consciously or subconsciously) reinforce standard gender roles. Just look at iconic Hong Kong director Chang Cheh basing his action features around “yanggang” or staunch masculinity. Then, of course, there were Reagan-era American action movies that starred buff dudes reinforcing classical masculine prowess and “the American way.”

Exceptions have existed throughout the years, from the leads of the Alien and Terminator movies to features headlined by Michelle Yeoh and Veronica Ngo. However, such movies are often thought of as anomalous in the genre. The very presence of women in an action movie protagonist role is seen as “subversive” of the genre’s norms. The women leads of this genre tend to remind us how rarely such figures get to step into the spotlight of this domain.

Action films have primarily reinforced the status quo. That’s why there’s an influx of heroic cops, soldiers, and similar figures being protagonists in the domain. This means that trans women have been basically non-existence in the genre for many years. One exception to this erasure? Trans women do make occasional appearances as the punchline to jokes. The 1984 movie Toxic Avenger, for instance, found time for transphobic jokes as part of its “transgressive” style of comedy. 15 years later, Wild Wild West squeezed in transphobic gags as part of recurring gay panic jokes. (Readers will be shocked to be reminded that Wild Wild West was a poorly written movie.)

Such demeaning jokes were part of the action movie as a reminder to moviegoers about what constitutes “normalcy.” Trans people (and, specifically, trans women) are “freaks” and anomalies in society. It’s okay to be grossed out by them! Just look at action/comedy The Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult. This wacky sequel featured a quasi-homage to The Crying Game. Said tribute hinged on Frank Drebin (Leslie Nielsen) horrifyingly discovering that supporting character Tanya Peters (Anna Nicole Smith) is a trans woman. Idiotic and tired jokes lifted from Ace Ventura movies were even making their way into the realm of action/comedies.

Thankfully, not all trans representation in 1990s action cinema was made equal. One complicated trans element of 1990s action cinema came in the 1996 feature Escape from L.A. This John Carpenter directorial effort featured trans woman Hershe Las Palmas (Pam Grier), a former associate of protagonist Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell). Escape from L.A. has garnered a cult following in recent years, in part due to the complicated, yet fond, relationship many viewers (including trans audiences) have with Las Palmas.

Carpenter’s film trades in unfortunate staples of “trans panic” gags. These include brief fixations on the character’s genitals and Plissken repeatedly dead-naming Palmas. However, Las Palmas does get to participate in action scenes. She’s decidedly not the main villain of the film. And she’s also portrayed by a cis woman (rather than a cis man in a wig). Compared to other 1990s action movies, Escape from L.A. was practically Lingua Franca!

Thankfully, trans women did leave a massive mark on action cinema in the final months of the 20th century. Enter Lana and Lilly Wachowski’s masterpiece The Matrix.

This 1999 Keanu Reeves vehicle didn’t feature any explicit on-screen trans representation. However, the entire premise of the movie has become famous for its allegorically trans material. A feature all about subverting societal norms that hinges on embracing your true self on taking just the “right” pill. If that’s not trans lady cinema, then what is? Heck, key crowdpleaser climactic moments in The Matrix and The Matrix Resurrections orient around protagonist characters reaffirming their names to someone “deadnaming” them! Lilly and Lana Wachowski weren’t out as trans women at the time of The Matrix’s release, so at the time audiences couldn’t quite appreciate this important piece of personal subtext. However, it was always there changing the default thematic norms of this genre.

The Matrix blew open the doors for what action movies could accomplish. One would have hoped that would have resulted in a deluge of trans-focused action cinema. Alas, trans women are still a rarity in the action genre. Hollywood sort of retired transphobic jokes, even if such gags still appeared in motion pictures as late as 2016’s Deadpool. Unfortunately, the approach to trans women in modern action cinema is a microcosm of how Hollywood has handled lots of marginalized populations in recent years. Off-color and cruel jokes are out. However, they haven’t been replaced with physical tangible representations that could potentially “alienate” intolerant viewers and their dollars. The response to the ubiquity of transphobic material was to just erase the idea of trans people altogether.

If modern action films even begin to approach something “kind of” trans-related, it’s usually for vomit-inducing gimmicks. The tedious 2016 Michelle Rodriguez vehicle The Assignment, for instance, focused on male assassin Frank Kitchen. (He was presumably named by the same screenwriter responsible for the 2010s action hero names Cade Yeager and Cypher Raige.) Kitchen wakes up to find himself surgically turned into a woman by his enemy. Needless to say, it’s an abhorrent piece of cinema exceeded only in its inaccuracy of trans experiences (not to mention its emphasis on trans stuff only through “medical” procedures) by its tediousness. To its credit, there is an adorable moment where a dog places its paw on top of two human hands. Save for that cute canine behavior, The Assignment has nothing to offer but retrograde approaches to gender.

Even the fleeting appearances of actual trans actors in action films are lacking. Why is Laverne Cox in the long-forgotten Amazon action movie Jolt if she’s only around to play a forgettable detective character with no memorable fight scenes? It wasn’t until Monkey Man that moviegoers received a welcome departure from these trends with Vipin Sharma’s Alpha, a member of the local hijra community that rescues the film’s protagonist.

Alpha and other trans characters in the movie are not depicted as eerie “others.” Their bodies are not framed as something repulsive, nor are they “freaks” worthy of jeers. The isolated world they inhabit is a kind of oasis in a movie full of corruption and darkness. Meanwhile, their oppression at the hands of the government reflects the rampant inequality Monkey Man‘s lead is fighting against. But even this exciting exception still casts a cis performer in the role.

At least Sharma’s performance is devoid of obnoxious over-the-top ticks other cis actors bring to trans characters. And, best of all, Monkey Man gives Alpha and the film’s other trans characters a big climactic action scene! This gaggle of societal outsiders gets to be Monkey Man’s equivalent to Han Solo/M’Baku/Middle-Earth Eagles by suddenly showing up to save the day just when all hope seems lost. Alpha and company even get nifty-looking scythes to use in viciously enacting violent revenge. Even just this one Monkey Man sequence makes one realize what this genre’s been missing. Trans women have been this domain’s source of go-to mockery, when what they need to become is the new default stars of the genre.

I mean, really, trans women and trans folks of any gender make for perfect action movie protagonists simply by nature of being underdogs. The action movie is often about “one person against an army of baddies.” Typically, American titles like Taken and Silent Night have used this dynamic to instill martyr complexes in privileged viewers. In these films, middle-aged white dads are the ultimate victims in society. Their enemy? Foreign “invaders,” particularly nasty people of color covered in tattoos. Trans-centric action movies could take the bare bones of this underdog story structure and ground it in some reality.

After all, trans people are being attacked in legislation regularly. This is an actually oppressed group of human beings, particularly when those trans folks intersect with other marginalized identities. Monkey Man proved you can pull from real-world woes and still deliver gnarly cheer-worthy action moments. This balance shows narrative hallmarks of action movies can evolve in exciting new directions.

Even more exciting, though, is the idea of actual trans artists molding the form. Save for the Wachowskis, trans artists have had minimal opportunities to contribute to the creative direction of the genre. It’s thrilling to imagine the new visual elements filmmakers like Sydney Freeland and Vera Drew could bring to this domain of guns, bullets, and taken offspring. (Freeland directed episodes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and Echo and Drew literally already made a superhero movie.) Trans filmmakers have employed unique visual flourishes in their indie works; imagine if they received the money to execute visually bold action movies. Just look at what Lilly and Lana Wachowski did with the camerawork and editing in The Matrix films and Speed Racer.

But even the recent The Matrix Resurrections still relied largely on subtext with trans performers only populating minor supporting roles. Alongside the casting of Monkey Man’s lead trans character, it feels like trans performers are even more absent than trans filmmakers. Hari Nef, MJ Rodriguez, Patti Harrison, Trace Lysette, and so many others are prominent in pop culture. Any one of them could become a new action movie star! In the past, the stars of Kinsey, Good Will Hunting, and Moonlighting became cisgendered action legends. Why can’t rising trans stars get their own Die Hard or The Bourne Identity?

The future for trans artists in action movies, even after something reassuring like Monkey Man, is fuzzy. On the one hand, the very existence of the acclaimed intersex-led Sundance 2024 thriller Ponyboi should give hope. But the River Gallo-starring feature is an indie in a genre that often requires a larger budget. (Ponyboi is more action-adjacent than action after all.) There’s also M.J. Bassett’s upcoming Red Sonja film. What a welcome sign seeing a trans woman helming a comic book adaptation full of punching! But the predominantly cis cast and cis screenwriter, implies a trans person would only get this opportunity by folding into the cis establishment, creating a movie whose connection to transness would be unknown by anyone unfamiliar with the director’s identity.

