Asexual lesbian with a nearly nonexistant sex drive here. All I hear is that the expected norm in lesbian relationships is hours and hours of sex at a time. PLEASE tell me this is true for only 9/10 non-ace lesbians (or less). I’m willing to compromise for a partner but sorry not sorry that I cannot imagine doing so for hours at a time as an adult with very limited free time who could probably only enjoy sex for a few minutes at the most before being bored to death (and inherently has no desire to have sex, it’d be a favor for a loved one). Considering the asexual spectrum dating pool is actually a kiddie pool, unless I can make it work with a non-ace I doubt I can ever find a partner… And yes I’ve heard and done it all when it comes to meeting ace spectrum women, there just aren’t enough out there.
A:
Hi, non-ace lesbian here, and I do not necessarily expect hours and hours of sex every time I have it. First of all, I’m busy! Second of all, there’s a time and place for a sex marathon, but it doesn’t have to be all the time and it doesn’t have to be the norm.
I think as with a lot of lesbian stereotypes and cliches, there’s some truth to it and also some myth to it. I think the commonly held mantra that lesbian sex is long and multi-orgasmic was born as a reaction to the reality that heterosexual sex often has a fixed start and end point that hinges entirely on the man’s pleasure, often satisfied swiftly. Since queer sex often decentralizes orgasm, the amount of “time” sex takes is more fluid.
And yes, some people love to go at it for very long amounts of time, but I do not think this is the norm across the board, just like how I’m pretty sure it isn’t actually the norm for the majority of lesbians to U-Haul with their partners. There’s a whole range of realities when it comes to lesbian dating and relationships, regardless of what the jokes and stereotypes reinforce.
So I wouldn’t get too worried about this, especially if you’re able to make your own expectations about sex and your asexuality clear upfront with a potential partner. Toys can make sex super…efficient. There are plenty of allosexual lesbians out there who enjoy or even prefer quickies. There are also plenty of allosexual lesbians with low sex drives, which I think we should also normalize! Talk to potential partners to see where they fall.
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?
Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya is the managing editor of Autostraddle and a lesbian writer of essays, fiction, and pop culture criticism living in Orlando. She is the former managing editor of TriQuarterly, and her short stories appear in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Joyland, Catapult, The Offing, The Rumpus, Cake Zine, and more. Some of her pop culture writing can be found at The A.V. Club, Vulture, The Cut, and others. When she is not writing, editing, or reading, she is probably playing tennis. You can follow her on Twitter or Instagram and learn more about her work on her website.
As an allosexual but completely exhausted human with chronic illness and disability, can confirm: I do not want long sex! My solo sex is usually 2-5 minutes, tops (hello “efficient” toys). My nb partner prefers long sex, but will begin our sessions by asking for a time limit because they know my needs and desires will vary. When they really need longer engagement, I offer to watch rather than have my whole body involved. Compromise is out there!
My wife Kristen and I have had conversations throughout our relationship about our relationships to femmeness and butchness. Prior to our relationship, I felt fledgling in my femmeness, but once we started dating, I gradually began harnessing an over-the-top femininity that felt like the real me. A huge part of that was Kristen’s almost precognitive perception of what I feel and look good in: from jewelry, to makeup, to clothes. This has led to us joking through the years that I’m like a Barbie doll for her to dress up and play with.
I was going to write an essay about this, but I thought an interview between the two of us would be even more revelatory — and I was right! Below, find our conversation about the “sliding scale” of gender expression, the masc urge to style femmes, the many services Kristen offers at “Daddy’s Salon,” and more.
Kayla: Okay, this is the interview where you’re going to talk about treating your wife like a Barbie doll, and then you’re going to get canceled.
Kristen: Hopefully, yeah, in that order.
Kayla: What would you get canceled for before?
Kristen: Who’s to say!
photo by Maria Rada, from Kayla and Kristen’s engagement shoot
Kayla: So I figured to start, I feel like you have a decent amount of Barbie lore. So before we even get into gender and sexuality and that kind of stuff, what is your history with Barbie?
Kristen: I wrote an essay about this for BuzzFeed, but I was obsessed with Barbies. I loved dolls growing up. I thought baby dolls were fine — I liked them, but they weren’t my favorite. I loved Barbies. I liked how they moved. I liked all the different outfits and themes they had. I liked the accessories. I liked the idea that you could spend a literal hour putting together a scenario, setting up a scene between two Barbies and put together what that bedroom would look like, or a kitchen or something. Sometimes I would do that and that would take me two hours, and then I’d be exhausted and I’d be like, well, I can’t even act the scene out now because I’m tired from setting up the scene.
So maybe that’s the writer in me, early writing brain being like, and here’s what’s going to happen in the scene. But we didn’t have any money either, so it’s like the dolls I had, I collected from different people on birthdays and Christmas. But I would use a shoebox as a bed and I would be like, oh, look, I can use the shoebox lid as a wall inside the place. I didn’t have stuff, using a Kleenex wadded up as a pillow and another Kleenex for a blanket, so it’d be trying to set stuff up with the things I had. It was very fun. The accessory stuff felt very creative, but I also liked the Barbies just because I thought that they were pretty. They were always older seeming than me, because when I had them, they were fully fleshed out in form.
Kayla: Boobs.
Kristen: They had boobs and asses, and they looked like adults. I liked that they looked like adults.
“i wanted to have a barbie that represented the babysitter’s club”
Kayla: Did you have favorite ones?
Kristen: Yes, but especially when I was in the fifth grade, I was obsessed with The Babysitter’s Club, and so I wanted to have a Barbie that represented what I thought was each member of the Babysitters Club. I’d set up the room where they would be at somebody’s house, at Claudia Kishi’s house, taking the meeting. She’s the only one with the phone line.
Kayla: Yeah. I said yeah, but I actually know very little about The Babysitter’s Club.
Kristen: Come on, Kayla.
feat. various sunglasses Kristen has given Kayla through the years
Kristen: So I had different Barbies that represented each of those members of The Babysitter’s Club. I thought I did a great job with them. My California Fun Barbie was Dawn because she was from California. So I’m like, aha, perfect. Because Ann M. Martin’s always writing her as dressing like she’s from California, whatever the fuck that means.
There were these dolls that weren’t Barbies, but were popular for a period of time called Maxie Dolls, and they were like Barbies, except I think at the time they were proto-feminist, so the boobs were a more normal size, the waist was—
Kayla: Smaller boobed Barbies?
Kristen: Yes.
Kayla: Like flat-chested Barbie?
Kristen: Not flat-chested, but a reasonable sized proportion. Her feet were flat.
Kayla: Oh, she didn’t have the perpetual heel.
Kristen: She wore a flat shoe, but she, to me, looked really sophisticated, so I made her Stacey, who was from New York.
Kayla: Got you.
Kristen: And then, I mean, Kristy, who was the tomboy, I made her Skipper.
Kayla: So she was the tomboy? I mean, that’s what I was going to get into.
Kristen: Skipper’s also a little kid, kind of.
Kayla: I think when I was playing with Barbies, Skipper went through a few rebrands and they aged her up eventually. She was still a teen. I had a skateboard Skipper that I think was supposed to be a little older.
Kristen: Then they came out with Kelly, who was supposed to be in elementary school.
Kayla: Yes, Kelly was the little one. With the exception of that one Skipper — which is also funny because Skipper was not that much of a tomboy.
Kristen: I think my brain chose her as that, because I was like…
Kayla: You were mostly playing with very high femme, classic Barbie dolls.
Kristen: Right. I had outfits for all of them. I wasn’t as interested in the gowns on Barbie. Don’t get me wrong. I had some, but it was like whatever people gave me, I kept. I had a shit ton of clothes, but my favorites were little slutty outfits.
Kayla: Like Club Barbie.
Kristen: Club Barbie. I had this white leather mini skirt with a purple velvet belt with glitter in it, and I thought that was a hot look. I loved crop tops, little tank tops or a little shrug, leotard, any aerobics clothes. I’d like them to look sexy. Somebody gave me a wedding with accessories, but those were not as fun to me. The fun stuff was more like, Rocker Chick Barbie.
“tomboy barbies were a subconsciously accessible form of queer expression”
Kayla: Well, that’s funny to me because I feel like Barbies are for us, like they are for a lot of queer people, part of our original queer lore, but in these interesting ways where you were playing with super, super femme Barbies, but now you’re more butch, more masc. I was playing with the “tomboy” barbies, which weren’t like,MascBarbie, but I was playing with Skipper—
Kristen: There was Ken, Kayla.
Kayla: There was Ken. I did not like Ken. I was like, that was too masc. But I liked Skipper. There was a line called The Generation Girls, something like that, and I had one who was a tomboy. She skateboarded and had these baggy metallic pants and a boombox. And also, I had a Mary Kate [of the Olsen Twins] Barbie, which was the tomboy one. She had a horse-riding outfit — khakis and a blazer, pretty masc for Barbie.Equestrian attire, basically masc.
So I was very drawn to that. And now I’m so femme and high-femme myself, but it also took me a while to get to that high-femme place. I think that those tomboy Barbies were almost like a subconsciously accessible form of queer expression or queer gender expression for me at a super young age, before I ever would’ve put words to that or really understood it. But then I think for you, it was the opposite. This idea of being able to dress up and manipulate these slutty, femme Barbies.
feat. a bathing suit Kristen got for Kayla
Kristen: I would’ve spent all day playing with Barbies, and I played with my Barbies way longer than other people I knew.
Kayla: Me too. We both have younger sisters, I will say.
Kristen: I used that quite often as an excuse to be able to play with them. But I didn’t like playing with my sister with them. I liked that my sister got stuff, and then I got to play with it myself. Because my sister’s eight and a half years younger than me. And my closest sibling was my brother, and he and I were less than two years apart, and he was not wanting to play with Barbies. There was a period of time when I had a friend from church who’d sometimes want to play Barbies, but mostly I’d play Barbies by myself. Just for hours, alone, putting together my scenarios. I was very specific about my Barbies and didn’t want people touching them or messing with them. I got very angry if my sister tried to do things to them ’cause I didn’t trust other people to take care of them the way I wanted to.
Kayla: Because those were your girlfriends.
Kristen: Those were my girlfriends.
Kayla: Those were literally your girlfriends. And if anybody was mistreating them, you were going to fight them.
Kristen: Well, I think because too, I was so careful how I put their clothes on, keeping all their stuff together, their hair. I wanted their hair to look like it had when they were in the box. You couldn’t have paid me money to cut off my Barbie’s hair, which I know some people did. I loved their hair! It was the most beautiful, long, gorgeous hair, and I was like, I really want to keep it looking nice.
Kayla: Did you ever have any of the brunette dolls, though, because you don’t love a blonde?
Kristen: I did have some, yeah. I had—
Kayla: Teresa, mayhaps? Was she around?
Kristen: Yes, I think she was my Mary Anne.
Kayla: I love Teresa.
Kristen: She was my Mary Anne in my situation. And my Claudia doll was Asian American, and she had beautiful hair. And I just wanted them to stay looking pristine and perfect. And the jewelry — like sometimes they came with earrings you could put on them.
Kayla: Yeah, I remember because I ripped some out of mine.
Kristen: Oh my God. Oh, that was a thing that happened too. I had an unholy fit once because it was either my brother or my sister chewed on the hands and feet of my Barbies and ruined them.
Kayla: A lot of people have oral fixation with Barbie limbs.
Kristen: I get it, but it ruined them — their hands were all crimped up! I wanted to maintain how they looked, which wasn’t something I felt for myself. I didn’t even brush my own hair most of the time. I was always dirty, my clothes never fit right. Dressing for church made me deeply physically uncomfortable.Not even like, oh, I feel uncomfortable with gender. I did feel uncomfortable about clothes. Most of the time, I just wore them. I had to start wearing heels and pantyhose and lipstick to church by the time I was in sixth grade, and I didn’t like that, but I knew that I had to. But I loved that stuff on Barbies.
“i like things that are shiny”
Kristen and Kayla at Orlando Pride
Kayla: So, from even very early on in our relationship, you bought me a lot of jewelry and clothes.
Kristen: Well, okay, for myself — the things I wear jewelry-wise are just the things I’ve worn for basically my whole life.
Kayla: Yeah. It’s very permanent. And It’s very masculine of center, I would say.
Kristen: It’s pretty minimal, and I don’t take it off ever, except my watch that I put on and take off every day. I don’t take any of it off.
Kayla: Yeah. Even in the shower.
Kristen: Even in the shower, to sleep.
Kayla: But you like femme jewelry. You just like it on me.
Kristen: I like to look at it. A huge part of what I liked about Barbie was that I could look at Barbie and be like, what do I think looks good on her? What do I think makes her look good? And so you could look at her and be like, she has this color hair. She looks this way. She comes with this makeup on. You could see what coloring that was, and then choose something to go with it.
I was also limited, because we didn’t have any money. My mom would sew clothes or I had some clothes that were hers from when she was young from her Barbie. So it’s these retro 1960s, 1970s stuff, which was really pretty fun. But yeah, buying clothes and jewelry for you felt actually so much easier than buying it for myself. Because when I was wearing stuff like skirts or jewelry, wearing makeup, I could buy it, but I’d never know what would fit on me or look right.
Kayla: Meanwhile, pretty much literally since the second we got together, you’ve bought me jewelry, at least one piece of jewelry for every single gift giving holiday that we’ve ever celebrated together — Christmas, my birthday, our anniversary, whatever. It’s very rarely something I would’ve picked for myself. It’s one of those things where you know what looks good on me better than I do. You’re also not going off of trends or anything. You’re not buying me the thing that you see that every girl is wearing on Instagram or something like that. You buy me something that’s so perfect on me. And my mom, early on, was always very shocked by that. She would compliment me on something I was wearing, like jewelry or clothes, and I was like, “Yeah, Kristen got that for me.” And she was like, “What?!”
Kristen: Well, some of it is that I feel like, in buying jewelry for you, what I usually try and think about is, because you do wear a lot of jewelry…
Kayla: I do. I love jewelry and I love to change it out too.
Kristen: You mix and match and wear a lot of different things. So usually I think about what things you are interested in, and I also think about the stuff you’ve been into…because you go through, I feel like, spurts of wearing more rings at one time or wearing more necklaces.
Kayla: More silver sometimes, more gold.
Kristen: Yeah. And so I go based off of that, but also I like to see if I can find something that you don’t have already. Is it something that looks like something that you would wear with the clothes and fashion you’re into right now?
Kayla: I always get compliments on pretty much all the jewelry I wear from you.
Kristen: I think jewelry — It has to have a personality. I try and get you something that looks like it has its own personality. But it’s fun to buy you jewelry because then you wear it, and then I get to look at you wear it. And that is better than if I put it on myself because, I used to get jewelry for myself but never wore it.
Kayla: You just liked looking at it.
Kristen: I like things that are shiny.
feat. shiny dresses Kristen has bought for Kayla
Kayla: You love things that are glittery, shiny, all of that. Which I think people don’t always associate first with butchness or masculinity or whatever.
Kristen: I love shimmer and glitter and sequins. Something shiny will catch my eye. I’m like a crow.
Kayla: You are. It can be the tackiest dress I’ve ever seen, but if it’s sparkly, you’re like, “That’s so cute.” Not that you’ve ever bought me something tacky. That’s not what I mean. I mean on reality television or something like that.
Kristen: Well, I know that I like looking at things that are shiny, but also, and I’ve bought you some things that are shiny, but I only try and buy you things that I think are something you will actually wear, first of all.
“this is the last time I’m wearing a dress”
Kayla: You also buy me clothes. And I think you approach buying me clothes in a similar way to how you’re dressing those Barbies, which is you are drawn to how these cuts of clothes look, but obviously you just don’t want to wear them. You want to admire them in proximity to you.
Kristen: Especially when I was working in libraries, I’d have to be dressed for work all the time — heels, pencil skirts, dresses or rights or whatever. I had a closet full of clothes ’cause I was interested in the idea of different patterns and looking at things. I had so many floral dresses and I’d just be looking at myself thinking okay, this is wearing me, instead of I was wearing that thing. And there were certain things I found that I liked better. Things that were more tailored, that had a certain something that made me wear them longer.
Kayla: Yeah, I mean, I think that anyone who knows you or is even a little bit familiar with you would be surprised to hear that one of the last times you wore a dress was as recently as earlier in our relationship. We went to a wedding together, and you wore a dress.
Kristen: And I remember being there, being like this is the last time I’m wearing a dress.
Kayla: And it was! Well, when you decide you’re done with something, it’s very definitive.
Kristen: Yeah, that is absolutely true. But I was looking around and I was like I’m at a gay wedding right now. Why am I in this outfit that I don’t want to be wearing?
Kayla: I think when you were working in libraries, you felt like you had to perform for the workplace, but at in a space like a queer wedding, that bubble was suddenly popped.
Kristen: I was really unhappy. I was unhappy that I had worn it, honestly. So I was like, that’s just the last time I’m doing that.
Kayla: I wore a full sequin dress because I knew you would love it.
Kristen: It was shiny. You looked like a mermaid.
“you’re holding it down for the long-haired butches”
Kayla: By the point of that wedding, you had been out as queer, as gay for a long time, but I think close to that wedding and the beginning of our relationship — even when we were just fucking around or whatever — you were still coming into butchness a little bit.
Kristen: Well, some of it is that I’ve always been really particular about what I like for myself, and when I do find something I like, I really keep that. I’ve had the same haircut since 100 years ago.
Kayla: You’re holding it down for the long-haired butches.
Kristen: I like long hair.
Kayla: You’re holding it down for the butches who sometimes wear lipstick, too.
Kristen: The lipstick I wear happens to be red, but it’s actually this balm that’s more of a chapstick-lipstick that’s minty. But I just like my hair long.
Kayla: I don’t think that changes my perception of you as butch or anything. I know that we have actually written or done these interviews for Autostraddle before, where we’ll get the weird response of “Kristen Arnett, she’s not a butch.” There’s been random troll-y comments like that, and I’m like, what are you talking about? Because she has long hair, because she wears lipstick? That just doesn’t click for me, but I think there’s still people even within our community that are so biased in the way that they perceive masc identity or butch identity.
Kristen and Kayla in North Carolina, Key West, New York City, Miami, and Maine
Kristen: I also think too, everything is so much on a sliding scale and whatever. There’s been times recently where I’m like, “I don’t really want to wear lipstick right now.” But then there’s still days I get up and then I’m like, I really want to wear a lot of it. And I think that’s just how you change how you think about yourself.
Kayla: Yeah, I mean you were wearing blush for a while when you were still very much already expressing butch-ness.
Kristen: There’s noprogrammed guide to be like, here’s how you perform any of this stuff.
Kayla: I think for either side of it, femme, butch, any of it.
Kristen: It’s all just movable on a scale, I think. I mean, some of it is here’s what I like right now, and that can include any number of things. I own the same pair of shorts in five different colors because I was like, I like these shorts because I like how they fit.
Kayla: You like what you like.
Kristen: I like what I like.
Kayla: But there’s a difference for you about what you like on you versus what you like to admire on me.
Kristen: I’m so particular and have such a narrow set of things I like for myself. But for you, it’s so expansive.
It’s like how I was for those Barbies, where I view it as an open palette. So it’s like, are we dressing you for summer? Are we going to New York for the weekend? What do those clothes look like, or that makeup? Are we going to the beach? Are we going on vacation? Are we going to the mountains?
“i got your femme hand-me-downs”
Kayla: When we moved in together, I always say, I got your femme hand-me-downs. You were getting rid of a bunch of stuff when we were moving and you were like,let me go through all my dresses and my heels. Tell me what you want. And I took a lot of it.
Kristen: You did.
Kayla: And I still wear a lot of it, like the pencil skirts from librarian days. And it’s interesting because people like my family, they really got to know you once you were a little more butch and more comfortable in that space too, so that’s how they know you. So every time my mom compliments me on a skirt and I say that it used to be yours, her mind is blown.
Kristen: I mean, some of that too is as soon as I got to leave the day work of library work to become a writer full-time, I got torelease a certain way of behaving or moving through the world.
Kayla: I think a lot of people who have worked service jobs can probably relate to that, having to perform.
Kristen: It basically was like, here’s all this uniform that I don’t need anymore. Because the only place I wore that stuff was at work. If I’m not doing this job anymore, I don’t have to wear this kind of “uniform” anymore. Jewelry, makeup, dresses, skirts, shoes, I just let it all go. It was very freeing. But then when you were trying it on, I was like, “oh that looks great on you!” Like those platforms I had that were getting older, and not gonna last much longer, I gave to you.
Kayla: Oh yeah. I wore those wedges to that Ilana Glazer show and the heel completely broke off.
Kristen: Yeah.
Kayla: I’m just walking around on mismatched heels at Gramps in Miami.
Kristen: But I liked them so much on you and you liked them so much, I just got you new ones.
Kayla and Kristen from casual to dressy
Kayla: Do you think it was solely the job that kept you holding onto those high femme parts of your clothing and wardrobe and stuff? Or was it also that when you were in your twenties, you hadn’t quite figured out that really liking that stuff actually meant you would like it on somebody else? Do you think you held onto it a little bit for that reason, before figuring that out?
Kristen: In my twenties, absolutely yes. But once I was in my thirties, and … some of it too was having a child and having to be in front of people who were judging me because of my age and because of my sexuality. I dressed up in those situations too, because it was basically also a uniform. I need you to take me seriously as a parent.
Kayla: Because those other parents were already biased against you.
Kristen: Yes.
Kayla: So to be too butch in that space would make that worse.
Kristen: Or just not even look serious. I couldn’t be wearing shorts or a t-shirt. I had to look so put together, at the very least like I was business-oriented, like I’m coming from a job, I’m serious. But in my thirties I only wore that stuff at work. Then I’d come home, and especially when I got divorced and I was dating and stuff, I only wore the same pair of ripped jeans and the same pair of Docs I’ve had since forever. Oxfords, like button-ups or tank tops or t-shirts, like V-necks and things.
My best friend Maria came to my Halloween party at the house, and I thought she’d just not worn a costume, but I thought she looked so hot. She was dressed as me! She was wearing those same stupid loafers I own and my ripped jeans and a white V-neck and the necklace that I wear every single day and my same glasses, holding a beer. And I was like, she looks amazing.
Kayla: And she was literally dressed as you.
Kristen: She was dressed like me. There’s just a way in which I like to look. And I knew that, kind of. I know I like to look like that. I still like to look like that. My fashion sense hasn’t changed. But dressing you is fun. I don’t do your makeup or anything, but I love when you sit down and put on a full face of makeup.
Kayla: And you have opinions, when I ask for them.
Kristen: When you ask. I would never try and tell you my opinion about how you should do your makeup.
“when we first started dating, we were on different gender expression journeys that ended up complementing each other really well.”
Kayla: I do think it’s really interesting because I feel like when we first started dating, you and I were both on very different gender expression journeys that then ended up complementing each other really well. We were both able to get to the point where we are now, I think, a lot faster than if we had not had that, not charged off of each other. Because for me, our first date, I showed up in a very … not masc outfit, but I was doing David Rose from Schitt’s Creek. drag. I was in a long black T-shirt.
Kristen: It was more like androgynous.
Kayla: Yeah, with these black cargo pants, really, oversized cargo pants, the long black shirt, some chains and some rings, sure, but I was definitely doing David Rose.
Kristen: It was just a lot of black eye makeup too, and not really anything else.
Kayla: Yeah. Not what has become my signature look now, I would say.
Kristen: Your New York era.
Kayla: That’s my New York era. No, but what it was, I mean, even when you and I started dating and that first date, I was coming off of at least a year, maybe longer, of not wearing dresses or skirts.And I think part of that was just my gender expression within dykeness, within being a lesbian, has really gone all over the place a lot. I had the awkward baby butch era, when I was first coming out and got an undercut. I still really liked makeup though, so it was heavy makeup, but a lot of button-downs and very fitted outfits that I thought lesbians wore.
And then I got a little comfortable with my queerness, went back to my wardrobe and fashion sense from before of long skirts and things like that, pretty femme or whatever. And then something that happened in my long-term relationship before our relationship just really threw me off. I became very insecure about a lot of things. I started wearing very baggy clothes, wearing the same things all the time. And then after that bad breakup, I was like, yeah, I don’t even know, going through something. I mean, even before the breakup, I got the Timothée Chalamet haircut.
I was almost back to square one with the confused baby butchness, a lot of eye makeup, oversized Calvin Klein t-shirts I’d buy from thrifts, big pants. It had been at least a year since I’d worn a skirt or dress when we went on our first date.
I think it was around that time of just getting out of that last relationship and then especially when I moved out of that apartment with that person, I was rediscovering myself and really realizing how much I love to be a femme. And then the fact that that was something too that you really enjoyed and you also were buying me these things, maybe buying me things that I wouldn’t have been buying for myself at the time — but wanted. It’s like you knew.
Kristen: Sure, yeah.
Kayla: Especially clothes. Yeah, sparkly clothes and things like that.
Kristen: I feel like it does sound the way I’m describing it. I buy things like toddler clothes for you.
Kayla: Not toddler! But they are something that a toddler would love. When I wear a dress that you bought me, I get so many compliments from my five-year-old niece.
Kristen: Oh my god.
Kayla wearing shoes that formerly belonged to Kristen
Kayla: But yeah, it was interesting because I think it was this dual thing happening for both of us at the same time, and I think that helped both of us too with that journey. When I bought that dress for that wedding, I knew you were really gonna like it. Itwas emerald green, head to toe, long sequined gown, super low cut. I loved it But I remember buying it because I was like, oh yeah, Kristen would really like this too. It was not the type of thing I would’ve bought myself for a long time, and I felt amazing in it, so good. So then the fact that you were at that wedding too in an outfit that you did not feel good in—
Kristen: I felt deeply uncomfortable in what I was wearing, but it was good for me because—
Kayla: I think we both had really good realizations at that wedding.
Kristen: After the wedding was over, our friends Ryan and Chelsea were there and they were like, “Do you guys want to go get drinks afterwards?” And I was like, “Yes, but we’ve got to go back to the hotel.”
Kayla: And change, that’s right.
Kristen: I was like, “I need to change clothes.”
Kayla: That’s right.
Kayla and Kristen at a wedding five years after the wedding mentioned in this interview, both wearing outfits that felt true to them
Kristen: So I got to put on normal clothes, and it was a relief, first of all. That physical relief I’ve always felt with getting to take off stuff like that. But then, because I also was wearing a dress that required a strapless bra.
Kayla: That’s crazy to think about, too.
Kristen: And I was like, why did I do this to myself? It was very funny to me because I feel like it was the last hurrah of trying that out, where I knew going into the situation I was going to be wearing a lot of things that made me really uncomfortable. The shoes I had were really pointy toe, black, almost stiletto heels.
Kayla: Yeah. You changed into your Docs for the bar.
Kristen: I changed into my Docs. And I was like, this is great. I’m never going to need to do this again. And I was like, if I’m going to go to another event, it’s going to be not in a dress anymore. And that was very helpful to me.
Kayla: Meanwhile, I left the floor-length sequin dress on for the dive bar. I only changed my shoes. But I was likeI’m leaving the dress on!
“you treat me like a Barbie doll because you do my hair”
Kayla: So I mean, I think we used to joke about you treating me like a Barbie with the jewelry and clothes and all of that, but recently it has become even more apparent that you treat me like a Barbie doll because you do my hair.
Kristen: Yes. I mean, I don’t do very intricate hairstyles or anything because I think a lot of times when people hear “do a person’s hair,” they’re thinking about some braiding or updo or—
Kayla: Blowout or something.
Kristen: And that’s not what’s happening. It’s more like hair care.
Kayla: Yeah, you’re doing my hair the way you did Barbie’s. In the way that you wanted to preserve how Barbie’s hair looked out of the box, you’re doing mine just as it’s naturally worn,which is honestly what I like, I mean, except for when I went through phases in high school, middle school and stuff where I was straightening my hair, as most curly girls did at some point. But for the most part, I like my hair to be very natural. At the most, when I’m doing my own hair, I diffuse it. But even for our wedding, I wanted a very natural look for my makeup and for my hair. I wanted it to look like the way I always do my makeup and hair, but just elevated. And so you do my hair just to make it look the way it’s naturally supposed to look. Natural curl pattern, all that stuff. You’re taking care of my hair.
Kristen: Yeah, I do. I would say I do hair care for you. I haven’t dyed my own hair since probably 2012, but I dye yours for you.
Kayla: Oh yeah, you do it and you do it so fast.
Kristen: It takes three boxes of dye to do your hair.
Kayla: I have a lot of hair! And I’ve always box dyed my hair, and I tried different colors throughout my youth and my mom would do it, or do it with my sister, sometimes. I think I’ve only had my hair professionally dyed once, and I was like, “this is dumb, I don’t have to pay for this.” But then then I said something about it and you were like, “I could do that.”
