Queer Horoscopes for Libra Season 2025

Libra Season begins on the Equinox, where night and day are equally split. This brief moment of balance is the epitome of what Libra, as an archetype, strives for. Equality, equilibrium, and harmony can seem harder and harder to attain in a world marked by increasing violence, polarization, and mistrust. What could inspire us to keep trying anyway?

Libra, being ruled by the planet Venus, represents the willingness to pursue not only justice, but also beauty, pleasure, and connection. The astrological season ahead is marked by some very challenging energies but, in balance-seeking Libra fashion, also encourages us to savor every drop of joy we can access.

Libra Season Highlights

Libra Season begins on September 22 and ends on October 21.

Key Dates

​​September 22: ➡️ Mars enters Scorpio
encouraging us to dive deep, confront hidden truths, and pursue our passions with unwavering determination

September 23: ⛓️‍💥 Neptune opposite The Sun
emphasizing tension around idealism versus practical reality — what lights you up, is in alignment with your values, and feels truly attainable?

September 24: 💥 Mars square Pluto
sparking significant challenge and conflict (lay low and/or be ready for backlash)

October 1: 💥 Mercury square Jupiter
creating friction around communication — watch out for misinterpretations or overconfidence in ideas

October 3: ⛓️‍💥 Mercury opposite Chiron
emphasizing continued tension around communication and revealing possibilities for healing conversations

October 6: 🌕 Full Moon in Aries
illuminating deeper motivations, highlighting where we can take action

October 7: 💥 Mercury square Pluto
creating more friction around communication — notice the feelings and desires hidden beneath what is being said

October 8: ✳️ Venus sextile Jupiter
offering a supportive cosmic environment for creative expression and opportunities for growth and connection

October 6: ➡️ Mercury enters Scorpio
asking us to dive deeper into understanding the subtext of our conversations

October 11: ⛓️‍💥 Venus opposite Saturn
revealing difficulties in our commitments and encouraging boundaries

October 13: 🏁 Pluto Stations Direct
inviting us to begin to integrate all that has been uncovered since May of this year so we may transform

October 13: ➡️ Venus enters Libra ⛓️‍💥 opposite Neptune
shifting relationship dynamics toward a more reciprocal mode and clearing some illusions in the process

October 16: 💥 Sun square Jupiter
creating friction around our sense of purpose and identity, opening possibility for growth by challenging us to re-examine our beliefs

October 17: ⛓️‍💥 Sun opposite Chiron
emphasizing continued tension around identity and purpose and revealing possibilities for healing breakthroughs

October 19: 🌀 Mercury conjunct Mars
prompting clarity around our desires and adding more intensity in communication

October 21: 🌑 New Moon in Libra
opening a portal for reflection on relationships & an opportunity for setting new intentions and goals around connection, reciprocity, and balance.

October 22: 🌞 Sun Enters Scorpio
beginning a new zodiac season!

Libra Season Breakdown

This Libra season is . . . dynamic. It arrives just one day after the Virgo solar eclipse. The month ahead does not necessarily make prioritizing eclipse aftercare easy, but it does make it very important.

Libra Season starts off with Mars entering Scorpio, which is a normal, yearly event, but what makes it different this year is that it immediately starts squaring Pluto in Aquarius. We haven’t experienced this specific transit in our lifetime before (the last time it happened was in the late 1700s, and if you’re curious you can read more about the revolutionary context of that and about my Pluto-specific astrology reading here). The energy of this square is divisive, volatile, and not easily diffused because it’s happening through fixed signs.

If you are feeling heightened emotions, particularly fear or anger, it makes sense! Things are scary and enraging right now! The Sun entering Libra amidst this tension reminds us of the importance of connection. It can be easy to retreat from others when we are exhausted and activated. Of course caring for ourselves involves a certain amount of space and alone time, but the astrology of this moment cautions against isolation and promotes both personal and collective growth through meaningful interactions.

Mercury’s many hard aspects throughout the season facilitate important conversations that may reveal previously undisclosed information. We are being invited to seriously evaluate the relationships and communities we are in to discern who can meet us in our mess, reciprocate support, and practice honest and caring dialogue with us.

It’s time to raise your standards and prioritize the connections that are truly supportive. This does not mean agreeing with each other all the time or never having conflict; it means baseline respecting and protecting each other through the ups and downs.

Working with this energy constructively could look like making space for safe catharsis through art, dance, journaling, kink, or other activities that help you move energy and express emotion. It could also look like being mindful about the amount and type of time you are spending on social and media and screens. Notice when you are reaching information overload and practice pivoting. No matter what, it looks like being honest with yourself and others about your needs and limits.

The Full Moon in Aries on October 6 provides an opportune moment to implement any boundaries you’ve been contemplating. And as Venus enters Libra on October 13, we experience a cosmic, collective shift toward establishing healthier relationship parameters, while Pluto’s direct station on the same day brings clarity to interpersonal dynamics that may have been ambiguous. Finally, on the New Moon in Libra on October 21, the last day of Libra Season, we have an excellent opportunity for recalibration and intention setting toward continued connection, reciprocity, and balance.

This month represents a significant astrological period characterized by tense energies and conflict, but it is ultimately conducive to profound growth for those who are willing to listen, reflect, and embrace the mess as an opportunity to learn and rebalance.

Below are horoscopes for each zodiac sign to help personalize your journey through Libra Season. Please read for both your Sun Sign AND your Rising Sign for a more complete picture!

Virgo Season Horoscopes

♎ LIBRA

Welcome to your time of the year, Libra! How are you going to celebrate? Although Eclipse season has brought some twists in the plot and the month ahead holds some undeniable intensity, you are the prince(ss) of making chaos look absolutely fabulous. Last month, the stars encouraged you to say “no” to more invitations and reclaim some of the energy that you’ve overextended. This month, you’d benefit from keeping up with that spirit. Said another way, say YES to the things that are genuinely lighting you up. To rebalance, take a note from your opposite sign, Aries, and lean into expressing yourself more boldly. Sometimes your desire to keep the peace can result in you forgetting what you actually want. Try to find the sweet spot between generosity and self-protection. This month challenges you to exercise more discernment about where your energy goes while maintaining your natural charm and ability to find and create beauty just about wherever you go.

♏ SCORPIO

If you take nothing else from your horoscope this month, heed these three words for Libra season: Go. Touch. Grass. Eclipse season has brought up a lot to reckon with and the month ahead holds continued intensity — especially for fixed signs, like you. This is an important time to take taking care of yourself seriously. To support your balance, take a note from your opposite sign, Taurus, and lean into embracing physical, sensory experiences to literally ground yourself. Feet, on ground. With Mars now in your sign, you’ll benefit from activities that connect you to your body and the earth. Whether it’s spending time in nature, enjoying tactile pleasures like good food or massage, or simply creating more structure in your daily routine, these practices will help you process the intensity of emotions that may arise. Your natural proclivity for intensity and depth can be an incredible asset during this transformative time if you balance it with enough earthly pleasures to keep you centered. Others might look to you for support or recognition right now. Say yes when you are genuinely moved and resourced.

♐ SAGITTARIUS

There’s a lot of heaviness in the air post-eclipse season, and some well-timed humor and levity has the power to be extra medicinal right now. Sagittarius, you can be a blunt truth-teller, and you can also be an optimistic breath of fresh air. Those traits are not mutually exclusive! This Libra Season, the Universe is beckoning you back to your own wholeness. You might still have lingering questions, uncertainty, and anxieties (perhaps about your work/life balance or other similar structures), but the more you make space to both honor and bring humor to the mess, the lighter you will feel and the more clarity can emerge. This is not a permission slip to stop caring, but rather a reminder to return to the things that actually resource you to care. To rebalance, take a note from your opposite sign, Gemini, by making space for variety this month. Mix things up. Try new things. Engage with versatile opinions. And don’t forget to include adequate rest, too. There is extra tension this month between your inner and outer world. Variety does not mean overextending, it means repeated recalibrating to sustain your spirit.

♑ CAPRICORN

The Universe is tempting you with a side quest. Maybe you’re being offered a few side quests, even! Did eclipse season bring you any surprises? Inspire any new perspectives? If you don’t know what I am talking about, it might be because the signs have been subtle and you need more time and space to digest. Let Libra season be a time to slow down and connect the dots. It might feel especially hard to slow down as there is extra tension in your network and perhaps a feeling of constriction around your resources, but that makes it all the more important. To rebalance, take a note from your opposite sign, Cancer, by listening to your intuition and making space for emotional processing. Get out of your head. Whether it’s an extra therapy session, a solo date with your journal, or time set aside to listen to your favorite emo album all the way through — prioritize containers for presence. I am going to repeat the same message from last month because it is really important for you right now: What at first may seem like a “distraction” may prove to be a catalyst for new projects you wouldn’t have otherwise been able to conceive of. Let yourself be surprised!

♒ AQUARIUS

Weird dreams? Previously suppressed memories resurfacing? The last month may have felt like a reckoning. To support yourself in integrating all the intense energy of Eclipse season, make sure you are making space to both process all the intense thoughts and feelings bubbling up from your subconscious and also taking breaks from processing. And there is a difference between a healthy break from processing and toxic escapism. Tension may be building around uncertainty with your career or general visibility in the world. Libra season wants to remind you that you don’t have to hold it all on your own. You are especially prone to reclusiveness, so to recalibrate this Libra season, take a note from your opposite sign Leo and lean into being seen a little more. Reach out to friends, choose vulnerability where it is safe, and get some support both grappling with the hard stuff and making space for fun distraction.

♓ PISCES

Last month, as we were heading into Eclipse Season, I encouraged you to examine your relationship to conflict. What have you learned? Have you been avoiding it? Instigating it? What tools do you have to navigate it? Libra season asks you to continue investigating this theme of conflict and invites you to process it through a systemic lens. What informs how you show up for conflict? What facets of your identity, your upbringing, your education, your spirituality inform how you approach disagreement? In this process, to find a sense of balance, take a note from your opposite sign, Virgo, and lean into analytical precision. Break down your feelings about conflict into manageable pieces. What specific behaviors trigger you? What practical boundaries could you set? Although it can be easier to just tune it all out, the relationships worth investing in require your genuine presence and participation. Although it can be hard to wrangle the vast, oceanic terrain of your inner landscape, aiming for practical understanding will help you navigate connection with more clarity during this astrologically tense time.

♈ ARIES

Part of your cardinal-fire nature is to amplify energy. You can multiply someone’s rage with one sentence, and you can also multiply someone’s pleasure with one look. Where do you want to point that magnifying glass this month? Eclipse season likely showed you some new layers of what is feeling exciting, what is feeling boring, and what no longer feels acceptable. The month ahead adds some fuel to the fire with Mars entering Scorpio, which might be particularly activating to your connections with others of all kinds. Are you being asked to compromise? Are you willing to compromise? To rebalance, take a note from your opposite sign, Libra, by practicing some diplomacy and patience. This is not a call to suppress your natural fire or abandon your values. Rather, it is an invitation to consider multiple perspectives before taking action. If you can slow down just a little bit, new pathways might emerge that offer a surprising amount of relief and more pleasure in the process.

♉ TAURUS

Belonging is a significant theme for you this whole year, Taurus. You’ve been uncovering desires for belonging, unpacking your fears around risking belonging, and perhaps meeting deeper layers of belonging than you previously thought were possible. Wherever you are in this process and whatever eclipse season has shaken up, Libra season is here to accelerate your growth. This month, there is building tension around recognition. Whether it’s about the chores you are doing at home, the emotional labor you are doing in your relationships, or the projects you are leading at work — you want to be seen for your contributions. You want to feel honored in your collaborations. Is someone ignoring you? Is it that you are in your own way of being seen because of imposter syndrome? To rebalance, take a note from your opposite sign, Scorpio, by embracing your shadow side with more courage. The parts of yourself that feel messy, unflattering, or uncomfortable are exactly the ones that deserve some attention right now. By acknowledging these aspects of yourself (rather than hiding them), you’ll actually gain more authentic recognition from others. What’s been hiding beneath the surface of your controlled exterior that’s asking to be integrated?

♊ GEMINI

There’s some significant existential tension brewing around your most basic and mundane activities — doing the laundry, walking the dog, paying the bills. As a mercurial, novelty-driven sign, it can be hard to stick to these tasks when you aren’t plugged into a bigger-picture purpose you are excited about. Eclipse season may have heightened a “what’s the point?” attitude in you. The “point,” from an astrological perspective, of this past month was to reflect on and digest the emotion underneath the buzz of endless information. And the upcoming month sets the stage for recalibrating your routines and your relationships with renewed intention. Evaluate which connections spark that mental stimulation you crave while also honoring your emotional needs. To rebalance, take a note from your opposite sign, Sagittarius, by connecting with a broader perspective or philosophy that gives your daily tasks more meaning. Step back from the details occasionally to see the bigger picture. Finding ways to infuse your routines with genuine inspiration will help you navigate this recalibration period with more enthusiasm and less resistance.

♋ CANCER

The past month has likely highlighted something you want or need to shift about your social landscape. Maybe you are yearning for a tighter-knit friend group or perhaps you are feeling burnt out and overextended trying to keep up with group chats and maintain a myriad of connections. Whatever you are realizing about your connections, Libra season is a perfect time to make some changes accordingly. Tension may be building around discrepancy between who gets to see the most vulnerable side of you versus who you can just have fun with. Libra season wants to ask you if you’d need to compartmentalize so much if your connections were more aligned with your values. Vulnerability doesn’t have to be all-or-nothing. You are moon-ruled, so let yourself ebb and flow. To rebalance, take a note from your opposite sign, Capricorn, by honoring your limits and setting clear boundaries. Try prioritizing relationships that honor both your desire for emotional depth and your need for lighthearted connection. Gradually reveal more layers of yourself as trust builds naturally, and recognize when that trust just isn’t actually there.

♌ LEO

Heading into eclipse season last month, I told you to try your best to commit to prioritizing your needs — getting more sleep, honoring your budget, etc. Well, how’d that go? Heading into Libra season, be really honest with yourself about where you’re still feeling depleted. And, don’t forget to celebrate yourself for any and all ways you are showing up for yourself. Libra season is a time of evaluating relationships for everyone, but that process might hold some extra tension for you this month as a fixed sign, Leo. Previously hidden desires or insecurities might be feeling particularly exposed right now. It might feel hard to balance your own needs with the reality of other people’s current capacity. To rebalance, take a note from your opposite sign, Aquarius, by practicing some healthy detachment. This is not a permission slip to bottle your feelings, ghost someone, or pretend everything is fine. Rather, it is an invitation to slow down and choose your battles wisely, to zoom-out and check in with the bigger picture before totally popping off. That is obviously easier said than done, but it is worth experimenting with to help nurture the connections that are most important to you.

♍ VIRGO

This eclipse season likely brought some massive change to your life. For some of you, it’s external: a breakup, a move, or some other shift in regular scheduling. For some of you, it’s internal: a new identity exploration, a change of heart, an epiphany. If you don’t know what the heck I am talking about and everything seems totally regular to you right now, you might benefit from making some more space to unwind and reflect. To recalibrate, take a note from your opposite sign, Pisces, by practicing some self-compassion. Your analytical mind is always searching for ways to optimize and improve, which is a beautiful gift! But during Libra season, there’s an invitation to soften those rigid expectations you place on yourself. There’s tension building between your desire to plan everything perfectly and the natural chaos of life. Allow yourself to operate with more fluidity and forgiveness this month. What would it look like to approach your relationships, work, and daily routines with less judgment and more grace? What would it look like to make more room for honoring the unknown?

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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G Weaver

G Weaver is a queer astrologer, creative coach, and certified digital wellness educator. She has a special interest in humans. Whether exploring the collective psyche through the cosmos or studying and teaching about how the Internet is impacting us all, she is passionate about understanding and supporting transformation. She offers readings, classes, and publishes audio, written, and visual content on numerous platforms—connect with her here.

G has written 8 articles for us.

Could the Supreme Court Really Overturn Gay Marriage?

feature image photo by Philip Yabut via Getty Images

After gay marriage passed federally in 2015, I went dancing in West Hollywood with my sister and some friends. On the street in front of the country western bar Flaming Saddles (RIP), my situationship Liz and I made out in celebration. Weirdly, a man nearby whistled at us. Liz turned to him and yelled, “NOT TODAY, SIR.” He skedaddled away in shame. That day, we were invincible.

Ten years later, under Donald Trump’s fascism, whispers began that Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court case that legalized gay marriage, could be on the chopping block. Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses to gay couples and whose trial was the impetus for the ruling, has filed an appeal. Davis, a slug who came to life after a witch’s curse, kicked up panic among queer people that the Republican majority Supreme Court might take up her case.

Don’t panic yet! But Davis could win. Some other losers from the Liberty Counsel took on her “religious freedom” case, even though it is unlikely to advance to our highest court.

That being said, most everything left-wing activists have been warning could happen has happened. We have a solidly right-wing (6-3) Supreme Court who worship at the feet of an orange dictator. “We won’t allow gay marriage to be taken away!” Democrats cry. People said the same about Roe, and here we are post-Dobbs.

Justices Clarence Thomas, a sex pest who takes bribes, and Samuel Alito, a blight to Italian-Americans everywhere, have hinted at re-litigating both Obergefell and 2003’s Lawrence v. Texas (which would make queer intimate acts illegal — but only when gay people do them). Justice Thomas explicitly named Lawrence in his Dobbs concurrence. If Lawrence were overturned, states could theoretically create a legal foundation for attacking gay marriage rights as well.

I’ve crunched the numbers and Obergefell being overturned could, in my opinion, be the last straw for a new civil war. The political divide is already so deep. The right is mobilized, militarized, and declaring the left and transgender people terrorists. Where racism and xenophobia don’t move liberals to action, the cultural seems to.

I’ve been working on the ground since June with other dedicated anti-ICE activists, attending city council and police commissioner meetings, traveling to an illegal detention center in the desert, and protesting outside the Metropolitan Detention Center where ICE, DHS, and LAPD beat and arrest my friends. The numbers of us putting our bodies on the line to fight fascism dwindled after the incredible movement of No Kings Day. The next time I witnessed hundreds of people outside to protest was last Thursday in front of Disney/ABC to support Jimmy Kimmel after his show was cancelled because the Trump administration didn’t like a joke.

It was surreal to hear speakers on megaphones say Kimmel’s firing and the restriction of free speech was “a step too far,” when I’ve spent months watching Latinos be hit with batons or dragged away from their families sobbing. But sure, if this is what it takes to get liberals on the streets, then fine.

So my thought is if Kimmel mobilized the privileged and the white, then the overturning of gay marriage could spark enough outrage to match the right’s insanity about the death of Charlie Kirk. It could be what ignites the left with the same lasting fervor.

The backlash would be immediate. Sixty-seven percent of the population supports gay marriage. Gay celebrities who have been silent on Gaza or ICE would finally have to give a shit. Democrats could have success making protecting gay marriage a cornerstone of their campaigns. (It’s far more popular than abortion and less of a risk than speaking up about trans rights or Palestine.)

Politically, fortifying gay marriages would fall to the states. New England, the tri-state area, DC, Illinois, Michigan, Colorado, New Mexico, Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada and Hawaiʻi have baked in protections in state law that wouldn’t be undone by Obergefell falling. States that don’t have these protections are Alaska, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, Ohio, Indiana, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Wisconsin, Kansas, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Arizona, Florida, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, and West Virginia. The GOP has been working overtime to pass all power to individual states over federal mandates, like with the federal anti-abortion ruling or legislation being presented to allow states to decide if they want to frack on formerly federally “protected” land. Overturning Obergefell is another step in a long path toward civil war.