Trans action filmmakers and trans action stars should be included more in the work that’s already getting made. But true change will come when trans filmmakers are allowed to push the genre to exciting new territory like the Wachowskis did a quarter of a century ago — this time out of the closet with trans actors on-screen.

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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Lisa Laman

Lisa Laman is a life-long movie fan, writer, and Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic located both on the autism spectrum and in Texas. Given that her first word was "Disney", Lisa Laman was "doomed" from the start to be a film geek! In addition to writing feature columns and reviews for Collider, her byline has been seen in outlets like Polygon, The Mary Sue, Fangoria, The Spool, and ScarleTeen. She has also presented original essays related to the world of cinema at multiple academic conferences, been a featured guest on a BBC podcast, and interviewed artists ranging from Anna Kerrigan to Mark Wahlberg. When she isn’t writing, Lisa loves karaoke, chips & queso, and rambling about Carly Rae Jepsen with friends.

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4 Comments

  1. I don’t think The Assignment is meant to be taken seriously. “Frank Kitchen” (a hilarious name repeated often in the film, funnier every time) was named by Walter Hill, who has referred to the movie as a “king-size Tales From the Crypt” episode; it’s a very silly and pulpy story about a mad scientist and her victim’s quest for revenge. Frank is clearly not trans.

    • Obviously Frank isn’t trans, but the film is clearly trafficking in trans imagery and using trans surgeries for shock value, so Lisa was correct to mention it.

  2. I’m MJ Bassett – director of Red Sonja here. Just want to correct something. Sonja was developed at an early stage by Joey Soloway, the creator of Transparent, before I came on board. Going from nonbinary film maker to transwoman film maker is no small thing. There IS a transwoman in the cast but she’s not played as such and is not relevant to story, and I offered a bigger name trans actress a role but she turned me down. So, to be clear, the studio was very open to this and there is trans representation both on screen and off but that’s not what the movie is about. It’s just going to be a good action film and that’s how I think things should be.

    • As the editor of this piece, I’m happy to hear there’s a trans woman in your cast and have changed that sentence accordingly! Looking forward to seeing your film.

      • As someone who actually loves Wild Wild West, i want to remind you that the late 80s and earlier 90s where teeming with female led action cinema and genderqueer characters, in Hongkong cinema. See for example Tsui Hark films like Peking Opera Blues or The Butterfly Lovers with trans male main characters, or the East is Red trilogy with a trans female lesbian main character.
        Great article btw, welcome here!

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‘Renegade Nell’ Stands and Delivers on Fun, But Not on Gay Content

Nell Jackson didn’t set out to become a highwaywoman; in fact, all she wanted to do was be a good soldier. Recently widowed, she returned to her hometown, where everyone thought she died with her husband. And when she returns, she returns a little…different. On her way into town, she’s held up by a highwayman, and a little mote of light goes into her mouth and imbues her with supernatural strength and speed and she’s able to get out of the jam all on her own. (Also this is neither here nor there, but there is currently another show about highwaymen called The Completely Made-Up Adventures of Dick Turpin that also features a highwaywoman named Nell, but apparently this is a complete coincidence, because while Dick Turpin was a real person, neither the Nell in that show nor Nell Jackson are.)

Played by Derry Girl Louisa Harland, Nell Jackson is a fierce, funny, sarcastic woman with no interest in behaving the way people of her time think women should behave. Nell prefers wearing pants to skirts, and doesn’t care if you mistake her for a man, as long as you don’t call her Nellie. But while she is clearly gender non-conforming for her time, there’s no evidence of her being queer. She seems to have loved her late husband, and doesn’t show romantic interest in anyone else. Which is only a bummer in that it means we don’t get to know whether or not she’s queer; in the grand scheme of things, I really appreciate a woman’s story not having anything to do with romance at all. Nell has more important things to worry about. Over the course of the season, Nell finds herself in many sticky situations, and is on a mission to clear her name of a crime she didn’t commit, all while protecting her two little sisters, Roxy and George.

Renegade Nell: Nell Jackson sitting with her sisters Roxy and George

Don’t underestimate them. Photo by Robert Viglasky.

There is a queer character we meet, though I’m not sure if she’s even fully aware of her own queerness by the end of the season. While on the road, Nell resorts to a little highway robbery, stopping the carriage of a wealthy family, stealing only what they need and letting the family go. The daughter of this family, Polly Honeycombe, becomes instantly enamored with this “highwayman” and eventually meets back up with Nell and her crew. While she is definitely surprised when it was revealed to her that Nell is a woman, it didn’t stop her from fantasizing about Nell. At one point, she even kisses Nell square on the mouth…to which Nell has no reaction. It’s then never addressed or brought up again. Very confusing. So while Polly does indeed seem to be queer, the mere fact of gender not getting in the way of her crush, it’s unclear if it goes deeper than her fascination with Nell.

Renegade Nell: Polly pulls Nell in for a kiss

I did appreciate Polly’s fantasy giving Nell the 90s slow-mo heartthrob treatment.

And personally, my queer heart was pulled in a slightly different direction. One person dedicated to stopping Nell is Sofia Wilmot, the magistrate’s daughter. Sofia is trying to keep her younger brother out of trouble, because she is unable to inherit the power and estate her father would leave behind. And let me tell you, Sofia Wilmot is the most Katie McGrath-coded character I’ve ever seen not played by Katie McGrath. I swear if this show was made ten years ago, it would have been her playing it. The character has a dash of Morgana’s arc and a touch of Lena Luthor’s serious stillness. Sofia starts out very buttoned up, prim and proper, rarely speaking, just listening, observing. But by the end of the season, she has let her hair down and taken power by the reins.

Renegade Nell: Sofia Wilmot

Tell me the casting call didn’t say “Katie McGrath type.” Photo by Robert Viglasky.

Sofia and Nell are posed as enemies, but they have more in common than either of them realize: They’re both widowed, both protective over their siblings, both feeling limited by what they can do as a woman in 18th century England, both consistently underestimated, and both more powerful than they even realize.

Sofia Wilmot is also played by queer actress Alice Kremelberg, who points out that even though the queer representation on this show is minimal, it is “very exciting, especially for a show that is on Disney and is for everyone.” I just wish they had pushed it a little further, either having Polly have a line about being surprised she still has a crush on Nell even though she knows she’s a woman, or even saying “I don’t care that Nell’s a woman, I still want her to sweep me off my feet” or something. Or maybe even, once the strange kiss moment passed, eventually having Polly eying another woman with similar vibes to Nell’s, indicating her horizons are a bit more open now. It was played off as a joke, which was fine and cute, and I’m glad nobody tried to dissuade her from her crush, and instead just let her know that Nell is a woman, but I still wished they hadn’t played it so…safe. When the backlash came out about the kids’ show Bluey momentarily almost hinting at the theoretical existence of a dog with two moms, I saw someone say something along the lines of: Bigots are going to get mad no matter how big or small your queer representation is, so why not commit to it if you’re going to include it at all? Similarly, PinkNews and Wikipedia both credit trans actress Iz Hesketh, who plays a noble assistant Valerian, as playing a non-binary character, Wikipedia even going so far as to say, “She is the first person to portray a non-binary character to appear in a Disney live action series.” But I would argue this is not an obvious fact. It’s very possible they/them pronouns are used by Valerian in the show, but if they are, I missed it entirely. (Side note: Iz uses she/her pronouns now but identified as non-binary at the time of filming.) Maybe I’m being too cyclical, but it feels like another instance of the representation being almost there. I wanted them to push the envelope juuuust a little further.

I find all of this especially surprising given the creator of this show, Sally Wainwright, was also the creator of Gentleman Jack. So maybe her hands were tied by Disney, maybe there was just too much other story to tell, who’s to say. Hopefully if the show gets a second season, we’ll see more obvious representation.

Renegade Nell: Nell sports a mustache to go undercover as a man

Nell is a drag king and we stan. Photo by Robert Viglasky.

Overall, this was a fun fantasy romp with a lot of heart. While there were still men pulling some reigns — for example, both Nell and Sofia technically get their power from a man, at least at first; Nell from the sprite Billy Blind that has been assigned to her for reasons neither of them know at first, and Sofia from the Earl of Poynton — at its core, this show is about young women. It’s about Nell and Sofia; it’s also about Roxy who wants to be able to choose who she loves and maybe has a touch of magic in her herself; it’s about George, as fearless as she is small, the first in her family to learn how to read. Also, Joely Richardson’s Lady Eularia Moggerhanger, who runs the local newspaper and is always looking for gossip, is a hilarious and fun character.