Kristen: It’s easy.
Kayla: You did an amazing job, so then you became my colorist. We do it in the backyard.
Kristen: Sometimes I make you a spritz.
Kayla: Yeah, exactly. It feels like the full salon experience.
Kristen: There’s usually a bird or something in the birdbath.
Kayla: We call it Daddy’s Salon.
Kristen: So I dye your hair, but also I’ve started doing a thing where, I’ve always looked to give you a scalp massage or scratch at your scalp for you. And then now, because your hair is getting really long right now because your hair grows really fast, I’ve been detangling it for you.
Kayla: Yeah. Every other day, you detangle my hair. We sit on the couch and you detangle my hair.
Kristen: And then sometimes I’ll put coconut oil in it.
Kayla: You’ve bought me hair products and told me how to use them. This all sounds crazy, you teaching me about hair, because it’s yeah, you’re a white person with straight hair and I’m half Indian and have this curly textured hair. But I think the context for this is no one ever really taught me how to do my hair.
I feel very sensitive about my hair because of the way that my mother was about my hair growing up. Also, for a little background context,my sister, who I’m very close with, does not have any hair. And I think that created a dynamic growing up where my parents, for a long time, thought we’re going to keep Kayla’s hair really short because Alex doesn’t have hair. We don’t want to make her jealous.
Anyways, my sister’s a very strong person. She has alopecia. She never felt any type of way, but my parents basically kept my hair really short. I think part of it was also my mom not really wanting to deal with it because any time it did get long, she didn’t really seemingly know how to deal with it at all. And my hair is not that curly and it’s not that textured, but it’s just different enough from what she was used to that she, to this day, doesn’t really understand. She’s like, “Well, why does your hair get tangled?” Or whatever. And I’m like, because texture. Because it’s thick. Because there’s a lot of it.
Kristen: Your mom also has never had long hair either. Your mom always has had a very short haircut.
Kayla: She has thick hair, but it’s just different than mine. And there was never a real understanding about that. She wanted to brush my hair out all the time. My hair looked really bad when it was brushed out. My family made fun of my hair a lot growing up, compared me to Ugly Betty.
Kristen: Oh my god.
Kayla: And I was like in middle school when that show came out. But that was mean! I do love America Ferrera. Actually, that’s a Barbie connection.
Kristen: Yeah it is!
Kayla: But also if my hair looked like Ugly Betty’s, it’s because my mom was brushing it out and just making it into a bushy mess.
Kristen: A big part about taking care of your hair for me has been being really patient. And so sometimes the only times I’ve gotten on your case about it is because you can occasionally be impatient with your hair and you’ll maybe yank it if there’s knots or anything. So it’s like, why don’t you let me do it, because I will sit and I’ll be patient with it. If your jewelry gets tangled, I’ll sit and unknot it. I can do the same thing with your hair. I don’t mind sitting and being patient and we can watch a show or do something.
Kayla owes any and all good hair days to Kristen
Kayla: Oh yeah. The first few times you detangled my hair, we were watching Severance.
Kristen: We were.
Kayla: We would pop Severance on and you’re just going to town, detangling my hair, being so gentle with it. No one has ever treated my hair with the care you do — not even me!
And yeah, ever since, I’ve had less breakage. My hair has been growing even faster than it usually does, which is already pretty fast. You’ve introduced me to new products, told me how to use them. I think that was something that super surprised me because I was like, you take care of your hair, for sure, but you have such different hair than I do, and we don’t use the same products. You’re washing your hair way more than I wash my hair.
Kristen: I just have different hair than you and so I do have to wash it way more often. I like taking care of your hair, I like taking care of you. I’ll lotion you or give you hand massage or foot massage.
“i think i have to go to the store and get nail polish remover because i can’t handle this.”
Kayla: I mean, you definitely did this during lockdown, but still now you will do my nails. You’re great at painting nails. That’s another thing that you’re very good at.
Kristen: And I’ve never done that for me, ever.
Kayla: And I remember there was a time where you did both of our toenails? And you did your own because you were like, “I’m going to try it out.”
Kristen: And I hated it.
Kayla: You were so upset.
Kristen: We didn’t have any nail polish remover, and I was like, “I think I have to go to the store and get nail polish remover because I can’t handle this.”
Kayla: That was one of the most dysphoric times I think I’ve ever seen you.
Kristen: It felt bad.
Kayla: Yeah. It was red, so it was bold. But yeah, you were like, “I have to get this off of my toes.”
Kristen: It was strange because I didn’t anticipate that happening.
But I love painting your nails. I always think they look really pretty. You can’t really go do it anymore because you’re doing a lot of tennis, but you were going and getting manicures and I thought that always looked really nice. You have really nice hands.
Kayla: Thank you. Very gay of you to say.
“you know what’s going to look good on me, also what’s going to make me feel good”
Kayla: I do think it’s interesting because I love dressing up, I love being high femme and doing my makeup and having my nails done and all this stuff, but I don’t really like doing it myself.
I don’t like making choices all the time. We’ve given this piece a very over-the-top headline, but I think there’s something empowering about me being like, you know what?You see me better than I could ever see myself in a lot of literal ways. You’re looking at my face more than I ever look at my own face, but also you love me and you see me in the best possible light. You know what’s going to look good on me, also what’s going to make me feel good. You’re never going to buy me a dress that I feel uncomfortable in.
Kristen: I don’t buy you something purely because I like the way it looks. I buy it because I think that you’ll enjoy wearing it.
Kayla: Yes. You’ve never bought me something uncomfortable. I think there’s something almost empowering about the fact that I can rely on you to make these choices for me and treat me in these ways. Because then it results in I look my best and I don’t have to think about it or do it myself.
Kristen: Yeah. I mean, I always just want you to feel good.
Kayla: I know.
Kayla showing off nails by Kristen // Kristen and Kayla, in a literal Barbie shirt
Kristen: I also do think it’s funny because you love to be pampered or have a spa treatment or something like that, which I never want. I don’t even go get my own hair cut. I hate it that much.
Kayla: Yeah. Please tell the folks at home how your hair gets cut.
Kristen: I’ve never felt more seen than watching New Girl and seeing Nick Miller say, “Getting a haircut is too intimate,” because I’ve said that for years.
Kayla: For years.
Kristen: For years, getting a haircut is too intimate. What I do is I trim the ends of my own hair, and that is what happens. I don’t want to go do that. My best friend is a massage therapist and she has never given me a massage because I was like, I definitely do not want that, but I massage you all the time and I’ll do your hair and do different stuff. I like watching videos of people getting facial treatments and having their hair done.
Kayla: See, I can’t do that. I have this weird tactile jealousy where if I watch someone else being massaged, I want to be massaged. I can’t watch it because I’m like, why is that not happening to me right now?
Kristen: So I think it ends up working out in that way — I love the idea of it, and I like doing it to you, but would never want someone to do that to me.And it makes me happy because, much like our sex life, I very much enjoy watching you be happy and pleased.
Kayla: Yeah, I mean, I guess this all just does go back to top/bottom dynamics. That’s all it is. An 8,000 word interview just to land on: I guess we’re just a top and a bottom!
Kristen: The classic scenario.
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?
Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya is the managing editor of Autostraddle and a lesbian writer of essays, fiction, and pop culture criticism living in Orlando. She is the former managing editor of TriQuarterly, and her short stories appear in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Joyland, Catapult, The Offing, The Rumpus, Cake Zine, and more. Some of her pop culture writing can be found at The A.V. Club, Vulture, The Cut, and others. When she is not writing, editing, or reading, she is probably playing tennis. You can follow her on Twitter or Instagram and learn more about her work on her website.
Kristen Arnett is the queer author of With Teeth: A Novel (Riverhead Books, 2021) which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in fiction and the New York Times bestselling debut novel Mostly Dead Things (Tin House, 2019) which was also a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in fiction and was shortlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. She was awarded a Shearing Fellowship at Black Mountain Institute, has held residencies at Ragdale Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, the Millay Colony, and the Key West Literary Seminar (upcoming 2024), and was longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize recognizing mid-career writers of fiction. Her work has appeared at The New York Times, TIME, The Cut, Oprah Magazine, Guernica, Buzzfeed, McSweeneys, PBS Newshour, The Guardian, Salon, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. Her next novel, CLOWN, will be published by Riverhead Books (Penguin Random House), followed by the publication of an untitled collection of short stories. She has a Masters in Library and Information Science from Florida State University and lives in Orlando, Florida. You can find her on Twitter here: @Kristen_Arnett
Also this: “I do think it’s interesting because I love dressing up, I love being high femme and doing my makeup and having my nails done and all this stuff, but I don’t really like doing it myself. I don’t like making choices all the time.” Elise would shop for me more if I let her and I’m always like ahhh I should be able to do it myself but this is really the vibe and I should embrace it. Except nails. I do like doing my own nails for some reason.
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i absolutely loooooathe picking clothes for myself, would gladly just let kristen do it all for me LOL
This past June 7th, queer content creator Thomas Sanders posted a video explaining which Muppets are gay. He specifically highlighted Sweetums as a burgeoning drag queen still trying to get her proportions right along with Gonzo, a canonically gender expansive character — he full on labelled himself as a “whatever” — who previously dressed in drag as Gonzo-rella in Disney’s Muppet Babies series. Gonzo has long been a queer fashion icon for his seemingly thrifted, brightly patterned button up tops and dapper clothing.
Miss Piggy herself has long been called a drag queen, appearing as a guest on RuPaul’s Drag Race, and content creator @rachleahx posted on X January 2024 that Chappell Ronan’s clothing appears to give some pretty explicit call outs to Miss Piggy. In a follow up video on TikTok, she breaks down how Chappell Roan’s Muppet Easter Eggs not only include Miss Piggy but also Constantine, an evil altar of Kermit, and others.
It’s not a new phenomenon. In the early days of the Muppets, Kermit the Frog even had a drag persona named Kermeena, donning a blonde wig to sing songs by Keely Smith and Rosemary Clooney. Sometimes Muppets would even be recycled from one into another, sometimes a Muppet of another gender — if we commit to the idea that Muppets even have a gender. And most recently in a kiki with fellow drag queen Trixie Mattel, drag queen Bosco celebrated Miss Piggy and Kermit as a t4t couple.
It’s also emblematic of the extremely queer history of the Muppets themselves.
The Muppets were always queer
A central tenet of The Muppets is accepting diversity within their communities and overcoming obstacles. Back in 1981, the song “We All Sing with the Same Voice” on Sesame Street not only sought to promote empathy and coexistence but also subtly hinted at LGBTQ+ families with the lyric, “I’ve got one daddy, I’ve got two.” While Sesame Street could not feature as much adult (queer characters and relationships being unfortunately coded as adult at the time) despite Bert and Ernie’s relationship being openly confirmed by a former Sesame Street writer as reflecting his own, The Muppet Show represented the culmination of Henson’s work to return to subversive content.
Matt Baume highlighted how back in the 1970s, Richard Hunt — a performer on The Muppet Show and gay man who created many of the characters that Muppet fans love, including Beaker and Scooter, was pivotal in incorporating queer content into the early runs of The Muppet Show. As Baume reminisces, Muppets like Statler joked about dating Lionel Barrymore and Bunsen and Beaker’s relationships while the show featured LGBTQ+ performers — Joel Grey, Liberace, Elton John, and Vincent Price. Like Sesame Street, The Muppet Show became a place of acceptance and humor for everyone.
And The Muppets never stopped being a group that openly welcomed LGBTQ+ creatives and uplifted queer characters. In 2005, when approaching Sam the Eagle at the gates of the Emerald City in The Muppets’ Wizard of Oz (2005), Fozzie Bear (as The Cowardly Lion) identifies himself, along with The Scarecrow (Kermit), Tin Thing (Gonzo) and Toto (Pepe the Prawn) as “friends of Dorothy!” a euphemism for a gay man.
Miss Piggy in particular has been a vocal advocate, giving a “snout-out to the gays” in a 2011 issue of Out magazine. The third point she shared was a not-so-subtle call for LGBTQ+ marriage equality, reading “Pigs + frogs. Interspecies marriage. The time has come.” It would be another four years before the US would see federal marriage equality. That same year, Miss Piggy walked the red carpet at OUT100 and was featured at a fundraising event for The Trevor Project. There, she said that on behalf of herself, Kermit, and all of the Muppets, “we support you.”
The publicity spoke to the root of Muppet philosophy while raising awareness for their 2011 film The Muppets. The Muppets plot even resonates today as in the film, the fabric puppets attempt to save their studio from an evil oil baron. It’s a not so subtle nod to anti-capitalism, and a premonition of what would come over ten years later when President Trump cut funding for public media, including funding for PBS and further Sesame Street. Netflix stepped in to purchase Sesame Street while providing funding for it to continue for free on PBS.
The Muppets (2011)
In The Muppets (2011), Walter — the fabric brother of Jason Segel — struggles with his identity: is he a man or a muppet in the aptly named ballad. Which community should he be part of and does he have to choose? In the end, he discovers that he’s a muppet, and his brother Gary accepts and loves this for him. He also discovers that he can exist partially in both and doesn’t have to give up anything about himself to be a Muppet. Heck, Walter’s human form is even played by gay actor Jim Parsons.
The spinoff 2015 television series after The Muppets even returned to Henson’s adult humor roots, where in “Hostile Makeover”, Pepe the Praun commented that he too is attracted to Josh Groban. “What?” he says, “He’s a handsome man, and gender is fluid.”
And as far-right anti-LGBTQ+ hostility grew in the early 2020s and increases today, the Muppets stayed true to their roots. Kermit appeared in the “Can’t Cancel Pride” streamed special during the COVID-19 pandemic, and in a 2021 interview with Kryss Shane, long-time Muppets performer Bill Barretta explained that the well-loved Muppet Howard Tubman is gay and that he based the character on his real-life LGBTQ+ friends in order to avoid making him a stereotype, which some have argued is best represented by Uncle Deadly. Unfortunately, the Muppet Studios shot down the idea of making Uncle Deadly explicitly gay in the 2015 sitcom, despite several writers forwarding the idea.
Despite Sesame Street’s continued official stance that Bert and Ernie are “just friends,” the show has consistently celebrated Pride Month since 2017, and shared posts on their Instagram, X, and Facebook accounts that celebrate how “Sesame Street is proud to support families of all shapes, sizes, and colors.” And The Jim Henson Company has even sold Pride collections, including the Fraggle Rock Pride-themed tees and hoodies. Fraggle Rock, a creation of Henson and Hunt, even features an episode titled “Gone But Not Forgotten” in its final season where Wembley makes a new friend he news will die soon. It paralleled, as Baume explained, Hunt’s own life who lost his partner to AIDS shortly before the episode was filmed.
The queer Muppet fandom and Muppetcore culture online
But the queer Muppet online fandom is much older than 2011’s The Muppets. For years, queer Muppetcore has flourished on the Internet and social media channels. Queer muppet fan Kieran Moore argued that Kermit’s songs like “Rainbow Connection” and “Bein’ Green” have resonated with queer people for decades. Frequent contributor to the Muppet fan blog Tough Pigs, Moore highlighted how behind the camera, the Muppets have also put their money where their fabric mouths are in terms of cutting ties with homophobic corporations like Chick-Fil-A.
And their fan base has remained loyal. Silly Lily Arts, an account run by queer artist Lily Cronin, frequently shares LGBTQ+ Muppet content, including a new Pride design this past May of Janice, the lead guitar player in The Electric Mayhem, alongside the words “Protect the Dolls.” The phrase originates from Black and Latina trans women in 1980s ballroom culture but has become a call for solidarity with and protecting trans women of color. It was recently popularized again when designer Conner Ives wore a t-shirt with the phrase after a runway show.
In the same vein, Gay Muppets, an account on Instagram, has 11,400 followers and claims openly in its title that “all the muppets are gay.” For the account’s owner, “it’s always nice to reimagine and rediscover queerness, seeing myself in my childhood favorites is so empowering.” The Internet helped them find niche communities, specifically other LGBTQ+ people who love and see themselves in the Muppets, and they fully plan to walk down the aisle to Kermit’s Rainbow Connection at their queer wedding.
Some of their most recent posts foreground Bert and Ernie, roommates from Sesame Street that are notoriously queer coded. Former Sesame Street writer Mark Saltzman claimed back in 2018 that their relationship was modeled after his own with his partner Arnold Glassman, whereas Sesame Streetcountered that they are “best friends” (as straight historians would say).
It’s been the best known secret of The Muppets. A 2013 cover of The New Yorker after the historic United States v. Windsor Supreme Court case pictured Bert and Ernie hugging while watching a television lit with a photo of the justices. Similarly, in 2019, Jazzelle (known as Uglyworldwide) transformed herself into the Muppets, confirming the queer nature of Henson’s puppets depicting herself and another as Bert and Ernie learning in for a kiss.
All Muppets are queer
In fact the Muppet community itself, inclusive of Muppets of different gender and species, is inherently queer. The idea that Muppets have a gender is complex. With their ability to speak for themselves (with the help of a skilled puppeteer), they tell people how they identify and how they would like to be addressed, such as Gonzo clarifying after backlash to him wearing drag on Muppet Babies that he is a “whatever.”
It’s not about what genitalia they have — they are made of fabric; it’s about how the Muppets affirm and celebrate who they choose to be. The difference between flesh and blood and fabric actors in Classic Muppet films like The Muppet Christmas Carol and Muppet Treasure Island did not exist then and does not exist now, even on the Muppets child-oriented counterpart Sesame Street.
At a time when the United States is facing record anti-LGBTQ+ legislation aimed at erasing representation of queer people in classrooms, books, and television shows and outright denying our existence and survival, the Muppets show how queer representation has been part of children’s public television and film history since the beginning.
For many queer and trans adults, like myself, the Muppets were a huge part of our childhoods and were some of the first groups to love and affirm us as we truly are, allowing us to share how we identify rather than making assumptions or placing expectations on us. As a result, whether explicit or not, the Muppets’ lessons of acceptance and kindness helped many queer people (like me) come out of the closet when we were in a safe place and served as our chosen family when we were alone.
It only makes sense that queer people have remained loyal to a fandom that refuses to abandon the queer children that these Muppets raised.
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?
Emma Cieslik (she/her) is a queer, disabled, and neurodivergent museum professional and writer based in Washington, DC. She is interested in the intersections of religion, gender, sexuality, and material culture, especially focused on queer religious identity and accessible histories.
The Ultimatum: Queer Love is perhaps the highest-profile reality dating show focused on queer women and non-binary people of all time — and it’s also one of the only ones. Historically, reality dating shows have focused on heterosexuals, despite the fact that gathering a bunch of horny bisexuals in one party house and plying them with alcohol while demanding constant, private confessionals is TV gold, as proven by Are You The One? Season Eight. While Love is Blind has co-opted lesbian dating rituals to create its bizarre reality TV experiment, dating shows rarely feature actual lesbians, and are historically bastions of traditional heterosexual courtship.
But over the years, a few brave shows have ventured into the murky waters of reality television dating shows for queer, lesbian and bisexual women and/or trans people of all genders. Let’s talk about some of them!
Date My Mom
MTV // 2004 – 2006
The triumphant mating call of, “I’m here, I’m queer and I’m ready to Mom Date!!” can be heard echoing through the generations from this entry in MTV’s 2000s Dating Show Frenzy in which the Mom of a teenager meets their potential dates and decides who’s best for her child. Although usually focused on heterosexuals, Date My Mom had a five gay or lesbian episodes per season quota, thus offering its viewers something we rarely received on television back then: a parent so supportive of their daughter’s sexual orientation that they wanted to help her find a girlfriend. “To the moms who did it with their daughters, we let them know that this is awesome that you’re stepping up for your child,” a casting director told The Village Voice in an interview about the challenges of casting its LGBT episodes. “To this day, we still all appreciate those parents.”
NeXt
MTV // 2005-2008
Many MTV shows of the 2000s that are impossible to track down online would feature a few lesbian contestants across their runs, including Parental Control, Dismissed, Exposed and Room Raiders, but NeXt has maintained the most prevalent spot in the public imagination. NeXt wasn’t a queer dating show specifically, but it was immediately inclusive of gay and lesbian daters, including 13 lesbian segments across its six-season run. Contestants went on five dates and were permitted to declare “Next!” to start over with someone new as soon as their present date lost their luster. The daters earned cash for every minute of dating they survived, and whomsever made it to the end could choose a second date or their accumulated lump of cash. Like many MTV dating shows of the era, NeXT was mostly cast with actors and often scripted. The series remains iconic for its stilted intros in which contestants delivered attempts at sassy pick-up lines and three horrifying bullet-pointed facts about themselves. An added delight of the queer episodes was the thirsty twentysomethings on the bus being able to flirt with each other while waiting for their big moment.
A Shot at Love With Tila Tequila
MTV // 2007 + 2008
The depiction of bisexuality in this absolute trash reality show haunts us to this day, beginning with the absolute horror of the premise, in which 16 lesbians and 16 men aren’t told ’til the end of the first episode that Tila is bisexual and will be choosing from the lot of them. Before dating Courtenay Semel or marrying Casey Johnson or becoming a Neo-Nazi who claimed to have only been “gay for pay,” Tila Tequila was a MySpace queen often spotted in Maxim and Playboy, and when this show debuted in 2007, we were all compelled by forces larger than ourselves to tune in. Personally, I shut it off after ten minutes because I was too offended to go on… but then I happened to catch the rest of the episode at the gym and…I got sucked in. Everybody got drunk and sloppy. Tila and many of her female suitors endorsed an unchecked butchphobia popular in mainstream and queer media at the time, which made it incredibly satisfying that she ended up with hot-as-fuck butch firefighter Dani Campbell as her final girl. In the end, though, she chose the male suitor, although they obviously didn’t last, and Tila returned for a second season.
A Double Shot at Love with the Ikki Twins
MTV // 2009
Tila Tequila was the host of this spinoff that again found 12 heterosexual men and 12 lesbians competing for a shot at love, this time with bisexual twins Rikki (Erica Mongeon) and Vikki (Victoria Mongeon), models who’d appeared in Playboy and a Hooters calendar, among other similar gigs. After this season, MTV canned the concept in favor of having a bunch of girls compete for a date with the Jersey Shore boys.
From the very first episode of Naked Attraction, this British show was inclusive of bisexual, pansexual, trans and/or queer contestants, who narrow down their group of potential dates to a handful of winners by seeing portions of their naked body, from bottom to top.
Courtney Act hosted “the UK’s first ever bisexual dating show” that featured bisexual people living together in a Spanish villa, exploring the dating scene of Barcelona and supporting each other through it all.
A group of single social media and reality TV stars gather in a luxurious Malibu villa for a dating show with a twist they somehow do not expect, even in latter seasons: their exes are gonna creep out of the ocean. Everyone wears designer swimwear, gets drunk, participates in challenges, digs into each other’s secrets, hooks up and votes each other off the show. Queer women started showing up in Season Three with bisexual reality TV / pop music entrepreneur Aubrey O’Day. Season Four — which eschews a tropical locale for winter in New Zealand — features noted lesbian Staten Island firefighter and Challenge contestant Nicole and a parade of her exes in a environment already queered by a drag queen, a bicurious former Nickelodeon actress, a trans beauty influencer and a bisexual Real World guy.
Game of Clones
MTV // 2019
In Clone Wars, reality television stars are given the rare and fascinating opportunity to date clones of their celebrity crushes, and amongst them are some lesbians. Nicole of The Challenge and Ex on the Beach is presented with seven Ciara clones and will date them all to determine which clone will win her commitment-phobic heart forever.
The absolute apex of queer reality television, Are You The One? mashed up 16 singles in an alcohol-infused house and through games and socials, challenged them to determine whomst amongst the other singles had been determined by a mysterious overlord to be their soulmate. Guessing correctly as a team wins some kind of money. But in Season 8 of this successful MTV program they decided to improve the show’s quality tenfold by casting an entirely bisexual group of singles. Every man, woman and non-binary person in the house could potentially match with anyone else in the house. It was a beautiful moment in television history that I for one will never forget.
Singled Out 3.0
Roku // 2020 – 2021
The original Singled Out was an absolute mainstay of every ’90s sleepover and an irresistible late-night double-billing on MTV with Loveline. The Singled Out gameshow put Playboy model Jenny McCarthy (now a notorious anti-vaxxer) and Chris Hardwick (of The Nerdist) on the map as hosts guiding a lucky girl or boy through weeding out 50 potential dates without seeing them, the pool decreasing as the picker cycled through their preferences amongst presented funny categories. The show was rebooted as a YouTube series in 2018 with an “urban contemporary hip-hop theme” that involved a whole thing with Catfishes. Then, finally, a third reboot arrived in 2020, produced by MTV for the Roku Channel. Hosted by KeKe Palmer and Joel Kim Booster and presented in mini-episodes by the Roku Channel, this new iteration featured bisexual and lesbian contestants in its two seasons of minisodes — even once featuring a lesbian couple looking for a third to join their relationship!
The producers of this Netflix show wanted a queer-inclusive cast of folks who wouldn’t ordinarily be on reality TV — people of all ages who could portray a realistic look at what dating is like in the age of apps and all that. “It is a little window into many people’s lives, of many different backgrounds and orientations, as they go on many first dates,” wrote Vulture in “Netflix’s Dating Around is a Secretly Great Reality Show.” Episode 6 featured Mila, who met five women for drinks, dinner and dessert.
12 Dates of Christmas
HBO Max // 2020 – 2021
Tragically wiped from HBO Max’s platform, 12 Dates of Christmas invited contestants to a romantic holiday-prepped chalet in the snowy mountains of somewhere to face a rotating cast of suitors with whom leads enjoyed dates like sledding, building gingerbread houses, riding horses through the snow and cuddling in bedazzled glamping tents. The winner gets to accompany the lead on a trip home to meet the family for Christmas, except it’s also definitely not Christmas, it’s March, and everybody is just pretending that it’s Christmas. Season Two featured three leads: a gay man, a lesbian (the stunningly beautiful Amanda Grace Jenkins) and a straight man.
On a surface-level Freeform’s Love Trip: Paris seems like just another heterosexual dating show: four twentysomethings who’ve been unlucky in love move to Paris where love is somehow truer and they’re given the opportunity to meet and date a rotating roster of local men… and women, because three of the four contestants are queer. We’ve got: 29-year-old Lacy; a chatty, sexually fluid “mental health podcaster” who loves crystals, open-hearted 26-year-old Mexican-American bisexual trans woman model Josielyn and finally Caroline, a bubbly 26-year-old genderqueer personal trainer from New York who proudly asserts “my best friend is my cat.” This show has been highly overlooked and I highly recommend it!
The Ultimatum: Queer Love is notable for many things, including introducing the world to Mal, who is a king and deserves the world. Six couples who are facing an ultimatum — one person is ready to marry and the other isn’t — gather together to try out dating each other, rather than the person they came with. After a three week “trial marriage” they’re able to trial marriage with their original partner and then at this point they are obviously 100% ready to decide on the next steps of their relationship. I love television!
Love Allways
Paramount+ // 2023 // Stream on Paramount+
Truly breaking the mold with a cast of Gen Zers, this program sees two ‘dating coaches’ employed to help singles of all genders in their pursuit of Lexi, the show’s bachelorette. The dating coaches are vaguely competing against each other to see which coach’s “team” wins Lexi over? It’s sort of like watching a bunch of TikTok drafts from a 21-year-old, or like a loosely organized pool party. But it’s fascinating to see what a dating show looks like when most of the contestants are too young to drink!
Four couples explore non-monogamy by spending a month in a tropical resort, meeting and dating potential thirds to bring into their relationship, and then at the end they can decide if they wanna be threes forever or remain a twosome. It wasn’t always the best show when it came to poly representation, but it had its moments.
The first British reality show exclusively featuring lesbian and bisexual women matched up ten single sapphics, forced to meet for the first time by kissing each other directly on the mouth, then living together in the “Masseria,” a beautiful italian country house. Sally appreciated the show’s respectable masc-to-femme ratio and contestants coming from small towns as well as the big cities. “Everyone on I Kissed a Girl just seems so good natured about it all,” she wrote. “They joke about wife swapping! They fess up quickly to their current partner when they like someone else! They celebrate each others’ sluttiness! There’s also a decent amount of people opening up and getting vulnerable about all kinds of aspects of their queerness and intersectionality, which is excellent to see on TV. As one of the girls so articulately puts it: “Being here is quite good for that being gay thing.”
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?
Riese is the 43-year-old Co-Founder of Autostraddle.com as well as an award-winning writer, video-maker, LGBTQ+ Marketing consultant and aspiring cyber-performance artist who grew up in Michigan, lost her mind in New York and now lives in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in nine books, magazines including Marie Claire and Curve, and all over the web including Nylon, Queerty, Nerve, Bitch, Emily Books and Jezebel. She had a very popular personal blog once upon a time, and then she recapped The L Word, and then she had the idea to make this place, and now here we all are! In 2016, she was nominated for a GLAAD Award for Outstanding Digital Journalism. She's Jewish. Follow her on twitter and instagram.