The states that banned gay marriage before they were forced to recognize it federally could reinstate their dormant bans. This leaves what rights gay people have in chaotic flux. There’d be a flight from those states to the ones where gay marriage is legal, adding fuel to the civil war flames. Those who can afford to uproot their lives will do so; those who can’t will be left behind.

A big reason for gay couples to need access to spousal protections was borne out of the AIDS crisis, where long-time partners were barred from hospital rooms (but toxic, abusive family members were let in). They were thrown out of their houses and received no financial support once their partner passed.

With marriages annulled, spouses would lose the rights to those hospital visits, their inheritances, joint taxes, Social Security, and immigration sponsorship. Spouses wouldn’t easily be entitled to pensions, and exes wouldn’t get alimony or child support. States could narrow who is considered a legal parent and void adoptions. In Oklahoma and Tennessee, lawsuits have sought to restrict who can be legally listed as a parent on birth certificates. The sperm donor could become the default father, for example. Existing marriages and families would fall into legal purgatory, unless their state rules to protect the partnerships. Employers would face complicated questions about benefits and HR policies. What if one spouse works in a state that recognizes gay marriages, but one lives in a state that doesn’t? In places where gay marriage becomes illegal, existing marriage could be fine but new marriages would be blocked.

A possible saving grace is 2022’s Respect for Marriage Act which requires both state and federal governments to recognize marriages that were valid where they were performed. For example, gay billionaire and Republican donor Peter Thiel was married in Vienna, Austria, so regardless of what happens in the US, his marriage is probably fine. Rich people, even gay ones, escape the fallout of most oppressive legislation.

Gay marriage is an unlikely and unpopular issue for Republicans to go after directly. There are out gay conservatives like Thiel or Ken Mehlman. Billionaire Paul Singer’s son Andrew is gay. If these people kowtow to eliminating gay marriages as official marriages because of the Bible (and we go back to civil unions), they would still balk the loss of their or their loved one’s rights. Even the most conservative justices may not want to mess with that. They also may not spark another culture-war firestorm so soon after Dobbs and while they believe they have the moral upperhand post-Charlie Kirk.

The Supreme Court has a very cohesive 6-3 conservative majority, but justices John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett have not said anything specific about gay marriage. It is a political loser if said directly, but “religious liberty” carve outs for businesses and adoption agencies push us out of public life and away from resources. This could avoid the explosive backlash an outright ban would trigger.

If losing gay marriage sparks liberal action, and if Democrats ever gain power again and grow spines, bringing back or passing stronger federal gay marriage protections (like amending the Constitution or expanding RMA) would hopefully be a first order of business. They should have done it for Roe under Biden. For now, the Respect for Marriage Act provides a buffer.

If gay marriage stays legal, that doesn’t mean anti-discrimination laws aren’t being chipped away. There’s more room for people like Kim Davis, a woman whose hair probably smells like black mold, to file discrimination claims under infringement of their religious liberty. Does providing a service to a gay wedding, like catering or venue rental, violate a business owner’s religious freedom? Christian nationalism is gaining power under the eye of the Heritage Foundation, the organization responsible for Project 2025.

Let’s not be fear mongers. How likely is any of this? Not very.

We should prepare anyway. Create a will and trust so your spouse or partner can inherit any property regardless of if you are legally married. Go to a legal website like LegalZoom and make a “living will” too, on the cheap. There’s a lot of leeway in what a will looks like — it mainly needs you to be of documented sound mind and it needs your signature and those of two or three witnesses. A notary would be good, but it’s not necessary. Create an advance directive in case you are incapacitated. Make sure your spouse is listed as your medical and financial power of attorney and healthcare proxy because, if not, it defaults to your parents. That could be disastrous.

Even if both names are on the birth certificate, legal adoption provides an extra protective layer. In some states, you can get a judicial declaration of parentage as a court order, which is harder for opponents to challenge.

Check on your employee benefits. Where does your 401K or pension go if you pass? Can you keep someone on your health insurance if your marriage is now invalid? Do you have life insurance where you can leave money to each other? There are options like a joint tenancy with right of survivorship form to ensure property passes automatically. If your state seems like it would ban gay marriage, it might be a good idea to get married again in a safe state to create added protection.

I know. It’s a lot. It sucks to think about. But even if gay marriage doesn’t lose federal protection, it’s never a bad idea to create legal safety nets for your love that don’t rely on a Republican majority Supreme Court to validate.

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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Gabe Dunn

Gabe (he/him) is a queer, trans writer and director whose most recent film GRINDR BABY was selected for Frameline Festival’s 2023 Voices. He is a best-selling author thrice-over, host of the podcasts The Knew Guys, Just Between Us and Bad With Money. As a TV writer, he has sold over a dozen TV shows to networks like FX, Freeform, and Netflix. His young adult sci-fi drama Apocalypse Untreated was released by Audible Originals in 2020. His latest TV project The Daring Life and Dangerous Times of Eve Adams is in development at Universal with Gabe set to write and produce.

Gabe has written 32 articles for us.

2 Comments

  1. In Arizona, our state ban was already overturned by a state court decision in 2014, iirc. With that said, I have no idea how a SCOTUS decision overturning Obergefell would affect that.

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Quiz: Which ‘Overcompensating’ Character Are You?

Overcompensating was recently renewed for a second season — thrilling news for me, someone who has not stopped asking people if they’ve watched season one of Overcompensating, which I adored so much I’m already ready for a rewatch to tide me over before we get more. It’s so good! Maybe one day I’ll finally write the personal essay I’ve been itching to write about the Halloween episode and my own experiences of being closeted during Halloweekend in college. Until then, I’ve whipped up this quiz for you fellow Overcompensating heads. Find out which character you are!!!! They’re pretty much ALL hot messes!!!!!

Which Overcompensating Character Are You?

We’re going back to college. What major are you declaring?(Required)
What club are you signing up for?(Required)
What’s a dorm room necessity?(Required)
How are you making friends?(Required)
Where are you spending most of your time when you’re not in class?(Required)
You’re handed the aux at the pregame. Who are you playing?(Required)
It’s a Saturday night! What are you up to?(Required)
What class sounds the most fun?(Required)
What would you most want to receive in a care package from home?(Required)
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It’s midterms week! What are you up to?(Required)
What are your winter break plans?(Required)
What’s your campus coffee shop order?(Required)

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Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya

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

Kayla has written 1088 articles for us.

6 Comments

  1. Megan Fox Poster
    “Arguably the most important character in the series! You’re hot, wise, and down to help someone be in delusional denial about their queerness if that’s what they really need.”

    Never seen the show but I’m okay with this!

  4. I got Carmen too and the denying what I want in favour of others was so real in college – but i’m working on it! I’m aware now!

  5. Never seen the show, but I got Grace and I’m happy to be Hot™. CAN I JUST SAY… The thought of playing Bon Iver at the pregame is killing me😭😭😭😭 Everyone bawling into their solo cup to “For Emma, Forever Ago” is my favourite new mental image (maybe this is not universally a bursting-into-tears album but it is to me!)

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What Does Online Sex Work Look Like Behind the Camera?

Over a year ago, I wrote about what it’s like to start online sex work in this age. I wasn’t just trying to pen an explainer. I was thinking of getting back into that line of work. And I did.

I’ve been back at the mattress actress job for a year. Things really have changed since the lawless days before OnlyFans hit it big. Things have changed (mostly for the worse) since I wrote that, too. Our online client base is being squeezed by online age verification laws that require submitting ID verification to access porn sites, social media, and even YouTube. Economic disorder ushered in by multiple armed conflicts, trade shocks, and the current US administration are causing cutbacks in sex work spending.

Yes, I did have to open this topic with a nod to legislation, pessimism, and its far-reaching effect on people’s spending. Because the first rule of sex work is that it’s work. Its practitioners and consumers are as much a part of this precarious economy as everyone else. And when the whole network sinks, we all sink together. Despite a salacious media narrative about how nobodies can become millionaires via OnlyFans, the people who earn so much via online sex work that they can ignore macroeconomic realities are a vanishingly small group.

We don’t just work in front of the camera. Most of us also comprise the entire operation behind the camera. So please, take this invitation into my bedroom as I discuss the unseen labour and bodily misadventures behind the scenes.

an outtake

I’ve curated a selection of my finest outtakes to break up the monotony. You’re welcome.

Manufacturing ✨authenticity✨

Contemporary online sex work and influencer marketing are twins sired by social media. Our relevance is maintained by running viewers through the content sieve to turn them into followers, then into clients. If we invest enough or hit an algorithmic jackpot, it might even be worth it.

The heart of this kind of work is a ruthless arithmetic of turning parasocial relationships into profit. People who don’t grasp online sex work will occasionally ask aloud, why would anyone want to pay for that when there’s so much free porn? The question misses out on the motivations of people who seek us out. Our clients don’t just want porn. They want the impression of a connection. They want authenticity.

As a provider of such authenticity, all I’ll say is I’d never say ‘Let me know what you think,’ or ‘Do you like this?’ if I wasn’t being financially incentivized.

Being an online sex worker is about image and marketing, but it’s contrary to my personality. I’m 30. I have two close friends and a partner. My last three birthdays were celebrated at home by ordering takeout and relaxing together. I find influencer marketing and the commodification of people’s attention loathsome. Manufacturing authenticity for my clientele is one of the hardest parts of this job.

I made it bearable by finding a loophole. Instead of fabricating a personality, I play up aspects of myself that are already there. My niche (nerdy; trans; Asian; slutty; submissive) reflects my actual personality. The imminent downside to this is that I’m further entrenching my personhood into a line of work notorious for scrubbing its workers’ clean of personal agency. Speaking of which…

I didn't notice my phone gimbal was shooting in Panorama mode until it was too late.

I didn’t notice my phone gimbal was shooting in Panorama mode until it was too late.

What’s in a category?

Sex work is intimately tied to the worker’s sexual agency. Contact sex workers place their bodily integrity, health, and mental well-being at risk at work. I’m privileged to risk less, but the core tenets of sex work still apply. Every day, I place a monetary value on my bodily agency and sexual boundaries.

An example: A client recently approached me to discuss the possibility of doing watersports/pee content. As usual, I took the request and did the mental math of how much I would want to charge for what he was asking. This led to me asking myself a question most people don’t think about: how much would I charge someone for a video of me peeing on my own face?

That’s not an extreme or unusual example to me. Sex work is work to me and I have a fairly non-moralistic view of my work. It’s only possible to participate in sex work consensually if you’re willing to monetize your sexual agency. Because you’re the one doing it, rather than seeing someone else do it for you.

Like modelling, sex work is deeply embodied. Being ‘capable’ of doing the job is rarely enough. Rather, the work is so tied to your appearance and personality that it becomes part of you.

My client-facing image is curated to reflect my marketing angle. I’m compelled to hashtag my content using terms I’d prefer to avoid. My income is very tied to my appearance, which makes it easy to justify unhealthy behavior on the basis of keeping my finances stable.

None of that is to say I’m living in constant memory. Every profession has downsides. In a profession so vulnerable to exploitation, independence is a joy. I’m willing to see these decisions as a compromise, rather than an indignity as long as I’m well-compensated and calling the shots.

Behind that candid 'good morning 🤗' selfie is a girl dropping the phone on herself in search of a perfect angle.

Behind that candid ‘good morning 🤗’ selfie is a girl dropping the phone on herself in search of a perfect angle.

Help wanted: A copy of myself to help with shaving, camera work

I’m a freelancer through-and-through. My writing happens on a freelance basis, and does sex work. MLM marketing is right about one thing: It is liberating to set my own schedule and work for myself. I can take days off at will. My job isn’t anchored to any particular place. I rarely have unnecessary meetings. In fact, props to the Autostraddle team: I’ve been writing for over three years and I’ve had zero audio or video calls. That’s the kind of workplace achievement I want to replicate.

The flipside of freelance life is something a joke I tell everyone who asks about my work: It’s very liberating to freelance. I can work any day I want, as long as I work all the days that end with ‘day’. 

Online sex workers wear many hats. Mostly unsexy ones. Independent workers like me are simultaneously on-screen personalities, social media managers, videographers, photo editors, set coordinators, and customer service workers. More specialized niches like cosplay and BDSM will rope in a wider skillset in addition to the basics. Online sex workers who specialize in on-camera work usually aren’t working independently. Some can afford other specialists (camera crews, editors) to produce higher-budget content. Others work in labour-sharing settings that pool their resources and delegate work, such as content houses. Coercion and exploitation do occur in online sex work, and many sex workers operating in ‘teams’ are also working in exploitative environments.

The workload and logistics that come with working online and independently are commonly treated as a point in favour of online work over in-person work. The most direct personal risks that sex workers face are imposed on us by other people. Extra proximity keeps us safe. Consequently, working alone in this industry is the closest thing to a ‘safe’ middle ground. Being part of a team can be a sign of success and privilege: You’re doing so well you can afford a team. Alternatively, it can be the result of exploitation and deprivation.

To be completely real, my day-to-day life isn’t so big-picture. Here’s some of the stuff I get up to:

  1. I have to schedule shooting days around writing jobs and my laser hair removal and waxing schedule. The domino effects of broken links in that chain are very annoying.
  2. I go through a lot of cheap, fast fashion lingerie to keep my content ‘fresh’ and I feel guilty about it.
  3. I once momentarily let my skin fall loose while epilating my testes. My scrotal skin was forcefully dragged into the epilator and I had to unjam it from the machine’s head. Certainly my most interesting bruise.
  4. Do you have any idea how hard it is to maneuver a pimple patch onto your ass crack?
  5. If my clientele found out how many enemas I need to achieve that porn star clean ass, I’d lose half of them. And immediately gain a new audience with a very different kink.
  6. I spend a lot of time posing in bed with my camera setup to learn new ways to include my feet in pics. But like, not in a way that’ll be too overt or turn off the general audience.
  7. Which plushie should I leave in-frame as today’s decorative prop? Which one would look most candid and ✨authentic✨?
  8. Sex worker lifehack: If you’re worried about how you sound during sex practice, moaning and dirty talk into your phone and listen back. Pick a few vocalizations you like so you can fall back on those during sex.
My decision to set a 5 second self-timer for this photo was calculated, but boy am I bad at math.

My decision to set a 5 second self-timer for this photo was calculated, but boy am I bad at math.

At the end of it, I can’t restate hard enough that sex work is just work. Of all the jobs I’ve had, this is certainly one of them. This ranks solidly higher than working admin at an underfunded NGO, but lower than the pre-AI golden age of freelance content writing when corporations were regularly paying $500 for stuff I could knock out in an hour.

Sure, I have complaints about my job and the unforgiving economic system that enables it. Everyone around me has their own version of that. There are also lots of things I don’t want to give up. I do love the connections I have with regulars who talk about nerdy things in between sexting sessions. My sexting skills and library of nudes has never been healthier. The income is excellent for the hours I put in and I have more free time than any of my peers.

As we approach 2026 (the worst year since 2025) I find myself wondering what this profession will look like in the future. Invasive and ineffective laws are rapidly being passed. They neither support sex workers nor protect our clients, much less The Children. My fellow sex workers are still adjusting to the influx of fresh faces and competition that resulted from COVID-era job loss. Generative AI has also reached online sex work. More workers are automating their client interactions and content pipelines with AI, usually to the reputational detriment of those of us who don’t.

I don’t know what things will look like a decade from now. I doubt I’ll even be in this profession by 2035. People tend to age out of this line of work and that gap decade between ‘hot college girl’ and ‘MILF’ can be awkward from a marketing standpoint. I just know that I’ll continue adapting, and keep my clients coming back for more.

We who work in the oldest profession are used to pressure and stigma. The fact that we’ve become such a visible force is a sign that things have changed for the better. Collectively, the road ahead will be a grind, but I’m ready to walk it with my fellow whoring industry professionals.

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Summer Tao

Summer Tao is a South Africa based writer. She has a fondness for queer relationships, sexuality and news. Her love for plush cats, and video games is only exceeded by the joy of being her bright, transgender self

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Caleb Hearon Mixes Humor and Heartbreak in New Comedy Special

When my friends and I first discovered Caleb Hearon’s front-facing Twitter videos in early 2020, I knew immediately I was going to follow him wherever he went for as long as I could. The contents of the videos themselves — I still drop a “I would rather die than wake up more dead” into casual conversation here and there — were incredibly funny on their own but what made Hearon stand out so quickly was his matter-of-fact delivery, the range of facial expressions and vocal tics he used to emphasize certain words and phrases, and his ability to craft narratives and scenarios that felt simultaneously too real and too ridiculous. A couple years later, in 2022, Hearon was featured on Comedy Central Stand-Up’s tenth season, and the way his feature moved seamlessly from giving a blowjob to someone on Lexapro to loving “bad” students to how being gay isn’t “cool” anymore cemented what I already suspected: Hearon’s comedic voice is one we desperately need right now.

Since 2022, Hearon’s popularity has rightfully been on a nonstop upward trajectory. He’s managed to amass a huge social media following, launch his highly-listened to So True with Caleb Hearon podcast via Headgum, star in MUNA’s “Silk Chiffon” music video, become a Ziwe interviewee, and gain both acting and writing credits in film and on television. And he’s done it all without losing one of the qualities that makes him so distinct from many people working in show business right now — fame hasn’t made him less of the people or less willing to be vulnerable for the sake of connecting with his audience. If anything, it seems to have brought the importance of speaking up for others, never being afraid to criticize even the most powerful among us, and using comedy as a force for good in the world to the forefront of all the work Hearon is doing.

This has never been more obvious than in his new, hour-long HBO comedy special, Model Comedian — the title of which comes from a hilariously misguided comment posted by one of his followers in response to an online troll. “The primary culling factor we used toward the end to figure out what jokes we wanted to include was thinking if this goes beyond the target audience, which it will because it’s HBO, I just wanted it to be introductory,” Hearon tells me in an interview prior to the Model Comedian’s release. “I wanted people to walk away from it first and foremost having laughed but also just having a better understanding of who I am and why I see the world the way I do and where I’m coming from. And maybe there’s something they can relate to. But primarily, I wanted to introduce myself to people who may not know me at all or who may just know me as the gay guy in their phone screen they scroll past sometimes.”

Hearon opens the special with an admission that might be startling to some: “I’m so randomly happy to be alive. I’m delusional, you know? I do feel good…the world’s on fire but I’m like ‘Let’s get silly with it,’ you know? I do. I wake up every day and feel good despite…everything.” It sets the tone for an hour of stand up that vacillates between keen and incisive observations on the nature of our online lives, the realities of being gay and growing up and living in the Midwest, the villainy of Republican lawmakers, drunk interactions with straight men, being an “uptight” kid and his journey to becoming “more chill,” a surprising visit to a concentration camp, and working through his feelings about his relationship to his late father with the trademark joviality and lighthearted sarcasm Hearon has become well known for.

Although the entire special brings that non-stop laughter Hearon was hoping for, there are a few stand out moments. One of the funniest bits features Hearon talking about what it was like to grow up as a fat kid who was bullied incessantly by his peers and about how ridiculous it is that adults expect kids who are bullied to respond with “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” As the bit comes to a close, he invites the help of audience members to help him enact the “speech [he] wrote for little fat kids today” and sends the crowd soaring into some of the loudest convulsions of the special.