So, while I wouldn’t recommend this show based on the queer representation alone, I would recommend Renegade Nell overall to anyone who enjoys women-led YA fantasy. On that, it absolutely (stands and) delivers.

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Valerie Anne

Just a TV-loving, Twitter-addicted nerd who loves reading, watching, and writing about stories. One part Kara Danvers, two parts Waverly Earp, a dash of Cosima and an extra helping of my own brand of weirdo.

Valerie has written 550 articles for us.

How Do I Approach Sex With My Partner of Six Years While We’re Both Navigating Trauma?

Q:

(Content Warning for discussions of sex and consent, consensual nonconsensual kink)

My partner and I have been together going on six years this year. The first year, our sex life was incredible. We had sex almost every day, sometimes two or three times a day. We were constantly trying new things and laughing during sex (which both of us really value with intimacy). But since, then it’s fizzled out.

A large component of that was both of us unearthing past traumas where boundaries were crossed and consent was violated. For them, that looked like wanting to step away from sex for a while. On the other side of things, I wanted to have more of it but while I was incapacitated in some way (drugs, alcohol, unconsciousness), which they were (understandably) uncomfortable with, particularly since they made the decision to solely engage in sex while they were sober.

The lack of sex, however, that resulted from our wildly differing needs has had a lasting impact. They have tried to initiate sex a lot more the last year and a half or so, and I am the one shutting it down. We have had so many conversations — around times of day we both enjoy having sex, whether they should initiate or I should, how our traumas affected our perceptions of sex, what we’d want to try out or would excite us, how to incorporate fun/spontaneity/curiosity into sex again, which toys to buy, etc. You name it, we’ve talked about it. We’ve even talked about my CNC kink, and they’ve asked how they can engage with that (even though, I know, they’re apprehensive about it).

It all sounds good in theory, but then I feel a block when it comes to initiating sex myself and some combination of aversion, panic, and stress when they do. The only time I feel sexual with them is when I’m VERY incapacitated, but we’ve established that’s a firm boundary for them.

The small handful of times we have had sex the last two years, 9 times out of 10, I find myself disassociating, feeling nothing, thinking about other things, and/or having to imagine different scenarios that don’t involve myself to connect to the physical sensations happening to my body. I’ve tried to explain this to my partner many times, and even though they’re very understanding of it, they’ve started to wonder if I’m not sexually attracted to them anymore. Which is understandable given how much I have withdrawn. And given that I’ve shared with them that I’ve had sexual thoughts about strangers 2-3 times this past year as well. (Not rooted in attraction to them, just those people being near me when I’ve been drinking in public on my own and the thrill of the idea of them taking advantage of me.)

Yes, I am in therapy. We’ve been talking about this for the better part of a year, but while I’m getting validation of my feelings, I am not getting any indication of how to work through this. It’s always “it takes time,” but it’s been years, and I still feel exactly the same, just more defeated.

Any advice?

A:

First, you both are doing great in terms of knowing you each have trauma to work through and facing that head on. Trauma sucks, and the strange and bumpy road of healing can take a very long time. It’s also, unfortunately, incredibly common for both/all people in a queer relationship to be dealing with some kind of trauma, PTSD or CPTSD. I’m not a therapist, but I am someone who’s been in trauma-specific therapy, who has CPTSD and has dealt with PTSD from more sudden events, and who has dealt with sexual / SA / consent violation related trauma. So, that’s where I’m coming from here, offering advice as a fellow traveler on this road and a friend, but not as a professional.

Okay, so, up top, I think it’s definitely the right move to be incredibly cautious about encouraging or asking your partner to engage with the full CNC kink situation at this time. For one, being the top or dom/me in a CNC scene is something that requires a ton of trust in the other partner and comfort with sex in the relationship as well as experience in kink/BDSM dynamics. It’s just not a starting point in kink, you know? And it’s also extremely sticky in this situation because of what your partner is working through, not even to get into their very reasonable and healthy boundaries around sobriety and sex.

It’s also an awesome move to be engaging in these conversations, and I’m really happy that you can be so frank with each other. It’s also totally normal to have the excitement around a new relationship override trauma for a while and then to have trauma resurface when we feel comfortable and safe (as we do in healthy partnerships). I know it can maybe feel like you’re being punished for feeling safer by having your brain decide that NOW is the time to process this trauma, but I remain hopeful that you can move through this.

Now, according to your description of what happens when you engage in sex with your partner, it seems like you’re dissociating during sex after initially feeling discomfort and panic. Dissociation during sex can be a trauma response because our brains learn to dissociate during traumatic events in order to protect us, and then they keep doing that during similar events. So, if you have trauma around consent violations and sex, that can be triggered during intimate moments. And also, sometimes, I have heard that physical arousal itself can trigger dissociation or other trauma responses because of the physical similarities in the body to fear —rapid heartbeat, etc. So, all that is to say, this sounds completely normal, as frustrating as it is. As a recommendation, I think it would be both helpful for you and helpful for your partner in understanding where you’re coming from to look into resources dedicated to helping people process dissociation and PTSD/CPTSD.

I started looking into some resources about trauma and dissociation for you, as a starting point:

  1. For one, this Reddit thread is ostensibly about dissociation during sex due to ADHD, but contains a lot of great recommendations from people going through similar and many who are dissociating because of trauma. Within the thread, I saw this book, Come As You Are recommended by a couple of people. The author, Dr. Emily Nagoski, also has a podcast. I’ve never read or listened, so your mileage may vary.
  2. I would recommend, also, some self-help books. Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving: A Guide and Map for Recovering from Childhood Trauma (which is also useful for recovering from complex trauma obtained from other situations), The Body Keeps the Score, and The Sexual Healing Journey (which I have not read, but is apparently a classic when it comes to helping people to recover from sexual abuse / violations of consent).
  3. Thirdly, I know you’re in therapy, but you don’t mention what kind. So, I do want to just bring up the potential for exploring somatic or movement therapy specifically because you are dealing with trauma associated with the body. And also, sex therapy is an option, too!
  4. Anything you can find or want to try with regards to meditation. Now, I’ve also dealt with my brain getting stuck in weird loops. Needing this particular scenario (alcohol + CNC) to be present and aroused is nothing to be ashamed of, but it also might not have to be the only thing that works for you forever, and also, it’s probably healthy for your body to attempt to move away from needing alcohol for sex. Meditation can help us deal with stress and trauma and to establish new mental patterns. For one, I recommend establishing a meditation practice for just like 5-20 minutes a day. I turned to Reddit once again for resources on getting started. But, as a very, very basic way to do this: find somewhere comfortable and sit in a way that is comfortable for your body and that won’t numb your limbs (some practices ask for specific positions but we’re just going to go for preserving blood flow). Minimize distractions. I don’t do any music or guidance or anything, just quiet. Breathe in for a measure of seconds or counts (like: 1, 2, 3, 4), hold your breath for the same, release for the same number of counts, and hold your exhalation (like don’t breathe in again yet) for the same number of counts. Repeat. This is called square breathing. Do this and also just let your thoughts run, but try to picture them as just like birds or bees flying by. It’s okay to notice them, but just let them go and don’t engage and keep breathing. Eventually, the thoughts will be fewer and less frequent and your mind should calm down. Meditation: apparently it’s good for ya!

And now for sex stuff. I’d like you to start with an analysis of your solo sex life. Do you masturbate sober? Do you masturbate only when you’re inebriated? What kinds of fantasies do you have or get off to most? Do you masturbate at all? And then, I want to encourage you, if you aren’t currently (and it’s not triggering – in which case, please move at your own pace), to try masturbating sober and while intentionally engaging with a variety of different fantasy scenarios to explore what turns you on and what feels fun and what might feel any kind of way from safe to exciting to both. You can seek out erotica or ethically sourced porn to try on different scenarios and dynamics, all while it’s just you and you know you’re safe and secure. I can’t tell you what you might or might not learn, but it might be neat to keep a journal and see where this takes you. As with meditation and trauma work, when we’re traumatized, we can get stuck, and I think that you could get yourself un-stuck from feeling only into this one particular scenario (and un-stuck from the handy dandy crutch that is alcohol) with just kind of giving yourself a push in a new direction. A lot of people turn to alcohol for its inhibition lowering properties, especially when sex is hard, but it also, longterm, doesn’t produce the sexiest results. That link is to a medical study which also shows that caffeine can lead to arousal, so…coffee dates? Sexier than we thought? My point is that masturbation can be a super healthy way to try things that are difficult yet desired during sex — and in this case, it might be getting aroused while sober, fantasizing about something that isn’t CNC, and working on feeling comfortable and safe in your body and home while engaged in sex.