I used to see the NEXT bus all the time by Venice beach when I was in community college. It was kind of annoying cause they would just be driving at 10mph through the streets & I didn’t see any filming car following. I remember they had an episode with a bi guy, got to choose between men & women. I assume they had one with a bi lady too? The only reason I remember the episode is because a girl I went to middle school with was one of the people he said next too. I think it was one of those episodes where everyone got nexted. MTV was really head of its time here.
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i wonder where all those Next Busses are now, it would be iconic to turn a NeXT bus into a party bus! and yes, MTV very ahead of its time with that whole slew of dating shows
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I wouldn’t be surprised they are now used as tour buses. Did it have a stripper pole in there or I am thinking of another MTV show?
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hmmmmmm feels like a common motif
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Okay, I just watched that Date My Mom part with Lara-Megan & ending. Wow so cheesy but offensive not in a good way; but, that’s MTV in 90s & 00s for ya. Women calling insulting other women’s looks.
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A recent Australian bachelorette, Brooke Blurton is bi and had male and female suitors.
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Yes!!!! I can’t believe my girl Brooke gets so slept on she’s amazing!!
The season was well done in my opinion even though SPOILER ALERT **** (you’ve been warned, finale spoiler) she picks a man at the end. But it’s all good bc the man is old news and she’s with a woman now.
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wow does anyone remember that LOGO dating show, “can’t get a date”? that was so good!
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I came here to say this! I always enjoyed the dry humor of the voiceover person talking to the dateless people.
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man, paramount+ is really dropping the ball by not having all of these mtv/vh1 shows available to stream. i bet a lot of us would just for the nostalgia of it all. my friend and i would sit in my dorm room and watch hours of NeXt!
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i KNOW like why is paramount+ failing us so hard at this time in our lives when we have never needed reality tv more!!!! they also need to be airing Undressed
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I was very disappointed by the first few episodes of Love Allways and don’t think I can keep watching it, a) because it’s sooooo cis girls vs cis boys and b) because while all the women are queer, only one of the guys seems to be.
So essentially, they put a bunch of straight cis guys and queer, pan, bi and lesbian cis women into one house, without telling/warning the women before. Yawn.
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yeah i found it really tedious and like, half-baked in general
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This seems like the perfect time to mention that one of the contestants on The Bi Life is an old old friend of mine I was desperately in love with as a teen who broke my heart by just kinda fading out of my life and who then went on to talk about this time in our lives on the Bi Life as if we’d been dating – I think I would have noticed if
we had been! As I was absolutely crushed that we weren’t! This is one of my favourite fun facts about myself.
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it’s not a dating show but i wish Hoochie Daddies was on here!
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First Dates (UK, there was also an Aussie one, not sure about US?) was also great, very chill and had decent queer representation!
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There was a dating show in the 90s called The Third Wheel or The Fifth Wheel or something. It was on very late at night, and the premise was that 2 dudes and 3 women or 2 women and 3 dudes go on a date all together and then each of them chooses which person they like best and usually there would be obvious pairing up and one person left out. Which obviously sucks and is mean. But one time, TWO OF THE GIRLS CHOSE EACH OTHER, and this repressed Midwestern closeted baby gay nearly lost her damn mind because I thought, for the first time ever, that maybe someday a girl could pick me too. So, I guess thank you to this mean, accidentally one time kinda queer dating show for inadvertently giving teenage me a little hope?
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Obligatory comment about Princess Charming (Germany)
Would be fun to see Autostraddle spotlight some of the more obscure web dating shows too.
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Are You The One? Season 8 is the best season of reality television ever made.
As someone whose favorite genre is horror, it pains me to say that I think most contemporary horror is really bad. Instead of being fun and having depth, so much of it wants to seem important without actually having anything to say at all. There are exceptions — especially among indie and international films — but I’m tired of empty films that claim to be about trauma. Want a great horror film about trauma? Watch Slumber Party Massacre II, a surreal fever dream where the killer is a retro rocker with a drill attached to his guitar. It’s smarter than anything Ari Aster has ever done.
I’m thinking about the state of modern horror, because episode three of King of Drag is all about the genre. But Murray’s fun bits at the beginning of the episode quickly give way to an episode of television that earns its trigger warnings — due to the lived experiences of the kings rather than their horror craft.
When the theme is announced reactions vary. Henlo has spent eight years working at haunts and is thrilled to get the opportunity to show what he can do. Perka is another king known for horror, a fact that makes him anxious to live up to reputation. Other kings like Big D go into the week feeling less confident.
Sasha comes to the Man Cave for the weenie challenge: a makeup look that’s half glamour/half monster. As I said last week, Sasha is such a great presence on this show. She’s the best kind of strict teacher, one who knows the kindest thing she can do is to push her students to be better.
As the kings get ready, Big D jokes that he has never done a half and half makeup look and arguably has never done a look period. Pressure K then talks about being inspired to do drag after Perka Sexxx, a very nice moment given Perka’s self-deprecation and anxiety. Then Charles talks about his history with attempted suicide.
The makeup looks are revealed and I really wish we got more time to look at each of them! This is inevitable with a first season of this kind of show, but production feels as rushed with these challenges as the kings. But based on what we see Perka is a deserving winner.
The beefy challenge is to create a look and performance inspired by what scares the kings the most. As the kings start to get ready, it quickly becomes clear that none of these fellas are afraid of ghosts or spiders. Instead the concepts range from Alexander the Great’s fear of fast fashion-induced climate disaster to Pressure K’s fear of the evil he has encountered in his personal life.
I often joke that RuPaul’s Drag Race dabbles in being RuPaul’s Trauma Race. On that show, moments where queens share their personal challenges often feel manufactured in a reality TV sort of way. There are big tonal shifts and these painful moments feel mined for reality TV tension. To its credit, King of Drag takes a different approach and really lives in the reality of what’s being shared. That said — and I fear it is callous of me to admit this — at some point in the episode I started to long for the whiplash of the reality TV approach. The pain on display here is so immense it results in a fairly brutal hour of television. It becomes less about how the trauma informs the drag and more about the trauma itself.
The judges this week are Sasha, Tenderoni, Liv Hewson, Vico Ortiz, and Dragula winner Landon Cider. It’s also revealed that this week will be a double elimination.
Perka starts off the performances with a number about being misgendered and having our rights getting taken away. He is a very talented king and he succeeds at creating something that’s genuinely uncomfortable and frightening, ending with him shouting the horrible words his mom said to him. Personally, I think it would have been even more effective with a dash of subtlety — did not need the trans and American flags — but there’s no denying its power.
Alexander then comes out in a cloak of different fabrics with a sales tag around his neck. It’s a cool look and I like the concept, but it does feel like it’s missing… something. Sasha leans over to another judge and says, I didn’t get it. Getting Alexander’s context in the man cave definitely helped.
Molasses continues to show he’s the best king in the competition with an abstract performance where he’s painted in all black and has a structured outfit that gives the illusion of four legs and a crystal void on his back. It’s by far the subtlest of the performances while still being so haunting. More of this please!
Big D also stands out as the only king who adds some humor to his take on horror. He’s a mad scientist with an enlarged brain saying, “I’m trapped in my own head.” Then his head explodes to reveal a miniature of him Ratatouille-ing it up in his head! Incredible! I was obsessed!
Pressure K comes out in a coat with “evil” words. He then throws off the coat and breaks off the chain around his neck. Earlier in the episode, he talks about being forced into femininity as a kid and the connection between that and using less makeup in his drag. The whole episode feels very transformational for K, but it doesn’t necessarily translate into the performance that feels a bit simple and rushed.
Dick’s performance also felt too simple to me. I really liked his grandfather clock outfit, but I needed more than the face reveal. Charles’ had the opposite problem with a look that was too simple, but a performance energy I really enjoyed.
We end with Henlo who had the biggest disappointment of the week. He looks so cool with wings of syringes and pus and blood oozing out of him. But then his final blood reveal doesn’t work! He seemed like a shoe-in for the top until he was unable to recover from that mishap.
Henlo ends up being safe along with Dick which seems fair given what he achieved and what went wrong. However, I do wish the judges spoken to him, because I think there was a lesson in there about what to do when things go wrong. If you commit to a performance, you can make anything work!
Throughout the judging, the kings share more details about their trauma and it’s all a lot! Again, queer and trans people have a lot of trauma and I do think there’s a value to giving those experiences the weight they deserve. I think it’s maybe a question of casting? The group leans very sincere and open and these moments might work better if a few more of the queens brought a slightly different energy. Or maybe everyone else is loving this and I’m just a cold-hearted Capricorn! Open to that possibility!
My biggest frustration with this episode is the way it tries to manufacture tension around the bottom three. It’s clear that Perka, Molasses, and Big D are the top, but because Big D is critiqued for wearing sneakers, there’s faux tension about whether he’s actually in the bottom. Last episode, there was also a fake out about who was going to be safe and who was tops/bottoms, and that kind of Tyra Banks/RuPaul reality TV phrasing feels very counter to the rest of the show’s tone. Also if Big D had been in the bottom I would’ve rioted.
Perka wins! This choice makes sense to me! I did enjoy Big D’s performance more, but I understand the sneakers being an issue.
The final thrust this week is the Blair Butch Project where Charles, Alexander, and K have to record videos of them getting scared and killed in the man cave. Based on what we saw, I thought K was actually the best, but alas K and Alexander are eliminated. I do, ultimately, agree with this choice, because the episode felt like an end to an emotional chapter for K and he even sort of says he’s ready to go home.
I hope everyone in this cast has a good therapist!
Showbiz! Here are some random thoughts:
+ Thank you to the commenter who shared that the opening animation is by Erma Fiend aka drag king Sweaty Eddie!
+ During the intro, Murray says from Rocky Horror to I Saw the TV Glow, queer people love horror, and I did, in fact, yearn for Murray and the show to teach the children about actual classic horror. From Dracula’s Daughter to I Saw the TV Glow… From The Uninvited to I Saw the TV Glow… From Cat People to I Saw the TV Glow…
+ Perka saying he knows he’s a man because he couldn’t find his own g spot was very funny.
+ King I hope returns next week with newfound confidence: Perka
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?
Drew is a Brooklyn-based writer, filmmaker, and theatremaker. She is a Senior Editor at Autostraddle with a focus in film and television, sex and dating, and politics. Her writing can also be found at Bright Wall/Dark Room, Cosmopolitan UK, Refinery29, Into, them, and Knock LA. She was a 2022 Outfest Screenwriting Lab Notable Writer and a 2023 Lambda Literary Screenwriting Fellow. She is currently working on a million film and TV projects mostly about queer trans women. Find her on Twitter and Instagram.
The lack of critique for Henlo is something we were talking about at the viewing party I was at last night! Henlo’s pulled out some great things, and Especially this episode and he deserved to have feedback to help push him and be given that face time.
I really hope next season they have more production time cause you can really feel that time constraint in every episode. I honestly wish the editing had done a little better to hide these constraints by taking some extra seconds to let us see the king’s looks at the top or end of the weenie challenge and the performances.
Also random thing that had me ??? Was that Vico Ortiz was only announced as an actor and not also as a drag king, considering Vico’s been a drag king for over a decade.
Also agreed around the fake tension being built, there was no way Big D was going to be in the Final Thrust with how thrilled everyone was with his performance despite the shoes.
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Did someone force you to report on this. This article has some negative under tones
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Assuming this is directed at me, nope no one forced me to report on this. I’m recapping the show weekly because I really care about drag and this show. Part of recapping/caring about a show is including a range of reactions some positive some negative.
To quote Sufjan Stevens, “I love kissing. If I could kiss all day, I would. I can’t stop thinking about kissing. I like kissing more than sex because there’s no end to it. You can kiss forever. You can kiss yourself into oblivion.” Here at Autostraddle, we respect the sex scene. We really, really do. But there’s just something about an on-screen make out. We’ve celebrated making out IRL, but now it’s time to celebrate the best lesbian movie make outs of all time.
Some of these scenes are hot, some of these scenes are sweet, and some of these scenes manage to achieve both. There are classic queer kisses, new favorites, and even some scenes I watched by googling “girls kissing” in the early days of YouTube long before I’d seen the films themselves.
Unlike our best lesbian movies of all time list which was created through an intricate process of ballots and voting, this list is entirely my opinion. It’s unlikely I forgot your fave, but you certainly can share what would be on your list. I’d love an excuse to revisit some scenes and do some more research.
Let’s begin with a beginning. While most on-screen make outs rely heavily on the build up, Halina Reijn’s comic thriller drops us in media res to tongues gliding against each other. It’s rare outside of a sex scene to get on-screen kissing this eager and realistic and hot. It’s a brief moment of sensuality and intimacy, a snapshot of what exists outside of the toxic nightmare of distrust these characters are about to enter.
19. Anaïs Demoustier and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi in Anaïs in Love
While this list does not include kissing during sex, it does include kissing that leads to sex. This one is for the age gap girls and anyone who doesn’t care about getting sand in crevices. Throughout the film, we’ve watched Anaïs dominate the men in her life, but faced with her crush — who also happens to be the wife of the man she’s having an affair with — she’s timid. Luckily, this older woman grabs her face with a sandy hand and initiates, allowing Anaïs to sink into the moment.
18. Sheila Munyiva and Samantha Mugatsia in Rafiki
Some of the make outs on this list are more about the circumstances than the kisses themselves. This moment in Rafiki with its two leads’ faces painted in neon is heavy with the possibility of a kiss, faces inching closer and closer. Finally, they get up and go somewhere more private, the tension still remaining. The kiss itself is brief but it holds the entirety of the moments before. That it then cuts to the characters hugging and laughing goes to show young love at its best is as much about finding a best friend as it is finding sexual awakening.
I’ve only had about a dozen cigarettes in my life and I’d say ten of them were because I wanted to kiss someone. Sorry, but if a hot woman asks if you want to step outside for a smoke it’s very hard to say no even if you’re not a smoker! I didn’t love the movie Cuckoo, but I did love the representation of a hot woman asking if you smoke followed by an excellent make out against a tree cigarettes in hand.
This is for anyone who loves PDA! From their first encounter, pop star Mimi and punk singer Billie have a combative relationship. But their sexual chemistry is as electric as their conflicts! After showing them fight in a music studio, filmmaker Alexis Langlois cuts to them devouring each other in a club. When one of their friends calls them out saying they might as well be fisting, this doesn’t phase them. Instead it inspires them to lie on the table, exchange more spit, and come up with the film’s best song, “Fisted to the Heart.”
15. Rachel McAdams and Rachel Weisz in Disobedience
Alas, the spit scene can’t be included, because it happens during sex and that’s the rule of this list. BUT before that incredible sex scene is an incredible make out. I love this moment because of the slow build, the plausible deniability that the women are embracing as friends until the line is crossed further and further. I also love this moment because both women are still dressed in full winter wear. The winter kiss is underrated! There’s something about all the layers of clothes between you and the hunger to get them off.
This list would not be complete without a sleepover first kiss. The tension of the night out with friends, the soft glow of the bedroom’s darkness, the giggling, the touching, the anxiety, the panic, the disbelief, the trust. This is a coming-of-age story, not a love story, but writer/director Dee Rees understands the importance of this moment being one of overwhelming joy. Alike isn’t just connecting with her crush, she’s connecting with herself.
13. Heather Graham and Bridget Moynahan in Gray Matters
Once again, reminding the folks at home that this list is a solo effort, so you cannot judge my picks. I will accept that Gray Matters is not a good movie, but this two minute clip is why I learned how to delete YouTube history from my family computer. Heather Graham drunkenly making out with her brother’s fiancée!!! Very overwhelming to me as a closeted teen!!!
Despite having one of the most iconic lesbian kisses in movie history, Desert Hearts does not make this list. It’s not a make out! Yes, it’s raining and intense, but it’s too brief! However, Cameron Post and Coley Taylor kissing during Desert Hearts does make it. Whether a closeted teen or a seasoned queer, sometimes showing your friend a movie is a way to make a move. My favorite part of this moment isn’t even the kiss itself. It’s when Coley kicks Cameron and then just lets her foot stay there as they keep watching a model for what they’re about to do.
11. Sook-Yin Lee and Justin Vivian Bond in Shortbus
While a frequent anxiety of the sexually inexperienced is that they’ll do something wrong, I’ve found that someone being inexperienced but eager to experience can be really hot! I love this moment from Shortbus where the iconic Justin Vivian Bond fills the uniquely queer trans role of being both the Wise Gay Bestie and the First Lesbian Crush. Sofia is at her first sex party and unsure what she wants. There’s a real tenderness between her and Vivian indicative of the film as a whole. Yes, it has unsimulated sex, but it’s also really sweet!
There have been many movies with homoerotic teen girl friendships over the years ready-made for projection and fanfic. But Jennifer’s Body makes subtext text. Not only does it have its toxic besties kiss. It teases a kiss. Then has them keep kissing with a close up of their mouths. Then has them keep kissing lying on the bed. It’s as if writer Diablo Cody and director Karyn Kusama wanted to make sure no one could misread this moment as anything but the manifestation of true desire between the girls. In fact, it doesn’t stop because one of them loses interest — Needy is just concerned about the whole killing boys thing.
9. Isabél Zuaa and Marjorie Estiano in Good Manners
This one is for all the sniffers, lickers, and biters. This one is for anyone who wants their on-screen make outs to include someone pregnant. This one is for anyone who has a thing for werewolves. Tension has been building between the chaotic Ana and her hired nanny Clara. But after a night out to herself when she gets another woman’s number, Clara comes home to find Ana rummaging through the fridge. In a trance-like state, Ana inhales her scent, licks her mouth, hungrily kisses her, and then bites Clara’s lip. When Clara pulls away, she sees Ana’s eyes glowing orange. Is Clara scared or horny? Why not both?
In a film filled with power games, one of its most delicious is when Lady Hideko tells her handmaiden she’s anxious about marriage because she doesn’t even know how to kiss. Is this true? Or is it a move? Both? Either way it works. Handmaiden Sook-Hee sucks on a lollipop and then shares the sweetness between their lips. Pretty soon they’re making out with no sign of stopping. Educational!
7. Madeline Grey DeFreece and Rachel Sennott in Tahara
A very different “teach me to kiss” scene, this scene trades eroticism for the mortifying experience of being young. After enough goading, Carrie agrees to tell her cruel friend Hannah — who she is in love with, of course — whether or not Hannah is a good kisser. As their mouths meet, the 1:1 aspect ratio widens and the characters turn to clay. The camera spins around and around until the clay figures begin to meld into one another. This bold stylistic choice reveals the all-consuming unreality of adolescent longing.
6. Denise Richards and Neve Campbell in Wild Things
Another scene I watched over and over long before seeing the movie itself, this iconic pool fight turned make out is everything good about trashy 90s erotic thrillers. What does it do to a young person’s brain to watch one hot woman try to drown another hot woman before sucking her finger and then proceeding to make out topless? I’m not sure, but I turned out alright. (I have health insurance because I make lists of lesbian make outs after all.) The funny thing is that the broader context of this movie is even gayer than this scene led me to believe. No spoilers, but the end contextualizes this moment in a way that’s absolutely delicious.
5. Cécile de France and Izïa Higelin in Summertime
Finally, a film that combines sensual lesbian romance and feminist activism! I love the subversion of roles here. Even though Carole is older and has been the guide into this political sphere, it’s Delphine who instigates their sexual relationship. After a failed attempt late at night, they finally kiss — in an alleyway! in public! in the 70s! — after Carole insists she’s not a lesbian and Delphine reassures her that she isn’t either. Okay, ladies, whatever you say. That kissing looks pretty gay!
While this film is predominantly about Eunice’s relationship to her family, I really appreciate the richness of her scenes with hot stranger eventual girlfriend Joana. Their first meeting is incredible club make out representation. The music is loud, allowing all of the communication to take place silently. Lesbians are known in media for talking, not for cruising, and this scene is the rare sequence where without dialogue we see a queer woman spot someone she’s into, gulp down liquid courage, make her way toward the woman, dance with her, and, finally, kiss her.
3. Anne Celestino and Thaís Schier in Alice Júnior
I cannot explain to you the joy I felt when this movie about a trans teenager trying to get her first kiss turned gay. The whole movie she’s talking about boys and even crushing on her new friend’s boyfriend. But then during her going away party the new friend kisses her and everything changes. I love that this movie allows for both self-confidence and self-discovery. Alice knows with full confidence who she is — and, at the same time, there’s still more to learn. This is a sweet, wholesome moment that still allows its young characters to have a really good kiss. After decades of movies where the twist is a character is trans, what a delight to instead have a twist where a trans character is into girls.
“Only this time I’m going to stick my tongue in your mouth. And when I do that I want you to massage my tongue with yours.” The teaching-to-kiss scene that came with an instruction manual. Where to begin? The outfits? The string of spit? Sarah Michelle Gellar’s performance? This moment is ICONIC. In fact, it’s so iconic that we have already discussed it in detail.
1. Guinevere Turner and Cheryl Dunye in The Watermelon Woman
The point of this list was to highlight make outs rather than sex scenes. So how can I top this list with a make out that only lasts a few moments before it leads into a sex scene? Well, because nothing else deserves this spot, that’s why.
After their video store encounter, Diana has invited Cheryl over to her new place offering her wine, dinner, and friendly conversation. This sequence in particular begins with a clip from one of Dunye’s recreations of 1930s “race films” — Cheryl is talking excitedly about star Fae Richards and Diana looks bored. But then their eyes lock and Diana smirks. As Cheryl smokes and the two women talk about their mutual attraction, the film walks such a smart line between sexy and painful. Some moments are erotic and cringe! We get why Cheryl is drawn to Diana without the film hiding the limits of their relationship. When Diana reaches into Cheryl’s shirt pocket or when she flicks her tongue against her mouth or the way she holds both cigarettes in one hand, it’s enough to make you forget the rest. The casting of Guinevere Turner is another brilliant detail. Having co-written and starred in Go Fish two years prior, Turner is this icon of white lesbian culture seducing and repelling Cheryl.
The final beat of the sequence before the sex scene has the two women fall out of frame. Dunye holds on the TV screen allowing the rest of the scene within the scene to play out. The character played by Fae slaps the other woman for saying God chose her to pass. Look, this list has mostly been an excuse to get horny, but the very best of lesbian cinema doesn’t choose between horniness and depth.
The best lesbian movie make outs are more than just a kiss.
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?
Drew is a Brooklyn-based writer, filmmaker, and theatremaker. She is a Senior Editor at Autostraddle with a focus in film and television, sex and dating, and politics. Her writing can also be found at Bright Wall/Dark Room, Cosmopolitan UK, Refinery29, Into, them, and Knock LA. She was a 2022 Outfest Screenwriting Lab Notable Writer and a 2023 Lambda Literary Screenwriting Fellow. She is currently working on a million film and TV projects mostly about queer trans women. Find her on Twitter and Instagram.
on-screen makeout I’d love to add to this list: Charlize Theron and Sofia Boutella bathroom makeup in Atomic Blonde
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SUCH a good pick!
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Love this list! Loads of my faves on here and a few to add to my watchlist. Off the top of my head, But I’m A Cheerleader would definitely be up there if I were to do my own list.
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Soooo good. I decided to consider that a sex scene instead of a make out scene but it’s a gray area for sure.
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No I agree, that’s a sex scene imo too! I was actually thinking of their first kiss at the gay bar.
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Ooooo that IS a good one!
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Incredible list!! Drew rules always. For me it’s the first kiss in The World to Come.
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I find it odd that some of these not only look incredibly awkward but fall under the category of experimentation. Cruel Intentions isn’t a lesbian film, two or three on this list would be purely just experimenting which is fine, but it’s misleading to include them in a LESBIAN list while completely over-looking Elena Undone, Walk with Me, Carol and numerous other actual lesbian films.
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Elena Undone was unbearable to watch, worthy makeout or not.
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Look, the World to Come is one of the worst lesbian films ever made BECAUSE it also includes the best kiss ever
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Definitely missing Chloe Sevigny & Michelle Williams in These Walls Could Talk 2 – it’s everything 🥵
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Lesbians 🤝 teenage boys
Having to hide YouTube lesbians search history
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Finally, the recognition these iconic scenes deserve! It’s amazing to see lesbian love and chemistry portrayed with such passion and authenticity on screen. Some of these moments live rent-free in my head..
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It’s the Imagine Me and You kiss in the flower shop for me
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YES the departure and then the sudden return and the kiss! Right up there
It’s summertime, and we’re hot hot hot. I intend to eat as many creamsicles and creamsicle-adjacent treats as possible for the foreseeable future. The temperatures are sweltering, my body is sweating, and in the interest of cooling us all down mentally, I’ve prepared this nostalgic lesbian ice cream truck quiz for your enjoyment. Which lesbian ice cream truck treat ARE you! Time to find out!
Which Lesbian Ice Cream Truck Treat Are You?
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Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya is the managing editor of Autostraddle and a lesbian writer of essays, fiction, and pop culture criticism living in Orlando. She is the former managing editor of TriQuarterly, and her short stories appear in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Joyland, Catapult, The Offing, The Rumpus, Cake Zine, and more. Some of her pop culture writing can be found at The A.V. Club, Vulture, The Cut, and others. When she is not writing, editing, or reading, she is probably playing tennis. You can follow her on Twitter or Instagram and learn more about her work on her website.
– Pick for queer arts & craft: Homemade soap
– Come on choco taco, or maybe a drumstick
– CHIPWICH!…..I’ll take it. Hopefully it’s a mint chipwich.
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Creamsicle!
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I love that I’m a choco taco!
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I just want to know which cast member of the ultimatum: queer love season 2 has been assigned to which treat
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I’m a Creamsicle. Tho’ I would like to protest the omission of hand-poured resin D&D dice at the craft fair. Every craft fair I’ve been to in the last few years has had at least one set. Usually with little delights like flowers or tiny charms that look like frogs or cats inside.
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I somehow got firecracker pop even though, far from being a jock or jock adjacent, I’m clumsy and uncoordinated and have made a lack of interest in sports a personality trait.
I guess this closest way I relate is having ballroom dance as a hobby, but not a terribly mainstream sport.
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?
Kate Hawkins is a city-loving Californian currently residing in New Hampshire with her wife and toddler, where she's currently enjoying sports that require unwieldy pieces of equipment (kayaking! biking! cross country skiing!) and grilling lots of corn. She's stoked to be writing puzzles for Autostraddle and hopes you enjoy solving these gay puzzles!
My two closest friends (and future roommates) *Sophie and Madeline have been dating for a couple months. Before that, Sophie and I had a bit of a quiet situationship that I was going to make official, but timing didn’t work out, so she and Madeline ended up together instead. I love both of them dearly and they make a sweet couple, but whenever we go out, Sophie is all over me instead of Madeline. I can tell this is distressing for Madeline, especially since she knows that Sophie has had a thing for me in the past, but I don’t know how to address it without being a problem. Now when we spend time together, I have to keep my guard up because I’m afraid something will happen to ruin our friendships if I don’t, let alone managing my own feelings for Sophie. I don’t even know really what advice I’m asking for, but I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s been in this situation. I have other friends, but we all revolve around this one group and I desperately don’t want to cause a rift. Help!
*Names have been changed! Did we pick good ones? What would you have gone with? Sound off in the comments.
A
Valerie Anne: What in the L Word is going on here! You absolutely cannot move in with these people before having an open and honest conversation about what is going on. You have to set boundaries, be honest, and clear the air before becoming roommates. It’s going to be hard. And probably awkward as hell. But it’s going to be way more awkward and awful if things come to a head after you’re all on the same lease (or in the same dorm; both similarly hard to quickly escape from). You don’t have to mention you’re navigating your own feelings for Sophie if you’re worried that will upset both of them, but you have to tell Sophie if her being all over you makes you uncomfortable considering the situation. You can talk to them separately or together or both, and make it clear that you’re having this conversation because you DO like them as a couple and DO want to stay friends and be good roommates to each other, but if you don’t set boundaries and expectations now, things can only get worse.
Summer: Oh, this is something.
My immediate reaction is that Sophie is violating the breach of trust she has with Madeline. If Madeline is stressed about Sophie coming onto you, then Sophie’s behavior isn’t above board in their relationship. People are allowed to have complex feelings within a relationship, but actively seeking you out in that romantic capacity is a violation of Madeline’s trust. It’s also contrary to your attempts to keep things stable with Madeline and the friend group. I think Sophie’s behavior is at the point where it’s infringing on your personal boundaries and this bears a firm, but caring discussion with Sophie. Since you’re also friends with Madeline, I would hope that you also have a good enough relationship to discuss it in private with her should you feel the need to ‘get ahead’ of a developing story. Before things get messier.