Later, in the most vulnerable part of his set, Hearon jokes about his “mentally ill” family and discusses his experiences with his “hermit absentee father” who he largely stayed in touch with via phone calls and didn’t feel truly connected to until after his death when Hearon had to help his family take care of his father’s belongings. Through these difficult recollections, he never misses the chance to point out the absurdity and irony of being the child of someone who didn’t “want to be a father” while also giving incredible grace to the man his father was despite the pain caused by their relationship. The ending of this part is particularly prescient as Hearon astutely highlights the way people with complicated relationships to their parents have to grieve after that parent’s death. Hearon says, “When you have a complicated relationship with someone you love and you lose them, you have to mourn kind of two relationships. You have to mourn the actual one that you had, which was complicated and fraught and sometimes fucked up, but it was the one you got. And then, you have to mourn the second relationship, this kind of like hopeful relationship that you’ll never get now.” But his striking ability to blend humor and heartache comes to a hilarious close when he says, “If any of you have ever been through anything, this part will probably be hitting like crazy. But as the only person who’s ever been through anything, you’ll have to just take my word for it.”

This also launches him into an explanation of “redneck progressivism,” a term he’s coined to describe and explain the way people in the Midwest (and the South) often have good intentions for everyone around them — even people who are distinctly different than them — but can’t seem to talk about those beliefs and differences without stumbling into some problematic territory. Together, these two pieces become a beautiful testament to the unique balancing act Hearon has become so skilled at employing in both his comedy and commentary. In Hearon’s world, nothing is truly black and white and no one is truly “evil.” There is always something else to be excavated from our interactions and connections with others even if they seem at odds with who we are, and we’re allowed to make fun of how we make our ways through those interactions.

“I think our national conversation about so many things is lacking. And one thing that I think is really unfortunate is that conversations around queerness, specifically, really veered into this ‘precious objects’ territory where we were incorrectly made out to be these sensitive, precious people,” Hearon tells me. “It’s just really not reality, and I hope we’re — queer and trans people and our allies and people who don’t understand us yet but will at some point — moving towards a conversation that’s less about policing and being sensitive and treating us different and special and holding us up and just going like ‘No, we actually just want you to treat us like your neighbors. We actually just want to be joked around with. We have the same wants and desires you have. We want to make a living wage and take care of our families and have a good time.’ And I think it’s so unfortunate that the conversation has drifted into this psychotic fearmongering about trans people.”

Of course, Hearon doesn’t veer away from skewering the far-right lawmakers who are making our lives a living hell right now. “My favorite straight guys out right now are conservative Republicans. I don’t care, I love them. I love them. I think they’re so funny because they all hate gay people so much and they’re such faggots,” Hearon says before hysterically pointing out the ridiculousness of men like Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, J.D. Vance, and Ron Desantis worrying about masculinity and scapegoating trans people while wearing “bespoke little bowties,” “so much mascara just to be compelling,” and having the vocal inflections of someone he’s seen “do Cher at Hamburger Mary’s Maryoke.” When I ask Hearon about this part specifically, he says outright: “I’m not ceding home to anybody. I’m not scared of these motherfuckers. I am from this place just as much as anybody else is, and they don’t get to tell me that we’re something that we’re not or that we don’t belong where we’re from because we do.”

As Model Comedian comes to a close, it’s clear Hearon manages to not only accomplish his goal of thoroughly introducing himself to people who aren’t familiar with his work but also provides a reminder of something we should be clinging to in this formidable and fatiguing moment in our history. Everything might seem like it’s closing in on us, yet we have the remarkable ability to seize the absurdity and incongruity we’re witnessing and turn it entirely on its head if we want to. Model Comedian proves once again that for Hearon, writing and performing comedy isn’t just a tool to get through the most grueling parts of living in this intense moment of anti-queer and anti-trans backlash, it’s a tool we can use to start breaking through it and breaking it down entirely. And we should wield it as often and as audaciously as we possibly can.

Model Comedian is now streaming on HBO. 

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Stef Rubino

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

Stef has written 160 articles for us.

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Help I Have a Crush On My Ex-Boyfriend’s Sister

Would It Be Weird For Me To Make a Move?

Q

This is gonna sound like a rom-com setup but it’s my actual life: I think I might be developing feelings for my ex-boyfriend’s sister? I dated her brother ending about six years ago for a solid three years, so I know their parents fairly well. She was away at school out of state for most of that time, so I didn’t get to know her very much back then, but what little I saw, I remember thinking she was cute and feeling intrigued by her bisexuality around the same time I was starting to realize I liked girls too. Not saying she’s my “root”…. But not saying she isn’t. Her brother is married now and lives close enough to visit but far enough away that he’s not constantly around. Now, her and I work at the same place, and I have been getting to know her, and I do think there’s something there. So, the big question is: should I let myself have feelings for the sister or is it totally out of pocket to pursue something with her?

A:

Riese: Is it super super weird? Absolutely. Is it prohibited? I don’t think so? I went ahead and googled “fell in love with ex-boyfriend’s sister” and I was like, wow this is a common query, but it turned out all those results were men who’d fallen in love with their ex-girlfriend’s sister, which does seem worse? Is this because I just saw “The Better Sister”? Probably there’s something gender rigid/essentialist about feeling that it’s worse, like that somehow two sisters are variations on a theme but a brother and a sister are different entities? Or that there are 6,000 times more straight women out there than there are queer women so for straight men it seems like ok dude just pick someone else for chrissake? IDK, maybe someone else will have insight into that. It’s just truly so hard to envision like hanging out with the same family but while dating a different sibling?? But it looks like there are other people who’ve done this and lived to tell the tale and sometimes it’s not weird.

I do think the more important factors here are that it was six years ago that you dated and that he’s married — also I’m not sure anybody’s ages here, if you dated him while you were in high school, for example, maybe it’s not as weird. But honestly I think the person most at risk for discomfort here is her — but I’m not sure there’s any way to broach it with her unless genuine feelings have been seen and acknowledged by you both. I truly think she has to be a once-in-a-lifetime love to overcome the potential weirdness. If she is then maybe this will be a really funny story to tell at your wedding!

Summer: It just occurred to me that I love writing AF+ Advice answers but I’m assessed autistic and therefore have a diagnosable condition that makes interpreting social cues difficult. Absolutely great.

But IMO? You’re not out-of-pocket for wanting this. The main factors I’m looking at to reach that conclusion are emotional distance from your ex, and evidence of horrible fallout. The worst distance to do this would be to fall for his sister while you’re still dating him. Not the case here. You’ve been separated by six years of time and he’s definitely moved on. The people involved might have completely different life stages and personalities at this point. So you’ve got a good emotional distance from the ex to make this doable.

And I also don’t see signs that there is emotional fallout to contend with. You didn’t mention a horrible separation from the ex. You’re interacting amicably with your new crush. You even have a reasonable connection (work) to start afresh. I don’t see an issue continuing this. I honestly think your real challenge is going to be dating within the same workplace.

Valerie: I agree that the biggest hurdle is probably going to be if SHE thinks it’s weird. Riese said if you dating her brother while you were in high school it might not be weird, but as an older sister, if she was in college at that time, and you were her brother’s high school girlfriend, she might not see you as “her age” at all, no matter what your ages are now. I am four years older than my brother, and it’s actually very funny to me how I see him and his friends as “little” still, even though we are all in our 30s. It would be a bit of a hurdle for me to consider dating someone I knew through my brother when he was in high school and I was in college, despite the fact that a four-year age difference wouldn’t give me pause in any other situation at my big age. I know it doesn’t really make sense, and maybe it’s an older sister/younger brother thing, or maybe it’s a “my brain is weird” thing, I don’t know, but that’s just something to consider if she doesn’t seem to be returning your feelings. Also, depending on how things ended and how close your ex was with his parents…consider you might be the family villain. The girl that broke their baby boy’s heart. So that’s something else to consider, if things would be awkward if you were ever brought home to re-meet the parents. That said, I’ve heard of MUCH stranger starts to relationships working out just fine, so it could definitely be more out of pocket.

Nico: You’re not…completely out of pocket. Just…if this happens, don’t ever discuss one with the other, I think, is a good rule. You might be tempted — but just don’t. I think Valerie’s question as to whether you might inadvertently be a family villain is a good one, maybe wise to do some investigating there. And finally, as everyone else has said, the most important person to check in here with is your crush. If she’s uncomfortable, it probably just won’t work. Speaking of “work” — what kind of workplace are you in, is actually a big factor here. Is it appropriate to have a workplace romance, or will you two see some scrutiny for that? If you think that you’re likely to be under a microscope at all, then you might expect the fact that you dated her brother in the past to come out, so just be careful out there!

What If I’m Too Intimidated To Sext Her

Q

I’m dating a writer and they are a REALLY good sexter which makes me REALLY intimidated. What I need is for you, the writers of Autostraddle, to give me tips or tell me that I should not feel this intimidated! Thank you. 

A

Summer: Ahahahah oh goodness. Yeah okay, I’m a writer and online sex worker. So I have to be a great sexter or I’ll discredit both of my professions. I have input for you. You’re going to be okay.

For one, take heart. You and them are dating. And engaging s-e-x-u-a-l-l-y. They’re already into you. Whatever your sexting is, it’s already good enough to keep them interested. We can always look for areas of improvement, of course.

This one is overdone, but true. My best sexting comes from a place of genuine interest and arousal. Whether sexting at work or in a personal capacity, this remains true. When you start sexting, do what you can to make it a whole-body experience for you. If it’s appropriate, throw on some smut or porn. Draw the curtains. Settle into your comfy spot and give her your time and imagination. If you’re enjoying yourself, it’ll automatically show in the texts.

Don’t be afraid to fantasize about your next sex with her and not send it immediately. Play your fantasies out in your mind. Masturbate over them. Decorate them with sights, scents, and sounds well before you text. That way, when sexting time rolls around and your emotions are already running, you have a pre-made vision to draw on. Less stress about coming up with something good in the moment.

Everything else I leave to my fellow authors.

Kayla: I promise you shouldn’t be intimidated! Good writing and good sexting, I’ve found, are actually distinct skills. So your partner is a good writer and a good sexter, but I don’t think the latter is inherently because of the former. Which is all to say: Even if you’re not a writer, you can be very good at sexting. And I’ve sexted with writers who were just okay at sexting!!!!

For starters, you don’t even HAVE to use a lot of words in sexting —you can utilize photos and Live Photos. I love sexting, and I’m a writer, but I wouldn’t say I apply much of the craft of writing to my sexting. I’m indeed more of a visual sexter! And you don’t have to be a professional photographer to be good at taking nudes either. In general, I find with sexting that less is more —unless your partner is into excessive scene setting, just get to the point, leave some things up for imagination, and don’t overthink it.

Nico: Like Kayla said, sometimes, less is more. Leaving a bit of mystery gives your texting partner room to fill in the gaps. You don’t have to sext like you’re laying out a roadmap. You can think more about setting a scene, highlighting a moment, or throwing in a kind-of-forward curveball about something you want to do that will open the floor to more expansive conversation. And also — who doesn’t love a hot photo. One of the hottest sexts I’ve ever been sent was from a stone butch I dated extremely briefly: she sent me something very much like, “I was thinking about you the other night and my stomach dropped. I imagined touching you for the first time and seeing on your face that you knew you were about to be fucked right.” It’s somehow so hot without being explicit at all!! Art!! And no, this person was not a writer by trade.

Riese: Some articles for you:

Let’s Talk About Sexting: A Roundtable

10 Tips For Texting About Sex

8 Queer Sexting Experts On How We Digitally Do It

10 Tips For Better Lesbian Sexting

How To Write a Really Hot Sex in 5 Easy Steps

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2 Comments

  1. OK, so I was the sister in LW’s scenario. In my case, we both liked each other. We discussed getting together, but it felt a little too weird and we basically talked it to death instead of doing anything.

    More details: I had a secret crush on my brother’s high school girlfriend. She was my friend first she and I stayed friends after they broke up. She and I both came out as bi in college and after a lot of pining, we talked about our mutual feeling when we were early to mid 20s.

    (Also, I accidentally submitted this comment in the submit your own question box, so AS team, pls ignore that!)

  2. One more comment for LW1 – based on my own experience (see above) I don’t think it’s out of pocket for you to pursue your brother’s ex. But it may be a little weird. And you should be prepared for it to be weirder for her than for you.

    But in my case, I think the real reason it felt too weird is because we would have been TERRIBLE for each other – and that had nothing to do with my brother and everything to do with us both being kind of messed up 20-somethings who needed more therapy and less drama. Plus, neither of us was really mature enough to not triangulate, although we tried to institute “don’t talk about [brother] rules.”

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No Filter: Tessa Thompson Back on IG? Must Be Movie Promo Season

feature image photo by Gilbert Carrasquillo / Contributor via Getty Images

Hello and welcome back to No Filter! This is the place where I tell you what our favorite queer celebrities have been up to this week, via Instagram! Let’s rock and roll!

I would literally weep if I was about to eat a cake and then someone put their whole HAND in it, but I am clearly old and fussy so! Go off KP!

BERNADETTE PETERS IS THAT YOU?? Oh, no it is just your biological daughter, Jinkx!

Tessa’s on IG again, you know what that means! Movie promo season is here!

Top tier glambot! Hot as hell my word!

I know that’s right!

Hannah Einbinder after her Emmy win

MY EMMY WINNER AND PHILLY QUEEN! Sorry, but as a person of living in Philly experience, “go birds, fuck ICE, free Palestine” is the best thing I have ever heard!

Holyyyyyy shit I love that giant ear cuff so much though I have to imagine it is heavy AF? Worth it!

HOTTTTT to me!

You ever just see a rainbow and be like damn we really went off as far as atmosphere and and the way light and water interact?

My good lord!!! Lemme catch a breath!

This perfect album press run continues, love her so bad!

What is going on why did everyone decide to be super hot this week? Is this the last of summer slutty posting?

I have never not once listened to this podcast BUT come on, Loretta Devine!!! Forever an icon and the moment!

These two are ADDICTED to being in love and I love that for them and hope it lasts!

Every day, The Hunting Wives takes one more step to becoming reality. Also chances we see Sophia next season? Seems high!

This is monumental for me because this is the first time I have been like “oh wow Brandi is hot!” Usually I feel very awwww that’s my elder, but…I like that spread, what I can I say!

Here we go again!

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Christina Tucker

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

Christina has written 370 articles for us.

3 Comments

  2. “Holyyyyyy shit I love that giant ear cuff so much though I have to imagine it is heavy AF? Worth it!”

    Are ear cuffs coming back? Please tell me ear cuffs are coming back! 🙏

    Hannah w/ cigarette: deal-breaker 🛑
    Tessa w/ puppies: deal-sealer! 🥰

  3. Your writing has a way of resonating with me on a deep level. I appreciate the honesty and authenticity you bring to every post. Thank you for sharing your journey with us.

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‘Gen V’ Returns With Queer Kisses, New Mysteries, and Utter Chaos

This recap will have spoilers for Gen V Season 2, including episodes 201 (“New Year, New U”), 202 (“Justice Never Forgets”), and 203 (“H is for Human”), Prime’s spinoff of The Boys.

School is OFFICIALLY back in session and Gen V Season 2 is off to a dramatic and gay start. I’m going to be recapping this season for you here on Autostraddle dot com, where we can break down all the queer shenanigans our favorite young adult supes get up to. This one will be a little more condensed because we’re covering three episodes at once, but I’ll be sure to include all the juicy gay details. Because while The Boys all but buried their gay (RIP Brave Maeve, I hope you’re living your best assumed-dead life out there), it seems Gen V is not unlike Gen Z in their penchant for a more fluid understanding of sexuality. We have Marie (Jaz Sinclair), who is definitely queer because they have a thing for Jordan (London Thor & Derek Luh), the bi-gender supe who can shift between male- and female-presenting forms on a whim, and Emma (Lizze Broadway) who hasn’t explicitly said she’s bi/pan but has been saying very queer things from the jump (like wanting to have a threesome with a m/f couple, for example) and talks really close to her female classmates’ faces so I’m going to go ahead and assume is queer until proven otherwise.

Also a note that I’m sure anyone reading this already knows but I want to acknowledge: The actor who played Andre in season one, Chance Perdomo, passed away in a motorcycle accident before season two filming began. Instead of recasting him, the team decided to rewrite the season to explain Andre’s absence, and the season is dedicated to Chance.

Gen V Season 2, Episode 1

Let’s start with episode 201, which actually doesn’t even pick up where we left off, but instead takes us to 1967 where we see something called Project Odessa go awry when people inject themselves with blue goo only to self-destruct moments later in front of a very distressed scientist.

Back in the present day, we pick up a few months after we left off and not too long after the events of The Boys Season 4. The country is split between supe supremacists and “Starlighters”; Homelander has more control than any one asshole should; and the new dean, Cipher, is promoting Godolkin University as a place where supes can experience “freedom from the woke agenda.”

Jordan and Emma, imprisoned all summer for crimes they did not commit, are surprised to find themselves let out of a transport van on the GodU campus, with Cate of all people to welcome them. Cate looks behind them and asks after Andre, but Emma snaps at her, not believing Cate’s ignorance. But it’s clear Cate was telling the truth when she reads Jordan’s mind and learns that Andre died in Elmira, the prison they ended Season 1 in.

Still confused as to why they’re there and also where Marie is, the troupe is interrupted by Stacy, head of student life and a real pain in the ass, who also possesses a literal pain in the ass in the form of a stinger. And she lives by honeybee rules: if you get stung, you die, but if she stings, Stacy will die, too. This feels like Chekov’s stinger and I am weirdly looking forward to seeing how this comes to fruition.

The deal is: Jordan and Emma can rematriculate if they give their Vought-approved speech and agree to play nice.

Gen V 201: Jordan and Emma sit at a press conference table looking miserable.

I don’t know how anyone bought that this was something they did willingly, they weren’t even trying to fake a smile.

They reluctantly agree — what choice do they have, really — but keep asking after Marie, who escaped from Elmira and hasn’t been heard from since. In fact, Cate starts to suggest that if Marie had just waited, if Andre had waited…but Jordan punches her about it. There will be no disrespecting their friends on their watch. But later, when it’s just Jordan and Emma, Jordan says they don’t need Marie, clearly hurt that she left them.

When Cipher gives his start-of-school speech to the students, he talks about not being able to trust humans and calling Starlight a race traitor. Jordan and Emma can tell they’re in enemy territory and will have to watch their step if they want to stay out of Elmira going forward.

Gen V 201: Emma and Jordan look horrified in the audience listening to Cipher talk

Me in my Catholic high school listening to my principal spew hypocritical nonsense.

Meanwhile, Marie is elsewhere, slinking around the shadows going hoodie-up into a convenience store, choosing a Brave Maeve Pride Bar over some Firecracker Freedom Sticks. A friendly stranger spots her the two bucks she’s short, which will be important later. Marie goes back to her seedy motel room and continues what we can imagine she was doing all summer: calling people to try to find her sister.

Later, she spots the kind stranger standing with other Starlighter protestors and sees them get antagonized by Homelander stans, who are unfortunately called Home Teamers. One of them punches her, drawing blood, which was his biggest mistake, because she uses that blood to kick his ass. As she leaves, the kind stranger thinks he recognizes her, but she tells him she’s nobody and smiles as she walks away.

Gen V 201: Marie looks serious as she tells the kind stranger to stop recognizing her.

“I’m Nobody! Who are you? Are you – Nobody – too?”

Back on campus, Emma goes to see Andre’s dad, Polarity, to tell him about Andre, but he already knows. She tries to recruit him to help them solve some of the mysteries they have — why she remembers Cipher being at Elmire, for example — but he’s too busy wallowing in self pity to help…and Emma tells him so.

That night, Jordan and Emma try to go through the college motions and go to a frat party, but their hearts aren’t in it. Jordan punches a frat boy for being a dick, Emma knocks her ex-friend Justine over and blows off Sam’s request for a truce, dropping truth bombs on him as she storms past. The whole ordeal ends up being too much for her, so she goes to the bathroom and cries…and ends up shrinking. Instead of stressing too much about it, she decides to play beer pong…as the ball.