With your partner, you mention bringing in fun, spontaneity, toys! Again, I love that you two are working together on this. It’s a great thing to do for each other, and also, while I haven’t mentioned this yet, I’m excited for your partner who seems to be progressing on their healing journey and who is into initiating sex again and who discovered some cool boundaries around sobriety that are helpful!

I mentioned before that CNC scenes are like…another level. Starting with CNC in a kink dynamic is like if I decided to learn to skateboard by taking myself on a skateboard to the top of a half pipe in a skate park and to just roll with it and see how it goes. I’m probably going to end up on my ass, injured, is how it’s going to go. However, that doesn’t mean all kink / BDSM acts are off the table. You can try incorporating things into your sex life that might give you that loss of control you crave in a much physically and mentally safer way for all involved. And hopefully these ways are also fun for your partner (you’ll find this out by talking with them!).

As a start, here are some sensual things you can try together that are sexy but not sex:

  1. Massage. This actually seems like a great first step. I think it might be nice to get in touch with your bodies by giving each other massages. Make it nice. Break out the candles, the oils, the music, make the bed and arrange the pillows just so, and really let yourselves explore each others’ bodies while touching each other sensually but not necessarily sexually (or with sex off the table for the duration if that takes the pressure off). It’s a great way to appreciate a partner and how hot they are without, hopefully, feeling that pressure or panic when it comes to initiating or like sex is expected (provided you both communicate this first!).
  2. Intentionally sexy dates. There are so many activities you and your partner can get up to that might open up conversation, help you feel in touch with each other and your sexuality, get you out of your comfort zone safely or sink you deep into a place of comfort, depending. All this is up to you, but this type of activity can include stuff like: taking a sensual bath together, going to the beach in swimwear you find sexy and lying around on towels ogling each other, watching an erotic movie or digging up vintage queer porn, going to a store that sells sex toys or erotica and browsing or shopping, make erotic art of or about each other (this suggestion is very gay), or even attending a kink or sex class together, either in-person or online. This is about grounding yourself in your body but also exploring sexy stuff without an expectation of the actual sex act.
  3. Just plain old romantic stuff! Yes, that’s right! You’ve never been together too long to get past the wooing phase. Plan time to laugh, to have fun, to try new things together that aren’t just new sexy things. Maybe you want to try pottery or watch the sunset somewhere new or go out dancing somewhere you’ve never been — truly, whatever is your speed. Bonus: novel positive experiences can help with trauma.
  4. I also recommend the classic worksheet published by Autostraddle for talking to your partner about sex. It’s a great exercise to go through.

Here are some kinky things you can try:

  1. Brush up on kink basics. Talk about all the little things you want to try and all your boundaries, limits, maybe’s, hard no’s — and also know that these might change over time. Come up with safe words for BOTH of you and establish ways that you can check in with each other during sex that fit into the flow. You can have a check-in word, for example, as simple as saying “okay?” to which the other person either responds with “okay” or “no” or even “I don’t know” to get confirmation that you’re both feeling okay or to see if you need to slow down or pause. It’s important for both you AND your partner to have safe words, because even someone in a topping situation can feel uncomfortable, obviously, and should have just as much of an ability to stop a scene. You can have the same or different safe words, whatever works.
  2. Verbal domination. You can ask your partner to play with you in a scenario where you follow their orders. If you can get into a submissive headspace, it might give you some of that sense of submitting or being ravished that you describe in your fantasies. And, bonus, is that this doesn’t involve any kind of physical tool or restraint — it’s just all verbal and in your head.
  3. A blindfold. You can have sex with just the use of a blindfold. It might be thrilling to not be able to see where your partner is going to touch you, and also, it gives you permission to fantasize because sight is out of the picture and it’s all about your other senses and what’s in your head. Also, using a blindfold by itself without restraint or substances is likely a thing that a partner who is made anxious about things like this might feel more comfortable with trying (discuss first of course!).
  4. Beginner-level restraints. I don’t necessarily recommend starting with rope, especially not if one or both of you might start to feel panicky, but instead with some SOFT fabric or leather padded cuffs that can buckle or velcro and become unbuckled or un-velcroed quickly in the event that either of you wants to stop or take a break. Again, this isn’t the whole scenario you’re imagining, but it’s touching on aspects of it, such as being physically restrained.
  5. Roleplay. You can come up with entire scenarios together that you want to play out. Maybe you want to pretend that your partner’s a boss or other authority figure or a hot stranger or a doctor or a vampire or an alien — you can incorporate costumes and props and settings. You can get elaborate or not. The possibilities are as many and as varied as your imagination!

Some of these things might not be helpful, but I hope I’ve given you enough different starting points to work from. I also hope you can show this to your partner and be like “See! Autostraddle says it’s dissociation, not that I’m not attracted to you.” I also want to finish by saying you may or may not get to a place where you and your partner are comfortable or ready to engage with this specific CNC fantasy, but I hope this answer gives you a range of options to consider, pick, and choose from while on your healing journey and as you two work together on your sexual dynamic (as you both continue work on your trauma). This is so hard, and it’s no easy task, and I’m proud of y’all. Trauma is so fucking tough to deal with, and to deal with in relationships, but you’re moving forward, and that’s awesome. One day at a time! Thank you again for writing in and sending you both so much love!

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

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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Nico

Nico Hall is Autostraddle's A+ and Fundraising Director, and has been fundraising and working in the arts and nonprofit sector for over a decade. They write nonfiction and personal essays and are currently at work on a queer fiction novel and podcasts. They live in Pittsburgh. Nico is also haunted. You can find them on Twitter and Instagram as @nknhall.

Nico has written 223 articles for us.

9 Comments

  1. This sounds like a great question for a kink-aware sex therapist. Sex therapists are usually MFTs/couples therapists that have expertise in sexual issues, and there are databases of kink-friendly, trauma-informed therapists. Unfortunately they’re not usually covered by insurance and can therefore be inaccessible, but I hope you can talk to someone about it!

  2. I have felt so much shame that I can’t be like those cool, enlightened queers who can have sex while sober and not dissociate, and so this is SO validating. 

    for me personally, I’ve found that I enjoy sex most (or rather the only time I enjoy it at all) when I’m tipsy, in subspace, and it’s in a setting that feels really distant from real life in some way (on vacation or with a new partner). I’ve been a whole “am I asexual??” kick lately but I always come back to the fact I can feel sexual attraction when I’m drunk. 

    I wish I had magical advice for you, but I’m in the thick of it too but I just get to be single and have zero pressure to actually figure it out. I just want to validate how hard you’re working and how you’re Doing All the Right Things and it sucks so much when nothing seems to be shifting. You seem amazing.

    I know a lot of the advice is around how to learn more about trauma and how to engage in different kinds of therapy, but I’m wondering (as someone who personally loves therapy and reading books about trauma!) if this might actually be a situation where hiring a sex worker or pro domme who is experienced in working with people with intoxication kinks might be helpful. No idea if that’s feasible, but might be the most useful expert to consult with. It’s something I’ve personally considered but the process of hiring one seems even more confusing and expensive than finding a good therapist.

    • Thank you so much for this comment and sending you love <3

      This is also a really interesting suggestion as it's definitely something that crossed my mind when reading this queston, but I also know a lot of monogamous people / couples probably wouldn't be open to it — and then there's the whole question in and of itself of finding a pro domme. Going to noodle on this haha.

  3. As someone with similar trauma, this answer felt really helpful and validating to me, thank you! I had somehow never before considered that trauma might resurface more later on in the relationship because we feel safer and more comfortable then, which is what’s always happened for me, so that’s given me an entirely new framework within which to look at/understand my experiences!

    Re therapy, I think generally anything that is not solely talk therapy is more helpful when it comes to trauma – I would also suggest maybe looking into IFS.

    Sending solidarity to the letter writer 🤗

    • C, thank you so much for this kind comment. And yes, I think that depending on the therapist’s experience and areas of focus / expertise, talk therapy has really varied for me in terms of its effectiveness when coping with trauma.

  4. “come as you are” is great, really really good. Though I’m not sure it directly addresses things in the question, it definitely addresses at least adjacent things, so it is worth a read.

Comments are closed.

