We may earn a commission through product links on this page. But we only recommend stuff we love.

Let’s Celebrate Gay Books! Congrats to the 2024 Lambda Literary Award Finalists!

It’s almost time for one of the biggest nights in LGBTQ literature/publishing! The 36th annual Lambda Literary Awards will take place on June 11 in New York City. Today, the shortlist was announced. There are five finalists for all 26 categories of the awards, and so many of the titles have been covered in some way by Autostraddle, your favorite (or at least, it should be!) destination for LGBTQ book reviews, author interviews, and more!

As a former Lambda Literary fellow and writer in residence, I’ve received a ton of support and resources from the organization and had the pleasure of attending the awards ceremony last year. If you want to see the full list of finalists, head to Lambda’s official website. If you want to read more about the finalists Autostraddle has covered over the past year, I’ve rounded up the relevant titles below, with commentary from Autostraddle writers. Congratulations to all of the authors, editors, and creative queer minds behind these brilliant books!


Lesbian Fiction

Big Swiss by Jen Beagin

“This very much feels like a sex novel but without being obnoxious about it. It’s erotic in bursts and embeds into its fabric weighty contemplations on sex and relationships, with nuance and mess.” – Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya, “Big Swiss” Review: On the Queer Age Gap Novel Set in a House Full of Bees

Biography of X by Catherine Lacey

“While finessing the rest of the placements on this list was laborious, and many positions changed over time, the one thing I knew to be true from the onset of compiling this list was that Biography of X would be number one.” – Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya, The Top 12 Queer Novels of 2023

Organ Meats by K-Ming Chang

“Queer desire and queer care become magical and monstrous on the page.” – Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya, Queer Desire Is Feral in K-Ming Chang’s Bloody, Spitty “Organ Meats”

Our Hideous Progeny by C.E. McGill

“Our Hideous Progeny is a worthy successor to [Mary] Shelley’s ground-breaking science fiction masterpiece.” – Casey Stepaniuk, 65 of the Best Queer Books of 2023

Pomegranate by Helen Elaine Lee

“At the risk of sounding corny, the novel is indeed like a pomegranate itself: acidic and sweet in equal measure. Crack it open and marvel at all its interconnected seeds.” – Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya, The Top 12 Queer Novels of 2023


Gay Fiction

Blackouts by Justin Torres

“This is a novel I’ll return to often, not in search of concrete answers but rather to sit with the questions it asks.” – Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya, The Top 12 Queer Novels of 2023

Family Meal by Bryan Washington

“Gay ghosts, good food, queer sex — the novel checks so many boxes for me. I couldn’t decide if I wanted to devour it in one sitting or savor it slowly. I opted for the latter and didn’t regret it.” – Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya, The Top 12 Queer Novels of 2023


Bisexual Fiction

All-Night Pharmacy by Ruth Madievsky

“Oh how I love art about fucked-up sister dynamics, and All-Night Pharmacy is an instant classic of the canon.” – Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya, The Top 12 Queer Novels of 2023

Endpapers by Jennifer Savran Kelly

“Set against the authoritarian backdrops of the McCarthy era and George W. Bush’s post 9/11 America, Endpapers asks: What happens when we stop trying to force ourselves to be something we’re not? And in this world, is there a way to be our authentic selves, even when those people don’t fit neatly into one box or another?” – Darcy, “Endpapers” Is a Glimpse Into One Artist’s Fight To Be Themselves


Transgender Fiction

Girlfriends by Emily Zhou

“Reading Girlfriends can feel like people-watching at a particularly eclectic party while your insightful, biting, and painfully self-conscious friend whispers judgment and gossip in your ear.” – Nic Anstett, Short Fiction Collection “Girlfriends” Presents Expansive, Nonlinear View of Transition and Dysphoria

The Rage Letters by Valérie Bah; translator Kama La Mackerel

“Troubling yet full of possibility, the stories investigate the strange contradictions in the characters’ lives, such as when two new lovers have fantastic sex…in the literal shadow of wax sculptures depicting their exes.” – Casey Stepaniuk, 65 of the Best Queer Books of 2023


LGBTQ+ Middle Grade

Ellie Engle Saves Herself by Leah Johnson

Ellie Engle Saves Herself isn’t solely for children. They are, of course, the target audience, but if you’ve ever found yourself on a journey of self understanding, you will see yourself in Ellie.” – Sa’iyda Shabazz, Leah Johnson’s Middle Grade Debut Will Take You Right Back to Seventh Grade