When Sam finds Cate to ask her about the stuff about Andre and Elmira Emma told him, starting to get worked up, Cate just uses her powers to zap his emotions away again, as she’s been doing since last year.

Back at Marie’s hotel room, she gets an unwanted visitor when the supe Dogknott shows up. They have a knock-down drag-out fight and Dogknott almost ends up injecting Marie with something, but Starlight shows up and saves her just in time.

Starlight — sorry, Annie — tells Marie she can’t be on the run forever and tries to convince her to take the offer her friends took to stay at GodU. She tells her it won’t only be safer for her, but also Annie needs Marie to research something called Project Odessa, because Annie is worried it’s starting up again.

Gen V 201: Annie aka Starlighter talks to Marie

Annie (or maybe Erin Moriarty?) kind of looked like she was losing’ the plot at the end of the last season of The Boys, so it’s nice to see her looking almost normal here with some spark back in her eyes.

Marie doesn’t want anything to do with it, she just wants to find her sister, but Annie says she sees the hero in her and warns her that she can’t stay out of the fight forever.

Marie’s dust-up with the counter-protestors ends up on the news, letting Emma and Jordan (and, clandestinely, Cate) track her down. When they find her, Jordan tells her that Andre tried to get the rest of them out after Marie left, but he ended up pushing his powers too hard and had a stroke and died. Seeing they’re having a hard time convincing her, Cate steps out of the shadows to try to help, saying they’re safer at school, but then she sees in Marie’s mind that she met with Starlight.

Gen V 201: Emma Marie and Jordan look at each other in disbelief at the predicament they are in

I love them, your honor.

Cate goes to use her powers on Marie, maybe to convince her to come back to school, but Jordan shoots her with their powers instead, and Cate’s head smashes against the wall. Cate is barely conscious and begs them to help her, but Marie can’t help her without touching her, and if she touches her, Cate could use her powers on her…so they leave her for dead.

Gen V Season 2, Episode 2

On to episode 202!

Marie tries to record a video about how she super duper can’t wait to start her sophomore year at GodU, and even though it’s deeply unconvincing to anyone who knows Marie, it’s enough to force Cipher’s hand into letting her back in. At her meeting with the dean, Marie finds out that Andre had the same condition as his dad; that is to say, every time he used his powers, his physical health deteriorated. Cipher also said Andre knew that when he pushed his powers to try to open a steel door that fateful day. Oh also? Cate is alive. This is a lot of information for Marie, but she and Cipher seem to be able to see through each other’s bullshit, for the most part, so this semester is sure to be interesting.

Emma is itching to do something. Research Odessa, finish the job with Cate, she’s not particularly picky, she just can’t sit around and do nothing. Marie agrees they should look into what Starlight asked them too, but Jordan thinks they’re both a bit crazy. But luckily, Andre’s dad accepted a job at the school, so they’ll have an adultier adult to help them out a bit.

Sam goes to visit Cate at the hospital, and though she’s still catatonic, when a nurse touches her arm, Cate sort of possesses her, says “They left me to die,” namedrops Emma, then uses the nurse’s body to go on a bit of a stabby spree.

Emma quickly learns the classes at GodU are a bit different than she remembers. Or maybe SHE’S different. She is in a social media class being taught by Modesty Monarch, a butterfly-lady trad wife who believes feminism ruined America and whose comments are often filled with, and I quote, “hairy, baby-killing lesbos” attacking her. Emma tries to opt out of the class that she once might have loved, at the height of her Little Cricket days, but MM tells her in no uncertain terms that she’s exactly where the dean wants her.

Marie tells Jordan what she learned about Andre, and they snipe at each other a bit. Jordan is mad, Marie is sorry, but they’re just not on the same page right now. But when they go to the dean’s special “hero optimization seminar”, Marie and Jordan naturally fall back into working together to pass the test.

Back in Marie’s room, Marie is thanking Jordan for helping her while also changing, and catches Jordan looking at her longingly. Marie apologizes again, a little softer this time, and Jordan admits that their lashing out earlier was misdirected anger. They start to laugh together about their favorite Andre memories, and before long Jordan admits it was easier for them to be mad at Marie than risk losing her.

They take a moment, pressing their foreheads together, before going in for the kiss.

Marie and Jordan press foreheads together in a gay way

The forehead touch of our people!

Jordan is still in their femme form and asks if that’s okay with Marie, and Marie says lovingly and earnestly, “Anything and everything you do is okay.” Relieved that they’re back with one of the only people who truly accepts them for all that they are, Jordan goes back in for another kiss, and they fall back onto the bed, smooching.

Meanwhile, Emma and Polarity sneak into the school’s archives and find a secret room with lots of literal Nazi paraphernalia and also the Odessa file they were looking for. Emma is so excited she found it that she gets BIIIIG. THEN she’s excited she got big all by herself, and it’s a miracle she didn’t Alice in Wonderland herself right out of the building.

Gen V 202: Emma gets really big and naked in the archives.

Emma is so deliciously chaotic, I love her dearly.

Back in the dorms, Marie and Jordan lay in bed together, and Jordan asks Marie out on a proper date. Not just canoodling now and then between life and death experiences. But a proper date, like going to Olive Garden and playing League of Legends after.

Gen V 202: Marie and Jordan snuggle in bed together

Also feels worth noting that Billie Eilish’s Birds of a Feather was playing for some of their sexy scenes.

Marie likes this idea, and Jordan shifts and starts kissing her again. Marie says she loves them, which surprises Jordan. But Jordan’s surprise doesn’t make Marie take it back, or claim it was a heat-of-the-moment slip; in fact, she doubles down, asking if it’s okay. Jordan starts to mutter about it being fine but, before they can really talk about it, they’re interrupted by fireworks outside.

The fireworks are to celebrate that Vought caught the people who attacked Cate…they said it was a hate crime by Starlighters and pointed the finger at the protesters Marie protected, including her kindly stranger, who the news says was killed by Dogknott. Marie says this is their fault, her and her friends.

Speaking of, Emma catches up with them and gives them the file she found. As it turns out, Odessa is Marie, Marie is Odessa.

Gen V Season 2, Episode 3

And with that, we venture on to 203! Which is also where I’ll pause to mention that this season has some great needledrops. The music department really knows what they’re doing.

This episode opens with the campus cafe barista taking three Xanax before going to her job as a human employee at a school full of supes and supe supremacists, where she is constantly harassed for things like Starlighter resistance posters she didn’t even put up. In fact, on this particular day, there’s a poster that just won’t go away, causing her nothing but unending trouble.

Our main crew is busy trying to parse out what it means that Marie is in the Odessa file. In fact, she’s the only one listed in the file who is still alive. Polarity thinks she was designed to be a weapon, but Marie doesn’t feel like a weapon, and she says people who look like her aren’t usually the Chosen One. Jordan isn’t sure if they can trust Starlight, but Marie thinks they can. Marie decides to ask her mom’s best friend Pam if she remembers anything about Odessa, since she’s in one of the photos they found, even though Pam hasn’t spoken to her since she accidentally killed her parents. But it’s worth a try! And hey, she had tried to adopt Annabeth right after their parents died, so maybe she knows where Marie’s sister is, too.

Cate is well enough to return to campus, dressed in black and looking overwhelmed as hell…but not in the usual way you might expect a mind-reader to be in a crowd. In fact, she can’t hear anyone’s thoughts at all. Also, her return goes viral and she accidentally Regina Georges the beanie look — one she’s rocking because of her gaping head wound — and if you watch the rest of the episode, more and more students are wearing beanies, with most of them wearing one by the crowd scene at the end. This little detail tickled me.

Gen V 203: Stacy presents Cate who is glaring because she sees the "friends" who attacked her

“One time, she punched me in the face… It was AWESOME!”

Stacy leads her back on campus and is oblivious to the tension when Cate comes face to face with our main trio, barely holding it together in the face of her ex-friends who left her for dead.

Gen V 203: jordan marie and emma see cate for the first time

College was awkward for a lot of people but not usually “having to face the person you left for dead and pretend everything’s fine and normal” awkward.

Marie tries to talk to Jordan about why she dropped the L word and admits they were the first person they slept with. Jordan is a little wigged out by this fact at first and says you shouldn’t say “I love you” to the first person you have sex with. They start to fight about it, but they’re interrupted by Stacy the Stinger putting up holographic posters of Jordan that shift between their two forms depending on where you stand. As it turns out, Jordan has rocketed up to #1 in the school’s all-important ranking system.

Being #1 comes with a car and some sponsorship deals and fans asking to take photos and asking them to shift (which they politely decline) and yet another pre-written speech by Stacy, who says she uses words like “transtastic” and wants them to emphasize how supportive GodU has been to them. Jordan tries to point out they’re not trans, they’re bi-gender, but Stacy basically tells them to shut up and sing. She adds, “Next time a fan asks you to switch, tuck the junk, inflate the fun bags, and do it.” A real charmer, that Stacy. And haven’t we all experienced the kinds of people who tell you they’re an ally with one hand while they’re slapping you with the other.

Cate goes to see Ciphon, wanting to tell Vought and the world who really attacked her, but Ciphon says they can’t do that without telling everyone Cate lost their powers, and tells her, in no uncertain terms, that her value is directly correlated to her powers. Dejected, Cate leaves the dean’s office, but not before noticing a very fortified almost submarine-like door. Suspicious.

Cate goes back to her room to inspect her head wound when Sam busts in; he’s been tweaking out and seeing puppets again and wants her to clear his mind. Cate says she can’t, but instead of telling him her powers are busted, she says she doesn’t want to push him too far like she did his brother.

Sam storms off and starts destroying things, but Jordan calms him down. They sit together, get high, and watch Avenue V (which is Sesame Street meets Avenue Q), clearly the source of a lot of Sam’s hallucinations. They bond over missing the people they’ve lost, and seem to bury the hatchet between them.

At the campus coffee shop, the barista is being harassed again, but this time Emma helps her out. She is in full Helper Mode, trying to be the hero Andre told her she can be, so she vows to solve the mystery of the reappearing Starlighter sign, and eventually tracks down her betailed friend Harper, whose powers are chameleon (she can borrow powers for 60 seconds at a time) and is a secret Starlighter with her roommate Allie.

Gen V 203: emma goes nose to nose with hannah

Also this whole exchange felt sexually charged, especially when Emma gets Hannah to show her her powers by saying, “Do me.”

Emma hears the rebels’ plans for more vandalism, but Emma wants them to go bigger. Full sabotage, something that can’t be cleaned up with some Magic Erasers. Hannah and Allie are doubtful they can make a difference, but Emma believes in them and wants to empower them to be heroes.

Marie goes to Aunt Pam’s house and while Pam doesn’t know about Odessa specifically, she knows about the clinic her parents went to so they could get pregnant with her and shows Marie some more photos of that day, including one of Ciphon. Pam calls him Dr. Gold and says he’s the one who delivered Marie. Marie also learned that her parents didn’t just put her in the Compound V experiment for the money; they genuinely wanted a baby. On her way out, Marie notices a room that looks suspiciously like a teenage girl’s room and goes in to snoop around. Sure enough, she finds cards addressed to Annabeth and finds out she’s been living with Pam for years. Marie and Pam fight, Pam insisting Annabeth doesn’t want to see Marie because she’s scared of her, and Marie is furious that Pam still doesn’t get it, that her parents death was an accident. Marie is furious that Pam made her feel like a monster, and let her sister think she was a monster all these years.

Gen V 203: Marie is pissed at Pam

Marie has gotten so much better about believing she’s not a monster and also standing up for herself AND I AM PROUD.

On Goldokin Day, Jordan’s banners are hung up alongside Maeve and other past and present members of the Seven. Before they go on to give their speech, they find Marie and tell them that they love her, too. They were weird about it all week because it freaks them out, but they don’t want to regret not saying it, since they never know what the next day could bring, especially in the hellscape they’re currently living in. Marie kisses them and beams at them as they run up on stage.

Gen V 203: marie and jordan kiss

“If you go, I’m going too, ’cause it was always you.” 🎶

But Marie’s smile quickly fades as Jordan strays from Stacy’s script after a few cringeworthy moments like “we were all assigned awesome at birth.” Jordan tells everyone watching that Andre is dead, that his powers killed him, and that he died a hero. They also say Cate wasn’t attacked by Starlighters. In fact, Marie looks on in horror as Jordan confesses the truth: They were the one who hurt Cate.

Gen V 203: jordan confesses everything at a podium

MUST PROTEC

This season is already off to a stressful start, with the parallels to our world being as prevalent as ever, as this franchise is wont to do, and I’m glad they re-established Marie and Jordan’s relationship, even if it is about to get a lot more complicated for them. Who knows what will happen to Jordan; on one hand, they’re #1, and Cipher has been talking at length about how important this ranking system is. On the other hand, they were booed pretty heavily when they admitted to attacking the school’s golden girl, so Vought might want to make an example of them. But also their friends won’t let them go without a fight. So who knows what will happen! Only time (and the rest of the season) will tell.

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Valerie Anne

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

Valerie has written 668 articles for us.

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What Is the Brat/Brat Tamer Kink Dynamic All About?

Saying you’re a brat in BDSM circles might get you the same response as calling yourself a pillow princess among lesbians. It’s polarizing, and a lot of people lose interest without giving the topic any consideration. This style of submission and its associated dynamic is often maligned due to cultural perceptions or people’s bad experiences with a brat.

I for one think brats get an unfair treatment due to the knee-jerk reaction people have when they hear the term. And I don’t think the people who dismiss us are unsympathetic. I just think people don’t understand the structure of a brat dynamic before making their decision. I’ll explain.

The brat dynamic is a story

I’ve got a bratty streak, so I know that the main criticism people level at us can be summarized as, you’re going to be annoying and I’m supposed to get turned on by that?

No. I’m going be annoying and you’re going to fuck the annoying out of me. It’s a three “act story.

Act 1: An Established Order

Brat dynamics are fundamentally about the consensual and playful violation of a rules-based order. Brattiness is recalcitrant. Disobedient. In order to disobey or rebel, there must be an established order. In most BDSM relationships, the authority to impose this order is granted to the dominant partner with input from the submissive partner. This can play out in brat dynamics too. An established brat dynamic may adjust their rules with the expectation of being broken. A dominant could set rules that are easy or entertaining to break. A brat might feign enthusiastic interest in following the rules as part of the play-acting. Regardless of the approach, rules are established. Think: check-ins, dress codes, use of titles, and routines.

The very fact that brats are going to break those rules is exactly what makes the dynamic fun. It’s also why the dynamic fails when brattiness is imposed on others. Imposing bratiness on an unsuspecting or unwilling dominant partner disregards their comfort zones and expectations. At best, it sours their opinion of the relationship. At worst, it can feel like a boundary violation. Likewise, a dominant partner who expects their rules to be broken is going to be disappointed when they get an obedient, apologetic, perfectionist for a partner.

Act 2: Disobedience and Tension

Once the rules are in place, it’s the brat’s turn. Like any relationship, good brat dynamics are reciprocal. The previous act is the dominant partner’s domain: regulation, firmness, and order. Now it’s the ‘submissive’ partner’s turn.

This is the brat part of the dynamic. This is when they openly bend rules and challenge the dominant’s authority. Classics include flirtation when the dominant can’t respond (steamy sexts while they’re at work) and verbal teasing (is that the best you’ve got?). Bratting can also reward creativity. Brats also play pranks. Hide something the dominant needs (like the crop they’re gonna use on you) or screw all of their water bottles and pickle jars on really hard. Another time-honored tradition is malicious compliance. Ordered to fold the laundry? Sure, it’s all folded into one massive tower. Prepare lunch? It’s done. It’s also eaten because nothing was said about what was to be done after the preparation.

The point of disobedience is to contribute tension to the dynamic. The brat has introduced disorder and that provokes a response from the dominant partner. In a healthy dynamic, bratty disobedience is playful and consensual. It’s also fun for the dominant partner because they don’t know what the brat will do next, but they do know that the misbehavior is well-intentioned and won’t exceed hard boundaries. For the dominant, it’s like a shot of sensory deprivation. You don’t know what’s going to happen next and that’s what makes it fun.

Bratty behavior won’t be well-received in an unprepared dynamic. It’ll instead be childish or downright frustrating. A dominant who isn’t ready to meet the brat’s needs may also be at a loss for how to react to this. If that happens, you don’t have tension. You have a disconnect. There’s a breakdown in relationship expectations and it’s time to scroll down to the bottom of any of these articles and write into our advice box.

Act 3: Resolution and Release

Once tension and disobedience reach a point that demands a response, we reach the final act. The dominant partner responds to the accumulated infractions and annoyances by restoring the rules-based order. In a sexual dynamic, this usually includes a BDSM scene that includes punishment. The ways this can happen are as diverse as BDSM relationships themselves. Traditional punishments like orgasm denial and impact play may be imposed. Rules may be amended to prevent (and further encourage) creative circumvention. The dominant may levy creative punishments for the brat’s creative misdeeds, which adds unpredictability to the dynamic. The dominant may just restore their bruised authority by subjecting the brat to kinky sex.

This culminating moment has two main purposes: releasing tension and resolving this cycle of play. It also gives more agency to the dominant partner after the brat has had the entire previous act to wreak havoc.

Releasing Tension

The brat’s insubordinate or frustrating behavior has continuously introduced tension to the dynamic. This is intentional. However, just as horror fiction needs a release, so does sexual tension. Accumulating tension without an end will simply tilt the dominant’s feelings into genuine irritation and powerlessness. For the brat’s part in this, their misbehavior is also intentional and has the aim of eliciting a strong, sexual response from their dominant partner. If that response doesn’t happen, the brat is also left disappointed.

In most brat dynamics, this the climax (hah) of the story is expected and inevitable. But the intensity and sex acts that follow are not always predictable. Just as the brattiness can be unpredictable, the dominant’s response is also unpredictable. That mounting fear and excitement of how the dominant will respond is key to many brat’s enjoyment of this dynamic. In any case, things usually reach The Point where the dominant gives the brat exactly what they’ve been working toward this whole time.

Resolving the Arc

The other purpose of this act is to resolve this period of teasing and rulebreaking with definitive action from the dominant’s part. Contrary to people’s perceptions, a brat dynamic is highly reciprocative and dynamic. The dominant’s involvement in this final stage reasserts the established order through punishment and domination. It also restores the dominant’s authority that has been eroded, sometimes through (consensual) humiliation on the brat’s part. The brat had their fun, now the dominant gets to have their fun. And when it works correctly, everyone is having fun.

Once the brat has been chastised through sexual punishment, rough sex, or whatever else the dynamic needs, the arc can be closed. This is where the customary reflection, aftercare, and gentleness can happen. The participants are exhausted or bruised. Order is restored.

If each round of bratting didn’t end with resolution, the relationship would just be an escalatory ladder of misdeeds. The brat has frozen the dominant’s work clothes solid overnight, reset their alarms half an hour early, and refused to give oral when ordered. If there’s no response after those and numerous other offenses, what next? Welding their car doors shut? Serve them divorce papers as a deeply inadvisable prank? It can’t go on forever. The brat needs to be put in their place. We crave it.

Lastly, closing the arc opens the way for the next round of bratty behavior. The dominant enjoys a period of comfortable authority until the brat is ready to instigate again. The relationship continues flourishing.

Who deserves a brat

Brat kink dynamics elicit a strong response from people for good reason. They are not for everyone. They’re not for people whose romantic cohesion depends on a sense of stability and routine. They’re not for people who are unwilling to get creative in response to chaos. They’re not for people who want steady obedience. This applies to us brats and those we pursue.