How ‘Booksmart’ Helped Me Come Out as Nonbinary

Of all the places to come out as nonbinary, my Brooklyn-based self did it in Texas around my 21st birthday in 2019. You might be wondering, “What?” Isn’t NYC the most inclusive city in America? The center of gay culture even? What would a New Yorker find in Texas to help them come out? The answer: the Austin-based festival South By Southwest, where I saw a particularly beloved teen comedy.

Growing up, I was a weird, feminine kid. Instead of traditional boyish activities like sports, I liked staying inside playing Mario while listening to girly pop songs on Radio Disney sung by Raven, Aly & AJ, and Hilary Duff. For Pete’s sake, my first celebrity crush was Alyson Stoner, starting with their Cheaper By the Dozen/Missy Elliot music video era.

Throughout my upbringing, the boys at school and some of my family members tried to impose masculinity on me. I was criticized for having my hip out and knee bent as my default stance. Whenever any dominant force told me to be a man or man up, I would adamantly refuse. I did have a great source of manliness through my late affectionate father, and it was through his acceptance of my idiosyncrasies I felt comfortable being myself — even with no self-awareness. Imagine being in eighth grade in a predominately Black middle school, interpretive dancing to Taylor Swift’s “Safe and Sound” during the Friday morning assembly just because you were excited about The Hunger Games coming.

As I entered college, self-awareness was installed into my mental software, lending to aggressive anxiety attacks. (Yay!) There was even a brief moment when I pledged to a fraternity because I was in need of brotherly guidance. Thankfully, that short haze, I mean phase, came and went.

Amid academia and identity tribulations, my main solace was running my self-published independent outlet, Rendy Reviews, where I would write — surprise, surprise — movie reviews. Every day after school, you’d see me in a long line at a free advanced screening, waiting patiently for access to see the latest release. Then, at the tail end of the summer of 2018, Rotten Tomatoes integrated me into their database at 20, making me their youngest critic and the first Gen Z critic in their database. That spawned some life-changing opportunities… and some conflict with my schooling.

Early in my Spring 2019 semester, I had a film professor who wasn’t impressed with my critical efforts. He was one of those curmudgeon, failed filmmaker-type professors who had his class watch movies he worked on. Some of them were Woody Allen flicks — not even good ones — and he also assigned Allen’s biography for required reading. In the year of our Lord 2019! The film department had a rule: If you’re absent more than twice a semester, you must drop the class, or it will be an automatic withdrawal. I abused that rule every semester and all my other professors didn’t give a damn. They were adjuncts so they knew the struggle of my hustling. This professor didn’t.

I was absent from my first two weeks of classes because I was covering my first Sundance Film Festival — my second time traveling solo. Upon landing in Utah for Sundance, I received an accredited press email for SXSW. At the time, Austin was the dream place I always wanted to travel to. Since it rolled around my 21st birthday, going there was a once-in-a-lifetime moment I didn’t want to miss.

When I asked that professor if there was anything I could do to go without dropping the class, he declined and said, “You must choose between your education and your career.” At that moment, in anger and shock, I responded with, “Okay,” and was instructed not to attend any further classes.

Immediately after, I dropped the class and it affected my full ride. Thanks to that professor, I have to pay student loans. While stressed on my flight, wondering if I made the right decision, I received an invite to attend the premiere and after-party for Olivia Wilde’s Booksmart. I’d never received an invite to a premiere before, and that good news took my mind off the anxiety of becoming a part-time student.

During Booksmart, I quickly identified with Kaitlyn Dever’s character, Amy. She was the safeguarded, deadpan, lesbian best friend to Beanie Feldstein’s Molly. They may be besties, but Amy plays second fiddle to Molly the entire time. She follows Molly’s lead rather than showing off her individuality. I saw so much of myself in her, especially during high school, where I was attached to the hip and second in command to my best friend. Our film-centric high school prepared us for the film industry, and we both aspired to become directors. By the time it became junior year, he was placed in the directing cohort while I was set in post-production. It was like the universe telling me, “Give up, kid, you’ll only be the supporting character.”

At first, I was confused. Why was I, a Black man, identifying hard with a white teen lesbian girl? My initial connection to Amy puzzled me, but it was her “leap of faith” moment where everything clicked. During Amy and Molly’s escapades to attend their class party, Amy is motivated to impress her skater crush, Ryan. When separated from Molly, she thrives alone, doing karaoke with her peers and killing it on Alanis Morissette’s “You Oughta Know.”

She’s then led to the backyard pool, and in a rush of joy, she jumps in as Perfume Genius’ “Slip Away” plays in the background. The visual language of that moment was perfect at conveying Amy’s joy. Although she was swimming, I knew she was soaring. To see her comfortable in her skin and happy with who she was at that moment was so important to me.

The scene expresses a joyous freedom and I felt it in every fiber of my being. After a few days of the gender attack, it hit me that I didn’t feel like a man at all, nor did I want that to define my being. I loved being right in the middle, existing in a world surrounded by others where I could fly high no matter what.

And so, on the heels of 21 in Austin, Texas, I came out as nonbinary. (Well, not publicly yet, but you get it.) I decided to use they/them pronouns — eventually, they/he cause I like identifying as a short king. Every time I return to SXSW, it’s like a homecoming to the place where I found my sense of belonging and was reborn.

Five years later, I’ve been more confident and carefree than I’d ever been before. I’m unapologetic about my identity and don’t second guess who I am and how I navigate the world. Upon every SXSW, I see different facets of myself through the friends I’ve made and the memories we’ve created

When I first dropped that class with the asshole professor, I was in a state of doubt and regret, but if I were to do it all again, I wouldn’t do anything differently. Okay, probably rent at a cheaper Airbnb, but other than that, NOTHING!

Booksmart is currently streaming on Peacock. 

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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Related:

Rendy Jones

Rendy Jones (they/he) is a film and television journalist born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. They are the world's first gwen-z film journalist and owner of self-published independent outlet Rendy Reviews, a member of the Critics' Choice Association, GALECA, and a screenwriter. They have been seen in Vanity Fair, Them, RogerEbert.com, Rolling Stone, and Paste.

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The Spice Girls Reunite, Stop My Gay Heart in its Track

Feature image of the Spice Girls reunion via Victoria Beckham on Instagram

Be Still My 90s Kid Heart, the Spice Girls Reunited for Victoria Beckham’s 50th Birthday

There was a moment during Victoria Beckham’s 50th birthday party where the song “Stop” was playing and the Spice Girls all did the choreo for it that my friends and I all do when we hear the song, and it was a beautiful moment. (Side note: FIFTY?! They barely look older than they did in the original music video.) My only gripe about this adorable video is that Mr. Posh decided to film it selfie-style. I don’t want your big head in the shot, SHOW ME THE GIRLS! I’m not surprised that Victoria’s husband was probably the only one allowed to film this on his phone at this A-list event, but the fact that there’s not a clearer video of this is a bummer.

Either way, it’s really nice to see them all together and at least getting along enough to play around for the crowd. People pointed out that they’re standing in the same formation they did in the music video, which Emma says wasn’t planned at all.

This does make me wonder, then, if Geri and Mel B. are standing on opposite sides on purpose (in both this performance, and in the more professional photo from Victoria’s instagram), as they are rumored to have had some kind of more-than-friends relationship in the past, and who have made public jabs at each other over the years. Hopefully they’ll eventually learn to be friends again, as many good sapphic exes do.

For now we can just enjoy these cuties dancing and hope against hope they’ll do a worldwide reunion tour someday.

Never Give Up on the Good (News)

+ Kim Kardashian, Emma Roberts and Pretty Little Liars Creator I. Marlene King make a curious creative trio for an upcoming Netflix show

+ Speaking of Pretty Little Liars, a new Summer School trailer shows the return of Annabeth Gish… and I know I’ve talked about this show before but there is a lot of promo for it, which is making me want to watch it, unfortunately. I am a victim of the PR machine and it turns out that Annabeth Gish is a hook I will bit every time.

+ We Are Lady Parts returns May 30th! 🤘

+ “Little Miss Perfect,” which started as a song for Write Out Loud that I was obsessed with and also half of TikTok was obsessed with, is becoming a full stage musical

+ A new trailer for Deadpool & Wolverine dropped, and in it I caught a glimpse of Brianna Hildebrand’s lesbian anti-hero Negasonic Teenage Warhead

+ Bravo might be trying to blackmail Kyle Richards out of the closet (allegedly)

+ Kirby Howell-Baptiste will reprise her role as Death in Sandman spinoff Dead Boy Detectives

+ I really enjoyed this piece on Chappell Roan and her rise to the top breaking “gay famous” barriers. PS — Have you taken our Chappell Roan quiz yet to find out which song you are? I’m Pink Pony Club.