Drew: My immediate question is whether you’ve talked explicitly to Sophie or Madeline or both about what you want and how you feel. Because that does seem like the first step if your priority is to reduce the drama and end anything flirtatious between you and Sophie. I wonder if the feelings you still have for Sophie are resulting in you keeping the situation in chaos because a part of you still wants it to be. No judgment! An understandable behavior! But if what you really want is to change this dynamic toward something less complicated then you need to express that explicitly.
Laneia: Hear me out, is there literally anywhere else you could live?
Nico: This might sound super stressful, but it might be the move to sit down and talk with them together, in person. I think it’s fair to give Sophie a heads up that you’re going to disclose your situationship history, but that heads up can be while you are all in the same place (one of your apartments). I recommend this move so that no one amongst the three of you can have sidebar conversations about this until after everyone is for sure on the same page. If Sophie wants to dispute what you have to say, she can do it in front of both you and Madeline, and not just to Madeline in private. I think this protects you from a potentially extremely awkward living situation, and also offers Madeline the fullest perspective, and finally asks Sophie to be accountable for her behavior to the both of you at the same time. That said, I am hoping that you consider living somewhere else, unless your motives are to get between Madeline and Sophie. Unless you all are top notch communicators and de-escalators, I don’t foresee this situation NOT becoming tense. Save the friendship and please save yourself!
Should you retroactively un-identify as a lesbian?
Q
I have identified as a lesbian since my mid-twenties, and had two serious relationships since then. It’s not like I really hated the men I dated before I came out but I just had much stronger connections with women, and usually dated people on the butch or masc end of things. I only had two serious relationships though with people who did identify as women at the time, and since our breakups, both of those exes have come out as trans men. Does this mean I’m not actually a lesbian after all? Would it be offensive for me to still identify as a lesbian?
A
Valerie: Do you still FEEL like a lesbian? Is that still a label that you identify with and feel is right for you? Because if so, that’s really the only requirement. You’re attracted to women, and you thought your last two partners were women when you dated them. I personally don’t think, just because it turns out you were wrong and they came out as men, it has to change your label if you don’t want it to. I actually have a friend who identifies as a lesbian and has a trans man ex and she actually delights in being able to talk about her ex who has a stereotypically male name and watch eyebrows go up. That said, if the lesbian label doesn’t FEEL right to you anymore, you can change it! There are no rules about it. But if it still does, I personally don’t think you have to change it because your exes transitioned.
Sa’iyda: I don’t think other people’s gender journey needs to affect how you see yourself in terms of language. Labels are self identifiers, so no one else can tell you how you feel about yourself. If you feel like a lesbian, then that’s what you are. I identified as bi, then queer when I no longer was attracted to men but wanted to respect my past relationship with a cis man. Now I call myself a lesbian because that’s what feels right to me at this stage of my life. Maybe I’ll reach a point in my life where I go back to queer, I don’t know! Nowadays, people are constantly shifting their self-identifiers based on what feels right. And there are a lot of women who say they’re lesbians but have dated or been in serious relationships with men in the past! It happens! But if your former partners transitioning makes you question or want to expand the way you view yourself, try on a new label. You can always go back to being a lesbian if that’s what makes you feel most comfortable.
Summer: It wouldn’t be ‘offensive’ for you to still ID as a lesbian just because the people you dated turned out to be trans after the fact. You are a lesbian as long as you feel strongly enough about your attraction to women to call yourself a lesbian. I think it can be that simple.
More to the point, when you were dating those partners who are now trans, I’m guessing they still characterized themselves as women, or women-like enough to fit into the lesbian attraction matrix. That means you were dating people whose genders aligned to your lesbian identity. They can change that later, but the past is already written. And while there is much capital-D Discourse about whether to characterize trans people as always their current and correct gender or to alter your terminology to reflect certain parts of their lives, that Discourse™ doesn’t have to impugn your right to personhood. As far as my (trans) ass is concerned, you’re a lesbian because you feel strongly about women in a particular way and that’s your call to make.
Drew: I’m going to go a step further and say you could continue to identify as a lesbian even if you were still dating one of your exes and that felt good for you and good for them. I fundamentally believe labels are fluid and about what feels right in describing yourself and your community. This feels related to the exhausting “can trans men be lesbians” discourse that’s been happening even more than usual in recent weeks. People want everything to be so categorized but that’s just not how it’s ever been and I don’t see the value in it becoming that way. To me, queerness should be about expansion and I’m grateful that lesbian identity and community includes people with a wide variety of gender experiences.
Nico: Here to say that labels are always evolving and fluid in their meanings — as Drew said, and lesbian community does in fact include people of a variety of gender identities. At the end of the day, a label is just a word, and I usually find someone’s label, followed by their own personal definition for how they relate to that label, to be what is actually required for me to understand where that person is coming from. I think that if you had a current partner who, while you were dating, did not identify as a woman, and who was uncomfortable with you using the label “lesbian,” then that is a conversation you can have between the two of you to find out what feels best. I am assuming that at the time, your partners did not express discomfort with your label, and since you are not a psychic who can tell if someone is a trans man before they tell you, I do not thing you did anything wrong there. When I was dating a lesbian and also came out as genderfluid, she asked how I felt about her continuing to identify as a lesbian. But here’s the thing: it was more than just about her attraction, it was also about the history and culture she was tapped into, about her deprioritization of cis men, and how she moved through community and in all of her relationships — not to mention the word being a part of her own personal history of coming out and navigating a hostile heteronormative world. The word “lesbian” was core to her identity for a lot of reasons, and I didn’t particularly feel like my gender identity was in any way challenging or delegitimizing that. That, though, was my own individual take, and someone else could feel completely differently — and that is also valid. However, you are not in a situation like this, so you don’t have to worry about that right now, and you are free to use whatever label feels right to you. You can also try other labels on, see if they feel better than “lesbian,” and you can change your mind LITERALLY at any time.
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In a crowded Lower East Side park with people playing volleyball behind her, Benedict Nguyễn began the performance. While I was there to talk to Benedict about her debut novel Hot Girls with Balls, I relished the opportunity to watch a run-through of her piece Defense. A true multi-hyphenate, Benedict would be performing this work with collaborator Sugar Vendil at her book launch blurring the lines between literature, dance, and sports.
Throughout the run-through, some kids kept hitting their ball onto our stage and each time Benedict hit it back as if they were part of the company. This is the kind of precision, creativity, and freedom Benedict brings to the page. Hot Girls with Balls is a novel that feels deliberate in its form while still vibrating with an energy of unpredictability.
Existing in a world parallel to our own, the novel follows Six and Green, two Asian American trans women competing at the highest level of men’s indoor volleyball. Influencers as well as athletes, the two women struggle to balance their sport with the pressures of their public and private lives.
I spoke to Benedict about why volleyball is the most aesthetic sport, writing Six and Green’s romance, and why the names of real tech companies are not in the book. While you’re reading, imagine the background sounds of people playing volleyball in a New York City park.
Drew: Tell me about the performance I just watched. What was the idea behind it and was it always planned to be in tandem with book events?
Benedict:Defense is a dance work. You could also call it a dance theatre work. It’s a duet between me and my friend and collaborator Sugar Vendil. It’s set on a sports court where we’re both players on a team getting ready for a game and we’re catching up and also having intense discussions about the nature of violence and also having some close call not-quite-arguments while doing functional exercises, pushups, and warming up with the ball. I’ve had the idea for a couple of years and we started rehearsing it in April. I was working on it as a solo and when I got back to New York last summer, I was hanging out with Sugar and I had the idea of turning it into a duet. Then I let that idea marinate for a few months before I accepted we can let the idea crisscross with the book launch.
Drew: When you say you accepted that they can crisscross… (laughs) What do you mean by that? That you wanted it as a solo piece but it felt like a valuable way to promote the book?
Benedict: Yeah I think the hesitancy is I had this idea and I wanted to just do the idea.
Drew: You didn’t want it to be marketing.
Benedict: Yeah but also the logistics of when and how this work would be shared. And this is a moment in which an audience we hope will appear.
Drew: So in a sense the book is marketing for the performance piece as well.
Benedict: (laughs)
Drew: But really neither is marketing. They’re just two creations of yours that are in conversation. Do you think they’re in conversation?
Benedict: Absolutely. Defense is not an adaptation of Hot Girls with Balls but in this period of public output I have a narrow enough set of ideas that I’m digesting.
Drew: More broadly, how do you feel like your work as a dancer and a performer affects your writing?
Benedict: I think a lot of my adult professional career has been trying to understand the relationship between them. Earlier when I was just starting to work with choreographers, I had a challenge of all of a sudden having to learn a lot of new material very quickly which hadn’t been my strong suit before then. Writing became a tool that helped me become a better dancer. I’ve written dance and cultural criticism in the past and there I was thinking of how to translate an hour-long performance into so many words and the impossibility of that task. Then I decided to write a sports novel. (laughs)
Drew: There’s a clear link there to me though, because you write physicality very well and athleticism very well. How do you approach that?
Benedict: It’s a delicate task where I want to be specific in certain ways without being too rote or itemized or atomized about a person’s body. I want to create a clear sensation and image but I also want to infuse that with a degree of mood. And then with the satirical element of the book I’m also trying to make fun of it at times. I think there are moments where the seriousness of a life devoted to one’s physical performance — and I felt this in my dance life as well — that commitment can feel bizarre.
Drew: That makes me think about how it connects to the presenting of oneself on social media as a sort of influencer. What about that world were you hoping to capture and satirize?
Benedict: The way the algorithm prioritizes beauty and prioritizes face to the screen over other compositional choices in photographic or film medium. It’s a codification of sex sells. But unlike the 1990s, no one is exactly discussing it that way. Or, at least, not as much. The “hot” in Hot Girls with Balls is that it’s a given our protagonists are extremely beautiful. And they know it and they’re aware of how that affects the growth of their fan bases. It affects their careers offline and their relationships to their sports team employers. Athlete as celebrity blurs public self and personal brand.
Drew: Even though Six and Green are active participants in their careers as influencers, it does feel like the book is getting into something around the way race and gender identity often force people into that kind of space. Only some athletes get to just be athletes. When you have these points of identity you’re more likely to have to fall into this influencer space in order to turn these things into commodified plusses in the eyes of your employers and the culture rather than hindrances.
Benedict: Yeah people have been talking about the flattening of social critique and identity politics that occurred in the 2010s social media era. The logic of celebrity affects people who are genuinely activists and then get incentivized to build their platforms and then that slippery slope into hawking products on a platform that might be well-intentioned but are not that different from a traditional influencer hawking a beauty product in terms of the distribution flows from product to influencer to consumer.
Drew: The book is so grounded in our current moment, but it exists in this explicitly parallel world due things like Flitter instead of Twitter. At what point in the process, did you find that angle and what was the intention behind that distancing?
Benedict: It’s the most surface-level satire of the book. It immediately reminds the reader that even if things feel extremely familiar, the book’s orientation toward our timeline is slanted. Even on a drafting level, I didn’t want to be typing out the names of corporations that I don’t care for.
Drew: (laughs)
Benedict: I didn’t want these names printed ad infinitum. But this allows a reader to recognize an applications interface without me having to spell out how a certain 3×3 grid is shaped.
Drew: You float from these various limited third perspectives. Did the decisions to favor which character at which point in the story come naturally? Was that something that shifted through revisions?
Benedict: I wanted it to be somewhat volleyball rally-esque. It bounces between Six and Green and it sometimes bounces between Six and Green and somebody else.
Drew: Sometimes it goes out of bounds.
Benedict: Way up into the stands. And having that structure helped shape the delivery of information. There are moments when it’s not exactly even.
Drew: As in sports.
Benedict: Yes.
Drew: Why volleyball? How did your interest in the sport develop?
Benedict: We’re sitting outside watching a bunch of people play and I just think it’s such a stunningly gorgeous use of round sports ball. Basketball does not look this good. Soccer does not look this good. Throwing up the ball, looking back, and then swinging your arm around your shoulder socket and hitting the ball real hard — that’s beauty, baby. (laughs)
Drew: It’s very aesthetic. When did you start playing?
Benedict: I had some high school gym class, but I didn’t touch a volleyball again until I started writing this novel and thought I should remember what it feels like. And I was like, wait is my hand-eye coordination better than it used to be?
Drew: That’s a great thing to learn.
Benedict: It’s been great playing a lot more again rehearsing for Defense.
Drew: One of the aspects of the book that I find most interesting and that I think people will potentially fixate on because it’s of the moment is that this is a trans women in sports book. How did you decide to make it about trans women playing in men’s sports specifically?
Benedict: That was a day one conceit, because unfortunately the narrative pathways — at least in my imagination — for where a trans woman could go in a women’s league feels so predictable and in a novel less compelling to write about. At least to me.
Drew: Totally.
Benedict: Whereas our protagonists complying with the conservative thought that they should just play with their gender assigned at birth draws attention to the paradox of gender and opens up space for humor. I had fun showing the girls on a boys team dynamics.
Drew: And in terms of hormones and how medical transition is discussed in the book, was everything just character driven and narrative driven or were you thinking about the wider conversation? I guess the question is are you able to remove yourself from this fraught world that we’re in right now where trans people in sports has become a moral panic or did that weigh on you as you wrote?
Benedict: Within the novel, the narrative deliberately doesn’t give that much insight into Six and Green’s personal choices around the question. But that debate does happen around them and about them. And I think the tension between Six and Green making empowered choices around their medical transitions based on their experience of their genders within or outside of the context of the sports regulations and market incentives is an ambiguity that I invite a reader to interpret.
Drew: It’s a sports story, but it’s also a love story. I appreciated how the book is romantic and I was rooting for this couple, but you don’t brush past the challenges of the relationship and even certain incompatibilities between them. Can you talk about creating Six and Green as a couple?
Benedict: When I knew that I wasn’t just going to have one but two Asian American trans women as my protagonists, I knew that they had to be lovers and I knew that they had to be opposites.
Drew: You said well they obviously have to kiss.
Benedict: (laughs) Well, yeah. And there’s definitely black cat/golden retriever energy and that allowed me to differentiate them on the page and their orientations toward social media and their sense of stability within the sport. I wanted the density of all of the similarities in the structures of their lives with their different personalities to create tension and have that be an internal motor of the plot alongside all the other outside events that happen.
Drew: Do you think there could be a Six and Green in professional sports? I know mens sports are very conservative and very toxic toward queer people but I am always waiting for a baseball player to transition. Or even come out as gay would be huge I guess. (laughs)
Benedict: That’s part of the satire/fantasy/alternate reality of the book is that I have a hard time imagining someone truly being able to be out in this way and progress in a sports field without real obstruction. But it has been great to see the proliferation of queer sexualities of athletes that I follow. There was a nonbinary track runner at the Olympics last year which was very cool to see. I recommend reading Michael Waters’ The Other Olympians that traces the history of trans athletes in the 1930s amidst the rise of fascism and Cecé Telfer’s memoir Make it Count which discusses her journey from becoming an NCAA champion to competing in the Olympics. Oh there was also a nonbinary figure skater at the 2022 Olympics. And gender was happening.
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?
Drew is a Brooklyn-based writer, filmmaker, and theatremaker. She is a Senior Editor at Autostraddle with a focus in film and television, sex and dating, and politics. Her writing can also be found at Bright Wall/Dark Room, Cosmopolitan UK, Refinery29, Into, them, and Knock LA. She was a 2022 Outfest Screenwriting Lab Notable Writer and a 2023 Lambda Literary Screenwriting Fellow. She is currently working on a million film and TV projects mostly about queer trans women. Find her on Twitter and Instagram.
Feature image of the Budapest Pride Parade 2025 by Janos Kummer via Getty Images
June was a hard month for democracy in the United States. Now that Pride is behind us, it’s time to take stock—not only of what we’ve lost, but also of the lessons we urgently need from LGBTQI+ victories and resistance to growing authoritarianism around the world. This week, Budapest Pride in Hungary offered exactly such a lesson.
The month began with World Pride in Washington, D.C., where turnout was half what organizers predicted, and not a single federal official took the stage. Thanks to discriminatory policies under the Trump Administration—like Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s trans visa restrictions—many trans and nonbinary people were simply too afraid to travel to the U.S. By contrast, World Pride in Australia in 2022 became the country’s biggest event since the 2000 Olympics.
The Canadian organization EGALE called for a boycott of World Pride in D.C., and governments from Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom issued official travel warnings to LGBTQI+ citizens about visiting the United States. Such warnings are usually reserved for places where homosexuality is illegal or blackmail or there’s utter impunity for anti-queer-trans violence. The fact that the U.S. is lumped into that category is staggering.
After years of progress for LGBTQI+ Americans, a recent wave of federal anti-LGBTQI+ policies and court rulings has brought a dangerous new reality. Just this week, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that schools must permit parents to opt out of LGBT-themed books and expanded presidential power even when it risks violating constitutional rights like birthright citizenship. A week earlier, the Department of Health and Human Services defunded the suicide hotline for LGBTQI+ youth. From the Skrmetti decision, to executive orders attacking so-called “gender ideology,” to bans on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, to illegally withholding funds allocated by Congress—the list of authoritarian actions keeps growing and the pace is overwhelming to keep us feeling powerless.
That’s why Hungary’s demonstration of resistance matters so deeply.
In March, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s government banned Pride events under the pretext of protecting minors from the “depiction or promotion” of homosexuality. Yet this past Saturday, over 300,000 people flooded the streets of Budapest Pride in defiance. Marchers risked being identified through facial recognition cameras blanketing the city, as well as fines equivalent to $686 each (€586). Considering that only about 30,000 attended Budapest Pride last year, this was a resounding rebuke to Orbán’s repression.
Though likely no fan of Budapest Pride, Donald Trump has openly admired Hungary, calling it a “strong country” and Orbán “a very great leader, a very strong man.” Orbán has become a MAGA favorite because, as Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation explained, “Modern Hungary is not just a model for conservative statecraft, but the model.”
We’re doubtful that’s the only reason for the infatuation. Hungary today has channeled wealth to Orbán and his cronies, earning it the label of the European Union’s “most corrupt country.” It has eroded judicial independence, suppressed university free speech, seized control of the media, and tampered with elections, earning a rebuke from the European Parliament as an “electoral autocracy.” Sound familiar?
We believe that Hungary represents the kind of country Trump and his allies want the United States to become. And Orbán is the kind of ruler Trump aspires to be. We’ve seen many of the strategies from the Orban playbook used by Trump this term. This means there could come a day when Pride is banned in the United States, too. Instead of imagining that as some distant nightmare, we have to face the long-standing truth: American exceptionalism is a myth. And we must learn how Hungarians are fighting back and how to muster the courage to rise up to protect our democratic freedoms.
Americans don’t have the luxury of time. Orbán’s crackdown on LGBTQI+ rights developed gradually. By contrast, the Trump Administration’s attacks on queer rights, diversity, and democracy have been swift. We need to anticipate the next attacks and move from merely reacting to actively charting our own path forward.
Researchers of authoritarianism have actually measured what type of civic resistance works to overthrow authoritarian, illiberal regimes. Looking at hundreds of campaigns over the last century, Harvard University’s Erica Chenoweth found that nonviolent campaigns are twice as likely to achieve their goals as violent campaigns, and although the exact dynamics will depend on many factors, Chenoweth has shown it takes around 3.5% of the population actively participating in the protests to ensure serious political change. Nearly 3% of Hungarians joined Budapest Pride in spite of Orban’s threats.
Three crucial lessons stand out from Hungary’s LGBTQI+ movement.
First, activists pulled from a diverse toolkit.. Human rights defenders turned to the courts, published op-eds, debated opponents on television, and built coalitions across sectors of society. Broad tactics matter.
Second, Hungarians understood that LGBTQI+ rights are inseparable from the broader fight against authoritarianism. It’s not only about queer people—it’s about fighting corruption and defending democracy and equality for all.
Third, they infused resistance with creativity, humor, and joy. Local political groups organized a satirical “Grey Pride” rally a month prior, and instead of beautiful rainbow flags, they carried monochromatic signs proclaiming, “Sameness is trendy.” As one organizer explained, “That’s the twist, of course. We don’t want everyone to be the same.” People love Pride marches because of the colors, the diversity, the freedom, and the pure queer joy that is palpable. We should keep celebrating the beauty of our queerness.
The work in Hungary isn’t finished—but it’s making a difference. People are mobilizing, finding hope, and showing that countless everyday citizens are willing to take risks for justice. That’s why hundreds of thousands poured into the streets last Saturday to claim their rights despite the ban and threats.
Hungary is just one example. Across the globe—from Uganda to Kenya, Lebanon to Egypt, Indonesia to South Korea, Poland to the United Kingdom, Guatemala to Argentina—LGBTQI+ movements are resisting powerful adversaries and defending their rights and the dignity of all. Studying these movements isn’t optional—it’s essential if we want to chart a path away from the threat of American autocracy toward democracy, and perhaps even toward equity.
While some in the U.S. are retreating—like too many corporations, law firms, and universities dismantling diversity, equity, and inclusion programs—others are stepping up. Litigation is working. Community organizing is flourishing. People are starting to create the muscle memory to protest regularly in the streets and to defend their immigrant neighbors. There are early signs that Congress might eventually reassert its constitutional role as a check on presidential power. But as Senator Chris Murphy has even said, “The only route through this crisis is the mobilization of the public.”
While the start of the month in DC was lackluster, the end of Pride month proved inspirational. All of us have a role to play. Doing something regularly helps keep hope alive and despair away. Call your representatives every day—even if they’re already supportive, they need to hear from constituents. Join a community mobilization group like Indivisible or Working Families or Public Citizen. Get trained to help immigrant neighbors resist illegal deportations. Find your way to engage that matches your particular risk tolerance, but don’t let fear immobilize! If nothing else, donate to organizations doing good work. And if you are able, show up for every mass mobilization. Keep queer joy, humor, and defiance alive in your activism long after the parades end.
As our Hungarian friends have shown us in vivid color, we are an essential part of the resistance—and of the fight for equality itself.
Muster all your courage for this moment. What we all do collectively right now will write this chapter of history.
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?
Julie Dorf is a highly respected career professional and a pivotal figure in LGBTQI+ human rights. With over 35 years of unparalleled leadership experience, she has consistently demonstrated expertise in policymaking, direct advocacy, and philanthropy, establishing herself as a trailblazer in the global LGBTQI+ rights movement. Her extensive contributions include founding Outright International (formerly the International Gay & Lesbian Human Rights Commission), where she served as Executive Director from 1990 to 2000. She later co-founded the Council for Global Equality in 2008, a coalition of 40 U.S. human rights and LGBTQI+ organizations and continues to serve as its Co-Chair. In this role, she plays a key part in advocating for inclusive U.S. foreign and development policy. Additionally, she advises Equality Without Borders, a group of individual donors dedicated to supporting international LGBTQI+ rights organizations.
Jessica Stern is the former U.S. Special Envoy for the Human Rights of LGBTQI+ Persons and the former Executive Director of Outright International. She is Co-Founder and Principal of the Alliance for Diplomacy and Justice, an initiative consisting of former ambassadors, special representatives, and special envoys advocating for human rights, inclusive development, and global justice in U.S. foreign policy. She is currently a Senior Fellow at the Carr-Ryan Center at the Harvard Kennedy School.
GREAT NEWS to all our To L and Back friends and family! We’ve gotten the band back together for two very special episodes covering the glorious mess known as The Ultimatum: Queer Love. You can listen to both episodes — the first recapping the first chunk of episodes and the second covering the final three, wherever you get your podcasts!
But we’ve also got a video and transcript for our AF+ members, right here.
Riese: Hi, I am Riese!
Drew: And I’m Drew.
Analyssa: and I’m Analyssa!
All: And this is To L and Back The Ultimatum Queer Love Edition!
Riese: That was really good. No, no rust at all that time. It was perfect. Now we’re really back from the L.
Analyssa: Now we’re really in it.
Riese: Okay. So the first episodes have come out, you’ve already listened to our podcast on that topic. Everybody is responding on the internet to the first batch of episodes, including everyone who’s in it. Like, I think every single cast member has made a video reminding everybody that they’re real people and that nobody should be mean to them.
Drew: Fair.
Riese: I don’t know if this happened the first time around or not, but like on TikTok, like every other video I have, is a different Ultimatum cast member being like, “just remember that we’re trying hard to live, you know.”
Drew: This is maybe hypocritical of me since I’m literally recording a podcast about this show, but I can’t imagine caring enough to go after these individual people! Maybe it’s more — people like posting a reaction and then it just happens to cross the feed of the person they’re talking about — I don’t know how many people are like personally reaching out and like commenting on these people’s pages, ’cause that feels crazy to me.
But recording a full podcast, that’s just totally normal!
Riese: Just another day in the office.
Drew: It’s part of my job. So, you know, I’m just trying to get health insurance like everyone else.
Analyssa: That’s kind of the thing about reality tv, right? Once you’re on reality tv people can post about you on social media and say whatever they want.
I guess someone could do that about me, but I’m interacting with fewer people and fewer people know who I am. So like — where is the line of being mean and bullying? Are we not allowed to say anything about anyone who’s been on reality TV? I just find that very fascinating.
It’s happening in my Love Island discourse also.
Drew: Hmm.
Analyssa: They’re having a mean season.
Riese: Well, I for one love Islands. On that note, should we talk about the episodes? We’re gonna talk about eight, nine, and the reunion, which was a wild event. Our screeners for it haven’t been color corrected yet and the sound hadn’t been mixed yet. So I don’t know what you guys are gonna see, but what we saw, like color-wise also was just very fascinating. It had a, like a soft metallic glow. It felt like someone had spent a lot of time in Party City with a specific color palette in mind, and we’ll see how that turns out in the final episode. And I’m sure everybody’s on the edge of their seat as far as that’s concerned.
Analyssa: That’s the most exciting thing about the reunion to await.
Riese: So we return to our couples in strife.
Drew: I think we start with Pilar and Haley.
Riese: Haley and Pilar are, believe it or not, having a bit of a rough go of it.
Drew: Kind of! I also think that the way they communicate is so much better than most of the other couples, in my opinion. Like, yeah, they’re going through a period of time where they’ve been together for 10 years. One of them just — I’m doing air quotes right now — “fell in love with someone else” — and they’re navigating that. There’s issues but you know, Pilar is saying to Haley, I can’t tell you how to feel. I just think that they’re navigating it in a way that I would hope if I had good friends who I cared about, who were hoping to maybe at the end of this fight still be together and this rough patch still be together.
Like they are navigating all of this quite well, in my opinion.
Riese: I agree. It actually also did remind me of the Mal, Yoly, Xander thing from season one, where Mel was commended for communicating effectively, not flying off the handle. It feels like that’s the same case here where Pilar is like, “I’m gonna make space for the fact that you had this experience, but like, I’m still here and I’m still like fighting for you,” you know?
Drew: Yeah.
Riese: And isn’t that lovely?
Drew: It is.
Riese: Okay. Dayna and Magan. Magan says she missed Dayna, and she lost hope and isn’t sure if she would’ve slept with Haley had the pool incident not occurred. The pool incident that we all know changed the course of human history. In my notes, I said, Dayna is still lying. And then said she needs surety, which is not a word. And Dayna’s through line for all of this to Magan is like That wasn’t you. That wasn’t really you. I can’t believe this is you. I don’t know what that’s about, but that’s like a really interesting approach. It’s interesting, you know? Okay.
Drew: Yeah, I think you can’t, I mean, you can, Dayna’s doing it, but be like, “I don’t know how to trust you again for doing this thing that I also did, but I’m lying about also having done it so.”
Analyssa: But even regardless of that, Magan called Dayna in the first few nights being like, “I don’t wanna do this.” And Dayna said, “if you’re committed to me, you will commit to this experience,” which is bananas, and Magan said, okay, I will do that
Riese: Yeah.
Analyssa: You can not like the way that she did it. That makes sense. But being like, “I can’t believe you would commit to this experience and do the thing that Netflix is trying to get us to do.” When Dayna has done the exact same thing and is committed to lying about it on camera, which is wild.
It doesn’t make any sense to me. Like the, I understand people are heartbroken, so the logic isn’t really the point, but the logic doesn’t track.
Riese: I felt like she was just using it to have the upper hand in the fight. I guess that’s her business. She’s a real person, so I dunno.
Analyssa: I think it’s in Kayla’s recap, she was like — I wish that Magan had revealed that she hooked up with Haley earlier so that Dayna can’t just hide behind that the whole time. Like use that. and that was prophetic.
Riese: Indeed.
Drew: My next note is, “I don’t care about Marita and Ashley.” Sorry. So I’m gonna hand that off to any notes that you both have on, on this couple that’s just … clearly over.