Transgender Nonfiction

Miss Major Speaks: Conversations with a Black Trans Revolutionary by Miss Major and Toshio Meronek

“Part memoir and part trans manifesto, Miss Major Speaks reads like being privy to an intimate conversation with a living icon of Black, queer, trans, and sex worker liberation.” – Casey Stepaniuk, 65 of the Best Queer Books of 2023

On Community by Casey Plett

“It’s an endlessly engaging and moving read that will make you, perhaps surprisingly, optimistic about the idea of community after all.” – Casey Stepaniuk, 65 of the Best Queer Books of 2023


LGBTQ+ Speculative Fiction

I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself by Marisa Crane

“Is it brazen to declare one of my Books of the Year in January? Yeah, it is brazen, but so am I. This one’s a hall-of-famer.” – Yashwina Canter, Dystopian Commentary Bares Its Teeth and Heart in “I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself”


Lesbian Memoir/Biography

Hijab Butch Blues by Lamya H

“The memoir is masterfully constructed and mapped out, split between three parts with each one spanning time and space instead of going in chronological order from the beginning of their life to where they are now.” – Stef Rubino, Lamya H’s Debut Memoir Is a Testament to the Powers of Faith and Hope

Lesbian Love Story: A Memoir in Archives by Amelia Possanza

“Through the story of seven lesbians from different decades of the twentieth century and one ancient lesbian romance, Possanza documents the friendships, partnerships, and love lives of women who have seemingly been forgotten (or purposely obscured) in our historical narratives while also giving us glimpses into the story of her life as queer woman from when she first recognized her attraction to women to her life right now.” – Stef Rubino, “Lesbian Love Story” Has Something To Teach Us About Ourselves

To Name the Bigger Lie by Sarah Viren

“When we live in a society where truth matters so little, what are we supposed to do with it once we have it? How do we rehabilitate how valuable truth really is when so many others seem hellbent on unceasingly devaluing it? Does knowing the truth even matter?” – Stef Rubino, Sarah Viren’s Memoir Is A Compelling Exploration of the Nature of Truth

(Should this category be renamed the Reviewed By Stef Rubino category?)


LGBTQ+ Comics

Roaming by Jillian Tamaki, Mariko Tamaki

“The epic team of cousins Tamaki and Tamaki have done it again with this lushly drawn — literally and figuratively — coming of gayge graphic novel about the delicate period between adolescence and adulthood.” – Casey Stepaniuk, 65 of the Best Queer Books of 2023

A Guest in The House by Emily Caroll

“With art equal parts extremely creepy and extremely gorgeous, Emily Carroll’s latest disarming horror tale is set in an idyllic lakeside town.” – Casey Stepaniuk, 65 of the Best Queer Books of 2023


Lesbian Romance

Love at 350° by Lisa Peers

“If you’re looking for a cozy read, Love At 350° is absolutely it.” – Sa’iyda Shabazz, “Love at 350º” Is a Sapphic Romance for Us Gays Who Spend Saturdays Baking Pies


LGBTQ+ Romance and Erotica

Fly with Me by Andie Burke

“Yes, there’s grief. But Fly With Me is one of the swooniest, funniest, sexiest books I’ve ever read.” – Heather Hogan, Andie Burke’s “Fly With Me” Takes Sapphic Fake Dating to New Heights

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

Join AF+!

Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya

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

Kayla has written 791 articles for us.

1 Comment

  1. I was the author of one of the short stories in the anthology Rosalind’s Siblings that was also nominated!

Comments are closed.

Baby, Please!! ‘A Simple Favor 2’ Confirmed to Start Filming With Blake Lively, Anna Kendrick Returning

All the way back in the hallowed halls of May 2022, we reported that an A Simple Favor sequel was in the works, at the time calling the original a “cinematic masterpiece” (we were correct, and I stand by it). Well today I have excellent news for anyone reading this who still gets a shiver when Blake Lively calls you “baby” — A Simple Favor 2 is OFFICIALLY HAPPENING!

Deadline announced today that Amazon MGM Studios has given the film a green light. But wait, much like me on my knees begging for Blake Lively to be mean to me, grab me by the neck, and make me a martini, we’re not done! The sequel will also come with Paul Fieg back in the director’s chair, Jessica Sharzar back on the pen, plus Anna Kendrick, Blake Lively, and the original cast all reunited!!