+ Don’t miss our very own Drew talking with Jinkx Monsoon about her new role as Audrey in Little Shop of Horrors

+ Bridgerton will reportedly get gayer in the coming seasons

+ And last but not least, I leave you with a queer reading of Taylor Swift’s ‘The Tortured Poet’s Department’

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

Just a TV-loving, Twitter-addicted nerd who loves reading, watching, and writing about stories. One part Kara Danvers, two parts Waverly Earp, a dash of Cosima and an extra helping of my own brand of weirdo.

Valerie has written 550 articles for us.

3 Comments

  2. Omg the autoplaying videos make me want to scream!

    As a certified Gaylor, I feel like TTPD is the least queer of Taylor’s music, it’s so disappointing. Poetry is the language of our people! This queer reading was such a stretch – ‘oh this song is about an ex, and that song is about a powerful woman, they’re queer anthems’, no you’re definitely reaching!

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Men of ‘The L Word’ and ‘Generation Q,’ Ranked

The original L Word had a very specific point of view when it came to men, and that point of view was that all told, men were very bad. While it was allegedly untrue that all lesbians were man-haters, it was unfortunately true that all lesbians were in fact surrounded by terrible men doing terrible things all the time and therefore had no choice but to hate the whole lot of ’em. Furthermore, the original series was hilariously limited when it came to naming minor male characters. and Gen Q continued in that tradition by giving new characters names already used on the original series. Because who cares it’s just men right????

Infamously, The L Word also agreed that all trans men were bad, but, then Generation Q came along with the bold argument that trans men were not actually bad, but were instead often boring. Is this progress? Who can say.

I gathered my fellow television editors (Kayla, Carmen and Drew) to vote on the men of The L Word and Generation Q. What follows is our expert assessment of the landscape.

44. Gomey

Mark’s Best Friend / Production Partner

gomey working security at an aparmtent or something

It is far more difficult to seize the prize of “worst man” in the L Word franchise than it is to secure the Best Man award. There is a lot of competition for “Worst Man.” In fact, when designing voting for this event, for the first time in the history of me asking my colleagues to vote on things, I had to limit not only the number of 10s a person could give, but also the number of 0s. At the end of the day, everybody kept one fat zero in their pocket for this man, Gomey, the absolute scumlord lizard of a man who spoke some of the series’ worst lines (“News flash, man, this girl you’re crushing on is never gonna be with you! You’ve got a real live dick and that disqualifies you from getting up in there!” is a line that will haunt me well into the afterlife) and inspired Mark to put up hidden cameras around his home to film his lesbian roommates having sex. However, one big thing Gomey did for lesbian culture was inspire what I still consider to be one of the best episodes of noted L Word podcast To L and Back of all time, in which Carly and I fantasized about all of the ways him and Mark could die.

43. Hendrix

Angie’s teacher and boyfriend, Generation Q

(L-R): Jordan Hull as Angie and Simon Longnight as Hendrix in THE L WORD: GENERATION Q, "Quiz Show". Photo Credit: Nicole Wilder/SHOWTIME.

Carmen: A grown ass man dating a barely 18 college freshman, who is one of his students. And then he has to nerve to belittle and infantilize her during their break up? My dude, yes she’s a child, So!! Why!! Were!! You!! Dating!! Her!!
Drew: It’s not just that he’s hooking up with his student — it’s that he’s boring and made Angie’s whole storyline boring.

42. Rodolfo Nùñez

Dani’s father, Generation Q

rodolfo talking to dani outside

Drew: The show kind of made it seem like he was the L Word universe’s version of the Sacklers, so… can’t get much worse than that.
Carmen: I gave Rodolfo two points to counter the fact that he was written as a slick, suit wearing, Latino drug dealer stereotype and while that is awful and unlikeable, I want to acknowledge that the fault on that lands with the writers.

41. Drew Wilson

Aloce Show producer, Generation Q

(L-R) Christopher Wallinger as Drew Wilson and Rosanny Zayas as Sophie Suarez in THE L WORD: GENERATION Q, "Lapse In Judgement". Photo Credit: Erica Parise/SHOWTIME.

Erica Parise/SHOWTIME.

Carmen: A man created solely to be hated.

40. Danny Wilson

Dylan’s boyfriend and filmmaking partner

danny in mediation

He entrapped Helena and disrespected Peggy Peabody. Plus I could really never stop seeing him as a cylon.

39. Mark Wayland

Shane & Jenny’s roommate

mark talking to the camera while jenny smokes behind hiem

Blake Lively’s brother, Eric Lively, joined The L Word‘s second season as Mark to deliver one of its most batshit terrible storylines and trigger Jenny into a nervous breakdown. Initially he had a lot going for him, like that he was hot and had a cute bromance with Shane, but despite being the brains behind our favorite short film, “Shane/Carmen Love Confession,” Mark was banished to the vortex forever. Good riddance!

38. Aaron Kornbluth

Producer of Lez Girls

aaron at the table in a meeeting

A realistic character who told a lesbian he valued her art and her point of view and therefore wanted to fund her project but then when it was all said and done wanted to change the art to be less gay. Boo!

37. Tom Mater

Jodi’s interpreter and Max’s boyfriend

Tom and Max

Carmen: Wait why did Tom leave Max? What I am forgetting? What’s the drama?
Drew: Max was pregnant (via Tom) and Tom disappeared in the middle of the night!
Carmen: THE FUCKKK
Oh wow ok thank you, i shall rate him accordingly!

36. Henry

Tina’s boyfriend

Henry is wearing a coat

Henry had terrible friends and clipped his toenails right in front of the camera.

35. Josh Becker

Tina’s colleague / hookup

Josh Becker

On the upside, his decision to tell Tina, mid-makeout, that she’s definitely not a lesbian, did give Tina the opportunity to shove him away by the head and when you watch that clip in slo-mo it’s pretty solid stuff.

34. Greg

Actor who played “Jim” in Lez Girls and briefly dated Nikki Stevens

greg at table read

No

33. Dr. Benjamin Bradshaw

Kit’s married boyfriend 

benjamin bradshaw after one of his TOE speeches
Carmen: Con man. I still cannot believe how much he told Kit to charge for a damn tart.
Drew: I mean he basically runs a cult but I guess he was right about the pear polenta tart.
Riese: Pear polenta tart inflation is late capitalism at its finest but also he was right and it turned Kit’s fortunes around. But then he stood Kit up for that cute date she’d prepared for with special food and everything! That was so sad! Also the alley cat business. IYKYK

32. Conrad Voynow

Dana’s agent

dana's agent talking a big game

The best part about Dana’s homophobic agent was the part where she fired him.

31. Gabriel McCutcheon

Shane’s father

gabe and his wife sitting outside at the ski resort

Shane’s Dad failed her as a child, and then showed up for round two: failing her as an adult and in turn, failing our dearly beloved Carmen De La Pica Morales and also Helena Peabody. Unforgivable!

30. Leo Herrera

California Art Center fundraiser

Leo at his desk at the CAC

Leo was probably a bad man, but he gets a pass for also being a man so unmemorable that we all really had to try extremely hard to remember who he was and what he did. So he was the guy they brought in to “help out” at the CAC, against Bette’s wishes, and who told her in their first meeting that he met her ex last night with Helena Peabody and that they were so excited about the baby, which is like, oof, you know?

29. Tim Haspel

Jenny’s boyfriend

tim looking at jenny feeling happy

Season One Tim started out as a cutie who seemingly had little in common with his girlfriend Jenny, who arrived in West Hollywood and immediately began to cheat on him. Mostly, Tim was just a sweet guy who fell in love with the wrong girl. But his character also made some weird problematic and aggressive choices, including many of his lines at that lunch with Max and Jenny in Season Three.

28. Franklin Phillips

Bette’s boss at the California Art Center

Franklin at a board meeting

Fired Bette at her father’s funeral. Bad taste in art.

27. David Waters

Kit’s son

David sitting on sofa with Angelica

Kit’s son literally just had to sit there and smile and hold Angelica so Bette could get her second-parent adoption rights and instead he did a little speech about how gay adoption was bad and Angelica would suffer without a man in the house. As we all know from Generation Q, Angie turned out just fine, so.

26. Randy Jackson

Tim’s co-captain for the California University swim team

randy jackson outside the team bus

Tim Haspel’s only friend, said some weird things about lesbians?

25. Irwin Fairbaks

Dana’s father

dana's parents looking at her with concern

Dana’s Dad…. homophobic…. also is Colonel Tigh….