Conversely, brat dynamics can be thriving places for those who need it. People who enjoy rough sex or consensual non-consent love the resistance and inevitable punishment inherent to brat kink. Kinksters who flourish in chaos and unseriousness can do well to find a relationship that keeps all participants on their toes. A well-informed brat dynamic can also alleviate one of the most common annoyances in BDSM: the dominant needn’t be the instigator of play all the time. Our dominants and ‘brat tamers’ can go through a whole cycle of seeing their authority respected and challenged before they need to plan a scene. When executed well, all of that bratty behavior also serves as foreplay and prelude to get the dominant going so they’re not just an unwitting slave to the submissive’s kinky desires.

The last thing I want to point out is that brat dynamics demand as much, if not more, communication and respect for boundaries as any kinky relationship. It’s one thing to establish an order in a relationship, but establishing an order and intentionally challenging it injects a lot of extra complexity into a relationship. For this to work, boundaries need to be clear-cut and respected by everyone involved.

There are dynamics where all bratty behavior is only permitted in the bedroom. There are ones where brattiness is only allowed when the dominant is in a headspace to respond. Brats can have an in-depth list of boundaries and no-go punishments, and it falls to their dominant to respect those. Everyone has a ‘sacred’ boundary that can never be impugned. I’d never stand for someone ‘punishing’ me by confiscating or harming my plush animals. If I dated a fellow miniature painter, I’d never presume to interfere with their model collection. Healthy consensual non-consent or impact kinks appear violent, but are founded on a core of utmost respect. Brat dynamics appear intrusive and childish, but should likewise be an environment of mutual love and respect.

There. Brat kink as explained by a self-professed brat. One who is very frustrated at people’s knee-jerk treatment of a kink dynamic that is actually creative and reciprocal. I know it’s not suitable for most people, especially the dominants who have to put up with us. We feel the same way when searching for a compatible partner. Nonetheless, all kinksters deserve to be understood. And I hope I contributed something to that understanding.

When brat kink is done well, it’s awesome. You truly can have a fruitful back-and-forth dance built on challenging authority. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to censor some choice nudes with 💩 emojis and send them to people who were hoping for better behavior.

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Summer Tao

Summer Tao is a South Africa based writer. She has a fondness for queer relationships, sexuality and news. Her love for plush cats, and video games is only exceeded by the joy of being her bright, transgender self

Summer has written 91 articles for us.

4 Comments

  2. Ah, that makes a lot of sense. I really appreciate how you laid that out and explained it as three acts. Of course there is way more depth and detail behind a term I sometimes hear tossed around lightly. Put it this way, I’m nowhere near secure enough to try it out, I think I crave stability too much, but I’m glad to have learned.

  3. This was great :) I have some anxiety about rule-breaking, which is why many aspects of this dynamic appeal to me—the chance to ~not~ do as I’m told, and to be earnestly mischievous instead of earnestly proper, in a situation where I know it won’t change anyone’s opinion of me.

  4. Thanks for explaining! I finally understand brat dynamics better. The playful tension, rule-bending, and consensual mischief really make the dynamic exciting, fun, and engaging for both dominant and brat partners.

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In the California Desert, an Illegal ICE Detention Center Opens With Little Pushback From Politicians

feature image photo by PATRICK T. FALLON / Contributor via Getty Images

There’s an illegal detention center operating out of a small desert town in California called California City. There might be one in your state too, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you’d never heard about it. CoreCivic, the second largest private prison company in the US, runs 82 prisons, 16 of which are Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities. ICE is CoreCivic’s largest client. As of this month, the company has reopened a former correctional facility that Governor Gavin Newsom shut down two years ago (as part of an effort to reduce California’s reliance on private prisons). The once-closed prison is now a CoreCivic immigration detention center which disregards California Senate Bill 29. Under that bill, local governments are not allowed to issue building permits to private federal immigrant centers without a 180-day public notice period and at least two public hearings.

There have been zero public hearings with CoreCivic in California City.

***

California City’s population is less than 15,000. It is home to two airports: the aerospace testing site known as the Mojave Air and Space Port and the California City Municipal Airport. The re-opening of the prison means there are 2,560 beds to fill to make operating the place cost-effective.

On September 4, KQED confirmed that the center, which would be the largest in California, was receiving detainees without a business license and without passing fire department and building safety checks. CoreCivic admitted they had started taking in detainees but would not say when intake had begun. Lawyers heard that their clients were in California City at the end of August, according to KQED. On Monday, The Fresno Bee reported that the center is in fact open without the proper permits and that conditions inside have been called “chaos” by detainees, activist groups, and lawyers. (This entire article is well-worth a read.)

The facility also failed a fire department inspection in July, KQED reported. CoreCivic’s spokesman Ryan Gustin told the reporter there that all problems at the center have been addressed and CoreCivic has resubmitted their permit application. Yet, they are still open and taking in prisoners without one. Gustin implied there wasn’t time to follow Senate Bill 29 because the company was responding “to an immediate need from the federal government for safe, humane and appropriate housing and care for these individuals.”

On September 9, myself and two fellow activists drove two hours outside Los Angeles to attend what ended up being a five-hour city council meeting in California City.

Along with other activists and a roomful of concerned citizens, we each stood at a podium, and one after another, and asked the city council to force the ICE facility to stop operating given the failed permit inspections and their lack of a business license. Close it down like you would close any other business that was without the proper permits and licenses. What makes this any different?

***

During public comment at the California City city council meeting, two different mothers call in over Zoom begging in Spanish (translated by relatives) for help or information about their sons. One knows her son is being held in the facility, having been transferred there without notice, she explains. She didn’t find out where he was for three days. Then, she was able to speak to him about the un-livable conditions in the center.

“They are only allowed to leave their cells for 10 minutes,” she says, voice breaking. “My son says there is no clean water.” This is validated by KQED’s interview with Jonathan Montes Diaz, a 33-year-old California man who was once in prison at the facility, and said when a water line ruptured in April of 2023, prisoners had to use plastic bags to relieve themselves. (The prison’s spokesperson confirmed the loss of water, but not the aspect about the plastic bags.)

The woman on Zoom pleads, beyond distraught: “Por favor. Por favor.”

A little girl calls in and begs for information about her father. She’s called before, activists tell me. When her time is up, the mayor replies with the standard “thank you,” and the council moves on to the next caller.

***

It was all hard to listen to. The girl’s voice had made me lightheaded. For a few minutes mid-public comment, I walked around the building to get some fresh air. I looked up at the desert stars. My hands were shaking. It is strange to be at all the city council meetings I’ve been to in the last four months both in Cal City and LA and still feel the detachment from the council members. They hardly ever visibly react to the pleas of their constituents.

At that meeting, I learned California City is in serious debt. Mayor Marquette Hawkins’ stated reason for allowing the center open is to bring in revenue and jobs to a drowning town. Fellow LA-based activist Catie warned the council that when a big company comes into a small town and becomes the residents’ main source of income, that company owns the town. Even if the center does provide jobs, it means that the people of Cal City will be completely beholden to a private corporation. CoreCivic could hold everyone’s jobs hostage and have free reign. No oversight. No accountability.

All of us at the meeting have our own reasons for fighting this and wanting to convince California City that letting the detention center stand is a huge mistake, both financially and morally.

I personally believe California City, vulnerable with a small population and desperate because of debt, is being stripped for parts by a private prison company known for forced labor. CoreCivic has been sued for it. These residents are being sold the lie that allowing this facility in will save them from their debts. I believe this is not true. The city will bear the brunt of electric and water usage. They are opening themselves to more lawsuits they can’t afford. Detainees will get sick or injured without the center passing proper inspections, and California City’s emergency services will be overrun. Inviting ICE in will allow people to be swept off the streets, especially after the Supreme Court’s recent ruling allowing racial profiling. No one in town will be safe. CoreCivic will eat California City alive while working overtime to indiscriminately fill 2,560 beds.

By the end of the exhausting five hours, one of the city council members Michael Hurles at least said he now felt the city needed to ask more questions about the center. Whether he’s sincere or not remains to be seen.

***

I’m not an expert. I’m not writing this as someone who has studied local government or can cite all the rules and statutes. I’m an outsider who has decided to back up activists from the area who know better than me. Maybe there truly is nothing anyone on any city council in the whole country can do — beyond slogans and platitudes — to fight ICE and the federal government from invading. Maybe there are ways to fight and they don’t want to do it. Maybe they see fighting as overstepping — go outside their jurisdiction or roles. At the city council, activists named a few grants and programs that could ease Cal City’s debt so that they don’t have to rely on a detention center. They told the members if they needed help with any part of it, the activists were here to guide them. I didn’t see any indication the members were interested in that.

Everything I’ve heard at city councils in multiple California cities leads me to think they don’t see or hear the fire alarms of fascism whirring as closely as I do. Maybe they do hear them and their cost-benefit analysis says they benefit. Mayor Hawkins keeps throwing his hands up or passing the buck. But who cares about procedure right now? When one side is breaking the rules, our side has to think outside the box and maybe, God forbid, break decorum ourselves. Why aren’t our politicians using their bodies? Why aren’t they lining up as a group and standing with activists outside the facility? I don’t get it.

I write this as an offering to you, the readers. My biggest, most unique asset in this fight is that I have the privilege of avenues to gather and report this information.

This private prison company can not continue to operate an illegal detention center in California City. There are around 500 or so detainees currently held there in inhumane conditions. CoreCivic cannot do the same in your state or in your city — Laredo, Texas or San Diego, California, or Eloy, Arizona or Lumpkin, Georgia. Look for any that are close to you. At least try to get on Zoom or show up to a local city council meeting and call it out on the record. CoreCivic can not come into these towns, open its gaping maw and move in darkness to swallow people whole.

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Gabe Dunn

Gabe (he/him) is a queer, trans writer and director whose most recent film GRINDR BABY was selected for Frameline Festival’s 2023 Voices. He is a best-selling author thrice-over, host of the podcasts The Knew Guys, Just Between Us and Bad With Money. As a TV writer, he has sold over a dozen TV shows to networks like FX, Freeform, and Netflix. His young adult sci-fi drama Apocalypse Untreated was released by Audible Originals in 2020. His latest TV project The Daring Life and Dangerous Times of Eve Adams is in development at Universal with Gabe set to write and produce.

Gabe has written 32 articles for us.

5 Comments

  3. It’s concerning to see an ICE detention center open in the California desert with so little oversight or political pushback. While debates continue on immigration policies, it’s also important to support ethical and thoughtful practices in business and daily life. On a lighter note, for those interested in quality and responsibly made products, check out our premium Custom Aprons Collection
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  5. Great article. I feel a small modicum of hope and maybe a sense of purpose. Thanks for doing the work, and thanks for writing.

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Trump’s Anti-Trans Passport Policy Deemed Unconstitutional by Judge

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The biggest news of this week — something I will not really be discussing here because I’m not sure why anyone is debating what can happen when someone lives their life in service of encouraging violence and hatred against other people — spurred some hateful rhetoric regarding trans lives. We know this kind of rhetoric sometimes leads to further violence against our communities, and it makes sense to be concerned about how these kinds of claims might impact our daily lives. I’m grateful for the work of journalists and media analysts who swiftly stepped in to show the actual facts of the situation and shut the unverified claims down. Beyond that, the past week brought on a lot more resistance from trans people and their allies, especially in the courts, but it also brought with it some potential new dangers for us that we’ll be tracking.

A Win Against Trump’s Anti-Trans Passport Policy

Following an earlier injunction against the Trump administration’s decision to cut trans people off from receiving passports with their correct gender markers, the administration filed a lawsuit arguing they have the right to ban trans people from changing their documents. The administration brought an appeal against the injunction to the First U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston last week.

As we’ve seen in many courts around the country, judges have been showing up for trans rights, and this situation was no different. The judge who presided over the administration’s appeal against the injunction has once again deemed the administration’s passport ban “unconstitutional” and reflected “animus toward transgender Americans.” In the decision, George L. Russell III, the district’s chief judge, wrote, “Like every other court that has considered this Executive Order, the Court finds its stated purpose does not serve an important governmental interest that is exceedingly persuasive. Further, the discriminatory means employed are not substantially related to the achievement of those objectives.” This marks the second time an injunction has been placed against the administration’s order against proper access to legal documents for trans people.

A U.S. State Department spokesperson responded to the second injunction by saying, “We believe that the President Trump’s Executive Order 14168, titled ‘Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,’ is factually and legally sound, and that the district court erroneously relied on an untenable equal protection theory that is inconsistent with controlling Supreme Court authorities. Notably, this is a very narrow opinion, applying by its terms only to a few individual plaintiffs. We will be discussing all our options with the Department of Justice.” It seems as if they’re learning slowly that there are just some areas of the law where they can’t do whatever they want and get away with it.

The next steps regarding the ban are still up in the air so this fight isn’t over yet, but this represents a larger pro-trans rights trend happening in District Courts across the U.S. And no matter what happens, we should stay vigilant and wait to see if this will make it to the Supreme Court.

Some Good Trans News For Once

Their play was cancelled by the University—these college students are putting it on anyway. After a production of the play Boy My Greatness by Zoe Senese-Grossberg was canceled at the University of Oklahoma due to its “defiance” of Oklahoma’s state law banning anything that promotes equity, diversity, and inclusion, a group of students have launched a GoFundMe to promote and put on the play on their own without the university’s help.

Judge blocks Trump administration’s subpoena of trans kids’ medical records from Boston hospital. Some more good news out of Boston Children’s Hospital, one of the only state-funded gender-affirming care clinics in the country that is refusing to bow to Trump’s orders that they must stop providing care to trans youth. When will the administration learn they shouldn’t mess with Massachusetts? At this point, they’re just asking for losses.

Pope Leo XIV to follow doctrine of “openness and welcome” for LGBTQ+ community. The Catholic Church sucks and we all know it, but I do think it’s important that religious leaders stand against the virulent hatred and backlash we’re experiencing right now. If for nothing else, it makes the members of those churches rethink their own stances for a minute, even if they don’t adopt the stances of their leaders.

‘Blatantly unconstitutional’: Second Amendment groups slam floated gun ban for transgender Americans. As a trans person who made it my business to learn how to use a gun over the last year, the fact that the National Rifle Association (NRA) is sticking up for our rights to use them has been making me laugh on and off for the last week. What’s that thing they say about broken clocks again?

Rally planned as Tacoma’s children hospital limits trans gender-affirming care and Trans advocates rally against U of M Health’s decision to end gender-affirming care for minors. People in Washington held a “Rally to Defend Trans Kids” in response to Tacoma’s MultiCare Mary Bridge Children Hospital’s decision to stop providing gender-affirming care for trans youth. Meanwhile, people in Michigan are standing up against the University of Michigan’s Michigan Medicine’s decision to do the same thing. More of this! More of this!

Stand with Trans hotline offers help, virtual hugs for transgender kids, their families. Another win for Michigan: A group in Detroit has launched their own trans support hotline for trans youth and their advocates in the wake of the Trump administration destroying the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline’s LGBTQ+ Youth Specialized Services program.

Manhattan school board rescinds trans youth sports measure. Schools in New York City are now being advised and gently pushed to make gender-inclusion a top priority in their youth sports programs as a result of pushback from parents. You read that right: parents.

Supreme Court lets transgender student in South Carolina continue using boys’ bathroom at school for now. Not fully good news but not bad news, either, considering more and more bathroom bans are being brought to the floors of state legislatures everywhere. As a person from Florida, it’s always great to see Southern states push back against anti-trans legislation.

State to pay $85,000 to LGBTQ+ students forced to leave Iowa Capitol in 2020. Following their expulsion from the Iowa State Capitol after protesting a bathroom bill, a group of students sued the state in 2022. Their lawsuit has finally come to a conclusion with the state having to pay financial restitution to all 150 of them.

International Trans News:

Trans people must be allowed ID reflecting lived gender, EU court adviser says. Huge news for anyone living in Europe with a European Union passport: No matter where they live or what their country says about trans rights, those countries are legally obligated as an EU member state to issue passports that reflect the correct gender markers to their trans citizens.

Cuba’s trans people see legal progress with new gender ID law. I reported on Cuba’s new pro-trans legislation in a previous Trans New Tracker, but I think this profile about how laws that support correct legal identification for trans people can and do improve our lives and expand our ability to move freely through the various bureaucracies we’re all forced to contend with is important for everyone to read.

Trans News I Wish I Didn’t Have to Report

House HHS Appropriations Bill Would Devastate Trans Adult Healthcare Nationwide. A new Health and Human Services appropriations bill making its way to the House is attempting to gut healthcare for trans people in a similar way the earliest version of the Trump administration’s “Big Beautiful Bill Act” was originally intended to. The bill takes aim at trans healthcare funding made through Medicaid and Medicare and states, “None of the funds made available by this Act may be used for any social, psychological, behavioral, or medical intervention performed for the purposes of intentionally changing the body of an individual (including by disrupting the body’s development, inhibiting its natural functions, or modifying its appearance) to no longer correspond to the individual’s biological sex.” While the Senate version of this bill doesn’t include this language, it’s still important to track how the House bill moves through the legislature.

Alabama libraries could stop children from seeing books that ‘positively depict’ transgender people. This one is especially shocking because it’s not coming from the state — it’s coming from the Alabama Public Library Service.

Video of clash over gender-identity content in Texas A&M children’s lit class leads to firing, removals. By now, you’ve probably seen the viral video of that one loser student calling out their professor over the supposed inclusion of “gender ideology” in class. Sadly, this is the inevitable outcome of the video’s creation and its virality, despite the fact that the professor and the department’s members were simply doing their jobs and doing the right thing. I don’t know what else to say…I’m sick of this shit.

Malcolm Gladwell says he’s ‘ashamed’ of being ‘cowed’ into supporting trans athletes in women’s sports. Gladwell has been on my “Enemies List” since at least 2016, and I think it’s time he’s on everyone else’s, too. What a fucking loser.

Last Bits

Amid anti-trans sports bans, Tucson Roller Derby builds safe space for LGBTQIA+ athletes. I love how roller derby and the people who participate in it are constantly on the right side of history when it comes to almost anything happening in this country.

Who’s afraid of Jinkx Monsoon? Just a truly great profile of the inimitable Jinkx Monsoon, whose starring role in the Tony-winning Broadway hit, Oh, Mary!, is sadly coming to an end very soon.

Nancy Mace melts down after colleague mentions ‘boob jobs’. God, this was really funny. Sometimes we just have to laugh at these buffoons. They deserve it.

Charlie Kirk’s legacy deserves no mourning. Can’t even believe we have to keep saying this, honestly.

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Stef Rubino

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

Stef has written 160 articles for us.

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Here’s What Was Good and Gay About the 2025 Emmy Awards

feature image photo by Gilbert Flores / Contributor via Getty Images

The 2025 Emmy Awards were last night, and so let’s talk about all the gay goings-on!

First up, some winners I think you’ll all appreciate. While queer faves like The Last of Us and Ayo Edebiri may not have taken home any awards, there were some winners to celebrate. Like bisexual comedian Hannah Einbinder winning for Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series and using her acceptance speech to say “Go Birds, fuck ICE, and free Palestine.” (Her partner-in-comedy-crime on Hacks Jean Smart also won for Best Actress in a Comedy series.)

Actress Erin Doherty thanked her girlfriend in her acceptance speech after she won for Best Supporting Actress in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie for her role in Adolescence. And a gay fave that is also littered with queer contestants, The Traitors, won for Best Reality Competition Program. Jeff Hiller and Tramell Tillman also took home Emmy Awards.

Of course, queer people showed up to serve lewks on the red carpet, including Hunter Schafer, Brittani Nichols, Megan Stalter, Halsey, and Kristen Kish. And actually I think you should specifically check out Kristen Kish’s glambot.