According to Deadline, the A Simple Favor sequel will see “the return of Stephanie Smothers (Kendrick) and Emily Nelson (Lively) as they head to the beautiful island of Capri, Italy, for Emily’s extravagant wedding to a rich Italian businessman.” You can expect some light murdering, of course, and “more twists and turns than the road from the Marina Grande to the Capri town square” — which all sounds very *chef’s kiss erotique if you ask me.

In addition to Kendrick and Lively, you can expect Andrew Rannells, Bashir Salahuddin, Joshua Satine, Ian Ho, Henry Golding (one of the few straight romance leads I care about) in A Simple Favor 2, along with… wait for it… Kelly McCormack, who in the time between the original film and now has become beloved by queer audiences as A League of Their Own’ resident butch, Jess McCready.

Lionsgate is co-producing the sequel with Amazon MGM Studios and cameras are set to start rolling this very spring! There’s a streaming release on Prime Video in 240 countries already planned. Sharzer will continue to build off characters originally created by Darcy Bell in A Simple Favor’s original novel.

I don’t what to tell you! This is a big day for me, personally. I’m so grateful to live in a world in which I get to experience this triumph of cinema twice, and the second time in Italy. It’s giving Killing Eve meets Under the Tuscan Sun. It’s giving Katharine Hepburn in an old Hollywood film that I only learned about this year, 1955’s Summertime. It’s giving Halle Berry tits out and naked on her balcony (this is also the wallpaper on my cell phone). It’s giving rich bitch in a silk bathrobe and a bottle of pinot. Are you not entertained?!?!

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

Join AF+!

Carmen Phillips

Carmen is Autostraddle's Editor-in-Chief and a Black Puerto Rican femme/inist writer. She claims many past homes, but left the largest parts of her heart in Detroit, Brooklyn, and Buffalo, NY. There were several years in her early 20s when she earnestly slept with a copy of James Baldwin’s “Fire Next Time” under her pillow. You can find her on twitter, @carmencitaloves.

Carmen has written 692 articles for us.

1 Comment

  1. What good news! I can hardly wait!! I’m glad they are bringing back so many of the original movie’s characters, including the Greek chorus of other parents

Comments are closed.

Pop Culture Fix: Fletcher Has Been Signing a Lot of Boobs on Tour

Fletcher on Signing Boobs, Fletcher vs. Cari, Having a Gemini Moon, and More

Fletcher at the mic, surrounded by bras

photo by Nykieria Chaney/Getty Images

In an interview and accompanying photoshoot for Coveteur, Cari Fletcher spoke about her sophmore studio album In Search of The Antidote and its tour, on which she has apparently signed a lot of boobs. Twelve in a week as of the time of the interview, to be precise, and that’s pairs not individual boobs. The interview also ledes with the vital information that she’s a Gemini Moon, which really does contextualize so much of her art and persona for me, personally.

Speaking of persona, Fletcher touches on the differences and connective tissue between herself as Cari and her on-stage and in-the-studio persona of “Fletcher.”

“Cari is more emotional, an anxious overthinker, a homebody. Fletcher is the powerhouse we see on stage—unbridled and unfiltered,” Andie Eisen writes. “I ask her, if Cari and Fletcher were a yin and yang, what is the dot that is always contained within the other?”

Fletcher’s response? “I think the throughline between the two is this essence of expressing truth.”

When asked what was the hardest song to write on the album, Fletcher had this to say:

“I was deeply in my feels when I wrote ‘Eras of Us,’ though that song was written the fastest. They were hard for different reasons. ‘Pretending’ is one of my absolute favorites, but it was hard vocally for me, so I was going through a whole thing with that song. ‘Two Things Can Be True’ was also hard for me to write. They all just feel like characters in a movie with super unique personalities and arcs and storylines and I think they all pose a challenge in some way for me.”

If Fletcher were to program a lesbian film festival, she says she’d screen a double feature of Imagine Me & You and Blue Is the Warmest Color, both of which she refers to as queer canon, which sure, is technically true.

Fletcher also of course touched on the subject of sapphic yearning, a vibe present in much of her work. She had this to say on the prevalence of yearning in gay art:

“The gay yearn, it’s so real. I feel like my music is a perfect example—as queer people, more often than not, we have been through some difficult struggles of self-acceptance and self-love. It’s a deep journey. So when we arrive at a moment that we feel so deeply invigorated and alive, or feeling something for the first time after suppressing it for years, there’s an emotional release. You think, ‘Whoa, I get to be who I am even in all the ways that scare me or that I can’t fully express yet.’ There’s the yearning for belonging.”