24. Isaac Zakarian

Bette’s boss at the Zakarian gallery, Generation Q

Griffin Dunne as Isaac Zakarian in THE L WORD: GENERATION Q “Late to the Party”. Photo Credit: Liz Morris/SHOWTIME.

He was fine?

23. Dan Foxworthy

Therapist to Bette & Tina and also Tasha & Alice

therapist sitting in his chair

Mediocre at his job, missed opportunity for The L Word to hire a hot queer couples therapist.

22. Melvin Porter

Bette’s father

Bette's Dad melvin having dinner with his family
Carmen: As a Black person walking upon this earth, I cannot in good conscience give Ossie Davis a zero. But just know, in my heart, this is someplace around a zero.
Drew: Yes, he’s homophobic. But Ossie Davis is such a good actor, he makes the character complex and even likable.
Riese: I loved the way he said “Ms Kennard,” that’s what I call Tina in my head now forever

21. Angus Partridge

Angie’s Manny and Kit’s boyfriend

angus holding angie

Noted Manny and lying lowdown nanny-fucking motherfucker Angus Partridge got more screen time than any other cis man on The L Word.

Carmen: I’m saying though… HE CHEATED ON PAM GRIER!!! Some things are unforgivable.
Drew: He cheated on Kit and he also interrupted her recording session. He was an insecure man who ruined the best things in his life. But people are complicated and I do think he had some really nice qualities!

20. Captain Curtis Beech

Tasha’s attorney in her DADT trial

beech sitting at the desk with tasha

Riese: Did he start out homophobic and annoying? He did. But did he come around eventually??? He did!
Carmen: I gave bonus points for any affiliation with Tasha. I am who I am.

19. José Garcia

Micah’s boyfriend, Generation Q

(L-R) Freddy Miyares as Jose and Leo Sheng as Micah Lee in THE L WORD: GENERATION Q, "Lapse In Judgement". Photo Credit: Erica Parise/SHOWTIME.

Erica Parise/SHOWTIME.

Carmen: Wait now, why do we hate Micah’s Jose? Why don’t I remember any of these men’s worst deeds?
OH WAIT was Jose married and never told Micah? But he was so cute!!
Drew: Yeah he was married and didn’t say
But yes very cute lol
Riese: MICAH MERMAN PAINTING DREW
Drew: OMG I FORGOT
Carmen: OMG THAT PAINTING
Riese: the most offensive art in the history of the franchise
Carmen: ok no gotta take off another point

18. Leonard Kroll

Phyllis’s husband

leonard looking proudly at ehlena for some reaosn

Carmen: No. Just No.
Riese: That fight with Phyllis in her office where he asks her if she wants to flush their life down the toilet is some of the worst dialogue in L Word history. But also… he is sad and his heart hurts and it was sort of cute when he came over to Alice’s to learn about lesbians…
Drew: He’s just a man whose wife is a lesbian doing the best he can with that info.

17. Gene Feinberg

Jenny’s boyfriend

Gene at the farmers market

Gene was such a nice Jewish boy. Loved marine life, brought Jenny flowers, was chill about Robyn.

16. William Halsey

Funder of Lez Girls

wallace shawn as william, sitting next to jenny

Carmen: Cher Horowitz’s dad debate teacher will always get at least a 8 out of 10 for me, no matter the role, on principle.

15. Clive

Shane’s friend 

Clive waving at a guy in The Planet

Clive was just going through a rough time and needed help, you know?

14. Burr Connor

Famous actor Jenny was going to ghostwrite for

Burr at lunch with Chatlotte and Jenny

Well, we hope this man found his way out of the closet.

13. Hassan

Micah’s hookup, Generation Q

(L-R) Freddy Miyares as Jose, Leo Sheng as Micah Lee and Shyaam Karra as Hassan in THE L WORD: GENERATION Q, "LA Times". Photo Credit: Hilary Bronwyn Gayle/SHOWTIME.

Hilary Bronwyn Gayle/SHOWTIME.

Very hot, did not do or say anything particularly memorable.

12. Harrison

Dana’s double’s partner / beard

harrison ready for the tennis event

Dana’s gay doubles partner. Sometimes I remember this role as being played by Andrew Rannells even though it wasn’t. But like….. imagine if it was?

11. Sunset Boulevard

Employee of The Planet After Dark, Kit’s boyfriend

"i make really good pancakes" says sunset on stage in an outfit

This man was a good man — but also a very bad drag queen. But happy for Kit that she ended her run in the franchise with a boyfriend who didn’t suck! Porter for Progress!

10. Oscar

Social Justice Advocate

oscar in a a "fight in the fields" t-shirt

Very kind and helpful man who gave Tina something to think about during her miscarriage grief (volunteering for his org) and also helped getting dirt on Faye Buckley for Bette’s debate.

9. Pierce Williams

Bette’s mayoral campaign leader, Generation Q

pierce

Drew: I’m glad that Brian Michael Smith landed his role on 9-1-1: Lone Star and that worked out well for his career, but I wanted more for Pierce and his flawless suits.

8. Shay McCutcheon

Shane’s little brother

Shay talking to the school principal

Kayla: I feel like people hated him but he was literally just a child? Also really love the side of Shane he brings out.
Carmen: I know this is a minority opinion, but I wish Shay had stayed on the show and gotten adopted. Shane had never been better. Anyway, give that kid a milkshake!!

7. Howie Fairbanks

Dana’s brother

howie in dana's living room

Dana’s gay brother knew how to have a good time!

6. James

Bette’s assistant

james standing behind bette at her desk

Drew: Behind every powerful woman, is a man scheduling her meetings.

5. Tom Maultsby

Alice’s ghostwriter & boyfriend, Generation Q

Donald Faison as Tom in THE L WORD: GENERATION Q ÒLuck be a LadyÓ. Photo Credit: Liz Morris/SHOWTIME.

Carmen: Such a great use of Donald Faison’s easy smile and charm. Tom, you did no wrong.
Drew: People were so weird about Alice actually having a boyfriend. Tom was lovely!
Kayla: Genuinely great chemistry with Alice! Even though nothing about the publishing industry made sense wrt his character!

4. Max Sweeney

Max in a blue t-shirt and dark blue cap sitting next to Jenny on a couch

Drew: I love Max. Even if I don’t love everything the show did with/to Max.
Riese: We’ve obviously discussed this issue to death on To L and Back, but Max is such a hard one, because he was such a sweet, earnest, interesting character but transphobia in the writers room did him — and all trans men — so deeply dirty. His return in Generation Q was one of the show’s best moments.

3. Micah Lee

micah lee smiling in a white button-up shirt

Carmen: Micah deserved better than Generation Q. Micah deserved to be a shy 00s-style romantic comedy lead in which he’s a flower shop owner who has chemistry with a deadpan girl who didn’t think she could fall in love, played by Ayo Edebiri. In this essay, I will…

2. Ivan Aycock

Kit’s friend

ivan in drag with moustache

Carmen: Swoonworthy.
Drew: The show’s best depiction of transmasculinity occurred when they didn’t even know that was the story they were telling. I think this often happens with cis work about trans people. Sometimes it’s best if they’re just observing the realities they see rather than bringing their baggage of What It Means To Be Trans.

1. Billie Blaikie

Kit’s party planner

billie chatting with kit at the planet

Drew: By far the best man in The L Word‘s history. Shows up, helps Max transition, has a sex at work, and then goes off on his merry way.

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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Riese

Riese is the 41-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 and has a cute dog named Carol. Follow her on twitter and instagram.

Riese has written 3186 articles for us.

19 Comments

  1. Couldn’t agree more about Shay!! That’s my favorite L Word storyline, no exaggeration

    And perfect top 4 overall, especially Billy. I feel like Billy and Max’s relationship might be my second favorite L Word storyline.

    As always, I’m reminded that what I like about this show seems to be wildly different than what most people seem to like about this show (seems to be Tibette for them, mostly). I’m glad Autostraddle has always been a soft spot for me to land in that regard!

    • There is this peculiar tendency of a certain kind of TV fans to want the characters to behave in a certain way and make the same mistakes over and over again – as if it were a sitcom before long narrative arcs on TV shows caught on – and resist any sort of change in the core of the characters as they were when that particular fan started watching. TiBette die-hards land in that category for me.

  2. also agree on the top 5! and it’s kind of impressive how few men were even in this show, considering 9 seasons.

    Micah deserved so much more.
    Related: I give Hassan an automatic two-point deduction for inviting everyone to his improv show at Bette’s mayoral event.

  3. They saved the best men on the show for the soundtrack: Leonard Cohen, Rufus Wainwright, Joseph Arthur, Damien Rice…

  4. I fully apologize that this is my takeaway/somewhat less than meaningful contribution but William Halsey/Wallace Shawn is Cher Horowitz’s debate teacher, not her dad.