Riese: I transcribed a quote? “We’re never promised tomorrow.”
Drew: Hmm
Riese: Someone said that, and I guess that’s true. We could all die tonight!
Drew: And do you wanna die being in a relationship with Ashley or not?
Riese: Yeah. Do you wanna die romantically or do you wanna die having to make your own dinner? Hard to say, but I wrote, “nobody opens their mouths.” Oh, they met up with Ashley’s sisters. Yeah. They’re all good real people who had the same hair and I thought that was adorable for everyone.
And it seems like they should break up.
Analyssa: It seemed like the sisters are also rooting for them to break up. They’re like, “no, we love you guys and we want you to be happy, but if you can’t be happy, maybe break up? And it doesn’t seem like you can be happy.” Like they kind of just keep cycling through that.
Riese: Well, we’re never promised tomorrow.
Analyssa: So true. I find them fascinating to watch because I think it’s so interesting to have chosen to be in a four year relationship with someone when you don’t like how they behave.
Like it’s not a values situation. It’s not like a, “I thought I wanted kids and I thought you did too, and now we’re four years in.” It’s like, “I don’t like that you don’t do nice things for me.” And the other person being like, “well, I can’t do nice things for you.” And nobody’s been willing to change their position on that in four years is like shocking to me.
Like I’ve dated people for less time who have done things that are annoying and I’ve been like, well, that’s just who they are. Or I’ve been like, okay, I don’t wanna deal with that. Like those are the options.
Riese: They do a lot of stuff in this show and all the Netflix reality dating shows that I’ve seen where they talk about the other person and what they like about the other person. But usually it’s what they like about what the other person brings out in them.
But they don’t spend enough time, in my opinion, telling me like, what do they do as a couple? Like what are their things together? What TV shows do they watch? Like what’s the little bagel store they go to every Saturday? What are the ties that bind them together? Do they send each other cute emojis in the morning?
Do they text each other from the other room and say, I’m eating your Butterfinger, like my wife does? What are the things that they do? And I say, get your fingers off my Butterfinger!
Speaking of butter fingers. Mel and Marie. Uh, Marie wants Mel to feel safe and love and trust makes Mel happy.
Drew: Mel says that she might never want safe and stable. Mel’s still sort of like in that world of Dayna—
Riese: Bonnie and Clyde!
Drew: Bonnie and Clyde! True romance. We’re just gonna just ride it out until we can and leave as many bodies in our wake as we need to, to prove that we’re outlaws in love.
Which is a way that people feel —and you shouldn’t then be in a relationship with someone and have a business with them. Then it just feels like Mel’s in a place maybe to just like — run around and live life and be free.
Riese: Yeah, like a bird.
Drew: Like a bird.
Riese: We go back to Haley and Pilar. Haley never felt like Pilar was prioritizing her, and Pilar wants to show that. Apparently they ran into Dayna and Magan at a club, and Magan said that they needed to cut all contact. And I’ve got a feeling that was Dayna’s idea, just a theory here!
Drew: Yeah.
Riese: Dayna says — tells Magan — that her relationship with Haley is not appropriate. Haley ignored Magan at the gym. These are the days of our lives like sand through the hourglass. Again, Magan doesn’t “sound like herself” whenever she says something that Dayna doesn’t like. She’s like, “that’s not, that doesn’t sound like you, you don’t sound like yourself.” Yourself only says things that I like.
Drew: I just have. “Yikes. Yikes, yikes!” That’s the note that I have here. So I don’t know what that was exactly in response to, I’m not having fun, not being super detailed in my notes, but it was between Magan cutting off Haley and Dayna saying Magan can’t be friends with Haley. So in between there, someone said something.
I’m gonna guess Dayna said something that made me go, “yikes!”
Analyssa: They’re really mad that Haley liked a photo of Magan’s on Instagram.
Riese: Yeah. More fights like that!
Drew: There’s a lot of Instagram drama.
Analyssa: We forgot to talk about Haley blocking Pilar or Pilar blocking Haley on Instagram After posting Kyle with heart eyes?
Riese: We should all be posting Kyle with heart eyes more often.
Drew: I’m not ever posting Kyle with heart eyes. Sorry.
Riese: That’s your prerogative. But they’re real people!
Drew: And you know what? Something brave about me — and they do, but not all of them can be posted with hard eyes by me. I only have so many hours in the day. If we do the math here, there’s a limit to the number of people I can post with heart eyes.
Analyssa: And me and Riese are in the top 10.
Drew: Oh yeah. I’ll post both of you with heart eyes.
Riese: Thank you so much. I’ll post both of you with heart eyes too. I will And I’ll see if my wife blocks me. Or if Kyle blocks me! But speaking of Kyle, they meet up with the parents and Bridget just still doesn’t get why marriage as necessary. And Kyle’s Dad says, “you don’t have enough money to get married. What are you guys doing? ”
Drew: Another real person on this show who is obsessed with “for sicker and through sickness and health for richer and poorer.” I’m like, man, we’re really, it’s really getting brought up again!
Riese: Should we get rid of those?
Analyssa: Bridget is like, “what is marriage?” And the parents just start reciting the vows and it’s like, no, no, no. Yeah, we, we all are aware of that, but it’s like, again, Bridget’s point — fair. Yeah. You guys are already kind of doing that, you know?
Drew: Well, and then —
Analyssa: But what they really mean when they say that they are poor is that they can’t buy a home in Los Angeles, which is like—
Riese: No one! Who can?
Drew: Literally who is a homeowner?,
I did gasp when Kyle’s dad was like, you shouldn’t get married. Um, if I was Bridget, that would make me wanna get married more.
Analyssa: I was, I was just about to say!
Drew: Okay. We’re not gonna be able to own a home? Well, let’s, let’s do this.
Analyssa: Bridget being like, “marriage is maybe too traditional and not really for me.” Like someone saying like, “well, you can’t do it because you’re not traditional enough.” I’d be like, “hold on. That’s up to me!”
Riese: Exactly. AJ loves Brittany, she worries she’s not enough.
Analyssa: The crowd cheers!
Riese: We too love Brittany. This is a relatable emotion. She says she’s worried she’s just not enough, and Brittany’s like, ‘okay, be more!” And again, queen! No notes.
Drew: Yeah, this was really revealing in a way that, some of the stuff from the last batch around like AJ being like, “you care about your career too much and you’re not like around to make me food!” And that was a little bit eye rolly. Like it’s clear that it’s more attached to like self-esteem and wanting to also have a career path that feels equal and insecurities around not having that.
And that was the final sort of moment that made me go like, “okay, I can, I can root for these real people to work things out if that’s, if that’s what they want.”
Analyssa: They’re real people when we’re excited about them. In the way that, in the way that Magan’s only really being herself when Dayna likes what she says,
Riese: Exactly. Yeah.
Analyssa: They seal it with a very, very sexy kiss for the, like, sushi restaurant that they’re in!
Riese: That was a big day at the restaurant!
Analyssa: But the cameras do a lot of angles, so you know they’re not sitting right next to anybody. They’re like “we’re gonna be on the booth on the other side of them.”
Riese: Do you sit next to your partner?
Analyssa: We sit across from each other.
Drew: I would say usually across, Elise likes to sit next and I’m always a little bit, like, I just feel like I can talk to you more while, like, I, I not to not be
Analyssa: my head.
Riese: I have an ex who always wanted to scooch up next to me, and I was like “I don’t know!’ It was adorable, actually, but I prefer across. I don’t see any advantage to the side by side.
Uh, how do you feel about PDA? I don’t know if I would kiss in a restaurant. Is that internalized homophobia or is it because I’m afraid people think we’re sisters? And then is that internalized incest phobia?
Drew: Hmm. Wow. Lots of unpack there. Um, I also struggle with this sometimes where like, don’t want to be someone who worries about like, what am I actually worried about, right? Like, am I worried about people being weirded out and making a comment? ‘Cause okay, I can get through that.
I’m not actually worried about violence. I don’t think so. I’ve been pushing myself to be more PDA, I’m very good at PDA if I’m like drunk out late at night and then the vibes feel, you know, whatever. It’s the daytime walking around or sitting at a restaurant where I do have a hesitation. But I’m working on it. I like other people’s PDA. Put on a show for us, you know?
Riese: Yeah. What are we here for? No one’s promised a tomorrow.
Drew: Exactly.
Analyssa: So today, let me see you kiss!
Drew: Yeah.
Riese: Do you feel differently with having a male partner, PDA than you would with a female partner? Or the same?
Analyssa: I was thinking about that ’cause you guys were both like, well maybe it’s homophobia. And I was like, right, I don’t experience that in the relationship that I’m in. but I think I feel about the same. I think I’m not a PDA person. In the daylight, a peck is something I feel comfortable with and would do pretty much with anybody. But the more intense kissing, I don’t know. Tongue? I might feel differently.
Drew: It might be ageist.
Riese: I was thinking that too.
Drew: I’m 31. Should I really be like hooking up with my partner in public right now? But who says that in your thirties you can’t continue to do that?
I don’t know. I don’t have a strong answer on this. I really feel conflicted.
Analyssa: I think I feel most on board with that actually. I haven’t thought about that, but I feel like a little bit too old.
Riese: Yeah. I’m like, no one wants to see this old hag tongue.
Analyssa: Nobody wants to see all that. What am I doing?
Riese: But everybody should feel confident no matter what age they are, and everyone’s a real person.
Drew: Pilar says is talking to Haley about seeing Magan and is like MAY-GAN? Megan?
Analyssa: “What’s her name?”
Drew: Haley’s, like, it’s very clearly Magan. I have to say this whole episode’s gonna be a lot of me obsessed with Pilar.
I think this is the exact balance between being a mature good partner and being just petty enough that you can hold onto yourself through the hard times of little jokes that undermine the person who your partner has feelings for, but still giving space for the actual mature conversations.
I was cracking up and I was like, this is, this is a perfect vibe. No notes.
Riese: This is like when my ex-boyfriend had this relationship with this other person that he lied to me about. And anyway, I only called her by her AOL screenname, which was AllyBoo. Never Allison. Allyboo forever. If him and I spoke tomorrow, I would still call this girl Allyboo. And that’s what happens if you lie and you cheat!
Analyssa: Then I get to make fun of you a little bit.
Riese: Then I get to make fun of you a little bit.
Drew: It’s a pretty effective bullying tactic? Or undermining tactic?
Riese: In my defense, I was 21.
Drew: Look, I’m 31 and I’m still encouraging people to do this. I just think it’s a pretty, it’s a pretty good — you’re not really making fun of anyone. You’re just forgetting someone’s name!
Analyssa: It’s a little bit like the phrase, “your little friend.” Dayna said that at the Recoupling, which is not like the kindest tone, but being like, “oh, your, is your friend gonna be there?” It’s like that a little bit.
Drew: Look straight people have been using “your little friend” in order to undermine our relationships for years and years and years. So, you know, we could do it to each other. And that’s progress.
Riese: That’s equality.
Drew: Yeah.
Riese: So then there’s a cocktail party, which is wild. Dayna tells Mel she’s being weird. I don’t know why Dayna cares about how Mel’s behaving at all at this point. ’cause she’s already made it clear she’s all in on Magan. Mel is still hung up on Dayna and Dayna says she learned so much, but then also is telling Mel like, I never wanna see this behavior from you.
I mean, Dayna can, the character of Dayna on our television show can do whatever she wants and everyone else is can’t and is at fault. And that’s sort of that sort of her stance it.
Analyssa: I think it’s like that thing where you’re not supposed to be dating someone or hooking up with someone or pursuing someone anymore, but you do still want them to be obsessed with you and miss you and text you and so that you can be like, “no, I’m not doing this.” You know?
It becomes kind of clear that Dayna and Magan wanna be just as committed to each other in these three weeks as they were to their trial partners.
So not having contact with their trial partner while they’re back together with their original partner. But I think in sort of a Dayna character fashion, like it’s a little double sided of being like, well, I’m supposed to be committed to Magan, but it’s really pissing me off that you’re not trying to break through that at all.
Riese: They’ve decided to sort of rewrite history. Magan only did any of this, because first of all, they, of the pool incident. And second of all, ’cause now she’s saying Haley was manipulating Magan and oh, “Magan knows she got manipulated.” “Haley came here to leave Pilar.”
But Haley is so benign as a person! I cannot imagine her manipulating anybody! Magan’s going along with this narrative and being so cold to Haley. I understand they’re focusing on their own relationships, but Haley’s willing to make room for the fact that what they had was real, even if only temporary.
Analyssa: She even tries to, yeah, tell Haley well, “did I say I loved you? Like, I don’t think I did.” And it’s like… you did. We all saw.
Riese: It was on camera! You guys say you’re in love with each other and that you love each other.
Drew: It did give us the episode title, which is “Backtrack of the Century/” which I thought was a great line.I think there’s just like a way that Meghan could have very kindly been like, look, I need some space for the next few weeks because I want to just see if there’s anything here with Dayna and really focus on this relationship.
And then let’s check back in to see what the energy is, whether that’s a friendship or something more. The problem is the structure of the show — you get your three weeks with the trial partner, then you get your three weeks with your original partner and then you make a decision.
In a real world scenario, you could be like, “Hey, I need the next three weeks to just focus — that’d be a weird period of time for some reason — two makes more sense. Gimme two weeks to reconnect and then I’ll let you know. And then the person can be like, fuck that, and then leave.
And then you don’t get to have those two weeks. But in the context of the show, it’s just a little tricky. It’s almost like this show is unnatural? Queerness — natural. The ultimatum? Unnatural.
Riese: Exactly. Ashley and Marita make vision boards. That was adorable, I thought.
Analyssa: First we have this very funny little montage of what everybody’s up to. Ashley and Marita are making vision boards. Brittany and AJ are doing Amazon Prime Spon Con. They’ve ordered a s’mores maker, but with really visible Amazon Prime tape. Haley and Pilar are going — paragliding? Is that what it’s called?
What’s it called when you fly behind the boat?
Riese: Jet skiing.
Analyssa: No, when you’re in the air?
Riese: Um, uh, flying?
Analyssa: Haley and Pilar are flying, which I think is really funny. All the couples are doing boring things like Amazon Prime spon con dates. But then Haley and Pilar who are kind of going through it — they’re like, let’s put ’em up in the air! Let’s add more chaos!
Riese: So, Pilar and Haley have Haley’s dad?
Analyssa: For dinner. He comes over for dinner.
Drew: Haley’s dad says “I’m not just here for Haley. I’m also here for you.” And I did cry. This is actually a new update since To L and Back original episodes is— I cry now. I don’t know if it’s because I went off my SSRI or if I’ve just lhave a really good therapist or what’s going on—
Riese: You’re really depressed?
Analyssa: Maybe your eye thing traumatized you into not crying.
Drew: Oh, that’s true.
Analyssa: You’re pretty far out from your eye thing. Not to be sorry, not to be so former roommate coded.
Drew: No, I love it. You know, my deep lore. This really got me. It was really nice. I think something that does happen with queer relationships is you — whether it’s just with your partner, or with a partner’s family —you develop a family structure that’s, even when you’re not meant to be together, can be really hard to disentangle yourself from and you can feel like you’re like losing your family, not just losing your partner. Which is already, even for a straight person, like a family to some extent.
But it’s just bigger, I think for queer people, especially if you have issues with your family.
Riese: Absolutely. And basically Haley’s feeling like she read Magan wrong and like now Dayna has her claws in and she feels bad and sad, and I do too. I read Magan wrong!
Analyssa: I probably wouldn’t tell my dad that I fell in love with somebody in three weeks?
Drew: I just don’t understand people with this kind of familial relationship. When we get later to the reunion montage of Kyle’s parents, I just, there’s no part of me that feels like, oh, this is so sweet.
And I know it’s probably jealousy.
Riese: Yeah, I think it’s sweet. Magan is proud of her relationship now. Feels hopeful about her parents, like in fixing it because of how great her relationship is with Dayna. Um, okay. Ashley and Marita. Marita still feels unfulfilled.
Analyssa: Marita starts sobbing.
Analyssa: She says doesn’t wanna just be friends forever, which is to me an insane thing to say to your partner of years. They’re not just friends!
Riese: Yeah, they’ve had sex! Sexuals. I think as we’ve discussed, things aren’t going well. Haley and Pilar are still talking it out and Someone says, “I thought the grass was perfectly green with you.” That was sweet.
Analyssa: I think Haley says that, I think Pilar is like, is it just a grass is greener situation? And Haley was like, well before this I thought the grass was perfectly green. Which is lovely. They’re cute and they have a very funny conversation about what viewers at home might be saying about them, and they weren’t wrong.
Drew: I think that it shows the fact that they could work through this. The fact that Pilar is like anyone watching this at home would say we shouldn’t be together. I’m like, you have no idea what’s going on in some, well, I guess they have some idea of what’s going on in some of these other couples, but like —
I’m gonna say something here, a theory, which is that for relationships to work, you need three things.
There’s like some more practical things.
Riese: A house in LA? Amazon Prime? A S’Mores kit?
Drew: You need to share a sense of humor, like be able to make each other laugh.
You have to be able to talk through conflict. Conflict is always gonna pop up. Youhave to be able to communicate through conflict well, and you have to have good kiss chemistry. These are the three things. If you’re someone who’s a sexual person, those are the things you need. Sexual chemistry can be found. Bodies are complicated, especially when you’re queer. But kiss chemistry? I’ve never been able to learn it.
So these are my, these are my three points that I think are the key to a happy, healthy relationship. And I’m seeing that from Pilar and Haley.
Riese: I think you’re right. I think that’s true. I love that theory and you should patent it.
Analyssa: Mel and Marie are at home talking about Mel wanting to be at Stay at Home Masc. My only other note from this is like, it doesn’t seem like she’s ever gonna talk about having hooked up with Dayna. Like that’s just so,
Riese: I wrote, “who doesn’t wanna be a stay at home masc?” I’d do that tomorrow.
Analyssa: I am really worried about what they will both do for work if they break up.
Riese: They could sell Cutco knives. Have I tried to talk about this before on the podcast?
Drew: I’m familiar with Cutco.
Analyssa: My best friend’s sister sold Cutco Knives right out of college and she’s young, so that was recent.
Riese: Well, I’m saying, it’s a career. I wrote “Maria’s trying so hard to get Mel to be a person.” I don’t know what’s going on there, but I love love.
Drew: Great.
Analyssa: The only other thing is in Magan and Dayna’s last conversation, Magan says she wants her life to be like Fast and Furious.
Riese: I want that for her too. I did think — “Oh, Drew will love this.”
Analyssa: I was like, this is for Drew.
Drew: Honestly, I’m over Magan at this point. I do think Fast and Furious is a franchise I very much enjoy, though I feel complicated about Vin Diesel due to recent things that have come out. It’s also the kind of franchise that I don’t necessarily feel an immediate affinity to people in the fandom.
Riese: Magan wants to have backyard barbecues of chosen family, just like in Fast and the Furious. Whenever I watch Better Things and she has all of her smart, creative friends over, that’s when I think I want my life to be like that, like on Better Things. But anyway, there are other barbecues.
Drew: Fast and Furious is like Better Things, if the way they formed bonds was in the previous movie, one of them was the villain and now they’re in the crew. That’s how it…
Riese: So like a hero-to-villain trope.
Drew: Yeah. Villain, villain to Barbecue was sort of the.
Riese: Wait, in Killing Eve, was her name Villanelle because of the word “villain”?
Drew: Yeah, and a villanelle in poetry. But yes, she’s literally a villain character named Vielle, and her obsession is Eve, the first woman. It’s not a subtle show, but it is a good one.
Riese: Okay so episode nine — the proposal episode. Wow. No one’s sure about anything and everyone feels differently, and everything is happening.
Drew: Yeah. It starts with a conversation, or the first thing I noted was a conversation between Magan and Haley. They meet up. Haley gives her a gift she’s like, “I already ordered this anyway,” which again, I very much enjoy Haley. The thing I had to say about this interaction is you fundamentally cannot get to know someone fully in three weeks. You cannot. We can all have different definitions of what love is. You cannot love someone in three weeks. You can have feelings, you can even fall in love. And I’ve said “I love you” very quickly in my relationships. I’m not… you can say anything, you can do anything, but what’s happening here is a very weird scenario created by this television program that forces you to cohabitate, and then you develop a real bond potentially, and that’s real. And you can have hurt feelings over it, but ultimately, it shouldn’t be surprising, specifically saying this to Haley, that the person who you really connected with for three weeks… it didn’t… You’re like, “Oh, I actually don’t know you fully.” It’s like, you could date someone for three years and not really know them fully.
Riese: Well, I fell in love with Magan in three weeks and, like Haley, felt betrayed by this conversation in which Magan said she feels differently and Haley didn’t give her and Dayna the space they needed. I feel like Magan is doing a complete turnaround and it’s very mean.
Just acknowledge you have what you had, but you’ve moved on. But don’t deny it happened. It happened! And we saw it.
Analyssa: It feels like Magan and Dayna have locked elbows and been, “We’re, this is it. We are putting a fence around this.”
Riese: This is the new story and this is the story we believe in going forward.
Analyssa: Which is further to me proven when Magan says to Haley, “if you want to be friends with me in the future, you owe an apology to Dayna.” Which is BEYOND.
Riese: Like, the fuck? For what?
Analyssa: For not respecting our relationship?
Riese: Insane!
Drew: Horrible.
Riese: At this point, I’m supposed to think Magan is a person who’s making choices with free will. I don’t know why I am not willing to accept that! But wild. It takes two to tango, my mom always says.
Drew: Yeah. It doesn’t mean that someone can’t be manipulative, but as a queer community in discourse, we really like to slot people into categories. It’d be very easy, and I’m sure we’ll see this and already have seen this in discussions of this show, to be like, “Dayna’s manipulative and Magan’s a victim.” Not to say that that can’t be possible, but I don’t think anything we’ve seen makes me think Dayna is some unique super-villain or even…
Magan’s making a choice to be with this person. Earlier, I think in the last episode, Haley said something like, “Oh, I thought Dayna was the issue, but maybe it’s Magan.” Two people can be the issue or neither can really be the issue. It’s not good guy, bad guy. That’s not how life is.
Riese: But speaking of good guys, AJ and Brittany! AJ proposes and Brittany says yes, and they’re happy.
Analyssa: It is really…
Drew: Very sweet.
Riese: It is cute. They look great. I’m rooting for them.
Drew: I feel they could make it, which I’m not sure I said about anyone last year.
Riese: Now Pilar is ready for marriage. This show is really good at getting people suddenly ready for marriage. I mean, I have to say, at this point, the shoe works.
Drew: Okay, I would like to… we’ll get to this in the reunion, but no one is married yet. They are engaged. This show’s very good at getting people ready for engagements.
Analyssa: But I will say, weddings are very expensive.
Drew: Oh, totally, totally.
Riese: [Laughter]
Drew: I’m just saying, let’s hold off before we give Netflix and The Ultimatum too much credit.
Riese: But for the straight people, it has worked. Most of them are married.
Analyssa: Whoa.
Riese: The vast majority. Yep.
Analyssa: Good for them.
Riese: Good for them. Yeah. Good for straight people. Yeah, good for them. Whatever. And Pilar has a great blowout. They’ve grown together and they call Haley’s dad and he’s happy, and I am happy for them.
Analyssa: They look really happy. Haley says the ring is exactly what she wanted, and I thought all the rings got distributed at the beginning of this experiment.
Riese: Yeah.
Analyssa: So lucky she got the one she wanted, I guess.
Riese: She wanted one that Netflix picked out.
Riese: And isn’t Netflix kind of picking things out for all of us, if you think about it?
Drew: Maybe the exact ring she wanted was whatever ring that was given to her by Pilar!
Analyssa: Wow.
Drew: So it doesn’t matter.
Riese: Wasn’t there a point in this episode or another episode where they promoted a video game to us?
Drew: It’s at the end — at the very final moments in case your soul is still hanging on just a little bit. Just — BOOM!
Riese: Don’t worry!
Drew: Don’t worry.
Analyssa: You too could be involved in this!
Riese: Yes.
Drew: I was really happy for them and also — my unsolicited opinion, if these were L Word characters and not real people, would be that they should be non-monogamous.
That would be my advice. But I don’t know them in real life. And I also don’t know what happened in their little break. I just am always a little bit ehh with couples that have been together since they were really young. But maybe that’s just a me thing, maybe other people just wanna be with one person forever. It’s just that because Haley just had three weeks of being in love with someone else. I just still want Pilar to get to have — a throuple! Not even with Bridget and Kyle. I think she could do better. A little fling.
Riese: Yeah, they should. They should have a threesome with Alice Piasecki.
Drew: Who? Haley and Pilar?
Riese: Yes.
Drew: Sure. Okay.
Riese: Good, we agree. Ashley and Marita. A black cat is lurking around. She’s like, “Is that a bad sign?” Yeah.
Analyssa: Ashley gives a speech that is so close to proposing, and then at the end…
Riese: Big Love is Blind vibes there. Those at the altar moments.
Analyssa: And then at the end I was like, “But you know, I just can’t do it.” And Marita reveals that she was ready to propose, which I do think is a very easy thing to say when someone has not proposed to you. We don’t know that that’s true.
Riese: But it is an unscripted show, but every now and then some poetic dialogue gets in there, and her being like, “I would’ve said yes, I was gonna say yes.” I was just like, “Ah, this is your rom-com moment.”
Drew: Is now a good time to say that I wrote dialogue for The Ultimatum: Queer Love? I also wrote the lyrics for the song. I was really…
Riese: Oh my God. Is that why the 405 was mentioned in a song that played during Haley and Pilar’s convo? Because that took me out of the moment for sure. Kyle and Bridget. Bridget reiterates not understanding the point of marriage, but they say they’re going to get married. They’re
Analyssa: : They get married.
Riese: Mm-hmm. Yeah. They got married right on the spot.
Drew: I’m not that interested in this couple, but I did find something interesting, which was when Bridget says that Kyle has wanted to go by fiancé because it’s the one gender-neutral term. Someone was just telling me that, I literally was having a conversation with a friend who got engaged and they were like, “And you know, the name of their partner is so excited because this is the one period of time where the words we refer to each other as are gender neutral.”
Riese: People should, yeah.
Drew: Obviously make up new things to call each other, but…
Riese: Maybe “fiancé” will be the next neo-pronoun.
Drew: Mm-hmm. Much to consider.
Riese: Magan and Dayna. First, Netflix replays Magan telling Haley that she’s in love with her, just so we all remember that happening. And then…
Drew: Also during this montage, the lyric — because I’m always listening to those beautiful lyrics — is, “Show me how I can live my life if we can’t be open.” Which I thought was a funny thing for a show that pretends that non-monogamy doesn’t exist.
Riese: At this point in my viewing experience, Jude was being really fussy. So I took Jude and Gretchen began taking notes for me on the program.
Drew: Hmm. Oh, fun.
Riese: Yeah. So here we have: “Mel looks like she’s cater-waitering a child’s golf tournament. Mel’s nervous because Dayna is an asshole. Mel’s in deep with Dayna, but Dayna’s heart is closed for business. Mel is crushed. Mel doesn’t want a friendship. Dayna’s boobs are out. Wow, wow, wow. So frustrating.” She wrote in all caps.
Drew: So frustrating that Dayna’s…
Analyssa: Boobs are out?
Riese: Oh, just the whole thing. Mel got a ring for Marie because that’s what Marie wants.
Drew: Well, okay, wait, before we… I love these notes from Gretchen. Don’t mean to interrupt, but Dayna says the letter that Mel wrote her was the most beautiful letter anyone has ever written her.
Riese: She should have heard what Brian Krakow wrote for Jordan Catalano to give to Angela Chase in My So-Called Life, and then he might rethink that.
Drew: yeah, I guess I don’t have much to add beyond that.
Analyssa: I’ve missed the opportunity a few times to point out Dayna’s insistence on telling people how they feel and what they want. Because when Mel is like, “I don’t want to be friends,” she calls her a liar and is like, “Yes, you do. You do want that.” Again, in toxic situations that you’re trying to walk away from, you can project a lot. I’m speaking from personal experience. You can project a lot and be like, “Well, they really want to be with me. They’re just scared.” Whatever. But what they’re saying to you is they don’t want to be with you, so you just have to kind of grow up and let that go. Dayna does it a lot with Magan, sometimes with Haley, with Mel especially earlier when they were trial wives. Dayna’s like, “You don’t not want marriage. You’re just scared.”
Riese: I think that works both ways too with people like her. When you’re saying it in a positive way, like, “Oh, you want this,” or “You do this, but it’s a good thing,” then that makes… or it’s real, it’s true, then that makes me feel like, “Oh my God, this person who I just met really understands me,” because she’s telling me how I feel and it’s accurate and positive, and it makes me feel good about myself. So it’s a very interesting way to be a person, and that’s not the kind of person that I personally have a good time with anymore in my life.