And on the topic of the obsessive fan theories and speculation about her dating life that play out regularly on TikTok, Fletcher says she’s embracing it, looking at the lore about herself head-on, almost as if it’s about a character. She wrote the first song on the new album “Maybe I Am” as a response to seeing all these wild things online about herself.


Other Pop Culture Stories For Your Day:

+ Reneé Rapp Draws a Line About Her Sexuality: “If I Say I’m a Lesbian I’m a Lesbian”: Reneé has said she’s a lesbian, so don’t be weird about it! It’s true she identified as bisexual at one point, but she has said she’s a lesbian, so let her be a lesbian.

+ Where my action movie dykes at? ‘Love Lies Bleeding’ Breakout Katy O’Brian Joins Eighth ‘Mission: Impossible’.

+ Speaking of action movie dykes, D.E.B.S. turns 20 this year!

+ There are two queer couples on the new season of The Amazing Race! You can read about one of them here: Yvonne & Melissa weren’t ‘U-Haul lesbians’ before Amazing Race 36.

+ 11 Signs You’re Watching a Motherthriller: Not explicitly queer pop culture per se, but this article felt very relevant to me (slash I wish I wrote it), and perhaps it will for you as well. Definitely going to start working “motherthriller” into my daily vocabulary. Watch this space.

+ Shameless, Silly and Amoral: The New Wave of Horny Lesbian Cinema: It is truly my professional opinion there is no such thing as too much horny lesbian cinema, so keep it coming, Hollywood!

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

Join AF+!

Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya

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

Kayla has written 791 articles for us.

4 Comments

  1. Am I the only one who thinks it’s inappropriate to sign fans’ tits? I think as an artist she has the responsibly to not do that because of the power dynamic between her and her fans, not to mention that some of them might be minors? Idk, just think it’s something she should be careful about.

Comments are closed.

Autostraddle March Madness 2024: “The Kids Are Alright” Round One — Thesbians

Header: The 6th Annual Autostraddle March Madness 2024

Follow our March Madness content all tournament long and don’t forget to vote for your favs!

I love March Madness. It is absolutely my favorite time of the year… but, boy, am I relishing these few days between the end of the second round and the start of the Sweet 16. I needed the time to recover the lost sleep and rebuild my energy reserves.

Georgia Amoore coming alive, late, to give a shorthanded Virginia Tech team an opportunity after an unreal performance by Baylor’s Jada Walker?! Iowa State and Stanford going shot for shot, clutch basket after clutch basket, left me breathless. Watching my alma mater blow a 20 point lead against its former head coach and my otherwise beloved Tennessee Lady Vols was agonizing. West Virginia getting hosed by the refsand by ESPN — during their upset bid in Iowa City. It’s too much excitement… almost.

Now that I’ve had a moment to re-energize, bring on the Sweet 16! Tomorrow, the men’s Sweet 16 kicks off and the women’s tournament will follow on Friday. I will spare you a long rant about how pissed off I am that the NCAA/ESPN scheduled NC State’s men’s and women’s Sweet 16 match-ups at about the same time and, instead, for now I’m going to spend the next 48 hours trying to figure out how I can yell at both teams to stop missing their free throws simultaneously.

But also? We’re going to spend the next 48 hours digging into the final region of our own March Madness competition! Bring on the Thesbians! This region brings together queer artists of all sorts: musicians singers, dancers, painters, actors… and one quiet girl from the A/V Club. It’s a region that features some of the most celebrated queer characters on television while also, hopefully, exposing you to some great characters that (maybe) you’ve never heard of before. After March Madness is over, everyone needs a new binge until the start of the WNBA season: why not start planning one with our these characters?

The last round of voting, in the Rebels region, yielded a few surprising results. The region’s #1 seed, Rue Bennett, easily dispatched her first round opponent to advance to the second round, but she’ll be going without her (ex-?) girlfriend, Jules, who lost a close contest with Raelle of Motherland: Fort Salem. Scylla will join her wife in the second round, as she won decisively in her first round match-up with one half of the Pudge Patrol. Tara Maclay finished the first round as the Rebels’ top vote getter, easily beating Maya St. Germain in their match-up. Maya still lives on in my heart and my favorite Pretty Little Liars fanfic, though.