There were also other cheeky little gay moments sprinkled in, like stars of The Hunting Wives Malin Akerman and Brittany Snow presented an award together and had a cute little flirtatious bit at the beginning that stunned the crowd for a moment (and made my gay little heart race a bit, I won’t lie.)

So, while the Emmys weren’t quite as gay an affair as the Autostraddle TV Awards (whose winners are up now for you to celebrate), there was still plenty of queer fun to be had.

And Now Presenting…More Headlines

+ Melissa Etheridge’s daughter Bailey married her wife Jocelyn at a winery and the wedding was basically a music festival in what had to be the gayest event of the season

+ Sort of related, take a peek at the upcoming Lilith Fair documentary, dropping on Hulu later this week. Check out Drew’s review of the Lilith Fair documentary from TIFF (Also check out Drew’s review of it while you’re at it)

+ Pedro Pascal and his sister Lux interviewed each other about their relationship, her work as a trans actress, and more; it’s very sweet and a lovely read

+ Malin Akerman talks about the sapphic sex scenes with her costar Brittany Snow in The Hunting Wives and why she loves the lesbian fandom

+ And while we’re on the topic of Brittany Snow, Sophia Bush posted some photos with her real-life girlfriend and some other women she’s smooched on screen

+ Earpers don’t fret, Wynonna Earp might have been pulled off Netflix, but it’s now all on Tubi!

+ If you need a little giggle, watch Reneé Rapp try to be on her best behavior around small children, including but not limited to creating a rated G version of Leave Me Alone I can’t get out of my head (“Leave me alone, mom, I wanna have fun!”

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Valerie Anne

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

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3 Comments

  1. Trammel Tillman, Mr. Milchick on Severance, won for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series. He’s openly gay, and is the first black person to win the award.

  2. And Jeff Hiller for Somebody Somewhere (!), a true midwestern masterpiece of queer sweaty adult people grieving and growing together.

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On Charlie Kirk and How the Media Helped Perpetuate a Trans Boogeyman

feature image by twohumans via Getty Images

“If someone says it’s raining and another person says it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both. It’s your job to look out the fucking window.” – attributed to Jonathan Foster

West Hollywood, the historically gay city where I live, lowered the gay and trans pride flags in Matthew Shepherd Square because of the shooting death of right-wing podcaster Charlie Kirk. Kirk was killed while speaking at Utah Valley University last Wednesday. In its official statement, the city claimed that if the President declares the lowering of flags, cities have to do it. I thought maybe the flags were lowered for 9/11, but on the official Weho Instagram account, I found out the gay pride flag and trans pride flag were in fact lowered for Charlie Kirk.

In a speech at a church in September 2023, almost two years to the day before his murder, Kirk called transgender people a “throbbing middle finger to God.” 

“The one issue I think that is so against our senses, so against the natural law, and dare I say, a throbbing middle finger to God, is the transgender thing happening in America right now,” Kirk told the approving audience.

Utah governor Spencer Cox, in his comments after Kirk’s death, said he prayed the person responsible wasn’t “one of us.” If the phrasing was at all unclear, Cox added, “that somebody drove from another state, somebody came from another country.”

The desperation for the alleged killer to be someone foreign was palpable. It wasn’t just a rush to deem the person an outsider geographically, but also one politically or ideologically. Because Kirk was answering a question about the small number of trans mass shooters compared to cis mass shooters when he was shot, the fervor to label transness as the reason for his death was maniacal. (Even though the shooter was allegedly 200 yards away, and there’s no proof he could hear the topic of conversation in the tent.)

Then, the Wall Street Journal not only kicked the hornet’s nest but set it on fire and threw it into a crowd. Based on an unconfirmed police bulletin in the chaos following Kirk’s death, the Journal reported that the ammunition was engraved with “transgender and anti-fascist ideology.” That was later deemed untrue. Instead of issuing a massive apology, the Journal edited its original piece two days later only to say that the sources for the information weren’t solid. Then, just before the piece hits paywall, it admits there was nothing trans on the bullets. It still maintains the headline, “Early Bulletin Said Ammunition in Kirk Shooting Engraved With Transgender, Antifascist Ideology.” The Human Rights Campaign said the irresponsible reporting led to a “wave of threats against the trans community from right-wing influencers.”

When the “trans ideology”-engraved bullets were proven false, the right-wing media spread hypotheticals, like that alleged shooter, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, had a trans partner, or no, it was a trans roommate, etc etc. Something to do with trans people. He has to be connected to “trans.”

Even when we had nothing to do with it, we had everything to do with it.

The US loves creating a boogeyman for violence that distances itself from that violence. I was in eighth grade during 9/11. The backlash and hatred for Arabs and Muslims was immense and immediate, even though the attack was the work of extremists. In 2006, I started journalism school and wrote for the Boston Globe and The Times Magazine among lots of other places. Back then, it was frowned upon for reporters to be registered with a political party. In college, I was told it would create an air of bias. (How naive.) There’s a common saying in journalism: “We don’t make the news, we just report it.” That hasn’t been true for a long time.

The past writing of the three reporters who have been covering Kirk’s murder for the Journal, including the trans ideology article, can’t exist in a vacuum. One wrote an article labeling NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mandami’s policing views as a weakness in the wake of the shooting in Midtown Manhattan in July. (Somehow a shooting he had nothing to do with is written about as socialist boogeyman Mandami’s fault.) Another wrote about the random stabbing of Iryna Zatruska in North Carolina as a motive for Trump to call Democrats soft on crime. The headline reads, “After Fatal Stabbing of Ukrainian Refugee, Trump Says U.S. Must Confront Crime Problem.” This framing adds “evidence” linking the heinous but random murder to a need for Trump’s increased militarization — sending the National Guard into our own cities for our own good.

Journalists rarely choose their own headlines, but editors do. Despite the saying about not “making the news,” media outlets choose what to cover, and they choose how to cover it. I don’t personally get the NY Times delivered, but this past February I was staying over in Portland with a girlfriend and got to see the headlines for a few days in a row. Three out of four papers had stories about transgender people. The one from the 28th had three different articles about trans people in one paper.

We’re a clicky headline. Much has been made about the New York Times’ obsession with writing biased garbage about us, and as the paper of record, it has influenced a lot of other news sources’ coverage too. The press is not innocent in how the world moving forward looks for trans people in the United States. It never has been. Out of the 65 articles about trans people that the Times published in 2023, 60 percent of them did not include even one quote from a trans person. Eighteen percent quoted “anti-trans misinformation from conservative sources without additional context.”

In my almost 20-year career as a writer and reporter, I was taught you never just run with what a source tells you. “If your mother tells you she loves you, check on it,” the famous journalistic saying goes.

Just because Trump says it doesn’t make it true or worth running without seeing if it’s true first. Are Democrats soft on crime? You could look it up and do some research before headlining a big article with Trump saying so. Did shooter Tyler Robinson write trans ideology on his bullets? The cops are saying maybe, but you don’t have to report maybe. You can wait for yes or no.

I used to think the way the mainstream press wrote about trans people was based in ignorance, then willful ignorance, and now it’s very obviously malicious. There’s an old Jewish tale about a rabbi who assigns a person who has spread harmful information around their small village to rip open a pillow and let the feathers out. Then, his punishment is to gather back all the feathers. It’s impossible, he complains. The rabbi says that’s the point.

The Wall Street Journal and other mainstream media reports unleashed anti-trans feathers into the world that linked trans people to a story they had nothing to do with. It’s once again going to be impossible to get the feathers back.

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Gabe Dunn

Gabe (he/him) is a queer, trans writer and director whose most recent film GRINDR BABY was selected for Frameline Festival’s 2023 Voices. He is a best-selling author thrice-over, host of the podcasts The Knew Guys, Just Between Us and Bad With Money. As a TV writer, he has sold over a dozen TV shows to networks like FX, Freeform, and Netflix. His young adult sci-fi drama Apocalypse Untreated was released by Audible Originals in 2020. His latest TV project The Daring Life and Dangerous Times of Eve Adams is in development at Universal with Gabe set to write and produce.

Gabe has written 32 articles for us.

11 Comments

  2. This is a guy who advocated against having empathy for political enemies (literally, using the word “empathy”), and who’s decided all LGBTQ people and anyone who isn’t compatible with the most fascist version of Christianity are his political enemies. It’s fine that he got assassinated, actually! It’s not like he was in favor of legitimate channels of criticism towards his political positions! I like those better too, but the Republicans are working as hard as they can to take that away! I would’ve rather he repented that morning and then had a great life, I’d rather everyone with those beliefs repent and then have a great life, but right now I’m going to be happy that the people who want to genocide me are a little bit more afraid of someone shooting them about it!

    • “It’s fine that he got assassinated, actually!”

      It’s really not. Leaving aside completely the morality of assassination, history shows that assassination never solves anything. It never advances the cause of the one who assassinates. It only creates backlash (often wildly disproportionate backlash).

      (•_•)
      NON-
      / \

      (•_•)
      <) )╯VIOLENT…
      / \

      RESISTANCE! 🏳‍🌈 🏳‍⚧

      • Yeah, stand around all day ASKING the evil cult to not murder you, I’m sure that will work out great! It is overwhelmingly fine that a cartoonishly evil turbo-nazi is dead. It is absolutely vital that these monsters have to be afraid to advocate for our genocide, and it’s outrageous to imply that things would’ve somehow been fine if everyone just kept on letting them do whatever they want with no consequences like always.

        • Self-replying to add, in response to “assassination never solves anything,” please go read about a little thing called the French Revolution, you self-righteous idiot.

      • I don’t mean it’s politically fine that he was assassinated, I’m scared shitless about the backlash to this. But the mechanism of the backlash is that the right is acting like everyone has to be really nice about Charlie Kirk now or they’re just as bad as the terrorists, and what I’m trying to say is that it’s fine to think or say, “well, an evil person is now unable to continue doing the evil work he was doing, and [whatever this hypothetical person thinks about the actions of the shooter, I truly do not care], I do not have to consider it a tragedy that the evil person is dead.” It’s okay if the most important part of this to a person is that the evil person is gone or that they resent having to perform sympathy for the Turning Point USA guy.

        It’s fine if you think assassination is bad. What is not fine is that conservatives are acting like when a guy who wants the government to make me detransition and carry rape babies gets assassinated, the only thing I’m allowed to say is “assassination is bad”. It’s okay to have complicated feelings about the demise of people who want to hurt you, or even to have uncomplicatedly positive ones! He died like three seconds after shittalking my minority group. Have a fucking heart.

        ┏(-_-)┛┗(-_- )┓ I hope the government doesn’t put me in a camp!
        ╰( ^o^)╮╰( ^o^)╮ Wow, that would be terrible!
        ━━━━||Φ|(|ﾟ|∀|ﾟ|)|Φ||━━━━ Peace and love!

    • It’s not, it’s just not. It shouldn’t be controversial to say that murder is bad, no matter how bad the person is that was killed. You don’t have to mourn Kirk as an individual man, but we should all mourn the further erosion of the norms of political practice in a free society. Kirk was killed while exercising his right to freedom of expression. However abhorrent I may have found his views, he had the right to express them without fear of violence, as we all do. If both sides of the political spectrum lose sight of that, we are truly broken as a society.

  3. what is Gabe Dunn doing to distance himself from his zionist orgins and zionist family? Gabe Dunn is baked with genocide and went to Isnotreal many times

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Having Anxiety Dreams? It’s Time To Keep a Dream Journal

Dear Dreamers,

I’m writing this missive from a cute little coffee shop in Tulsa, Oklahoma called Cirque. I’m here with S., who I’ve known since 2015, when I was 18 years old. You couldn’t pay us to be 18 again, S. and I agreed in the car. But there was wonder in that age, too, I think. I wasn’t quite so haunted, back then, and my clarity of vision wasn’t so good, and I knew the ghosts were there but I didn’t want to talk to them. Or maybe they didn’t want to talk to me, bored with my ignorance, my refusal.

I’ve been thinking about that impossible age lately, as I enter my saturn return, as I close the loop. My birthday is next week, and next year, my twenties will be over. Will I miss them? I’m not so sure. To be alive right now, at this moment, well, it’s not so easy. But when I wake up in the morning with the dregs of a dream still all over me, when I see the texts that have come after my early bedtime, when the cats’ watch me brush my teeth with a creepy intensity, when the sun hits me in the eyes and my wrists hurt and my hair looks thinner than usual, I think, oh, I didn’t think I’d get this far. The future looks better than I ever thought it could.

Sending you good dreams,
Cowboy

P.S. I really do find a lot of joy in this community, and I’d love it if you’d submit a dream for interpretation or a question for a Tarot reading!

Queer Dream Interpretation

a dream door into a bird

What Can We Learn From Anxiety Dreams?

At a party where I know nobody. Theme is “things with wings”, but I am not on theme. I am having drinks. A brute dude tried to take my drink but I defend it and keep drinking. It is a dark bottle of beer now. I then start spitting out shards of glass in the bathroom and they just keep coming. I put them in a small circular Plexiglas dish. There are two dishes. Some shards, I have to take out with my fingers. A woman is soothing me saying it’s ok but also making sure I don’t sue. Another is sitting in the corner, laughing, making fun of me.
– LL

Dear LL,

Thank you for the gift of your dream. Not to put too much emphasis on “nightmare scenario” here, but this does indeed sound like a nightmare. While it is not wholly realistic, it is the dream version of a party we’ve all been at, one that can quickly make anxiety settle over us. Anxiety dreams in general, and related to you, are what I’d like to focus on here.

Private clients I’ve had, as well as folks who I’ve interpreted for out in the wild, have expressed to me a wide variety of dreams, with themes big and small, but by far the most common dreams that I hear about are those that I would call the “Anxiety Dream.” The anxiety dream can be one that recurs, one that involves showing up embarrassingly dressed to high school home room, or one that, seemingly, is so true to life that you wake up worried it might have really happened, but all are manifested by one’s own nervous energy, the brain blinking out a terrified message. This dream of yours is a great example of such a message, and I am especially drawn to the two women in the bathroom. These women, one helpful, but with a motive, and one who experiences delight at your misfortune, are actually mirrors of yourself and the way you handle your concerns. The first, while she seems soothing, actually just wants to corral something about you, and put it back into “working” order. Think about times in your life you have forced down your feelings for the benefit of smoothing down another person’s feelings, or to bring back some kind of peace and unity. Are you still doing that even when you should not?

The second woman, the laughing one, is a representation of making a mockery of yourself, of your “issues.” It is okay to feel wounded, and strange, and small, but instead of casting this off as ridiculous, interrogate it to its root. Is someone else making you feel this way, or is it your own feelings of inferiority rearing their ugly heads? Observe these things, and catalogue them. Next time either voice comes back, don’t allow them to lead your yoke.

For anyone experiencing an occurrence (or recurrence) of the Anxiety Dream, I would suggest the same steps, as well as the keeping of a dream journal (more on that later) even if it’s just a few sentences in your notes app. You, and your subconscious, will be better for it.

See you on the other side,
CC

a dream door into an eye

A Body Horror Dream With a Positive Message

I was trying to get an eyelash out of my eye, but it wasn’t an eyelash. There was an entire eyebrow growing under my eyelid. And then somehow a row of small teeth slowly emerged underneath and there was the outline of a third eye growing between the two. The eye never emerged, the pupil and iris were visible as darker spots behind thin skin pushing out in the shape of an eye. It wasn’t particularly unsettling or upsetting in the dream, and it wasn’t clear if I was growing a new body part or something was growing from me. But when I woke up I felt sick — unsettled and slightly nauseous, both disgusted and fascinated and perhaps a bit afraid.
– BL

Dear BL,

Thank you for the gift of your dream. And what a dream it is! I am no stranger to body horror dreams myself, and I must admit that I often feel the same way you’ve described after them. Fear not, however, for though this dream may make you feel unsettled in several ways, it is actually a positive message.

Let me explain, while body horror dreams can sometimes be classed as Anxiety Dreams, the threads you’ve described here point instead to a kind of birth. Pregnancy dreams, too, can act as something akin to what you’ve described here, a kind of violent letting of the body to produce something. In your case, however, the result is quite… gnarly. Or at least the production is. Creation, it must be said, is often not easy, especially in the world we are living in. Art, and things that do not produce cold hard cash, are not valued as they should be, and so we often relegate them to the sides of our lives. Are you allowed to indulge your creativity? Are you letting yourself do something outside of the work, for just you and no one else? If not, you should, and you should see where it takes you. It may be somewhere you do not expect.

Further, this dream could also be a signal that, aside from creativity, you are not expressing emotions and feelings that others might class as “ugly.” But remember, true range of expression is a type of freedom, and it is possible. This, too, might be something you do just for you, but it is worth it.

See you on the other side,
CC

Five Prompts for Your Dream Journal

a dream door into a dream journal

I’ve always been an advocate for the dream journal, even way back when I first started interpreting dreams publicly, what feels like a lifetime ago. And, to be clear, I am not good at journaling or keeping a diary in other respects. I think I have an aversion to the words themselves, and yet, in my notes app, in a few sentences or less, I’ve been able to keep a steady log of dreams I’ve had for a few years now, something that is especially helpful to look back on when I’m writing, like my own personal history book.

So, in that spirit, I’d like to present to you five easy prompts to begin (or continue) your dream journal journey. I hope they bring as much clarity as they’ve brought me.

  1. In the last dream you had, were you I yourself, or were you someone/something else? If you were not yourself, who were you, and has this someone/something appeared in your dreams before? 
  2. In the past two weeks, what emotion have you felt most strongly in your dreams? Happiness? Anger? Sadness? Something else? What was this emotion related to?
  3. What is the last dream you remember most vividly? What was it about? Do you know what it means? Why or why not? 
  4. Picture your subconscious like a room. What is filled with? What does it look like? 
  5. Name three physical objects that appeared in your last dream. Are they something you possess in real life? Are they an object from your past, present, or future? 
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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Autumn Fourkiller

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

Autumn has written 25 articles for us.

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‘Go Birds, Fuck ICE, Free Palestine’: Hannah Einbinder Won an Emmy and Won the Emmys

feature image photo by Myung J. Chun / Contributor via Getty Images

When Jean Smart won the award for Best Actress in a Comedy for her role as Deborah Vance on Hacks early on in the 2025 Emmy Awards broadcast, I texted one of my group chats: manifesting Hannah win.

I wanted Hannah Einbinder to win an Emmy not because it would be her first time securing a much deserved win after being nominated every single year of Hacks‘ four-season run. Yes, she deserves the award. Yes, she would have been my top pick on merit alone. First wins are exciting, and there were a few big ones last night, including Tramell Tillman first personal win which was also the first time a Black actor had won for Best Supporting Actor in a Drama at the Emmys. But the real reason I wanted Einbinder to win an Emmy was because I had a feeling that, if she did, she’d be the only winner in a sea of celebrities with enough of a backbone to actually say the words “free Palestine” into a mic.

Even when Jean Smart won her own category, when a camera cut to Einbinder’s emotional reaction for her co-star’s win, I noticed she turned her body slightly so the camera would more squarely capture the red pin affixed to her dress, a small symbol of solidarity with Palestine. Even before she had a moment in the spotlight, she was trying to signal where she stands (against genocide, which apparently is too controversial a stance for most celebrities in that room to take).

But then Einbinder did indeed take home her first Emmy. Thankfully ignoring the hokey and ultimately limiting speech cutoff time game implemented by the host, she ended her speech with a rallying cry very true to her: “Go Birds, Fuck ICE, Free Palestine.”