Drew: Yeah, I just hope that the queer community will not lose sight of the fact that Dayna, at least the character Dayna, is very annoying and unpleasant to be around. And that doesn’t have to mean that she’s abusive or any sort of horrible, toxic, she shouldn’t date anyone ever, we should cancel her and chase her off the internet with pitchforks. She can simply be quite unpleasant. And so many people are.
Analyssa: Yeah, sometimes people are just hard to be around and unpleasant, bordering on mean, and that’s okay.
Drew: Yeah.
Analyssa: Mel says to Dayna that she has a ring, and Dayna’s like, “Well, is it because it’s what you want or because it’s what Marie wants?” And Mel says, “It’s because it’s what Marie wants.”
Riese: Like, Dayna, why are you still meddling? You’re about to go get married.
Drew: Once again, I’m asking this question, “Does Mel know that this is being filmed?” It’s an interesting thing from your interview with Mal about how, as it goes on, you sort of forget some of the cameras because they’re around so much, and that’s a technique of reality TV, et cetera. But Mel being like, “I’m gonna propose because that’s what Marie wants, but I don’t really want that, and I’m sad that you don’t want to talk to me more, and you’re back with Magan.” I’m like, this is going to be seen. If you propose to Marie a year from now, there’s going to be problems. Anyway, then you’re right. Magan is proposing. I wrote, “Magan proposing, my God, yikes.”
Analyssa: And then Dayna proposes back.
Riese: Then Mel says she learned a lot about herself. Marie says they’ve grown so much. Okay. And Mel got her a ring pop.
Analyssa: Oh my God, the ring pop.
Riese: Ring pops. So many flavors and colors!
Drew: Yeah. I don’t know if maybe if I’d seen a different couple, I would feel differently about this, but it felt a little bit like your relationship is not steady enough for you to be doing bits during the proposal. I don’t know about this one. I don’t even take proposals that seriously, or any of it that seriously, but I think given everything that’s been happening, you might want to put the Ring Pop away and get the real ring out first.
Analyssa: No, but it’s like last season when Aussie and Sam were like, Aussie was so commitment avoidant and then was like, “So penguins give each other rocks, so I found you a rock.” It’s like, okay.
Riese: They’re still together and happy. They give advice to other couples about how to be better.
Drew: Honestly, here’s the thing though, when I was giving the most dating advice out in my twenties, I think about that sometimes, and I’m like, “Wow.” I mean, some of the things I said were pretty good, but it’s wild to me that I was allowed to get on the internet and give dating advice.
Riese: We let a lot of people say a lot of things on the internet.
Drew: When I think about the things that I was…
Riese: Advice is pretty benign.
Drew: I mean, it was a real, “Do what I say, not what I do,” situation. And now, look, ultimately I eventually listened to myself and now I’m in a very happy relationship.
Analyssa: Right. Sometimes you have to learn to take your own advice. You probably were giving good advice, just not to yourself.
Drew: The last thing I’ll say about this before we get into the reunion is it is edited to be like, “Yay, love.” And I just think that I could get more on board with a reality television program—
Riese: Boo, love?
Drew: No, not boo love… that didn’t take the circumstances we see and smash it into these boxes. Because that’s actually what’s happening here. This show had to know that by the time we get to the reunion, the chances of Marie and Mel being together were slim. So this music, the cues and everything sort of going to this thing of like, “Love conquers all.” They even do this in the reunion, and it is very annoying to me in some ways. But it just gets, I guess, to the heteronormativity of the whole thing and the structure of this show. Anyway, speaking of, should we get into the reunion?
Riese: We should.
Analyssa: Boy, should we!
Riese: Once again, I have Gretchen’s notes.
Riese shows Gretchen’s notes to Drew + Analyssa
Drew: Wow!
Analyssa: Her handwriting is so cute.
Riese: I know. I love her handwriting!
Drew:Great handwriting.
Riese: She wrote “Reunion episode for Love is Gay Blind.” Okay,
Analyssa: So we messed up the title when we introduced the episode today.
Riese: I’ll tell you what. I did not think Magan and Dayna were still gonna be together.
Analyssa: I didn’t either. And I also thought that Kyle and Bridget would be like, “We are still together, but we’re not engaged.”
Riese: Interesting.
Analyssa: I just had a feeling that they would kind of, to the point we’ve been making of the… it’s like on The Bachelor too, the rules don’t always fit. And I like sometimes when people are like, “We love each other and we want to be together, but this game, the rules weren’t right for us.” And I thought if anybody was gonna be that, it was gonna be Kyle and Bridget.
Drew: Well, then how could Kyle prove to their parents that…?
Analyssa: That they’ve got it all together.
Drew: Yeah, if they’re not engaged, so.
Riese: So this reunion was chaotic and full of drama. Also interesting because after the first Ultimatum, Aussie and Sam were still together at the reunion, but everyone else had broken up. So I was prepared for a similar level of carnage here and surprised to see it was just Marie and Mel. And obviously Marita and Ashley, but also Marie and Mel. We open with AJ and Brit. The relationship is better. It appears. Gretchen would like them to have a threesome with Marita.
Drew: Well, they credit Marita for keeping their relationship working, which I didn’t necessarily see on camera, but love that for them. Love that for Marita.
Analyssa: I think that’s a really sweet, full circle of Marita in The Choice was devastated by AJ, and then ended up with Brittany kind of by accident, and they had a really lovely time. I thought that was very sweet that now she knows them both pretty well and got to play a role. They do spend some time on the AJ dating period of it, and the way everyone keeps being like, “Well, the issue is that she was being really sexual.” We did not see that. I’m sorry, but my definition of being very sexual in dating, in flirting, is not what we saw from AJ. I truly… I was so mad at all of these prudes for acting like she had done something so horrendous. Also, I don’t even know, I don’t need to make it political, but I don’t understand watching this, and maybe something happened off camera that I didn’t see, but to be like, “AJ was just so sexual,” and saying it in this way where it was like something was done wrong. I’m just…
Riese: Right? They’re supposed to flirt.
Drew: Grow up.
Riese: One thing that becomes clear throughout the reunion is that AJ and Brittany were in touch a lot more than we saw. Even Ashley being like, “I was out there with my dog. You guys were always together.” Because we saw AJ immediately switch, and I wonder if the way things went down at The Choice made it that AJ was sort of shamed so much for what was happening that in order to save the relationship with Brittany, she had to opt out of the whole experience in a major way immediately. Even as it was ongoing. AJ’s experience was not a trial marriage. AJ’s experience was dating. They all saw how that went and decided, “Okay, no, you’re off the market. Let’s get it back together.” And they, by the way, look at everyone’s outfits. I think they really killed it. The dress that Brittany’s pulling off is incredible, honestly. So.
Drew: Then we go to Marie, and Marie’s quite angry at AJ and Brittany, and it feels a little bit… also, just watching Marie this whole time, it was so miserable. She just feels very traumatized and very…
Riese: Mm-hmm.
Drew: Sad. It was very not fun. Not in a reality TV way fun. It was just very miserable to watch. But I was a little bit like, “Your anger’s misplaced.” And then it’s revealed later that AJ and Brittany are pals with Magan and Dayna, and I was like, “Oh, okay. This makes more sense why there’s more animosity from Marie towards AJ.”
Analyssa: Yeah. And I think it’s fair to be irritated or even a little bit angry, and I think Brittany and AJ say this, “We get that you might be upset by that. We did what we had to do, and we’re really sorry that that’s impacted your relationship.” I mean, maybe they don’t exactly say that, but…
Riese: So we know that they see the show right before their reunion, right? Like they saw this yesterday and now they’re reunited. My sense is that for Marie, I think the thing that made her feel betrayed by watching it — and maybe I’m projecting, actually, definitely I am, but I think I’m correct — is that Mel telling people, “I’m telling you this thing about myself, about my health, or not having kids, and I haven’t told this to anybody, or I haven’t told this to Marie.” And I think seeing your partner of four years tell people that you are not a trustworthy receptacle of information about their physical health and their ability to have is so, so hurtful and insulting. It’s almost more hurtful and insulting than cheating, because that’s about becoming into somebody else. It’s more hurtful because that’s character slander in a way to be like, “Yeah, I can’t tell. I haven’t told her this.” And also it was cheesy, because as Mel was telling people this, I’m like, “You just told that to someone else. Why are you acting like this is exclusive information?” I think that’s why she felt the most betrayed.
Analyssa: Which, yeah, which they fight about when it comes their turn to discuss what went wrong. And she’s…
Riese: Right.
Analyssa: Again, kind of pointing to like, “I’m your partner. I’ve looked into everything that’s…”
Riese: You think, I don’t know.
Analyssa: “I’ve researched as much as I can,” all that stuff. So I think that’s probably definitely in there. Also…
Drew: Didn’t we get to the real surprise, which is Ashley and Marita? I didn’t know they had this in them. Honestly, I was a little bit bored of them the whole time, and then they did this and.. I don’t grasp what happened between them. I know it involved…
Riese:She was like, my grandpa’s dying.
Drew: And I know that at one point Marita says, “and that’s gaslighting”
Riese: And it was not! It was not gaslighting!
Analyssa: You know what that is? Gaslighting? Nope, wrong.
Riese: Yes. “I actually fucking hate you,” Marita said to Ashley
Analyssa: It sounds like both people have grandparents dying. We’re hurling… I mean, I think when you get to this level…
Riese: You should not be… you cannot be bringing your grandpa’s name into this Netflix reunion. You…
Analyssa: “Are we talking about my grandpa?”
Riese: I don’t know what happened with them. It is wild.
Analyssa: So Marita says that Ashley asked her dad for his blessing. So Marita, I think, went into proposal day assuming that Ashley was going to propose. I think that’s incident number one.
Drew: Mm-hmm.
Riese: Uh-huh.
Analyssa: Then it sounds like they broke up on the show. We saw that. After the show, they did a trip together where Ashley was kind of like, “Let’s still be together. The show doesn’t matter. Let’s, you know, be us.” Then maybe they were confused. My best read is that they were confused about whether that meant they were together, because Marita is accusing Ashley of cheating and Ashley is saying we weren’t together at that time. Everyone’s kind of getting involved on the side trying to parse it. It gets crazy in there.
Drew: A real classic Ross and Rachel, “We were on a break” situation.
Riese: Well, and then Ashley is like, “You cheated on me five times. I could name all the people,” and I’m like, “Name the people! Let’s get ’em in here! Stop talking about your grandpa! Leave him! Leave him out of it!”
Analyssa: Yeah, so Marita is like, “My grandpa was dying and Ashley cheated on me during that.” And Ashley in retort says, “Well, now my grandpa is dying,” which is an insane direction to take that claim.
Riese: Yes. And then Marita at one point storms off the set.
Drew: Well, Ashley…
Analyssa: No. Ashley storms off.
Riese: Ashley.
Drew: Because Marita says, “I don’t…” What does she say? I don’t want to misquote her, but she says, “I don’t care about your grandpa,” or something. It gets…
Analyssa: Which even… which causes all the rest of the cast to be like…
Drew: “Whoa, whoa, whoa. You don’t mean that. You don’t mean that. You don’t mean…”
Riese: “You love her, grandpa, Marita. Don’t talk about Earl like that.” Mel runs after Ashley.
Analyssa: Mel runs after Ashley. Marie inserts herself a lot. There are a lot of very confusing players in this, but Brittany and AJ go to comfort Marita, which makes sense given what we just learned about them. And then Mel runs off to hug Ashley.
Riese: Yes.
Analyssa: And then they come back, and Joanna, Joanna Garcia Swisher is like, “Well…”
Riese: “Everyone has their own perspective.”
Analyssa: Hmm.
Drew: Wait, can I just say that I accidentally called Joanna Garcia Swisher, “Joanna Kara Swisher,” in the first… the first…
Analyssa: I thought you were making a joke.
Riese: I did too. I thought you did it on purpose.
Drew: I learned that you both thought I was making a joke, which maybe I should just run with it, but I really wasn’t. It was in my notes as that because of the famous…
Riese: Lesbian.
Drew: I don’t actually know who Kara Swisher is, except that she’s a lesbian. But imagine if she was the host!
Riese: Yeah, exactly. That’s what they should do. They should be like, “We have a new Swisher in town.” You know, they could do a tie-in with Swiffer.
Analyssa: They kind of talk about Bridget. Marita’s like, “I don’t appreciate Bridget convincing Ashley to reverse the ultimatum,” which I think it was very clear that Bridget was joking and that was something they joked about in their trial marriage. But tensions are so high that I think let’s just let her have that.
Riese: Yeah.
Drew: This is the last time I’m going to be defending Bridget on this podcast episode, but I do think it’s pretty clear that she was responding to the things Ashley was saying. You are… you’re not convincing someone to break up with the person. If someone says, “I think I might not want to be with this person,” and you go, “Well, then maybe you shouldn’t be with that person,” you have not convinced them to do anything.
Riese: No one should be that easily convinced.
Analyssa: Would Bridget have an agenda of breaking up two people that she just met three weeks ago at Max? Like there’s…
Riese: Yeah. She didn’t have…
Analyssa: And Joanna is like, “So do you guys think you’ll ever reconcile?” Which I think is a grave misstep. They should not. I don’t think we should be promoting that at all.
Mel says the relationship is non-existent with like such a shit eating grin on her face that I felt instant rage. Like I was so upset during this whole thing. And when it pans to Marie and you can tell she’s feeling rage, I was like, “you know what? I understand.”
Riese: You know who else understood, according to these notes? At this point in time, Jude pooped his pants. All the way through his onesie through to his bouncer. “That’s how full of shit these people are,” Gretchen wrote.
Analyssa: Jude knew the vibe.
Drew: Even a generous read — like Mel’s clearly uncomfortable. I mean, it was clearly a coping mechanism, and that’s my most generous read. It’s still just, all of this is so unpleasant, and Dayna being so calm in her relationship is also… I was concerned about Marie throughout all of it. The good thing is that they broke up a couple months after the episodes. I was very worried about them watching the episodes still together. So they broke up a couple months after. And then we get into the whole playlist shenanigans. L
Analyssa: Which kind of seems like maybe it’s nothing?
Riese: People don’t seem to think it was a big deal and I still buy it.
Analyssa: The thing that is critical is like they did hook up, and I don’t appreciate what happens next, which is that we do a montage of “what do queer people think is sex?”
Riese: Joanna should have had to answer that! She should have been put on the spot, Joanna.
Analyssa: I just think it doesn’t matter that we all have the same definition of sex. Even a little bit. They did something that was beyond — there’s so much like technicality here and Mel even is like, “Well, by whose definition? He, he, hee.”
Riese: Well, Mel wants to tell the truth, I think,
Drew: Oh, you can tell that.
Riese: Mel is just bursting with it.
Drew: It’s also a thing of the emotions. The combination of emotionally connecting, as Mel and Dayna clearly did, and it getting physical to some extent. The sex acts do not matter. This is my general take: if you are talking to someone, this happens in media all the time where there are two people talking, and they’re like, “We can’t hook up. We’re coworkers, we’re each married, we can’t hook up, but we’re going to go out to eat together and lie to our partners about where we are and look at each other across the table.” But then at the end of the movie or TV season, it’s like they didn’t hook up, they’re so strong. I’m like, “You were just doing a weird kink thing.” This is sex. My definition of sex is whatever is happening right here where you’re sitting across the table, toes touch, but then you won’t let yourself have sex, but you’re talking about how you really want to have sex. This is a bigger betrayal than if you went out to a club and made out with someone, or went home with them and had, you know, all the sex. This highlights that this is a very narrow show. This is The Ultimatum: Queer Love. It’s really The Ultimatum: Cisgender Queer Love.
Riese: Cisgender queer love.
Drew: Yeah, with a few maybe non-binary people that we don’t talk about. Look, I’m not saying I want trans women on this show. In some ways, it’s kind of like…
Analyssa: Save them from this.
Drew: I’m sort of like, “Should trans women be allowed to be on this show?”
Riese: Or the military?
Drew: Yeah. I’ll give an added asterisk to military: people’s health insurance is at risk, and the military targets lower-income neighborhoods. I’ll also add an asterisk to that: in the military, you kill people. I don’t think anyone was killed on The Ultimatum: Queer Love.
Riese: Well, someone’s Grandpa.
Drew: I don’t think we’re allowed to make those jokes.
Riese: I’m allowed to make death jokes because I have had the worst deaths.
Drew: that’s so true. You are allowed to make death jokes. I will let it stand. All this to say, what’s fascinating to me about that exclusionary aspect of the show is it actually feels like they all have a very… I was a little bit like, I was waiting for them to be like, “Well, actually, sex is just when a penis goes into a vagina, so none of us could cheat on anyone.” I was so fascinated by them basically being like, “As queer people, we can’t really have sex and it really doesn’t matter. So you can’t really cheat.” It was so baffling and honestly, not that I ever care about this, but invalidating towards their queerness and towards queer relationships. Anyway, whatever.
Analyssa: Marie is like, “I think anything that’s intimate is sex.” And I was like, “Great.” There were some that were like, “Well, unless mouths are involved…”
Riese: Yeah, I think it was Mel or maybe Dayna who I’m like, “You guys are just fitting your definitions to get ou Of what you did!”
Analyssa: Shape out of what sex is so that theirs is not included. They’re gerrymandering the sex definition.
Drew: Well I learned from a recent Autostraddle article that there’s a lot of people out there who don’t ever wanna do oral. So there’s a whole world.
Should we move on to Bridget and Kyle?
Riese: Oh, you don’t wanna go into the montage of their pets that somebody decided to subject us to?
Drew: No
Riese: Kyle and Bridget are still together. Kyle’s mom says, “because I knew you, I’ve been changed for good,” which is the second time those lyrics have been peddled to us this television season.
‘’Cause that also happened on And Just Like That! Um, so I don’t know what to say about them besides that Bridget has cute hair.
Analyssa: Bridget says, “I finally came to the conclusion, this matters a lot to the person that I love, and it doesn’t matter that much to me. So I’m on board.” And I was like, “Thank you. That makes sense.”
Riese: Yes, thanks for listening to the pod.
Analyssa: Yeah. Thank you for hearing our pod and concluding we were correct.
Riese: Correct.
Analyssa: Haley and Pilar are also still engaged.
Riese: They’re going to elope, they’re living authentically.
Analyssa: Pilar has kind of just detached value from connecting with her parents, which is on one hand sad, and on the other hand seems to be very good for her, and she feels empowered and confident about it. I think that’s a really good outcome for…
Riese: Yeah. People will push you as far as you let them, and that’s what she learned by taking Haley to her cousin’s wedding, just being like, “This is my fiancée,” and realizing that when you don’t give them the space they need to hate you.
Analyssa: They talk about their kiss. It seems like it was all just like a mistake.
Drew: Bridget’s still pissed and.
Analyssa: Bridget does react pretty
Drew: I think for someone whose whole thing, for someone whose whole thing during her and Kyle’s section was like, “Bridget is so kooky. Bridget is so crazy. Bridget is so weird.” I was like, “She cannot even handle…”
Riese: They just meant by that she is in the gig economy.
Analyssa: She’s an artist. She’s creative. Yeah.
Drew: I don’t know. I was very… I was very over that. I think I’m a bit of a Bridget-Kyle characters hater.
Riese: I have no negative feelings.
Analyssa: I don’t either. I feel fine.
Riese: I I feel… Dayna and Magan, we have to see a montage of that. That’s fine.
Drew: If I was Magan’s formerly homophobic family that’s working on it and I saw any part of the show, it would make me homophobic again so quickly.
Analyssa: Well, Dayna even says that, she’s like, “We really went on this show thinking it would show how good we were,” which to that I say, “Whoa, that’s a crazy thing to have thought.” And obviously it didn’t go that way. I don’t know. I can’t tell what has happened, but they do seem more on the same page. So I…
Riese: They seem happy.
Analyssa: I guess, yeah, they seem happy. And I guess in the vein of, I love love and especially love for queer people, I’m like, “Great. I love that.” For…
Riese: Love is, yeah.
Analyssa: It is surprising to me. Dayna mentions that having seen all this back, she can adjust based on what she has seen. Which I was like, “Actually, that’s mature.” That’s a good read. It’s like when you listen to your voice and you’re like, “Do I really sound like that?” She’s seeing weeks of footage of her being intense, to say the least, and seeing there’s adjustments to be made.
Riese:Gretchen wrote, “Dayna says she has a lot to work on, and we finally agree on something.”
Analyssa: That’s how I felt.
Drew: I said sigh. I guess I’m rooting for Dayna too. Mostly rooting for this show to get canceled.
Riese: Why do you want every show we try to do a podcast for to get canceled?
Drew: Why can’t we ever do a show that’s good? Like, no one cares about any of the good shows, and I honestly had a bit of an emotional crisis over the last couple weeks because of this show. I know, I know!
It’s just like media is so broken and Hollywood is so broken. Look, I am literally recording a podcast about this show, so I cannot judge anyone for caring about the show, talking about the show, writing about this show. But it’s just like when I look at the numbers that the coverage we do for this show versus the coverage we do of really good stuff that’s even still fun. I just, I feel deep despair about this show, which honestly, I guess I felt that way about Gen Q too. So I’m really just the person who is… sorry! I’m here. I just… I feel really depressed. I really don’t know what to do with. I just also like, Are You the One? Season 8 was fun queer reality TV that didn’t make me want to die, and that felt actually queer, and we didn’t get another Are You the One? Come One, Come All season? And it makes me really sad. I just wish we had more of that. If we’re going to be obsessing over a reality TV show, let it be the one where there’s a wide range of queer experiences, where they’re having a fivesome, where it’s good. This show just feels so nasty and sad. Maybe we can pivot from that to talking about all of them praising the show having a straight host, and…
Riese: I, for one, love this show and want it to get a million more seasons. I find it incredibly entertaining. I’m not even just doing it like Gen Q where I was like, “I’m doing it for the hits. Gotta get the hits.” I would watch this show even if we weren’t. I mean, I watched it last season. I didn’t write about, did I? Whatever. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that I like this show, but it is sad that everything you said is true. It is sad though. But would anyone have listened to our Transparent podcast?
Analyssa: I would have at that time!
Drew: Oh yeah. In 2014, 2015, 2016. When there was an industry out there for queer media that wasn’t… I mean, not that Transparent‘s a perfect show by any means, but that was an exciting time. That was like, things were starting to happen and Pose came out. It really felt like, “Oh, wow.”
Riese: One Mississippi, Vida…
Drew:One Mississippi was so good. Vida‘s the best show ever. When does P-Valley come back? That’s not a show that I would host a podcast for, but it is a show that I would listen to a podcast for, and it is, I think, the best show on TV.
Riese: Well, in conclusion, I, for some reason, was genuinely moved by AJ and Kara’s conversation about how no one gives her enough credit. And I teared up.
Analyssa: I did not tear up, but I did think it was sweet. I thought it was a sweet ending, not because of praising Joanna Kara Garcia Swisher, but because it seems to get everybody else on the same page. And something we didn’t talk about earlier is Kyle kind of casually reveals that none of them have really spoken since.
Riese: Well, some of them are still friends.
Analyssa: Some of them are still friends, but that they kind of all ended in not really good places with each other, which I thought makes sense. And now after they’ve praised their straight mom, they’re like, “Maybe we could all go for a drink.” And they hug. The only person who leaves early is Marie.
Riese: Did you notice that? When they cut she was like —
Analyssa: She’s booking it out! She’s not doing the hugs with everybody!
Drew: Hashtag I’m with her.
Riese: I feel like if I was her, I could imagine that the next day I’d wake up and be like, “FUCK, I wish I could do that all over again,” because I would’ve known I went into it with my blood boiling, and when that’s happening, I have minimal control over what I’m about to say or do. But also I think everything that she felt was legitimate. You know, I think everybody’s feelings about everything are legitimate — but I do not think Joanna Kara Swisher should do the wedding for AJ and Brittany.
Analyssa: I do hope they get to a place where Dayna and Magan and Haley and Pilar can all be invited. If that’s what Brittany and AJ desire. Although, once you start looking at guest lists for a wedding, I’ll tell you, you start being like, maybe we could cut those people?
Riese: Are you inviting us to your wedding?
Analyssa: Yes.
Riese: Thank you. Okay.
Drew: Wow okay, very on the spot. I was gonna say it would be an honor to be invited, but no pressure!
Riese: It’s okay. It’s okay. You don’t have to.
Analyssa: Well currently the guest lists is 300 people. So.
Drew: Oh, okay. Well, if it was 300 people and I wasn’t invited, I’d be offended. But, but I, my thing about weddings, people that could invite me, don’t invite me. There’s a very small group of people where if I wasn’t invited, I would be deeply offended. It’s maybe two people. Like, it’s your wedding. Have it as big or small — invite who you want.
Riese: I get offended.
Drew: Really?
Riese: I do.
Drew: I guess I’ve just like, people get offended about not getting plus ones all the time…
Analyssa: I’ve never gotten offended about not having a plus one.
Riese: I think it’s ’cause I frequently do think I’m closer to someone than it turns out they feel like they are to me. So it’s really about hurt, it hurts me. Like, it’s about me not realizing where I stand with them, you know.
Analyssa: hmm.
Riese: To end it on a sad note!
Drew: Engagements are long. I don’t know if I’d want a long engagement. I sort of feel like once I’m engaged, I kind of wanna be married. But that means I can’t have a big wedding, obviously.
Analyssa: Yeah, if we wanted to like, elope, we would do it soon and be married. But once you start thinking about planning a wedding, a big wedding, that type of event, venues are booked out. You have to do catering, you have to do like all this shit. I would like a year and a half to plan for that and pay for that. But in my ideal world, we would get married a lot sooner than we’re thinking, but it’s not seeming possible.
Riese: On the note of things ending sooner. Do we have any last notes? Besides that, never on any season of Ultimatum or Love is Blind has anyone ever thanked Nick and Vanessa for anything. And I think that we know why. And it’s because they are bad at their jobs.
Drew: Um, I just wanna remind everyone that if you enjoyed the experience and you wanna feel more involved, that you can play the new Ultimatum Queer Love game that’s available now on Android and iOS. You can feel like you’re part of the action. And we don’t even have a sponcon deal with this.
Analyssa: I hope the pod has convinced you that you want to be a part of the action!
Riese: If you wanna be a REAL part of the action, you should join our membership program AF+. ‘Cause otherwise, who knows how much longer we’re gonna exist!
Drew: To take a note from AJ’s book. I’m gonna say that Drew might end it all if, if people don’t start supporting media beyond the Queer Ultimatum.
Riese: Mm-hmm.
Drew: Drew is very tired and very sad, but also so happy to be with Drew’s pals, you know!
Analyssa: Drew’s doing the best Drew can.
Drew: Drew’s doing the best Drew can and she’s mostly happy to be here with the two of you. If One Mississippi ever comes back, let’s do a podcast about it.
Riese: Oh, that was such a good show!
Analyssa: It was so good.
Riese: Okay. Well, everyone’s gay. And bisexual.
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?
Riese is the 43-year-old Co-Founder of Autostraddle.com as well as an award-winning writer, video-maker, LGBTQ+ Marketing consultant and aspiring cyber-performance artist who grew up in Michigan, lost her mind in New York and now lives in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in nine books, magazines including Marie Claire and Curve, and all over the web including Nylon, Queerty, Nerve, Bitch, Emily Books and Jezebel. She had a very popular personal blog once upon a time, and then she recapped The L Word, and then she had the idea to make this place, and now here we all are! In 2016, she was nominated for a GLAAD Award for Outstanding Digital Journalism. She's Jewish. Follow her on twitter and instagram.
Out the Movies is a bi-weekly newsletter about queer film for AF+ subscribers written by Drew Burnett Gregory.
“The two girls stood in front of that big wide window in broad daylight and began blatantly and passionately embracing and kissing each other. In defiance of their eviction, they were doing their thing so everybody in the bar could see them. It was a rift I was witnessing right there and then between these two separate worlds: the brazen girls outside who were the very essence of liberation and those old guys at the bar who were sitting there somewhat shell-shocked by something they’d never seen before.”
This is not an excerpt from a lesbian pulp novel. It’s an excerpt from Al Pacino’s recent memoir Sonny Boy. To the famous actor, this expression of queerness was a declaration of a changing time. To him, it was akin to the revolutions happening on the streets and at the cinema.
The 1970s are often discussed as a golden age of American cinema. The Hollywood studio system — and its Hays Code — had been destroyed and in its place were a collection of radical auteurs. Books like Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls helped to mythologize this era as a grand artistic achievement of drugs, genius, and masculinity.
Only in recent years, has the cultural canon broadened this American cinematic moment to include a wider range of voices. The artistic freedom allowed during this time didn’t just birth Scorsese and Coppola — it also included female voices like Barbara Loden and Elaine May, Black voices like Bill Gunn and Ivan Dixon, and queer voices like John Waters and Andy Warhol.