Another couple advancing into the next round? The vampire and her huntress: Juliette and Calliope. Juliette’s contest with Karolina Dean was the most hotly contest of the Rebels region and, in the end, they were separated by just 13 votes. Karolina will sail off into the sunset with Nico Minoru who also dropped her first round match up to The Last of Us‘ Ellie Williams. First Four competitor Jordan Li continues to impress, beating Raising Kanan‘s Jukebox to advance to the next round.

Our bracket challenge continues to heat up and, much to my dismay, I’ve climbed to the top spot. I don’t expect it to last long, though, because these contests are only going to get harder as we move on. However, I am taking screenshots of my current standing here and in my ESPN group so that when my collapse happens — because it always does — I have a memory of a moment when I didn’t look absolutely clueless.

Want to help dethrone me? Let’s cast some votes in the Thesbians Region!


Your Thesbians:

#1 seed Santana Lopez vs. #16 seed Olivia Hayes

#1. Santana Lopez, Glee

From the TV Team’s roundtable of all the Santana Lopez moments that changed our lives, this part from Carmen nails it:

“In my mind, there is no question that the ‘Rumor Has It/ Someone Like You’ mash up is the greatest performance in the show’s history. The choreography, costumes, lighting, Amber Riley’s and Naya Rivera’s vocals — everyone came together and did what they had to do. It’s the single most thrilling three minutes the Glee ever produced.

But what makes it iconic for me are the story choices that Naya Rivera makes. First there’s the pause. You know the one. Right after Mercedes sings the first lines of ‘Rumor Has It,’ the theatre goes dark and the beat drops out. Then Mercedes looks at Santana from the corner of her eye, as if to say ‘Girl can you do this?’ And Santana gives the smallest nod before the microphone picks up a sigh. That’s when you knew — this was going to the next level.

Later, Santana cuts through the dancers and bellows, ‘Don’t Forget Me! I Beg!’ As the camera cuts in tight. The entire rest of the verse Naya Rivera performs as a monologue in song. She looks to Brittany, she remembers their ‘dreams that came true’ and then the ‘rumors have it’ that ruined them all. Santana’s terrified that the rumors floating around McKinley are about to ruin Santana’s life, but maybe having Brittany will have made it all worth it.”

#16. Olivia Hayes, Get Even

When Margot shows up for drama club, she’s introduced to the club’s major players: Christopher, the director; Amber, the school’s queen bee who finds herself humbled in this space; and Olivia, the sidekick who gets to take center stage in the theater. It’s Olivia who secures the lead role in their production of The Duchess of Malfi, much to Amber’s chagrin.

“[Olivia’s] kind of like the posh, rich, shallow type. She’s definitely the best actress, though. She’s actually really talented,” Margot’s told. Of course, Margot knows all of this already because, unbeknownst to almost everyone, she and Olivia have forged an unlikely friendship within a secret society known as DGM (or “Don’t Get Mad”). The group seeks to expose — to get get even with — the bullies at their posh British prep school.

But even Margot doesn’t know the extent of Olivia’s talents: that she’s only been acting as though she’s posh and rich and she’s only been acting like she’s straight.


#2 seed Brittany Pierce vs. #15 seed Andi Agosti

#2. Brittany Pierce, Glee

Early in Glee’s second season, Kurt brings to the club’s attention a popular uprising that’s happening on Facebook: a small but mighty group of McKinley students are petitioning the glee club to perform a number by Britney Spears for the at the fall homecoming assembly. Mr. Schue rejects the idea, insisting that the Mickey Mouse Club alum isn’t a good role model (to which I always yell, “look in the mirror!” at my television). But then Brittany chimes in with her own distaste for the pop diva: for years, she’s has been eclipsed by Britney because their names are so phonetically similar.

“I’ve lived my entire life in Britney Spears’s shadow. I will never be as talented or as famous,” Brittany proclaims. “I hope you’ll all respect that I want Glee Club to remain a place where I, Brittany S. Pierce, can escape the torment of Britney Spears.”

For Mr. Schue that’s enough to end a conversation he never really wanted to have, but Brittany’s subconscious has other ideas. Under the impact of dental anesthesia, Brittany steps out of Britney Spears’ shadow and into her shoes: performing “I’m a Slave 4 U” during her first dental cleaning and “Me Against the Music” — a duet with Santana — during her second. The hallucinogenic experience has a profound impact on Brittany.