I was watching live, and the “fuck ICE” portion of the three-part declaration cut out due to network censors, but I texted that same group chat again accurately guessing the missing words, which were later confirmed all over social media. No other winner speeches of the evening had the same political teeth to them as Einbinder’s. While the silence of famous actors on Gaza is unsurprising given the long history of even the most progressive celebrities holding Zionist beliefs or choosing to remain silent in the face of Palestinian death, Einbinder was also the only winner to explicitly denounce ICE, which has escalated their violent raids, abductions, and detentions of immigrant populations in Los Angeles, right in the backyard of these awards. Many of the actors in that room were quick to be vocal about the devastating wildfires that destroyed many homes and communities in Los Angeles but have been silent about the human destruction enacted by ICE in their city.

Other queer artists also found ways to signal their advocacy for a free Palestine, like Abbott Elementary‘s (and recent Autostraddle TV Awards winner) Brittani Nichols, who was among the folks at the event wearing the red artists4ceasefire pin Einbinder also wore. Meg Stalter skipped the pomp and circumstance of designer fits to sport jeans and a white tee, complete with a purse that read CEASEFIRE NOW. On her Instagram, her fit dump post was accompanied by the caption: “End Occupation. Permanent cease fire in Gaza. ♥️” Javier Bardem (not queer but an actor with a long history of political activism) continued his long-standing advocacy for Palestine by wearing a keffiyeh and using his red carpet airtime to call attention to and condemn the genocide. Listen, he’s a real one. He and his wife Penelope Cruz have been denouncing Israeli genocide for over a decade.

Einbinder was the only winner of the night to explicitly call for a free Palestine. It’s rarely the biggest, most famous, most platformed artists at these events taking a stand. So often it’s queer or otherwise marginalized artists using these events as a moment for visibility and advocacy for Palestinian liberation. Of course, it’s these artists who also stand the most to lose by saying something. Einbinder’s speech was not given in a vacuum; she has been using awards ceremonies and her personal social media platforms to call attention to the genocide consistently over the past few years, including in her speech while accepting an award from the HRC. Earlier this month, she was part of a coordinated action with multiple chapters of Jewish Voice for Peace in California where members occupied U.S. Senator Adam Schiff’s office calling on him to stop taking money from AIPAC and to support an arms embargo on Israel.

While slipping a few words into an acceptance speech may seem like a small thing, given the ways these awards ceremonies serve as “distractions” from ongoing global violence, these moments are actually significant. Many activists have pointed toward Israel’s tendency to escalate violence in conjunction with major broadcasts like sporting events and awards ceremonies, as media attention is largely diverted to such things. Al Jazeera reports that on Sunday, Israel’s attacks leveled 16 buildings in Gaza City and killed 53 Palestinians. Today, many mainstream news, culture, and entertainment publications that have perpetuated Zionist propaganda and been complicit in the manufacturing of consent for this U.S.-backed genocide will capitalize on traffic garnered by posts about Einbinder’s speech. Meanwhile, I wouldn’t be surprised if our post about Einbinder’s speech gets us some level of shadowbanned on social media.

Aside from the scattered red pins, Bardem’s words on the red carpet, Stalter’s post, and Einbinder’s speech, the Emmys were, as usual, a largely apolitical affair. Some of the stars and creatives of The Pitt spoke in support of healthcare workers (with no mention of the many healthcare workers killed by Israel). But overall, the Emmys functioned the way so many mainstream Hollywood institutions do, sticking to the status quo. At least Einbinder found one small way to challenge it.

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

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Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya

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

Kayla has written 1088 articles for us.

9 Comments

    • I want to take this in good faith, genuinely. So I will! First– great article, I love her work, and think she is a stellar actor and also bringing attention to an unimaginably horrible event unfolding for the past two years. Secondly, it is difficult to take both sides, because it seems especially urgent to speak on the acts of the side which is currently ordering sniper hits on children. There’s a lot of trustworthy documentation supporting that. I personally don’t believe that you or I think the loss of life in this case is excusable. I will also add that it appears that the recent bombings in Qatar, which I am certain you’ve read about, have done quite a bit to slow negotiations. Happy to share coverage of all of this, and hope you have a lovely day, I know these are difficult times.

  2. Hannah Einbinder publicly identifies as bisexual. The character she plays on Hacks has been a stellar and rare example of positive bisexual representation in pop culture. Please do not erase all this by calling her “queer” for whatever reason you chose to do so. This article is long and fabulous, but the fact that it doesn’t use the word ‘bisexual’ even once is truly puzzling.

    • They don’t call her queer. They actually don’t refer to her sexuality at all. The first time the word “queer” is used in this article is “Other queer artists…”

      • The subheadline of this article on the homepage says “The queer star of Hacks won her first Emmy after four nominations and used her speech to call attention to genocide.”

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TIFF 2025: New Documentary Champions the Music Industry Rebellion That Was Lilith Fair

Drew Burnett Gregory is back at TIFF, reporting with queer movie reviews from one of the world’s most prestigious film festivals. Follow along for her coverage of the best in LGBTQ+ cinema and beyond.

A couple weeks from now, a variety of artists will perform at the 2025 All Things Go music festival just outside DC and at a concurrent festival in New York. This year’s lineup includes Doechii, Lucy Dacus, Joy Oladokun, Clairo, and Kesha. In recent years, the festival has been affectionately dubbed Gaychella and Lesbopalooza, monikers that incite enthusiasm in the communities they represent. But almost 30 years ago, another lineup of artists was called Lesbopalooza in a different tone. When critics and industry insiders and random men who didn’t attend called Lilith Fair that same name, they did so with derision as a way to further ostracize and belittle its collection of female artists.

Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery, Ally Pankiw’s new documentary about Lilith Fair, begins in the present. It shows us young people on TikTok discussing or discovering this moment in recent music history. Then it cuts to Olivia Rodrigo talking about the importance of Lilith Fair and the influence of those artists on her own work. At first, it seems the documentary is trying to appeal to Gen Z first and foremost, as if its primary goal is to teach young people rather than be for those who already care about Lilith Fair, including attendees. Luckily, this isn’t the case. Bookending the film in the present instead functions as a way to underline the influence of those three years of music tours. There would be no Lesbopalooza (positive) without Lesbopalooza (negative).

Using a mix of archival footage and contemporary interviews — as well as some spoken excerpts from Sarah McLachlan’s tour diary — the film creates a portrait of Lilith Fair and the culture it fought against. It illustrates the sexism of the 90s music industry and shows how McLachlan refused its boundaries. First, she invites Paula Cole to be her opening act despite the industry standard that two women can’t be on the same bill. When that’s a success, she begins to imagine something bigger.

As someone born in 1993, I did not attend Lilith Fair, but I’ve long romanticized it. This film feeds into that romance. From the opening night at The Gorge to Indigo Girls creating camaraderie among the acts to the surprise success that became undeniable, the archival footage — of performances, of fans gushing — allows those of us who weren’t there a little taste of the magic. It also shows the power of the shows beyond their lineups: the money raised for charities, the focus on having women crew, and even the insistence of giving all the crew healthcare.

It also displays the cost of this rebellion. Like the wonderful Indigo Girls documentary from a couple years ago, It’s Only Life After All, we’re shown how quickly Lilith Fair and its associated acts became an easy punchline. Both that documentary and this one reveal how the jokes weren’t a lighthearted jest but a more sinister reinforcement of sexism and homophobia.

One of my favorite parts of the documentary invites music journalist Ann Powers to respond to the complaint that it was women critics who were harshest, women critics who seemed to always be discovering “women musicians” anew. Powers notes that she was often writing the pieces her male colleagues and bosses assigned her. The sexism of the music industry didn’t just impact the artists — it was also experienced by the women writing about them.

By the end of Lilith Fair’s three years, the exhaustion of everyone involved — especially McLachlan — is deeply felt. It was a resounding success and yet the ambitious tours combined with the cultural backlash including bomb threats from anti-abortion groups made it taxing. The final conclusion is a hopeful one: these tours had a greater impact than McLachlan and her collaborators could ever have imagined at the time. It also leaves room for a different, less simplistic kind of hope. Like the angry young white men at Woodstock ‘99 and the media eager to tear women down, many of society’s worst impulses continue on. But anyone can take up the mantle of Lilith Fair, to refuse discriminating practices and push to make our world a little better. We can work together and view our successes as intertwined rather than in competition. We can gather and make a new world, even if it only lasts a few years, a summer, a night.

Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery will be available to stream on Hulu and Disney+ starting September 21.

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 was a 2022 Outfest Screenwriting Lab Notable Writer and a 2023 Lambda Literary Screenwriting Fellow. Her writing can also be found at Letterboxd Journal, Bright Wall/Dark Room, Cosmopolitan UK, Into, Refinery29, and them. She is currently working on a million film and TV projects mostly about queer trans women. Find her on Instagram.

Drew has written 750 articles for us.

6 Comments

  2. I (mid thirties trans guy, at the time I definitely did not know) went to Lilith Fair as a child! I think my family mostly went because my dad was a fan of Sheryl Crow, who was performing at the show we went to. There was a giant banner near the main stage that very heavily featured artistic nudity, at the time I was hoping my parents just wouldn’t notice it but there was no possible way that anyone wouldn’t have noticed it. I remember the attendee gender balance was so skewed that at some point the men’s restrooms just became treated as gender neutral – my dad thought it was funny to be peeing alongside the enterprising heroes of Lilith Fair while my mom was trying to keep it cool but was definitely a bit scandalized. Some girls were kissing and I got told they were sisters who got overly excited to be there??? A woman behind me kept screaming “SARAH!” when Sarah McLachlan was there, like she was really hoping sempai would notice her. We came away with a bunch of new bands and artists we liked and it was the first time I heard Goodbye Earl. All in all I had a great time.

  3. I went to the Lilith Fair as a teenager. I strangely decided to bring these three straight/preppy (“straight,” as far as I knew) and (except for one) uptight friends. At the time, and still in retrospect, it was amazing. Here I was, a gay teenage girl bass player (who knew it but kept shoving it back down–the gay thing, not the bass thing; you know what I mean), finally exposed to a concert composed solely of non-male musicians!

    I also had to come to terms with my gayness, because there were two women in the row right in front of us making out. This should have been empowering, but two of my friends seemed like they had never seen anything like this before, so then I had to act like I hadn’t. Also, one of the maker-outers was on the more masc side of the spectrum, and I’ve always been on/been attracted to the more femme side, so it made me question everything in again, in a confusing way. Regardless, I’m so glad we all saw everything that night, and that Lilith Fair was a safer place for queer people than the rest of the world. And it was so amazing to see that situation as a real possibility. Like, I didn’t have to pretend to be straight for much longer (after high school ended).

    I got super depressed the next year when I went to a high school Battle of the Bands event, and the only female musician in THE WHOLE NIGHT was a bassist who was the girlfriend of the guy lead singer. I guess that backlash really kicked in super quickly after that. Late ’90s music gave me a headache. Well, the mainstream stuff did, but Sleater-Kinney and The Muffs, etc., were killing it, except no one featured them on the radio. Listening to my local “alternative” station or watching MTV in hopes of hearing or seeing another woman yielded about one per hour, at the most. Still, I think if Sarah McLachlan hadn’t started the conversation, we wouldn’t be where we are now, and it was so important at the time, especially.

  5. I found this article very informative and detailed. The way you broke down complex concepts into easily understandable sections was impressive. It’s clear that a lot of effort went into this piece, and I appreciate the thoroughness and clarity.https://hsspreps.com/

  6. Thanks for this review Drew, as a huge Sarah McLachlan fan I went to Lilith Fair and lived through that particular era in music industry misogyny, etc. I can’t wait to see this film! On a different note, did you see Pink Light at TIFF? Would love to learn more about it as it apparently stars the amazing PWHL goalie/heartthrob CJ Jackson as trans hockey player Harrison Browne.

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Quiz: Which Lesbian Shark Are You?

I’ve been in a shark horror kick as of late, trying to watch as many entries in the canon as possible. Jaws is one of my favorite movies of all time, and while I was technically aware many a copycat had been made through the years and the wonderful world of shark-centric cinema was as vast as the sea itself, I still wasn’t quite prepared for just how many schlocky shark movies there are out there. None come close to touching Jaws, but many are fascinating in their own ways. You would think there are only so many ways a filmmaker could invent a BIGGER BADDER FASTER SMARTER shark, but alas, they keep on taking a stab at it! Anyway, let my latest obsession become yours as you take this shark-themed personality quiz, whose overall message is also meant to suggest: All sharks are lesbians.

Which Lesbian Shark Are You?

What statement best describes your relationship to sharks?(Required)
What word would you most likely use to describe a shark?(Required)
Pick a Jaws or Jaws-adjacent film:(Required)
Pick a non-Jaws shark film:(Required)
Which of the following shark behavioral traits most resembles a behavioral trait of your own?(Required)
Pick a non-shark sea creature:(Required)
Would you ever go shark cage diving?(Required)
You’re in a beachtown gift shop. What novelty item are you most likely to buy?(Required)
Pick an image:(Required)
Pick a seafood restaurant app:
Pick a body of water:(Required)
What are you known for in your friend group when you are all somewhere together?(Required)
What statement best reflects your love life?(Required)

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Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya

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

Kayla has written 1088 articles for us.

6 Comments

  1. I got Hammerhead Shark!

    “Body tea? More like Body T (literally their bodies are shaped like a T). Hammerheads have a wider field of vision than other sharks, so if you get this answer, you too can see more than meets the eye and therefore are a good friend for analyzing dyke drama.”

    I feel this is all very true but I did feel embarrassed about having to pick the “I’m terrified of sharks please don’t make me see another picture of them” answers for quite a few questions. The idea that all sharks are lesbians does make me a little more endeared to them, however – doing god’s work, Kayla!

  2. Carpet Shark! God this is so true of me.
    I could eat seafood forever and then eat some more on top of that

  3. Carpet Shark

    Sorry does this NOT sound like it would be used as a euphemistic slur for a lesbian in the 1980s? Carpet sharks like to eat little things on the ocean floor, like crustaceans and mollusks. So perhaps you are a tinned fish / oysters / clams kind of lesbian. A Seafood Tower Dyke, if you will.

    Hahahaha, yes to the euphemistic slur that I will gladly adopt, but hard pass to the seafood. I am an “avoid tinned fish/oysters/clams” kind of queer. Is it because I’m bi? Is tinned fish only a lesbian thing?

    Either way, Carpet Shark yes, tinned fish no, this quiz A+.

  4. I got Whale Shark

    “Whale sharks are mostly solitary but will gather in large groups to FEAST, so you are a dinner party gay and/or the gay always hosting a queer soup night for the gang.”

    Hah, this is true. Just hosted my annual picnic for my in-town extended family a couple weeks ago.

Comments are closed.

Jordan Gonzalez Wants To Play Every Role

feature image photo by Jon Kopaloff / Stringer via Getty Images

The Long Walk is the latest in the long list of Stephen King film adaptations, following 2024’s The Life of Chuck and 2025’s The Monkey. Though the dystopian novel it’s based on — published under King’s pseudonym Richard Bachman — came out five years after he exploded onto the scene with Carrie, it was actually the first full novel King wrote. He started it during his freshman year at University of Maine around 1966, and the story is often seen as a critical metaphor for the Vietnam War. In its alternate version of the U.S., there’s an annual competition where 100 young men must walk at a consistent pace of four miles per hour or else be killed for receiving too many warnings. Only one can survive, and that winner gets whatever he wants for the rest of his life.

The movie version is set in a totalitarian post-apocalyptic future and maintains those painful scenes of boys having to walk endlessly and find comfort in each other in their quests to get rich. Nobody knows torturing young people in post-apocalyptic futures better than director Francis Lawrence, who has helmed every Hunger Games installment since Catching Fire.

Jordan Gonzalez, best known as Ash Romero from Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin, plays Harkness #49. Harkness is an observant teen and journalist who aspires to be a novelist. He maintains a journal to compose a novel based on his experiences.

We spoke with Gonzalez in a Zoom interview about how he got the part of Harkness, how he made the character uniquely his own, and his desire to examine various facets of the human experience shaped by his own. The conversation below has been edited for length and clarity.

Rendy: How’d you land the role of Harkness?

Jordan: I had heard about The Long Walk from one of my acting coaches, and she was like, “Hey, have you heard about this project? There’s a bunch of guys that you’re right for.” And I was like, “No, I haven’t.” I looked into it and I went, “Shit, I want to do this.”

Lucky enough, I got an audition the following week. Originally I had auditioned for Olson, sent in my tape for him, and got an immediate response, “Hey, Francis really loved your take. Would you be open to reading for Harkness?” I was like, “Of course. Absolutely.”

I auditioned for Harkness, then went into a director session. Honestly, I just knew that this was going to be a cool moment for me to flesh out who I thought he was and while also trying to stay as true to who the fans thought he is as well and honoring that. Plus, no one is a better Olson than Ben [Wang] and everyone landed exactly where they were meant to!

I had two days to turn it around, but in those two days, I walked, I learned my lines, and I fleshed him out walking. I wanted to get his cadence while walking, while he’s out of breath at night when he’s scared. It was a cool experience to build someone from the ground up while also stretching myself physically, mentally, emotionally in a lot of ways.

Rendy: Tell me about your walking process and how it influenced your development of Harkness and his journalist identity?

Jordan: He always, to me, was the audience. He doesn’t speak a lot, he observes a lot. And for me it was a way for the audience to see through his lens. So I would write my lines as I was walking in my own journal over and over and over again and how that would feel actually physically walking at that pace while continuously trying to write, which is so difficult.

And for me, his walk is fast, silly, goofy while also making sure he’s playing by the rules so that he lasts as long as he can, so that his book can make it out alive. But I would walk at night with little to no clothes on, trying to get the temperature and how that would feel like. And walking through strange neighborhoods to feel scared and threatened by something. I had a lot of coyotes in my neighborhood at that time, and so I would pass by packs of coyotes as if maybe that were the Major and his men and a lot of things like that, which really helped inform me on the day.

Rendy: What was it like going from your small screen experiences on Pretty Little Liars to, is this your first feature?

Jordan: It’s definitely the first, and it’s definitely the biggest. I did a short film anthology that lives as a feature, but my portion in it is a short, so technically, yeah, it’s a feature.

Honestly, I was a little intimidated. I had no idea if it was going to be different, and it was different in such a beautiful way from the day that I got there and walked into the prop warehouse. It was like just tables upon tables of old vintage items where we were allowed to, and honestly pushed, to walk through those rows and see what called to us and each of our characters about what they would have specifically in their bags. It was the same sort of thing walking into the wardrobe room; there was this big board of inspiration of 1950s Stand By Me-esque photos and just racks of clothes.

And it was not, “Hey, this is what we think you should wear.” It was, “Hey, what do you think he would wear? And what variations of that wardrobe do you think he would wear throughout the walk? What do you think he would wear when he dies? What do you think he would wear when he’s cold or hot, when it’s raining? What would he have in his bag to fidget with?” And of course, for me, the big thing is the journal, which I still have.

[Here, Jordan shows off his journal from the movie that features handwritten notes, a dead flower, and a 7 of spades card]

Rendy: Oh my Goodness.

Jordan: I was lucky enough to bring it with me, and it’s filled with things that I actually wrote. As if I was him. And for me, Jordan, this is a little nod to me. The number seven has always followed me in my life. And whenever I’m on the right path or the universe is telling me that things are going well, that number always pops up for me. And funny enough, I am number seven on the call sheet.

Rendy: Wow, that’s beautiful. That’s fate right there.

Jordan: It was fate and it lined up that way. I have this dead flower, which is from a conversation that Francis and I had while building him out. I thought Harkness to me is the pure light of innocence and a little naive of a young kid who just wants his work to live past him, whether that’s him dying on the walk or him living in the world he lives in that’s limiting him. His book is more important than his life, and his legacy is more important than him. And so I would see all of those little yellow flowers all throughout one of the plains.