But I always say my goal is to expand the canon not replace it. I still love many of the films found on the AFI Top 100 and I believe they, too, can benefit from a broadening of perspective. The Godfather, arguably the mainstream Hollywood achievement of this era, is used to signal toxic film bro taste in both Barbie and the recent show Overcompensating. But its lead, Al Pacino, had a life and career touched by queerness. In fact, go through his filmography and you’ll start to wonder if every Pacino movie is gay.
A couple months ago I watched And Justice for All…, Norman Jewison’s late 70s courtroom drama about a defense attorney named Arthur Kirkland. Throughout the film, Kirkland (Pacino) tries to hold onto his principles while working in our inhumane justice system. The film is a critique of this system where winning and losing are prioritized over right and wrong, where overworked judges and lawyers make rash decisions that result in ruined lives for the most vulnerable.
One of these most vulnerable is a trans woman named Ralph Agee played by gay actor Robert Christian. This subplot is painful to watch due to the realities of how the law treated and treats Black trans women and due to the limits of even the most well-meaning 20th century depictions of trans people in Hollywood. But throughout the film Kirkland pleads for compassion for Agee in the courtroom and in life. There are no deep talks about gender identity, just a suggestion that if wearing a wig makes her happy, why can’t everyone accept it and treat her with respect?
I didn’t watch this film expecting a trans character. Despite years dedicated to the study of trans film and queer film history more broadly, I’d never seen mention of this subplot. Pacino’s greatest film, Dog Day Afternoon, finds his character robbing a bank to get the money to pay for his girlfriend’s sex change operation. But few people seem to mention that Dog Day was only one of Pacino’s movies that decade where he tried — and failed — to help a trans woman.
This revelation led me to watch his first on-screen appearance in Me, Natalie, a movie where a young woman moves to Greenwich Village and has gay neighbors. Then I watched The Local Stigmatic, an adaptation of a play by Pacino favorite Heathcoate Williams, about two gay sociopaths wandering the streets of London looking for violence. Then I finally watched Serpico, a film that isn’t gay but does emphasize Frank Serpico’s effeminate personality and appearance and their connection to his status as outsider in the NYPD he aims to legitimize.
Speaking of the NYPD, have you seen Cruising? It’s a movie where Pacino plays a cop who goes undercover as a gay man. He does poppers at the gay club and then all horned up goes home to fuck his girlfriend. It’s probably the best of his more problematic gay films — certainly better than The Humbling where he has an affair with a lesbian played by Greta Gerwig or Gigli another film with a male-amorous lesbian. (Also better than Jack and Jill if that counts. Pacino is obsessed with a woman — a woman played by Adam Sandler in bad drag.)
One of Pacino’s greatest on-screen performances is his turn as Roy Cohn in the limited series adaptation of Angels in America. Another one of his crowning achievements is Scarecrow, a film about two male drifters who form a homoerotic bond that has complex, explicit depictions of queerness. Then there’s Pacino’s Salomé passion project, a film based on Oscar Wilde’s play shot in conjunction with a run of the piece and a documentary about both. In the documentary, his obsession with Oscar Wilde takes him to the LGBTQ bookstore that holds Wilde’s name and inspires Pacino to play Wilde in recreations. When asked by a producer if his interpretation of Salomé’s King Herrod is bisexual, Pacino says, “Of course.”
In Sonny Boy, Pacino talks about how his performance in The Godfather films was inspired by a line in Mario Puzzo’s book. Michael is called the “sissy” of the Corleone family and that’s how Pacino decided to play him.
Al Pacino got into the Actors Studio with an audition scene where he played a gay sex worker. There he continued to learn method acting, participating in the tail-end of a revolution in the art of performance.
Since I started this viewing project, I’ve been joking with friends that Al Pacino is bisexual. The truth is Pacino’s real-life sexuality and gender mean less to me than the importance of queerness throughout his career. I don’t care if there’s a personal reason why Pacino was so drawn to these characters and stories — I care that in the previous paragraph when I mentioned method acting at least someone reading it rolled their eyes.
Method acting, like 1970s American cinema, has been twisted by its worst fans. Somehow Jared Leto and Joaquin Phoenix have convinced people “the method” is acting like an asshole rather than a series of teachings that encouraged actors to practice emotional replacement as a way to get closer to their characters. The method was about a reduction of artifice, a commitment to realism. Sometimes people mumble, sometimes images are dark.
By the time the method was fully adopted by Hollywood in the late 60s, the movies were responding to a moment in American history where the hope of progress was being crushed by American imperialism. The Hollywood films of the 70s weren’t a celebration of drugs, genius, and masculinity — they were a commitment to artistic purity and clear-eyed reality in a world desperate for both.
The queerness of Pacino’s filmography is a reminder. While the media and your worst uncle claim the newness of queer and trans people, the truth is we have always been here. This cinema belongs to us as much as it does any straight film bro. (Though I would like to note re: Overcompensating, when I went to film school at NYU in 2012, I was one of the only people in my class who had actually seen The Godfather. Film bros of a certain age really preferred Nolan and Fincher.)
To me, the most important film in Pacino’s queer canon is actually a much-maligned straight love story. During a Q&A in 2019, Pacino shared that his favorite of his films is Bobby Deerfield, the tale of a depressed racecar driver who falls in love with a terminally ill woman. While in some ways it’s a sort of prototypical Nicholas Sparks/John Green weepy romance with a dash of early Manic Pixie Dream Girl, there’s a real tenderness to Pacino’s performance that makes it all work.
Early in the film, Bobby’s brother mentions that as a kid Bobby would dance around doing a Mae West impression. Later in the film, the woman he falls for calls him feminine and asks if he’s a homo. At another point, he sits at a bar where he talks to a gay magician and two women dance behind him. (Is this a gay bar? Or just Europe?) Eventually, to show the woman he loves his vulnerability, he will do the Mae West impression he previously denied remembering.
During that same Q&A, he said of the scene, “I was criticized for that Mae West scene, because when I did it, they were saying, ‘Why is he really acting like Mae West?’”
Like Bobby, Al Pacino isn’t gay. But there were always gay people around, and he connected to them as someone with a type of masculinity that left him also feeling like an outsider. This is the history of method acting. This is the history of 1970s American cinema. It’s about connecting across difference. It’s about celebrating the personal. It’s about working outside the system until the systems themselves are forced to change.
When art and history are claimed by those with power, it’s tempting to dismiss the work and seek inspiration elsewhere. But I’m so glad I made my way back to Al Pacino. As we enter into another era of cultural conservatism, it’ll be up to us to hold on to our place in cinema. I refuse to be discovered again in thirty years. I refuse to lose art to its most shallow interpreters.
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?
Drew is a Brooklyn-based writer, filmmaker, and theatremaker. She is a Senior Editor at Autostraddle with a focus in film and television, sex and dating, and politics. Her writing can also be found at Bright Wall/Dark Room, Cosmopolitan UK, Refinery29, Into, them, and Knock LA. She was a 2022 Outfest Screenwriting Lab Notable Writer and a 2023 Lambda Literary Screenwriting Fellow. She is currently working on a million film and TV projects mostly about queer trans women. Find her on Twitter and Instagram.
Already read this in my inbox and adored it! Also feel this is where I’ll receive sympathy for the fact work just scheduled our (mandatory) summer party across my screening of Dog Day Afternoon
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Thank you!! And oh noooo that is cruel. Too bad the work party can’t be a trip to the movie. haha
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I feel like he would love to read this. Someone get it to Al!
And just like that, we’re BACK with the final three episodes of The Ultimatum: Queer Love season two, including two regular episodes leading up to and showing the six couples answer their ultimatums as well as a reunion that rattled me for DAYS when I first saw it. Catch up on past recaps, and read my recaps of episodes eight and nine below.
The Ultimatum: Queer Love Recap – Episode 8
I feel like we really ended on some emotionally devastating cliffhangers in episode seven, and crashing back into things here in episode eight feels…a little jarring? How much time has passed? How did we go from Dayna threatening to leave to Magan recommitting to her so fully???????!!!! Dayna’s influence is a bit unnerving! Anyway, let’s get into it.
Two Weeks Until Ultimatum Is Answered
Haley + Pilar
After their stressful balcony moment following Haley revealing she fell in love with Magan, Pilar is now worried that anything she does will only further push her away. She doesn’t want to tell Haley how to feel or project her own insecurities onto Haley.
And well, this episode basically made me sob straight out the gate, because everything Pilar is saying about how her behaviors and emotions have been impacted by her upbringing is so real. She did not get unconditional love from her family. She explains that the people who raised her are ashamed of her, and she doesn’t have a mom she can talk to about any of this.
Pilar doesn’t want Haley to just be with her because it’s all she has known for ten years, but she also believes in them as a couple. So do I tbh! I do think it is normal and natural for them to both crave other experiences outside of each other given that they’ve been together a decade and are only 29. I think Pilar wanted to experience something with Kyle, but when that was shut down she didn’t get the same kind of outside experience as Haley. I’m left wondering if nonmonogamy could work for them? And I say that as a deeply monogamous person! In any case, Pilar talking about her family makes me very sad. Losing Haley would mean losing the person who taught her real love in a way her family denied her.
Dayna + Magan
What a 180 these two have done!!!!! Magan apologizes for hurting Dayna, and Dayna wants to give this trial marriage everything so she can feel informed when she walks away from this experience. HELLO? I thought she was JUST wanting to go back to Michigan and/or have her mom come? Magan says she’s happy to be with Dayna and she is her home and comfort. WHAT???? I have whiplash with these two! I know people who have been in similar relationships where blowup fights were immediately followed by intense intimacy and closeness. IT IS A REALLY TROUBLESOME CYCLE.
Magan thinks she would not have had sex with Haley if the moment hadn’t happened where Dayna ignored her. WHAT? “It was a test and you failed,” Dayna says of the entire trial partner experience, and I am truly so confused. How does Haley suddenly have so much control and power here? Am I turning on Magan? Am I seeing her manipulated in real time? I can’t figure out what’s going on! Magan gently brings up the fact that Dayna was also sexual with Mel, which as we know Mel is denying, and Dayna downplays it by calling it kissing and a comfort thing, suggesting that what Magan did was different/”worse.” That balcony booty grab…that’s not how I personally comfort someone who is just my pal!
Marita + Ashley
These two who I think are fundamentally incompatible meet up with Ashley’s twin sister and regular sister. They seem close with Marita, which is cute. But again, I don’t think these two are meant to be together at all, and at this point I’m stressed out any time they’re on screen together!!! Ashley admits their first week back together was horrible. She’s still trying to figure out why it’s so hard for her to do these things Marita asks for. Her sisters are like you shouldn’t be together if you can’t get on the same page, and I agree!!!!!
Marie + Mel
Mel is still struggling to see herself in a long-term committed relationship, because she has never seen a happy married couple in her immediate life. No one has modeled that for her. I sympathize with the sentiment, but it’s almost like she completely absolves herself of any real agency or culpability in her own actions and decisions. Mel brings up the horrible relationship her uncle — who she lived with after her uncle died — was in. But Marie asks her if she thinks that’s how they’ll be.
The things that make Marie feel safe in a relationship, like trust and support, make Mel feel unsafe, Mel explains. Trusting and loving someone fully scares her. Okay, at a certain point I think Marie has to make a choice to walk away from this! Mel is essentially telling her she cannot be in a stable relationship. In fact, she says she doesn’t know if she wants safe and stable, because her life has always been chaotic. So…because she has only ever known dysfunction, she chooses dysfunction? GIRL, GET HELP!
10 Days Until Ultimatum Is Answered
Haley + Pilar
These two are going hard on trying to reconnect. They wake up to watch the sunrise, their first on the east coast. Pilar asks Haley what she needs, and Haley says she doesn’t feel prioritized by Pilar the way Magan prioritized her. (It’s a lot easier to make someone your priority during three weeks than after ten years together, but alas.) Haley says sometimes she tells Pilar she doesn’t want to do something and Pilar convinces her to do it anyway. Well, I do feel like we saw a bit of that in Pilar’s interactions with Kyle, too, so that tracks.
Pilar is trying not to take the confusion Haley is experiencing personally. I do think both of these two are trying to work through their issues in emotionally intelligent and mature ways.
Haley now brings up that while she and Pilar were out at the club, they ran into Magan and Dayna. Magan didn’t even look at Haley. So Magan did the thing she accused Dayna of doing?! Magan also told Haley they needed to cut all contact. Haley is confused, and I don’t blame her! They told each other they loved each other, and now Magan is cutting off contact, obviously in a attempt to appease Dayna.
Dayna + Magan
Well, these two are snuggling and telling each other they love each other, so I guess things are all good between them! I’m sick! Dayna tells Magan she has to get really intentional with Haley, and Magan tries to suggest she and Haley can be friends who just support each other, but Dayna shuts that down real quick and says that the relationship right now is not appropriate. Magan says maybe it just needs time, and Dayna shuts that down, too, saying it will take a lot of time if Magan wants to be with Dayna.
I don’t think Magan is completely innocent in the way the rest of this episode is about to go down, but I do feel like I’m so clearly watching someone be manipulated?!
Magan then brings up Haley ignoring her in the gym but then liking her photo, and Dayna says Haley is playing games. I really don’t think Haley is playing any games! Dayna says Magan is acting like she’s being the crazy one when really it’s Haley who is, and I think Dayna should get an Olympic gold medal in the sport of the SPIN.
Magan has gotten a lot of clarity. She doesn’t feel uncertain about any future possibility with Haley. Magan is fully back to Dayna. Well then!
Bridget + Kyle
It has become increasingly evident that the worst offense committed by these two is just being kind of boring. Kyle’s parents are back, and Bridget still wants to know what actual marriage adds to anything. Kyle never really seems to have a convincing answer for this. Kyle’s mom says it’s commitment and building a life together. Kyle’s dad doesn’t think she’s ready for marriage because of insecurity in her job and finances. Kyle says she isn’t ready to buy a house. Kyle’s mom points out Pilar was very mature and had a more secure profession, whereas Bridget and Kyle are two artists which makes life hard.
Well EXCUSE ME, I am a writer married to another writer, and our marriage is very strong!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! But yes life is hard lol she got me there, drag me to hell KYLE’S MOM.
But no really, Kyle and Bridget probably belong together. They just disagree about marriage as an institution.
Britney + AJ
Delightfully, these two are on a date at the same Gyu-Kaku my wife and I went on frequent dates to when we lived in Miami. I hope they get the s’mores. They do get the spicy shrimp, which is also a crucial order. Anyway, you’re probably not reading this to find out What To Order At Gyu-Kaku.
AJ is still scared Britney will wake up one day and know she can do better. Really the only problem here seems to be AJ’s insecurity. AJ, it’s just the risk you take when committing yourself to someone! Just take the plunge! Britney accurately points out that this is an AJ Problem, not something that Britney herself has made her feel. She sees AJ as her equal, and AJ is the one who does not and is taking that out on Britney. I think these two will probably make it out of here. AJ just needs to get over her insecurities. And Britney to her credit seems to have a pretty endless capacity of patience for that (well, besides the fact that she issued her an ultimatum I guess).
Marie + Mel
Mel shares she tried to text Dayna, and then Dayna called her and said she was uncomfortable. Mel wonders if it’s coming from Dayna herself or from Magan. Mel agrees to step back. Dayna and Magan are basically trying to do damage control and lock in with each other, icing everyone else out in the process.
Magan + Dayna
Magan is grilling and living in her delusional bubble where apparently she did not fall in love with another woman and is ready to be Dayna’s wife. Dayna is stressed about the prospect of talking to Mel, who she feels is going to have an attitude. Dayna thinks their trial partners probably feel betrayed. Yeah, probably!!!! Cutting off contract is crazy work!
Pilar + Haley
Pilar asks what the pros and cons of talking to Magan are, and Haley says she’s going to make a game day decision about talking to her. Let’s see how it goes down at……….
The Cocktail Party
Everyone agrees this is pretty weird. Marita asks Britney and AJ if Britney made oxtail yet, and she did. So everything between Britney and AJ seems good! Oxtail for wifey!
Let’s zero in on the central conflicts that play out here in two separate private conversations:
Dayna + Mel
Dayna says Mel is being weird toward her, and Mel doesn’t feel like she’s being any type of way. Dayna’s spin work is already at play. Mel expresses she felt she and Dayna were really similar and that they grew together. Mel says Dayna made her feel less crazy whereas Marie has made her feel crazy for four years. Mel brings up that they left things saying they would be friends no matter what.
Dayna says that has all changed by the fact that Magan brought up that the matching tattoos were such a betrayal, because she and Dayna had apparently had a conversation that if they made it out of the show they would get matching tattoos. Mel says Dayna didn’t tell her that, and Dayna claims she doesn’t remember the conversation with Magan. SPIN CITY USA!!! POPULATION: DAYNA!!!!
Dayna tells Mel not to talk to her the way she talks to other people and criticizes her for not being patient enough. She tells her to drop the act. “I know you ride for me, but I also know you ride for Magan,” Mel says. Dayna apologizes for not being able to be there for her right now. I feel like Dayna is playing Mel and Magan at the same time and trying to keep them both as options for her?
Dayna and Mel also end up talking about Magan/Haley. Mel asks Dayna if she trusts Haley, and Dayna says hell no. But what has Haley done, literally! Dayna thinks Pilar and Haley came to the show to leave each other. “Magan knows she got manipulated,” Dayna tells Mel. Excuse me…Magan got manipulated…by HALEY??????? DAYNA, LOOK IN THE MIRROR.
Magan + Haley
Haley doesn’t really want to talk but agrees to anyway. Magan tells Haley that when things ended between them, because of how far they went, Dayna was in a hurt place and she wanted to maximize her time with Dayna. Haley says the cold turkey no contact was jarring though, and fair! Magan wanted to set a boundary and asks that Haley respects her trial marriage.
But Magan treated Haley the exact way Magan said Dayna was treating her during the first trial marriage. She ignored her! That’s what set Magan off in the first place! Points are being made! Magan says it hurt her not to say hi but that she felt like she had to choose between Haley and Dayna and chose Dayna. So, here it’s clear Magan’s decisions for how to interact with Haley are being determined primarily by Dayna.
Haley says Magan’s actions don’t line up with her words and she feels like she got to know a completely different person than whoever this Magan is. Haley has been really honest with Pilar, and that’s true! She told her she fell in love with Magan! And we saw Magan also tell Dayna she fell in love with Haley, but now she’s backtracking. She says she had an authentic few weeks and doesn’t regret things but that she also made certain promises she shouldn’t have because she thought she was at a point of no return with Dayna. She says she loves Magan for everything they’ve gone through but that she’s not in love with her.
Magan says Haley is making her feel crazy, and Haley says she’s making HER feel crazy, and I gotta say I’m on Haley’s side here! Magan! We all saw you fall for Haley and say you were falling for her! I know you’re trying to lock it down with Dayna now, but backtracking is so foolish! There’s footage! Appease Dayna I guess, but we’re all watching! And judging tbh!
One thing’s for sure: I’m glad my invitation to this cocktail party got lost in the mail.
One Week Until Ultimatum Is Answered
Haley and Pilar are parasailing! Marita is making a vision board! AJ got Britney a s’mores station to remind her of their date together! I guess they did get the s’mores at Gyu-Kaku.
Haley + Pilar
Haley’s dad comes over for dinner with these two, and Haley tearfully shares with her dad that she and Magan fell in love with each other and that Magan is now backtracking the narrative. Her dad very kindly tells her it isn’t the worst thing ever to read a situation wrong. Pilar posits that perhaps Magan was using Haley to make Dayna jealous, and I honestly don’t think it was that calculating, but I do think Magan and Dayna are two people who HAVE to be in a relationship so they go all-in on whoever they see as their most viable option. Magan went all-in with Haley, but now shes’ going all-in on Dayna in a way that requires her to push Haley away.
Haley’s dad tells Pilar he’s here for her, too, and Pilar starts crying and so do I!!!! Pilar doesn’t have a dad to talk to about any of this, and Haley gets to be so open with hers. And he’s supportive of Pilar, too, and that’s just so sad and sweet! Pilar says she hasn’t been proud of herself for a long time but has learned to stick up with herself and be patient.
Magan + Dayna
It’s time for People Having Serious Conversations Under Blankets on the Couch, Magan says she talks to her mom about Dayna a lot and that her mom will say something like but one day you’re going to marry a guy and have kids, right? But today when Magan called and was talking about Dayna, she said everything but the part about the guy. Progress! I’m rooting for Magan to make progress with her family even if I’m not rooting for Magan and Dayna to work out!
Ashley + Marita
More couch time. Marita starts sobbing after telling Ashley again that there are so many things she’s not getting. I think she’s realizing it’s not going to work. She wants a relationship and love and romance and she doesn’t want to just feel like friends. I really struggle to understand these two. Ashley holds her while she sobs, and Marita says she doesn’t get why Ashley can’t do all these things for her. They’re so bad at communicating! I don’t even want them in couples therapy; I just want them both in individual therapy.
Haley + Pilar
Pilar checks in with Haley, who is grateful for what they have. Pilar realizes that when she takes herself out of it, they’re able to resolve things better. They’re both genuinely trying witheach other. Pilar says if she were on the outside — like us, as viewers — she’d think they were fucked. I don’t actually think that Pilar! Y’all are pretty chill compared to Ashley/Marita and Magan/Dayna AND Mel/Marie!
Pilar and Haley feel bad for Dayna, Haley saying she wonders if Magan is the real problem in that relationship. Counterpoint: I think they could both be a problem.
Pilar doesn’t want to leave this and feel she was a safe second option.
Trial Marriages Final Night
Marie + Mel
Marie and Mel are making meatballs and sauce together, apparently a Sunday tradition and recreation of their first date together. Mel doesn’t want to work; she wants to be a stay-at-home masc. But what about the FOOD TRUCK!!!!
Mel says what she thinks switches by the moment. Yeah girl, that’s a red flag! Marie says Mel should trust her when she says something is okay. She feels confident and sure of what she wants and feels. Marie, girl, you can’t change who Mel is though. And she has shown you who she is over and over and over.
Dayna + Magan
Though I am turning on her, Magan wins a small piece of me back by referencing the Fast & Furious film franchise’s conceptualization of chosen family. Magan says they both fucked up, and Dayna makes sure to reiterate that yeah but Magan fucked up WORSE. She says it’s not like Magan hooked up with a random girl at the club but rather built a connection with and fell in love with someone else, which is DIFFERENT AND BAD…even though it is baked into the premise of the reality show they not only both chose to do but that Dayna strong-armed Magan into following through with when she originally wanted to leave.
Dayna laments that Magan doesn’t seem to regret anything she did or think anything she did was wrong. I think she likes having this card to play. Any time the conversation turns to her actions, she pivots to talking about what Magan did and how she isn’t sure if she can get over it. Then don’t and leave! Do your little spins elsewhere! I’m honestly tired of the spins!
Next: Ultimatum Queer Love Season Two Recap Episode 9
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?
Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya is the managing editor of Autostraddle and a lesbian writer of essays, fiction, and pop culture criticism living in Orlando. She is the former managing editor of TriQuarterly, and her short stories appear in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Joyland, Catapult, The Offing, The Rumpus, Cake Zine, and more. Some of her pop culture writing can be found at The A.V. Club, Vulture, The Cut, and others. When she is not writing, editing, or reading, she is probably playing tennis. You can follow her on Twitter or Instagram and learn more about her work on her website.
Kayla! I am DYING to read your reunion recap. Amazing work thus far…can you imagine if we got this kind of insight on the show from an actual queer host?! Dare to dream. Truly, I am reeling right now at the fact that there were engagements beyond Haley/Pilar and Britney/AJ…
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Oh gods, I didn’t know a reality television show could make me dry heave. I’m actually low key a little scared for Magan? Like, the oddest thing I see not mentioned anywhere is that she is not out to her very strict Lebanese parents but she quite literally went on a Netflix reality television show? Even in the best of the best situations there would still be a non-zero chance that somehow someone in her family found out that she was on it no? She just seems not very good at thinking things through and that reflects in her behaviour and her relationship with Dayna. And that’s not a criticism of her, it’s why I’m so worried. Going on this show was the worst possible idea for her in every way and it is very obvious that in her little bubble with Dayna it is Dayna spinning her way into making every and all decisions. I just hope that Magan can break away from Dayna, especially after seeing Dayna’s behaviour in the footage.
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I’m so stressed out I don’t know how I’m going to deal with the reunion
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SO ready for the reunion recap. This is bonkers!
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Marie!! Noooooooooooooo
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The situation with Dayna and Magan is coercive control and is miserable to watch. It kills me that no one really pulls Dayna up on her controlling, manipulative and mean-spirited behaviour. Seeing how relaxed and happy Magan was with Haley versus how brittle, defensive and closed off she is with Dayna is heartbreaking. Yes, Magan is an adult and has her autonomy but that autonomy is being very seriously impeded by Dayna and I do really see Magan as a victim in all this because she quite literally doesn’t know any better. Imagine, actually imagine, living in the Dayna spin world every single day. Imagine never getting to express your own emotions without Dayna telling you “well actually THIS is how you feel”. It would break you and it’s clearly broken something in Magan. If society/Netflix took emotional abuse as seriously as physical abuse these episodes would come with a fucking warning about how Dayna’s behaviour is not ok. I’m so upset they got engaged. I hope they never get married.
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Also Mel and Marie …..lorde….Marie is a chump and Mel is an even bigger chump. Marie was so desperate for a ring she accepted that weak ass proposal? From the world’s least reliable, chaos loving and dishonest person? Couldn’t be me….
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– All the times people in this show said: “The biggest decision of my life” – that would have been a bingo in my bingo game of this show. Or when people say it will change their lives forever. Maybe, I don’t know what their lives are like! But it is also possible that a wedding changes something for a couple of years until they get divorced and then the other person is not really a part of their lives anymore. I’m also confused that people said the decision about the trial wife would be the second biggest decision of their lives.
– Marita: You could also play bingo every time she says: “You are not giving me what I want.” I don’t see any introspection of herself, only that she demands so very much of her partner all the time. A relationship should be about giving and receiving, and she constantly demands to receive more and more and more. It is debatable whether it is possible to do/ be what/ who she wants in a partner, but these two are not a good fit. And I don’t recall that there was ever the question what Marita could do for Ashley? What Marita could change?
Given Ashley’s prior history with intimate partner violence, I believe I see all these little moments with Marita that are certainly not abuse but are like a pattern in many people who experienced violence – Ashley not prioritizing their own feelings; not standing up for herself; agreeing with Marita when it looks like she does not; swallowing her anger. Ashley looks so annoyed on the couch when Marita cries but she holds her anyway and says: “You are right, I should consider your feelings more.” It is all about Marita’s feelings! Does Marita care about Ashley’s feelings!!
Very happy Ashley walked away and did not propose.
– Hayley: “I thought Danya was the problem, and now I thing Magan is the problem” – Me: They’re both the problem! Danya and Magan! Very painful to watch any scene Danya is in and how she manages to spin everything according what she wants at the moment. I want better for Magan even though she is not innocent in this. Their fights remind me of Tiff and Mildred, the drama in the fight and then making up and everything is peachy until it’s high drama again. (Everything we saw before we learned that Mildred was arrested for intimate partner violence after the show.)
– Mel: I understand that if one grows up with chaos, imagining a life of stability does not seem to be in reach. But therapy exists! It is an option to change patterns that made sense in the past and are no longer serving you in the present (e.g. I don’t want safety). Please be accountable for your actions and do not just say “yeah, my childhood, this is me, the end.”
– Brtitney: “The ultimate ‘I love you’ is marrying me” – yeah, I have to disagree on that. I’m glad they worked it out, and I hope AJ will work on her insecurities on the long-run and stop wanting (for some part) for Britney to be the housewife. Issues like that don’t disappear with a proposal.
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thanks to adu priest for restoring my marriage within 24hrs with the power of his reunion love spell once again thank you.( priestadu@ gmail. com )
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thanks to adu priest for restoring my marriage within 24hrs with the power of his reunion love spell once again thank you.(priestadu @ gmail. com)
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oh my god I am so perplexed by Mel’s refusal to do some long-term consequence thinking and respect for her partner? like how could she ask Marie to marry her, when she knows Marie will see the footage of ALLLL the stuff she did and said with Dayna, including that very same day admitting that if she proposed it will only be for Marie and not because that’s something Mel herself wants?!?!!
also I am so sad for Marie’s seeming lack of self-worth and being willing to lower her standards and accept subpar treatment from a partner.