“I would just like to say that, from now on, I demand to have every solo in Glee Club,” she insists. “When I had my teeth cleaned I had the most amazing Britney Spears fantasy. I sang and danced better than her. Now I realize what a powerful woman I truly am.”

#15. Andi Agosti, Rebelde

Andi Agosti arrives at Elite Way School with dreams of making it into Musical Excellence Program (MEP) and winning the Battle of the Bands. A win would offer her access to leaders within the music industry — a fast pass to success — and she’s determined to claim it. Despite the attempts to thwart her efforts, Andi accomplishes the first step easily: she crushes her audition. The crowd breaks into a racuous applause and even her crush, Emilia, can’t help but take notice.

With her spot in MEP secure, Andi moves onto the next step: building a band to compete at the Battle of the Bands. She turns up, origami flower in hand, to ask Emilia to join her band. It’s all very cute and weird, Emilia admits, but she refuses to join Andi’s band. It’s her last chance to compete in the Battle and she wants to win… and no freshman has ever won the contest.

Andi takes Emilia’s proclamation as a challenge and commits to building a band that won’t just win the Battle of the Bands but who will make history.


#3 seed Kate Messner vs. #14 seed Matilda Moss

#3. Kate Messner, Everything Sucks!

“My whole life, I have been the freak. The girl who nobody picked for dodgeball. The girl who didn’t have a mom. The girl who dressed funny because it was her dad buying her clothes,” Kate admits to Luke after the Tori Amos concert. “And then, tonight I looked at these people, and I thought maybe there’s a future where I don’t have to be a freak. Maybe I can be who I am and that’s okay.”

But while the world may have made her feel like a freak, Kate’s never been one alone. She’s found her tribe in the A/V Club. And even though she thinks she’s hiding behind the camera, disappearing where no one can see her — “I wanted to disappear. It’s like I actually did, kind of,” she tells Luke — but her people see her. McQuaid sees her, Tyler sees her, Luke sees her — maybe a little too much — and unbeknownst to Kate, Emaline has always seen her. Emaline has always seen Kate and coveted the way the principal’s daughter was always authentically herself… it was the one thing, seemingly, that Emaline couldn’t do.

“You’re so cool, and you don’t even try. It’s annoying,” Emaline tells her.

#14. Matilda Moss, Everything’s Gonna Be Okay

The night that Matilda’s supposed to find out if she got into the musical composition program at Juilliard, her sister, Genevieve, paces with worry. Gen pulls their half brother, Josh, into the bathroom and shares her concern: Matilda is not getting into Juilliard. Josh scoffs at the notion — of course, Matilda’s getting in, “she’s so good” — but Genevieve insists, Matilda is not getting into Juilliard because no one gets into Juilliard.

But Matilda does get in… and the next morning, high off the excitement of being accepted into one of the most prestigious performing arts schools in the country, she imagines her future. She stands in front of a mirror and gives her acceptance speech for her future Oscar/Tony/Emmy.

“Oh, I wasn’t expecting this. I didn’t prepare anything. I’m just so surprised,” she says. She recalls all the adversity she’s had to overcome to get to this (imaginary) point but credits her sheer will and belief in hard work. She continues, “Nothing in my life has come easily to me. I’d like to thank Juilliard. They believed in me when so few did. Oh. This [imaginary award I’m holding] is heavier than what I was expecting.”


#4 seed Tamia "Coop" Cooper vs. #13 seed Patience Robinson

#4. Tamia “Coop” Cooper, All American

In the early days of All American, Tamia “Coop” Cooper insists on her best friend, Spencer, chasing his dreams. She tells him, “If I had a tenth of your talent, bro, I’d say forget this place and bounce.” But she does have that talent — not on the football field, but behind the mic — and, for a while, it looks like she won’t take her own advice and use it to buld a better life.

It’s an opportune encounter in the halls of South Crenshaw High that motivates Coop to invest in her talent. She spots a guy using another student as lyrical target practice and steps in to give the wannabe lyricist a taste of his own medicine. The people and their cameras gather around and listen to Coop flow effortlessly. The response to the impromptu rap battle, both online and off, give Coop the push she needs to pursue her career as an emcees for real.

#13. Patience Robinson, All American

Patience Robinson never really imagined herself as a singer. Sure, she was part of the church choir and sang a lil’ bit, but you never got the sense that it was her life’s ambition. But then a hook she adds to one of Coop’s songs catches the ear of a music producer and she discovers a future she never dared to dream.