Also, tying into the Vietnam War aspect of peace and journalism, journalists are always trying to tell the truth and be peacekeepers. And that image of people like hippies in the ‘70s handing out flowers to try to create peace really stuck with me. I saw that imagery, and I was like, that’s perfect. And so I was like, “Hey Francis, how do you feel if Harkness starts with a flower tied into his jacket pocket? And as he dies, the flowers die, and as he’s starting to unravel and starting to really realize what he signed up for, the imagery of the flower is there as well.” And of course, by the time he ‘gets his ticket,’ the flower’s no longer on his jacket pocket. It’s sort of like a loss of innocence and understanding has gone with that flower, and he gets to go back home.

TV is a beautiful medium. It is so fun to do, but it is formulaic. You get to dive so much deeper, and really build out all of these things, because there’s time that allows it in film. And that was just the coolest thing for me as an artist that I had not gotten to do yet. I do for all of my auditions, but I hadn’t got to do it yet where it lives somewhere forever.

And so for me, of course, my love for TV and PLL, I will always be so grateful for that show. They took a chance on me when I had just started. I had not done anything, nor did I know that I wanted to act. And they plucked me out of obscurity and gave me this opportunity to be on this fantastic show with all these incredible actors who had been doing it for years. Without them giving me the opportunity to really learn as I went, I don’t know that I would be here talking to you now about The Long Walk. That is so cool to be able to do that and to be able to stretch yourself in that way.

Rendy: Were there any activities that you guys did to lift your spirits given the bleakness of the film?

Jordan: It is extremely hard to walk 20 miles a day in the heat with that weight and shooting chronologically as well, where you either get to build these friendships with even background kids, stunt workers who walked with us every single day, and one day they don’t get to say goodbye. Seeing those familiar faces be gone without even being able to say bye to them was another added layer. When one of the characters went down, I started crying out of nowhere, and I didn’t think that it would have that much of an effect on me.

When you are so immersed in it and you see that and you feel someone’s performance, it only amplifies all of us realizing how important this all is, but also how hard it all is. And then, we all would talk afterwards about how that death made us feel. But the light side of it was that, yeah, we went on walks together, we went in Stargaze together when we were in those random places.

Rendy: What are some takeaways you felt that you learned from your experience with this movie and what would you hope  to bring along with you towards the next project you take on?

Jordan: I think I have the confidence to really throw ideas at the wall and try different things. And I think that’s something that I am learning as I grow as a human and also as an artist. I’ve only been doing it for five years. And again, I didn’t know I would ever be doing this. I never grew up thinking that I wanted to be an actor. I was an athlete my entire life. And when I started doing this, I completely fell in love with it. And for me, I love playing with the raw human experience. And I think that the throughline from Ash to Harkness is like each of them have a lot of heart and a lot of truth and a lot of honesty in who they are, but they exist.

Ash has a lot of worldly flaws against him, Harkness has a lot of worldly flaws against him that shaped them as young men. And I think for me, I want to continue to flesh out all of those different versions of the human experience and what that looks like and really dig deep into different versions of how the world affects different people.

Rendy: What are some different genres you’d like to explore in the future?

Jordan: I love-hate this question, because I’ve just started, so there’s so much I want to do.  I love Heath Ledger. And for me, he is and was such a beautiful person who was able to do so many different things. And I think for me, because of my lived experience, I don’t want to be pigeonholed, and I want to be able to play a villain, and I want to be able to play a rock star, and I want to be able to play a superhero, and I want to be able to play the bleeding heart, romantic lead and all of these things because I am a fully faceted person. And so for me, I really look up to him, because he was really able to do that in all of his work. Everything is so different and everything is without bounds. And so for me, just if I’m lucky, I hope that I get to do things without bounds.

The Long Walk is in theaters now.

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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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.

Rendy has written 31 articles for us.

4 Comments

  1. Um, for those of us who have NO idea who this guy is, it might be helpful to tell us he’s trans? [Because otherwise, I was left w/ “OK, he’s sorta cute, but why is here here?”]

    • Yeah I was skimming through the interview to see if there were questions about the trans experience or something, I figured that must be the case, because AS doing an interview like this with a cis man would have been very off brand. I get not necessarily wanting to reduce people to “trans actor” when cis actors don’t need to be identified as cis, but I don’t think this person is famous enough to not include a detail like that

  3. Just came from this movie and really did a great job with the character, particularly his final scene!!! It got the most winces in my cinema out of any of them

Comments are closed.

I’m a Cis Butch Woman, and Boy Do I Want Top Surgery!

Is It Okay To Want Top Surgery This Much?

Q

I really want to get top surgery. I’m not a trans guy or non-binary. I just hate my DD boobs and always have. I have a lot of trans masc and nb friends and I feel overwhelming jealousy of their top surgery. I told my wife I wanted to do this, even if it cost money out of pocket, and she was kinda miffed about it, saying it seems like a silly thing to spend money on when we’re trying to save for a house down payment. She didn’t say NO but doesn’t seem to understand how much this means to me.  I’ve been depressed ever since that conversation.. I’m not excited about one day having a house because I will still have these boobs!! Can I feel dysphoric about my boobs even though I’m a butch woman and not trans?

A:

Summer: So it’s definitely possible to experience dysphoria about parts of the body without reconsidering their gender identity. That’s the foundation of any aesthetic modification that stems from a deep desire to ‘change’ one’s appearance. I want a nose job, but that doesn’t change my core identity. When someone has the desire to alter a secondary sexual characteristic, there’ll be inevitable questions about whether this is related to your gendered self. You’ll get those questions from medical professionals, loved ones, and yourself. It’s worth hearing out some perspectives on it, especially if they’re concerns in your own mind.

Otherwise, you sound adamant about getting top surgery. I believe what you’re looking for is a voluntary double mastectomy. Sometimes dubbed a prophylactic double mastectomy when used to reduce breast cancer risk. I can’t speak to the specifics of how to get one since that’ll depend on your place of residence, healthcare access, and even how you can advocate your position to medical professionals. But people do alter their secondary sexual characteristics because they feel disconnected from their body. Sure, most people add to, or alter their breasts rather than remove them, but that just makes you a minority, not nonexistent.

Nico: Yep. You’re not the only cis woman who’s wanted top surgery! Plenty of women, especially women on the butch/masc spectrum. Reasons include wanting to fit into the clothes that they feel good in, being tired of feeling like their breasts get in the way of exercise, and also pain from the weight of the breasts. It’s my understanding that having breasts on the larger side can be uncomfortable for some people, many of whom choose breast reduction. Finally, some women opt for just full removal instead of reduction so they can experience the freedom of not wearing a bra and even enjoy time out in the world shirtless.

Now, as for your conversation — that IS depressing. It’s also depressing that top surgery costs so much and so do house down payments. I can’t tell you two what to do financially, but the first place to start is with a conversation about your shared finances, shared goals, and how you’re getting there. And, yes, each of you are allowed to bring goals you have for yourselves and your personal fulfillment to these conversations.

Riese: I think there’s a vast spectrum of gender experiences and presentations that a person can have —you can not identify as trans and/or nonbinary but still feel that not having boobs is part of how your specific gender is best expressed. I feel like the jury’s still out on what exactly goes into any given experience of gender. But I know lots of people who’ve gotten top surgery despite not identifying as trans and/or nonbinary —some did, eventually, come out as trans and/or nonbinary, but many did not! Also I imagine DD boobs are pretty heavy, it’s within reason that you’d want to downsize those guys, and why not just downsize them all the way? You could probably finance part of the surgery if there are out-of-pocket expenses — but I think what Nico said is really important —you are allowed to bring goals you have for your own personal fulfillment to these financial conversations.

How Can I Learn To Love My Body?

Q

Hey! I need advice about crippling body image issues that have recently come up for me. I am a 30-something year old, who in the last 5 years has realised I am EXTREMELY queer, and loving my new-found acceptance of my sexual identity. More recently, I have also been having some _feelings_ about gender – I think I am non-binary, and leaning into the more masc side of my identity, and starting to embrace that too.

This is all background to say, I have all of these new swirling feelings about sexuality and gender, most of which are euphoric. BUT along with this, I have been so uncomfortable with my body I sometimes feel I want to rip my skin off. I have had (what I feel are) the usual body concerns growing up AFAB – diet culture and the like have made me aware of being too “big” or not feminine enough. I have done my best to combat this, and I have been a weightlifter for about 10 years. As a result of this, I have a really big, muscular frame – which sounds like it should be a brag – but along with hips and breasts and a new masc gender feeling, all of this has left me in a mess of body dysphoria. I think the advice I am asking is this: apart from therapy (which I am doing), what are some ways I can learn to love my body where it is at, as it is, without becoming obsessed with how people perceive me? I understand that maybe I am asking you to answer the equivalent to the meaning of life, but as a group of cool queer people, do you have any advice on radical body acceptance, gender acceptance, and love?

A

Summer: I’m sure you’ll get diverse opinions about this one. The angle I try to advise people on in this situation is informed by body neutrality. It’s an approach that tries to remove positive and negative value judgments from body image and first reduce bodies to their component functions. Before building up values again slowly.

So it would be like not seeing parts of your body as being ‘beautiful’ or ‘unattractive’, but looking toward their function. You are a weightlifter and you have robust arm, back, and core muscles. You have a sizable frame that supports these functions and provides necessary cushion when lifting. And so forth.

Another thing about body neutrality is that its orientation is not viciously positive. It leaves room to be dissatisfied with the functions and aesthetics of parts of your body, but encourages seeing the proverbial greener grass. Now, part of the dysphoria you’re experiencing is clearly gendered, and this won’t cut through that brand of dysphoria entirely. But it can give you a detached approach on some parts of yourself so that you’re not always drowning in value judgements from within and without.

Nico: I think that along with body neutrality, it might help to invest some time into styling. If you can feel comfortable in your clothes when out in the world, then you can be more comfortable with how people perceive you. Have you found pants that you feel look good on you and that also you feel bring out your masc-ness? Have you figured out where you feel most comfortable on the bra-less – bra – sports bra – binder spectrum? Dressing yourself well and in ways that make you feel confident before you leave your home can help you deal with worrying about how people perceive you.

I love that you’re going to therapy. I also recommend just exposing yourself to stories and media created by and featuring queer people as much as possible. The more you see all the awesome and hot ways masc queer people can be — and exist, and have bodies, the better I think you’ll be able to place yourself within that world. Autostraddle has a huge archive of everything — books, movie, TV, whatever your jam may be. And as for people perceiving you, I think it’s helpful to keep in mind that what is happening in your head — a preoccupation with your own world — is the norm. People may perceive you, and then they will perceive the next person, and the next, and the next. If in closer relationships — dating, friendships, etc. — you feel like people aren’t treating you in affirming ways, I hope that you feel like those relationships are ones where you can have those conversations. If not, then that merits evaluating those relationships.

 

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auto has written 802 articles for us.

3 Comments

  1. just another cis woman chiming in here about wanting top surgery! I’m not even particularly butch, and I don’t feel non-binary, but I hate my (DDD) breasts. I feel like having such big boobs give such an air of ‘femininity’ or ‘womanliness’ to me that I really hate – I wear a binder every day and am always going back on forth on if it would be silly to get surgery to have them removed (or at least dramatically reduced). It’s such a weird feeling because I don’t think I have the kind of dysphoria trans people do, so something about the desire feels superfluous or merely artificial — I keep thinking, ‘it’s just internalized misogyny that you don’t like your boobs! just accept that even non-feminine women can look lots of ways!’ but I haven’t convinced myself yet, and my desire to get rid of them feels very connected to how I feel about my gender. my partner also doesn’t quite get it, I don’t think – they always say, ‘oh yeah, those must be uncomfortable!’ but it’s not really about the physical discomfort for me.

    I probably won’t ever do it – the money and the health risks just make it out of reach for me personally – and I wish I had some real advice or something? but I’m just here to say I’m also feeling confused and conflicted about this topic, and I appreciate that you wrote in with this question. I hope that you’re able to find a way to make top surgery happen for you, and that your partner comes around to supporting you the way you deserve.

  2. I too wish to get top surgery! If your boobs are big enough (which they are) have you considered a minor lie? If u talk to ur primary care provider abt a breast reduction to reduce back pain u can get it covered by insurance! The trick is to SOLEY frame it within the confines of
    -back pain
    – tissue breakdown (if you get any skin breakdown under ur boobs)

  3. I am cis-ish and got top surgery a year ago!! I started the conversation by asking my primary care for a referral for breast reduction, because initially I wasn’t sure and that felt easier to ask for anyway. But in the consultation I realized I wouldn’t get a small enough result for it to feel worth doing and I asked about “just chopping them off instead” lol. That did require going through the gender route, but luckily for me that just meant doing a session with a gender therapist who signed off on it. I maybe exaggerated gender stuff a bit but I was quite honest about not being a woman in “the right way” and they asked how I felt about saying I was genderqueer and I was like yeah, sure. All this huge response to say, you can totally get top surgery as a cis woman, and if you’re one of us lucky ones (location location location) it can even be covered by insurance.

Comments are closed.

Lesbians Are an Essential Part of Basketball History

In the heart of Manhattan’s West Village, a haven for queer New York Liberty fans comes alive. Inside The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center, lovingly known as The Center, a vibrant floor hums with the rhythm of basketball, history, and queer fandom.

A poster with a bold declaration — “EVERYONE WATCHES DYKE SPORTS” — hangs proudly against a cream brick wall on the fourth floor of the library and archive space. Nearby, there are snapshots of lesbian couples and fans beaming from the stands of New York Liberty games, draped in the team’s signature seafoam green, posed with players or holding handmade signs. Interspersed among them are childhood photos of fans alongside the early Liberty team, capturing the roots of a lifelong connection. These photos lend a personal touch to the wall that makes you feel as if you’ve stepped into a family reunion for women’s sports fans. Together, they tell a story of visibility, belonging, and celebration both on and off the court.

Court and Becky Hammon, Solicited via Liberty’s Fan Drive, Courtesy of The Lesbian Herstory Archives
Maddie Escorting Jessica, Solicited via Liberty’s Fan Drive, Courtesy of The Lesbian Herstory Archives
Ana and Irma with Ellie, Solicited via Liberty’s Fan Drive, Courtesy of The Lesbian Herstory Archives
Jillian’s First Game, Solicited via Liberty’s Fan Drive, Courtesy of The Lesbian Herstory Archives
Denise and Layshia Clarendon, Solicited via Liberty’s Fan Drive, Courtesy of The Lesbian Herstory Archives
Dai and Courtney, Solicited via Liberty’s Fan Drive, Courtesy of The Lesbian Herstory Archives

Playful, vibrant fan-made signs that read “LESBIAN FANS ARE LEGION” and “LIBERTY: LESBIAN FANS ARE FILLING YOUR STANDS!” call to the viewer, encouraging them to bask in its joy and resistance.

Everyone Watches Dyke Sports: Queer Histories of New York Liberty Basketball examines how deeply intertwined queer identity, fandom, and community are within the culture of women’s sports. What began as a collaboration with the New York Liberty — featured initially at the team’s annual Pride game — has since expanded into an exhibition now on display at The Center. Curated by a group of Liberty fans at the Lesbian Herstory Archives, the exhibition foregrounds the voices, memories, and artifacts that made Liberty games a hub for lesbian life in the city.

“Lesbian fans have filled the stands of Liberty games since the earliest years of the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) in the late 1990s,” says The Center’s exhibition description. “As always, lesbian fans have helped propel the league’s surging popularity. This exhibit tells the story of lesbian fan cultures and their role in the leagues history.”

This thriving fan culture didn’t just develop by chance. It speaks to a larger history of queer community-building and visibility in spaces where LGBTQ+ presence has often been overlooked or excluded. For many lesbian fans, attending Liberty games wasn’t just about basketball, but claiming space, forming connections, and experiencing a sense of collective belonging that was a powerful alternative to the heteronormativity that defined much of mainstream sports culture in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

The spirit of community and resistance is at the heart of this exhibit. From personal photographs and handmade signs to vintage Liberty merchandise, each piece offers a glimpse into the ways lesbian fans have claimed visibility and belonging within (and beyond) the stands. Together, these objects form a visual narrative of creativity, resilience, and joy that has long thrived in spaces where it wasn’t always recognized.

To understand the emotional weight and cultural significance of this fandom, you only need to look at the artifacts themselves.

An original 2002 Liberty ticket stub, from the team’s early days playing at Madison Square Garden, hangs on the wall. Its weathered edges and faded ink are a testament to a different era of women’s basketball. That season, the team was led by Teresa Weatherspoon, Becky Hammon, Vickie Johnson, and more — a powerhouse roster of trailblazing athletes whose talent, charisma, and resilience helped define the early WNBA and laid the groundwork for the visibility and popularity of women’s sports today.

Courtesy of The Lesbian Herstory Archives

Just beneath the ticket stub, handmade paper glasses and paper fans sit carefully preserved behind glass with a vintage Liberty t-shirt and headband. The glasses, decorated with doodles of stars, hearts, and basketballs, proclaim “Lesbian Fans Fill the Stands!” The handmade memorabilia echoes the same cheeky slogan, but nods to the spirit of Lesbians For Liberty, a group of Liberty fans who protested the team’s management in the early 2000s for their failure to recognize and celebrate its deeply lesbian fanbase.

Jess Dobkin, Courtesy of The Lesbian Herstory Archives

At the time, despite the visible and vocal presence of queer fans in the stands, the Liberty’s marketing and outreach remained largely silent on LGBTQ+ representation. In response, fans organized under Lesbians For Liberty to make their presence impossible to ignore. They brought protest signs — many of which are featured in the exhibit — wrote open letters, and applied pressure to the organization to acknowledge and celebrate the community that had long supported the team. Among the materials preserved in the exhibit is a flyer with detailed instructions for a “Lesbian Time-Out Kiss-In for Liberty,” inviting “all lesbians, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer people” to stand and share a kiss during every time-out in a game as a peaceful act of protest and visibility.

Lesbians for Liberty, Courtesy of The Lesbian Herstory Archives

Lesbians for Liberty not only challenged the league to recognize its queer fanbase; it helped open the door for greater visibility of queer players themselves. Over time, the Liberty began to more openly embrace LGBTQ+ inclusion both in its public messaging and in its celebration of out athletes. A pivotal moment came when former Liberty player Sue Wicks came out in 2002 to Time Out, making her one of the first gay athletes to come out in the WNBA. In the exhibition, an archived page from Time Out featuring the interview with Wicks is on display.

The exhibit uses archival materials to highlight how fan activism helped transform professional women’s basketball into a more inclusive space. This not only honors those who demanded visibility, but also invites reflection on building a sports culture that strives for all identities to be seen, valued, and celebrated.

Jess Dobkin, Courtesy of The Lesbian Herstory Archives

“It’s been fun to watch people’s eyes light up when they see it,” said Lou McCarthy, The Center’s Director of Archives. “The direct action legacy it depicts, rooted in the work of the Lesbian Avengers and ACT UP, is proof that we can change institutions and the world around us on so many levels.”

Everyone Watches Dyke Sports: Queer Histories of New York Liberty Basketball is on view at The Center until September 28.

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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Kayley Cassidy

Kayley is a writer and journalist based in New York. Her writing can be found in GO Magazine, TV Guide Magazine, TV Insider, and a Substack newsletter she created, highlighting queer-inclusive sports clubs and leagues in New York City, Queer Sports Collective. When she’s not writing, ranting about the WNBA, or watching sitcoms, you can find her sunbathing along the East River.

Kayley has written 2 articles for us.