    • Oh my god!!! I think…. I mean, I know…. wow, you are so right.

      I have fully swapped this in my head for years.

      • It’s still the exact right ranking and reasoning! William and his family were sheer nonsense fun/agents of Season 5 chaos.

  5. Hm, I was really rooting for James as #1. His only shortcoming is that he didn’t continue to sacrifice his life and stay on as Bette’s assistant throughout Generation Q.

    • Hard agree! I remember worrying that James would be gone when Bette moved to her job at the university (season 4 or 5?), and I was delighted he was still there for her to order around.

  7. I will die mad about the Tim Haskell character assassination. The writer’s room was really bad about writing men. There was no reason that his character had to go from being a loving, supportive partner to the toxic mess he was. I know it’s peak soap opera writing, but I hated with the show did with him. There was a chance to split them up without all the general toxic masculinity they put into the character. He could still be sad and angry and hurt without turning into a monster.

    • yes i agree 100%! i think the weird things he did (like physically clutching marina’s wrists to the point that she got bruises) didn’t really fit with the character they established at the start. like they wanted him to not just be a man, he had to be a BAD man, i guess to justify jenny cheating? but it’s a more compelling narrative i think if he is a good man and she’s still doing what she’s doing

      • There’s this weird overlying (I hate to use the word) misandry in the original series. Even the men the main cast see as trustworthy pop up and reveal themselves to have been infiltrators or monsters. Max becomes The Incredible Hulk when he starts taking HRT, Angus (a sap and a goober, but generally a good guy) becomes a resentful, nanny-fucking motherfucker when they want to write him off, and then there’s Tim. I agree that the idea that Tim could be a good man and Jenny would still do what she did is more compelling, and would probably be more compelling in the long run. And the decision to have him start sleeping with one of the students confirmed my icky feeling that it’s not good enough to just write him out – they have to destroy anyone’s desire to see him back to validate Jenny’s choice to move on.

        I kind of hate it.

  8. No room for Marcus Allenwood on this list? And the guy (don’t remember his name) who Tibette invite to have a 3some to “steal” his sperm? Where to we stand on Lisa the Lesbian Identified Man?

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Queer Mom Chronicles: How Do You Create Queer Community for Your Family?

Friends! After a wonderful year, Queer Mom Chronicles is coming to an end! But never fear, this isn’t the end of parenting content at Autostraddle! And I’m not going anywhere either! To put a lid on this chapter, I would love to do a queer parenting Q&A. If there’s anything you’ve ever wanted to ask me about parenting, leave me a comment and I’ll gather them up in their own post!

In the past, I’ve written about wanting to find other families like mine so that we could have other people in our lives who get it. Finding and connecting with other two mom families, either by myself or with my family, has been so great. While our individual family dynamics are different, we can have conversations about the things that we all seem to face and there is an underlying sense of commonality. As we continue to navigate the world as a two mom family, and as our son gets older, having those other families as a part of our community continues to be invaluable.

Once I came out, it was important for me to have queer friends and begin building my queer community. Thankfully, I kind of fell into one thanks to the first woman I dated. She has an amazing ecology of queer friends who immediately took me and my son in as their own. She and I are still very good friends, so we get to be around that group quite often, which I love. Now, she has a son of her own, who she had with her gay male friend but was born via surrogate. My son, who was always used to being the only kid, now has a little buddy who looks up to him, and her son has someone who has a family that kind of looks like his.

After my wife and I met, we began to take stock of the community we were creating for our family. My son is lucky to have queer family members, but chosen family is also incredibly important to me. So many of our close friends are straight and cis, which is fine, but I wanted my son’s world to be bigger. I grew up around my mom’s queer friends, and I wanted my son to have that, too. Queer people are some of the most loving and amazing people that I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing, and I don’t want him to be deprived of having that kind of love in his life.

His world is rapidly expanding, and I want him to understand that queer people exist beyond what he sees on TV or reads about in books. We have trans and nonbinary friends, and those relationships helped him strengthen the connection in his mind for sure. Now when he meets new queer people, he’s relating those parts of their identity to the people he already knows, and it forms new, stronger connections for him.

I know I’m not the only queer parent who has thoughts and feelings about this kind of community building, so I reached out to some of my friends to ask them why it was important to create queer community for their families.

“I want my kid to see families like ours,” my friend Kelly explained. “It’s important that my kid be able to connect with other kids with queer parents. She needs that community — I don’t know what it’s like to be a kid with queer parents.” Our kids are friendly, and while I don’t think they’ve ever talked about having two moms, it’s good for them to know they have each other.

Kelly also explained that creating a community allows her daughter to “know and trust other queer adults in her life” beyond her moms, which is so important. The idea of safety and knowing that there are possibilities outside of the cis-het norm is one that is common. My friend Emily wants her kids to “expand their knowledge and awareness of what is ‘normal’ or ‘traditional’ because queerness is often a kind of permission or model for how to be yourself regardless of whether that pertains to your gender or sexuality.”

“Queer communities are some of the most diverse and expansive communities. I want my children to see countless possibilities of what rooting deeply in your authentic self and radical belonging look like in practice,” my friend Jasmine shared.

For my friend David, there are many reasons to seek queer community, but one thing that stuck out is how after he transitioned, his family started to look “straighter” to his kid. “When she was five she came to me and was like ‘I noticed that all kids have some kind of mom and some kind of dad’ and I was like ‘NO!!!!!’” he explained. “The world is vast and complex and full of variety, and I want my kid to experience some of that NOW. I don’t want to raise her in a bubble,” he explained. Like me, he feels it’s not enough for our kids to experience that just in books.

“It’s important for us, because my son is also gay, and between us and our close circle of friends, we are the only queer exposure he gets to others like himself,” my friend MyLove explained to me. “We are pretty isolated in our small town cis-het bubble, except for the rainbow island we carve out for him.”

For some queer parents, it’s finding safety for themselves in queer community that pushes them to create that same queer community for their kids.

“We need more queer chosen family as we grow and learn and love, we need queer role models for our children to aspire to be like, and we need to know ourselves as queer parents that we are never alone in this,” my friend Lindsay pointed out.

My friend Natalie’s daughter was around 10 when she came out, and for her, building community was a way to “assure her that life with me and my partner was going to be ok and better than what she always knew.” Natalie explained that her daughter grew up in Southern Mississippi where “exposure was slim and judgements were high.” But now, she’s 24 and “doing amazing.”

“I find kids of queer families are kinder, more well rounded and lots more loving than judging,” Natalie added.

Her point feels very true! Our kids are forced to move through the world differently, and while that doesn’t inherently mean they’re going to be more kind and empathetic, it lays a strong foundation. Even if their peers don’t treat them as others, our kids know they’re different. We as queer parents have to take the extra steps to make sure that our kids learn lessons their peers with cis-het parents don’t. Our family doesn’t fit into the same box as any of my kid’s friends’ families, so I knew I had to arm him with the tools to not feel bad or let others make him feel bad about being different.

Just know that if you’ve read or commented on this column in the last year, I now consider you a part of my queer community. How do you create queer communities for your family?

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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Sa'iyda Shabazz

Sa'iyda is a writer and mom who lives in LA with her partner, son and 3 adorable, albeit very extra animals. She has yet to meet a chocolate chip cookie she doesn't like, spends her free time (lol) reading as many queer romances as she can, and has spent the better part of her life obsessed with late 90s pop culture.

Sa'iyda has written 117 articles for us.

4 Comments

  1. oh, i am sad to hear this column is ending. i am queer single parent and it is soooo hard to find anything in the parenting world that feels like our family can belong :) thank you for these columns i have loved them!

    • you’re so welcome! thank you for reading! i’ll still be writing parenting content, so if there’s anything in particular you want to see, please do let me know!

  2. I too will miss these columns- they’re a beautiful window into your family and the years ahead of us (our little is not quite 2). Thank you for all your writing and vulnerability!

    This specific column really resonated, too. Our family can look straight to the straights (my amab nonbinary partner gets read as a cis dude, and both of our bi-ness is invisible to straights despite a LOT of gay tshirts, rainbow paraphernalia, and my side shaved purple hair 🙄), so cultivating community where our full selves are recognized and celebrated-and where our kiddo can see other family models-is so so important.

    • thank you for always being so engaged with my columns, i always appreciated it!

      creating a community for celebration and validation is so important, and i’m glad you’re creating that. the toddler years are rough, you definitely need community support, lol.

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