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Kayla, I loved reading your insights and review-it was fun to re-“view” those dramatic episodes through your words. I am Kyle’s Mom and 1) I laughed out loud (partly in gratitude for letting me off the hook I so solidly put myself on) at your “Life is hard, drag me to hell “comment and 2) I loved your review-
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hahahhaha thank you so much for reading!!! <3 <3 <3
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Kayla, I loved reading your insights and writing-it was fun to re-“view” those dramatic episodes through your words. I am Kyle’s Mom and I laughed out loud (partly in gratitude for letting me off the hook I so solidly put myself on) at your “Life is hard, drag me to hell “comment.
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(I am old obviously. Why do I think I can submit comments without screwing it up?)
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😂 hahahaha all good. again, thank you for reading, I’m glad you enjoyed!
Hello and a happy Lez Out July to you all! This is No Filter, the place where I tell you all about what our favorite queer celebrities were up to this week, via Instagram! Let’s rock and roll!
Cynthia. I know you are a Capricorn, but come on now! Two Wicked movies, a new album, hosting the Tony’s AND she wrote a book? I think we have officially found the one other human who has the same 24 hours that Beyoncé does!
As a person who watched this “Girls Like Girls” music video when it dropped, this does feel like a fever dream 25 year old me created? But good for me!
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?
Just wanter to add that Diane Guerrero from OITNB and Encanto appears to have hard launched her GF on insta!
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Tawny + Jasmin + alpacas <3 <3 <3
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there’s an old country song called “old dan tucker” but you’re neither old or named dan
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In other non-american news:
– Daria Kasatkina and Natalia Zabiiako got engaged (they have lots of online content on youtube)
– The EURO 25 has started. Today Denmark will play Sweden. Meaning Pernille Harder will play against her fiancee Magda Eriksson. There many other openly queer players btw.
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I just wish you would cover more news from around the world. Typically US-American are so self up-serve. Where not even talking about Europe here. Kasatkina is representing Australia now. Why instead of covering so called influencers bring us some news about accomplished athletes from around the world? 75% of the people you write about i have never heard about.
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Your comment is hilariously and ironically self-involved. Why should a US-based site focus more on international celebrities that you personally care about? How is your comment any less “self up-serve” than this post?
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Ok, I understand now that this site is US-only. I appreciate the clarification. However, this doesn’t change the fact that the US can sometimes come across as very inward-focused. Many Americans aren’t even familiar with the countries in their own continent, and I see this as a chance to broaden perspectives, which can sometimes be quite limited. People in other parts of the world are well aware of this dynamic.
If you prefer to keep this as a US-based site, that’s fine. But I believe it’s worth considering a wider focus, as the current US-centered perspective can feel quite narrow at times.
I’m not trying to spread negativity but to build bridges and encourage a broader view. It seems my message was misunderstood, and I take responsibility for not expressing myself clearly. English isn’t my native language, and the examples I mentioned were just that—examples.
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I’m in the US and I only recognize like 50% of the celebrities covered in this column ;)
I would love to read more international coverage at AS. Maybe you should pitch the editors.
This particular column (No Filter) isn’t meant to be news though – it’s just interesting posts from Instagram over the past week. The celebrities covered tend to change depending on the taste of the writer. The current writer, Christina, does mostly focus on American actors and musicians.
For all the jokes about Florida, the people who actually inhabit the state know its beauty. There’s a rich history in this state, not just in the buildings and communities that have been built over decades, but in the stunning natural landscapes that have always been there and, unfortunately, find themselves being regularly exploited and destroyed. To watch Sasha Wortzel’s feature documentary, River of Grass, is to experience a bit of the beauty and pain of existing in Florida surrounded by the Everglades.
Not to be mistaken with Kelly Reichardt’s only Floridian film of the same name, Wortzel’s River of Grass is a necessary document about the Everglades at this point in time anda personal reflection on what it means to connect with other communities for the greater good. By weaving together everything from archival material of the grasslands, Marjory Stoneman Douglas’ seminal text (The Everglades: River of Grass), Indigenous voices and activists Betty Osceola and Reverend Houston R. Cypress, and contemporary verité footage of prayer walks in the Everglades and around Lake Okeechobee, the film becomes a mirror of the vast scale of the Everglades themselves in our lives.
That it serves as a personal memoir, educational text, and call to action all at once is what makes River of Grass feel essential in a time when everything in Florida feels fraught with danger. As a fellow queer Floridian watching the film — as well as Wortzel’s past work like How to Carry Water, This Is Not An Address, and Happy Birthday Marsha (co-directed with Tourmaline) — I couldn’t help but get swept away by it. I found myself thinking a lot about the way so many communities in South Florida intersect and adapt. Coming up just before a screening at Frameline, Sasha and I sat down to talk about the film, the region’s history and politics, and the way queerness and nature intersect.
Juan: I feel like it’s a very Floridian thing to just grow up with the Everglades as something that’s always there, for airboat rides and swamp walks, but not something you’re connected with in any real capacity. What was your experience with it growing up?
Sasha: Like most Floridians, I grew up knowing that the Everglades existed and was there, yet I wasn’t necessarily spending a lot of time in the Everglades. My earliest memories are driving from the West Coast to the East Coast through them and I think that’s a common way that many Floridians experience this vast region of wetlands that our water comes from: as a place to pass through to get from one coast to the other. I think many Floridians also don’t understand what they are, might even find them scary and intimidating. Some people look and say “what’s there?” It seems like nothing’s there and though I did grow up having a pretty strong relationship with the environment – being on the water, being in coastal mangroves, kayaking, and I was like a junior naturalist – but I didn’t understand how my more immediate ecosystem that I grew up in was a part of this larger, vast interconnected system that is the Everglades. That’s something I really had to seek out on my own.
Juan: Yeah, Floridian schools don’t really educate you on this. There’s not enough weight placed on how integral the Everglades is.
Sasha: It was very much a thing of the 90s where our education around the environment was not stressing the interconnectedness of things and simply focused on teaching us to turn off the lights, recycle, and plant a tree on Earth Day. With that, you’ve done your part and we still see that today. The responsibility is often placed on the individual rather than on larger systems or corporations that are actually the culprit in extracting, polluting, and destroying our wetlands and natural wild spaces.
Juan: And I think your film speaks to that by actively involving various communities who are impacted and exist with the Everglades. Not to jump into the political immediacy of it, but I do wonder: do you consider your film something of a call to action, particularly in informing people about how much the Everglades impacts us?
Sasha: I believe my film is an invitation to learn more and to become engaged with the environment and educated in how interconnected everything is. I’m happy if it feels like a call to action too; I think it is in essence, with Betty’s last lines in the film [“Nature will always win in the end. You have to decide if you’re going to be there as a part of that win, and, if you don’t, she’s going to win without you.”] More than anything, I think the experience of making the film, for me, was sort of like getting to know a relative who’s always been there in a much deeper, more intimate, way.
Juan: The film kicks off with you dreaming about Marjory Stoneman Douglas and navigating the impact of hurricanes, so that makes sense. Were those the actual triggers that kicked off the creation of River of Grass?
Sasha: I was thinking about how, in my lifetime, I had seen many of our wetlands and wild spaces fundamentally change or disappear altogether. I was watching more frequent and intense storms and hurricanes, noticing that our water quality was really declining, and that, on both coasts, we were experiencing forms of harmful algal blooms. Red tides and green algae that were sucking the oxygen out of the water, causing these mass fish killings, and giving people health problems. I was feeling overwhelmed by it all, devastated and sad, and then realized that I didn’t quite understand why. I knew that it had something to do with the Everglades’ water system, and that our temperatures (in and out of the water) are rising, but I wanted to unpack that and understand it better for myself in order to process some of my grief and understand my place and what action I could take.
I started by picking up Marjory Stoneman Douglas’ book because, even today, it’s still considered one of the essential resource guides to the Everglades and the first non-fiction study of the Everglades. I’d also applied to Artists in Residence in Everglades (AIRIE) and arrived just after Hurricane Irma – there were tons of trees and phone lines down and the water levels were much higher than usual for that time of year – so, of course, hurricanes were on my mind. I spent that month reading Douglas’ book and using it to create a sort of roadmap of some of the stories, the sites, and the themes I might explore in the film, as well as reaching out to people who were removing pythons or riding around with rangers by boat taking water samples.
I met Houston Cypress at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Archives while doing some research after having written them prior to coming to the residency, knowing that one could not make a film about the Everglades without engaging Indigenous voices, and it was also at that time that I met Betty Osceola at Buffalo Tiger Air Boats. I was telling her what I was imagining and she said, “Hang on a second,” went and put gasoline in her airboat, and said “get on.” I went on a long ride with her and her late husband Jimmy and we walked and talked about a prayer walk she was organizing to walk the entire circumference of Lake Okeechobee. She invited me to join her, and so I did.
Juan: That is such a massive endeavor, but it sounds magnificent.
Sasha: From there, I just realized that it was going to be a film that reimagines Douglas’ book; her words in it felt very prescient and relevant, and yet it stopped in 1947. So much has followed that up to the present, so I wanted to weave her words alongside these portraits of what’s happening now. And that’s kind of how the project began, but then another hurricane came during the making of this and really destroyed where I’m from. Douglas did come to me in a dream during this time, telling me that she had more to say and felt she’d been forgotten. I felt that she wanted a direct address with the audience, not just through her book, and it launched me into doing more archival research and uncovering interviews with her where I was moved by her presence and bluntness.
She was so direct, so funny, so unapologetic, and a lot of what she said was extremely resonant with what’s happening now. She needed to be part of the story and all these elements needed some kind of grounding and a perspective, some kind of glue, and that had to be me. I realized it was also my story, but Douglas prompted me to pursue this project.
Juan: And you bring up trying to piece it all together, but I’m so interested in how you approached something as grand as the Everglades. There’s science, there’s spirituality, there’s history, there’s politics – obviously you’re grounding it in yourself, but how do you try to parse all of it down into something that isn’t just an info dump?
Sasha: It’s not an easy task and also why this was a project that took many years to make. I naively didn’t realize the education it would require of me; I’d need to learn Indigenous history, hydrology, legal frameworks around the Everglades, there’s just so many layers. Once I started meeting and engaging with people on the ground who call this region home, that would lead me to another story and another. It was through the making of this project that I became connected with the Stop the Burn campaign [which aims to eliminate the practice of pre-harvest sugarcane burning in the Everglades] and learned about that. It really took a lot of time and refining, and it was through the editing process that it became clear what would remain and what might be cast out to create something that could tell a very expansive story but wasn’t bogged down in too much detail. I hope people learn a lot about this place through watching, but I wanted it to feel more like you were sort of flowing with the water, digesting and absorbing and learning along the way.
Juan: That makes a lot of sense in how meditative the doc is. It forces you to become one with the nature of the Everglades. Your last short film, How to Carry Water, also had this vibe that you’re just trying to exist in the same space as your subjects. Do you always try to find that connection with them in some capacity?
Sasha: I tend to work on projects where I’m engaging with places and communities that I’m somehow already embedded in on some level. It’s been really important for me to think about landscape not just as background but as a character and to foreground it and really sit with and film with the same kind of dignity and respect that I give to the people that I film. I spent a lot of time in these different ecosystems that are collectively part of the Everglades with J. Bennett, the director of photography.
A really important part of the process for me is also relationship building. During the making of the film, Betty Osceola walked Lake Okeechobee twice. There were two separate prayer walks and I filmed one of them and went on another from start to finish without my camera. I think it was about 120 miles around the lake, mostly in silence. That sort of intention and process is hopefully embedded in the feeling of the film.
Juan: How much of those prayer walks and that journey is just walking and experiencing nature as opposed to moments where people stop and engage with each other?
Sasha: When you’re walking in pairs in a single file line through the Everglades, you’re meant to be silent and listen and pray, to look and witness the environment and connect with it. There’s a rhythm to these moments where you’re moving through the landscape and looking in a way that I think we often don’t look, especially while you’re on foot because of the pace and scale of things. In breaks, Betty would share a story or some kind of knowledge, ones that have been passed down from her ancestors about the ways the land looked when they were there or specific plants. Sometimes there’s breaks where we’re all just hanging out and laughing, eating snacks and enjoying being out there with each other.
It’s about community building when you’re out there with people from all walks of life. Over the course of filming, I watched the prayer walks really grow. Of course, Lake Okeechobee is a particularly long seven-day walk, so not everyone’s going to be able to participate in the full walk due to its intensity. But something really beautiful that I felt over the course of the film was the number of people participating in these walks, these spiritual actions, and the Everglades growing and finding intersections between these community members. So Donna and her daughter, I’d been out with them removing pythons, and then a few months later, we were on this walk together. It was interesting to see not only the interconnectedness of the different ecosystems that make up the Everglades, but the people themselves, and I wanted the structure of the film to reflect that as well.
One of the teachings that Betty spoke about during the making of the film was this Miccosukee teaching of land as ancestor, with trees and animals that are all our relatives. And in Douglas’ book, she very intentionally uses the pronoun “they” to describe the Everglades – this non-binary, plural pronoun – and I was really moved by these two ideas.
Juan: That makes a lot of sense to me because the film kind of ebbs and flows through all these different facets of community and ecosystem. I actually love that you bring up the non-binary pronoun for the Everglades because I’m wondering: How did your own queerness and your past work that looks at queer bodies in natural (and unnatural) spaces influence this film?
Sasha: I mean, how could it not? It’s just one of the lenses through which I experience and engage with the world, and the idea of the collective, the “they”, this sort of expansiveness of gender and community with plants, animals, and the unknown, like our ancestors and spirits. I think there are moments that do feel more explicitly queer in the film, like Houston walking through this beautiful cypress dome and saying that chosen family is a survival strategy.
Even something like Marjory being asked by a journalist why she never remarried. Would a journalist ever ask a man that? Of course not. I was moved by her answer being that she couldn’t be bothered with a man and was busy. Marjory may not have been queer, yet the way she lived her life defied a lot of prescribed gender roles. She did not marry, she did not have kids, and she wasn’t focused on this nuclear family unit because her family was the Everglades, her friends, her writing, and her art, the things she devoted her time to.
Something that really informed my approach to this project and How to Carry Water was thinking about the way in which queer bodies and trans bodies, like the wetlands, defy or refuse tidy binary categories. Wetlands are both land and water; the Everglades are sometimes dry as a bone and you can walk across and, other times, it’s flooded. It’s not any one thing, and there’s an interesting connection too in the way that wetlands have been demonized, extracted, drained, and reengineered that mirrors what we see happening in dominant culture with violent transphobic narratives.
Juan: So many people outside of these lived experiences and natural bodies are trying to force their will onto them, but you can’t change or stop what exists.
Sasha: Yeah, I think the same violent forces that deem a trans body, or a disabled body, or a fat body, unworthy or disposable in this world are the same forces that deem a swamp as unworthy or something we don’t need. And that is intimately connected to all kinds of violence and settler colonialism here in the United States and with what we’re seeing happening abroad.
Juan: And your film is explicitly in conversation with the fact that the world is comfortable destroying these things. Obviously your work is political – even thinking back to something like This is an Address, which features Sylvia Rivera – because you can’t make work like this without it being political, but what do you hope for with a film like River of Grass? Are you hoping for it to spark conversations about gentrification or destruction or faulty politics in Florida that make nothing last here?
Sasha: That’s the very story of Florida: Build as fast as you can before things sink or build and make as much money as you can before the next hurricane.
Juan: Does it feel like you ended up capturing the Everglades before it’s too late?
Sasha: There is an awareness that I am trying to tell a story that covers such a wide span of time and that connects the past to the present. To make this film is to create a document of a specific time and place because the way things look and feel are constantly changing. I hope the film is an invitation to become more connected to our environment and to each other, to our larger collective movements. Something that’s important to me with this film – that’s maybe not said explicitly but hopefully embedded in the architecture – is that climate justice is very intersectional. It cuts across race, class, gender, and sexuality, and connects to everything. Finding these interconnections between our movements and coalition building is really the way forward.
We are stronger together when we are thinking about how we can all get free and how our liberation is connected to our neighbors. We also need to listen to and support Indigenous voices and center those who are most impacted in our movements. Those are the experts and recognizing and dismantling these ongoing legacies of settler colonialism is central to the environmental justice movement. Those are some of the many things I’ve learned and taken away from the process of making this film. I started in this place of devastation and grief, feeling overwhelmed and unsure of what to do, and now I have all these answers and solutions. Through the making of the film, through learning our history and who came before, and by connecting with a broader coalition of neighbors in the region, I now feel more hope.
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“I hope people learn a lot about this place through watching, but I wanted it to feel more like you were sort of flowing with the water, digesting and absorbing and learning along the way.”
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I’m definitely going to watch this film now. I love the Everglades.
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?
June was of course a very busy month for LGBTQ+ book releases, but we still have a decent amount of new queer and trans books coming your way in July, too! Because it turns out gay people still exist after Pride month! Who knew! Below, find our top picks for the month, followed by the rest of our mostly anticipated queer books for July 2025. And feel free to shoutout additional books in the comments!
Autostraddle’s Top Most Anticipated LGBTQ Books for July 2025
Hilarious in its excavations of internet fame and the content-ification of relationships, Hot Girls with Balls follows Six and Green, two late-twenties Asian trans women on rival teams in the men’s pro indoor volleyball league. The influencer athletes have a massive platform where they document their long-distance relationship and often disagree about how much to make public and keep private. It’s a great “internet novel” and specifically a queer internet novel, so it’s extremely up my alley and I think if you get your book recommendations from Autostraddle dot com, it’ll be up yours, too.
Nothing bonds two girls quite like burying a body in the woods. Chloe Harper and Mel Tillman end up in a secret relationship after they spend a night in the woods burying the body of teen drug dealer Toby Dunne on Chloe’s 16th birthday. Six years later, Chloe has left town for the Canadian wilderness and Mel is working as a rural PI. Danger resurfaces from their past and brings the two women back together again.
The Other Wife, by Jackie Thomas-Kennedy (July 15, Literary Fiction)
Zuzu feels like an outsider growing up biracial in her small, rural town, but she finds deep friendship in her best friend Cash, whom she longs for but never pursues outright romance with. Now nearing her forties, she’s married to her wife Agnes while still yearning for Cash, who she reconnects with when a sudden loss brings her back to her hometown.
House of Beth by Kerry Cullen (July 15, Literary Fiction)
This twisty novel centers bisexual literary agency assistant Cassie Jackson, who flees Manhattan for her New Jersey hometown following the gruesome death of her boss, which also causes her harm OCD to flare up. There, she reconnects with her high school best friend Eli, who is a widowed father of two, and Cassie slides easily into his life as a new stepmother. But things get a little…messy…when the ghost of Eli’s dead homemaker wife Beth starts haunting the woods surrounding her home.
Subterrane, by Valérie Bah (July 17, Speculative Fiction)
Humor and political commentary collide in this kaleidoscopic work of speculative fiction featuring a chorus of Black and queer voices set in the fictional world of New Stockholm, a North American metropolis defined by class stratification. Zeynab is making a government-funded abstract documentary about the creatives and anti-capitalists of one of New Stockholm’s polluted and industrial neighborhoods, one of the last areas where housing is affordable.
The author of the outstanding Vagabonds! is back with another gorgeous literary exploration of queer life, family, friendship, desire in Nigeria. Featuring more than two dozen characters across generations and scattered throughout Lagos, it’s simultaneously sprawling and intimate.
A young aspiring writer moves to Los Angeles while grieving her dead brother and ends up in a relationship with a famous older radio host named Reid Steinman, beloved by her father and late brother. But things take an interesting turn when she ends up having an affair with his adult daughter Maddie.
Simplicity, by Mattie Lubchansky (July 29, Sci-Fi, Graphic Novel)
Whether you know her from her brilliant horror graphic novel Boys Weekend or just from her hilarious comics online, Mattie Lubchansky is a shining voice with a signature style in the queer and trans graphic narrative space, and you’re not going to want to miss her latest, an immersive and speculative story about Lucius Pasternak, who is hired by the Museum of the Former State of New York in 2081 to study a group called The Spiritual Association of Peers from the 1970s that took over a summer camp in the Catskills and called it Simplicity. Strangeness ensues. Expect sharp socio-political commentary wrapped up in eerie dystopian-horror imagery. And humor of course!
Lonely Crowds, by Stephanie Wambugu (July 29, Literary Fiction)
Set in the early-90s art world of NYC, this novel is about two friends: Ruth and Maria. Ruth is an only child of immigrants to New England attending a Catholic girl’s school on a scholarship, and Maria is an orphan whose Panamanian mother died by suicide and is being raised by her aunt and also on a scholarship to the school. They strike up an intense friendship. Ruth follows charming and free Maria, who embraces her sexuality and drive for an art career, to college and then NYC, where ambition and competition threaten their friendship. Toxic friendship novel, yes PLEASE!
And now enjoy the rest of our most anticipated LGBTQ books for July 2025!
A geeky science-lover and a prophesied Chosen One’s paths collide, and they start to fall for each other, but there’s one problem: They come from literally different universes. Second dates become a lot more complicated when they require a portal. For readers of sapphic cozy YA fantasy!
A suspenseful, gothic work of historical fiction, The Original follows Grace, who has predilections for art, forgery, and other girls. She’s saving up money in hopes of one day leaving her family for far away, but a letter from a long-presumed dead cousin staking potential claim in the family’s wealth complicates matters for Grace and the other members of her Oxfordshire estate.
This is the third book in the Her Majesty’s Royal Coven trilogy. Five witches — Niamh, Ciara, Leonie, Elle and Theo — are chosen by Lucifer the demon of desire to fulfill a dark prophecy. Uh oh.
Lacrimosa Arriscane AKA Lark is expelled from her boarding school and finds her family in financial ruin, so she accepts a marriage of convenience to a chthonic god, as one does. She becomes entangled in a sibling love triangle with a brother and sister. Romantic folk horror that promises a polyamorous bisexual romance!
This young adult sapphic rom-com follows Beau Carl, who is trying to figure out if Maia Moon, the popular girl she has been secretly hooking up with, really likes her. At the last big party before prom, Beau sees Maia about to kiss Charm Montgomery, who is thrilled that the vibes she has been picking up on in her tutoring sessions with Maia haven’t just been in her head. But then Beau interrupts the kiss, Maia accepts a promposal from her shitty boyfriend, and both Beau and Charm are left bereft. Beau and Charm team up to enact their revenge, but they start slipping into something sweeter along the way.
This is the first book in a fantasy trilogy inspired by Southwest Asian mythology. Ghouls, deadly monsters, and characters with dubious morals clash in a dynastic tale of romance, fantasy, and adventure.
The year is 2073, and agronomist Dr. Alex Cole moves to the first lunar colony where she falls in love. If you’re both a space nerd and a romance lover, the premise here sounds like it’ll be just for you. There’s also significant themes of climate horror and dystopia.
Whether you love lesbian poetry or lesbian literary history, you’re gonna want to get your hands on this biography of May Swenson, which pulls from her unpublished diaries as well as letters to people like fellow lesbian poet Elizabeth Bishop. The 20th century was such a fascinating time for lesbian poets, and this book particularly focuses on Swenson’s life from 1936 to 1959, during which she came of age and into her poetic voice in NYC.
Putafeminista, by Monique Prada, translated and edited by Amanda De Lisio (Nonfiction)
Activist and sex worker Monique Prada pens a work of sex-worker-centric feminism from Brazil, centering an anti-colonial and anti-whorephobia working women’s movement.
This is a revised re-release of Hanson’s collection, which features a new introduction and more than a dozen new weather-centric poems.
Sunburn, by Chloe Michelle Howarth (Literary Fiction)
This gorgeous novel about two girls falling in love in small-town Ireland in the 1990s is finally getting a U.S. publication after capturing hearts in the UK in 2023.
This novel follows six different girls who have been locked away in the 1968 nun-run institution Good Shepherd for the mere facts of being pregnant, gay, or otherwise difficult.
Nova Marwood has long been haunted by the tragedy of her missing father hiker but has become accustomed to pretending she’s okay. She’s also very good at pretending she doesn’t have a crush on the girl she pretends to hate. Nova ends up accidentally laying a hex on said faux-nemesis.
July is disability pride month, and this book features a disabled protagonist navigating a dystopian world of climate crisis and medical debt, set in a near-future Seattle ravaged by storms and a virus. Healthcare can only be earned by logging hours in the pharmaceutical factories run by society’s resident evil corporation Aegis Corp.
Hello history heads! Here is the clandestine history of a residence for American women artists in Paris from 1893 to 1914. The American Girls’ Club in Paris opened in 1893 and housed a generation of artist and activist expatriate American women during Belle Époque Paris. This meticulously researched book looks at the community that formed there and the legacy of its women.
Get it Out offers an inclusive study of the hysterectomy and includes medical history as well as qualitative data gathered from 100 participants, including trans men and nonbinary people in addition to cis women. It looks at how gender and race impact access to reproductive healthcare and the pushback people seeking hysterectomies often receive.
Taste the Love, by Karelia Stetz-Waters and Fay Stetz-Waters (Romance)
A sapphic rom-com for foodies, Taste the Love centers eco-chef Alice Sullivan and social media and food truck sensation Kia, who go from complicated culinary school rivals to…a public fake marriage in an attempt to save both their careers.
I had a lot of fun with Khaw’s Nothing But Blackened Teeth, and the author is back with a dark academia novel about the Hellebore Technical Institute for the Gifted, a prestigious academy for the “dangerously powerful,” including anti-christs, ragnaroks, world-eaters, and apocalypse-makers. In other words: school from hell.
This is a sequel to Saints of Storm and Sorrow and continues the saga’s exploration of Filipino-inspired fantasy, featuring magic, pirates, moon-eating dragons, and sapphic romance.
A group of women and nonbinary artists and writers come together to remember the legacy of Sinead O’Connor in this anthology.
Evil-ishby Kennedy Tarrell (YA Fantasy Graphic Novel)
Hawthorne Vandercast wants to join the Brigade of Shade and leave behind their life as a potions barista. But their pursuit of villainy proves more complicated than they hoped.
A space fantasy that combines Arthurian myth and the history of North Atlantic fisheries — two things I bet you didn’t think could combine to compelling effect, but here we are! For readers of queer sci-fi/fantasy tales.
So What If I’m a Puta, by Amara Moira, edited by Amanda de Lisio, and translaed by Bruna Dantas Lobato (Essay Collection)
This essay collection from Feminist Press touches on transition, safe sex, desire, whorephobia, consent, and the history and current contexts of Brazil’s violence against trans women.
A slow-burn romantasy with climate dystopia and dark academia vibes, this novel centers Kiana Strade, who has a special talent for collecting memories but refuses her post leading the temple she’s supposed to and instead does research for the Museum of Human Memory.
A Midwestern fantasy tale, this novel features a waystation for the dead on the shores of Lake Michigan in Chicago. Every night, the dead travel through the city to this waystation, guided by the titular lighthouse, where they must reckon with their lives before moving on into the great beyond, ushered by the ferryman of the dead. That ferryman’s daughter Nera notices one night that something is afoot. A living girl named Charlie has somehow boarded the boat looking for someone she has lost.
Two teens working at a donut shop for the summer band together to save it and fall in love along the way in this YA debut.
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?
Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya is the managing editor of Autostraddle and a lesbian writer of essays, fiction, and pop culture criticism living in Orlando. She is the former managing editor of TriQuarterly, and her short stories appear in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Joyland, Catapult, The Offing, The Rumpus, Cake Zine, and more. Some of her pop culture writing can be found at The A.V. Club, Vulture, The Cut, and others. When she is not writing, editing, or reading, she is probably playing tennis. You can follow her on Twitter or Instagram and learn more about her work on her website.
Riese is the 43-year-old Co-Founder of Autostraddle.com as well as an award-winning writer, video-maker, LGBTQ+ Marketing consultant and aspiring cyber-performance artist who grew up in Michigan, lost her mind in New York and now lives in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in nine books, magazines including Marie Claire and Curve, and all over the web including Nylon, Queerty, Nerve, Bitch, Emily Books and Jezebel. She had a very popular personal blog once upon a time, and then she recapped The L Word, and then she had the idea to make this place, and now here we all are! In 2016, she was nominated for a GLAAD Award for Outstanding Digital Journalism. She's Jewish. Follow her on twitter and instagram.
OH WOWW, thank you so much for including “The Club” on your awesome list! So, longtime Autostraddle reader, first-time commenter here– suffice to say that I was thrilled to see my book listed and I’m so grateful. (Kayla, I was especially excited to see you as one of the authors here… your coverage of “Yellowjackets” has been 100% critical to my viewership!). Thank you, thank you.
As an allosexual but completely exhausted human with chronic illness and disability, can confirm: I do not want long sex! My solo sex is usually 2-5 minutes, tops (hello “efficient” toys). My nb partner prefers long sex, but will begin our sessions by asking for a time limit because they know my needs and desires will vary. When they really need longer engagement, I offer to watch rather than have my whole body involved. Compromise is out there!