But everything that glitters is not gold. Patience’s music career is marred by difficulty: starting with the aforementioned producer to having her image upended to being stabbed by a superfan.


#5 seed Ashlyn Moon Caswell vs. #12 seed Emaline

#5. Ashlyn Moon Caswell, High School Musical: The Musical: The Series

There is, perhaps, no more prolific thesbian in this region than Ashlyn Caswell, who stays booked and busy. As a sophomore, she’s cast in the role of Ms. Darbus for East High School’s fall production of High School Musical. Because the drama teacher is convinced of Ashyln’s abilities — both as an actress and as a composer — Ms. Jenn asks Ashlyn to write an original work for the play. She somehow manages to churn out something Sara Bareilles-esque.

In her junior year, Ashlyn takes the helm: she’s cast as Belle in the spring production of Beauty and the Beast. At drama camp, she’s part of the ensemble for Frozen and then as Kelsi in their self-designed High School Musical sequel. Booked and busy… the girl stays booked and busy!

#12. Emaline Addario, Everything Sucks!

Sometimes, as I take in this ridiculous string of one Sydney Sweeney movie after another — three within the last four months (Anyone But You, Madame Web, and Immaculate) — I remember that it all kinda started here: at Boring High School in 1996 Oregon. Sweeney played Emaline, a junior member of the drama club who lingers in the shadow of her boyfriend. But Kate sees her: she recognizes her talent (among other things) and pushes Emaline to see her the way she does.


#6 seed Elle Argent vs. #11 seed Candace Powell

#6. Elle Argent, Heartstopper

Midway through Heartstopper‘s second season, the gang takes a trip to Paris and, during the first outing, Elle and Tao split off from the rest of the group. They go to Montmartre Museum, to see the place where Pierre-Auguste Renoir once lived and worked. Elle’s in awe of it all — “Imagine living somewhere like this and just being able to paint all day,” she says — and Tao reminds her that this will be her future in just three years. Elle grabs hold to that dream and speaks it into existence.

Later, as the group is making their way through the Louvre — well, not really, Netflix got money but not Beyoncé-esque Louvre rental money — Elle pauses and stares at The Supper at Emmaus. The painting captures the newly resurrected Jesus revealing himself for the first time to two of his disciplines.

Elle uses it as inspiration for her own work. In a piece she debuts at an art show later in the season, she captures herself, newly resurrected, in “a place that holds a lot of happy memories” with Tao, Isaac, and Charlie.

#11. Candace Powell, Astrid and Lilly Save the World

Candace Powell is the most popular girl in school. She’s dating the most popular boy in school. Among the string of yearbook superlatives that she accumulates is “best legs.” And, of course, as is required for anyone aspiring to be queen bee, Candace has more extra-curricular activities than she has time for, including running the Kissing Booth at the school fair and being the lead in the school play, Romeo & Juliet Down Under.

When Candace’s boyfriend passes up a date with her for soccer practice, the spurned girlfriend asks Lilly if she’d like to help her rehearse for the upcoming school play. The friefnds turned enemies are slowly approaching being friends again so Lilly readily accepts the offer. They run lines — Candace has not perfected her Australian accent yet, it’s shockingly bad — and reminisce about the time they spent together as kids, acting out sketches in front of Lilly’s little sister. But an inopportune call from Candace’s mother interrupts them and nearly drives a wedge in the friendship they’re rebuilding. It’s just the first in a series of roadblocks that keep Candace and Lilly apart.

But midway through her performance, Juliet goes off-script, pledging her love to Lilly while reciting the OG version from Shakespeare: “My bounty is as boundless as the sea, My love as deep. The more I give to thee, The more I have, for both are infinite.”


#7 seed Brooklyn 2 vs. #10 seed Mich

#7. Brooklyn 2, Utopia Falls

Brooklyn knows how to make an impression. She arrives late to New Babyl’s annual competition known as The Exemplar. The competition’s mentor recognizes Sage and calls her out for her tardiness. He snarks, “let’s hope your timing is better when it comes to performance.” And, though the mentor only offers faint praise, the timing on Brooklyn’s performance is impeccable. Her vocals and dancing showcase the same swagger, the same confidence, with which Brooklyn walks through the world… and she approaches the contest with that same energy.

But midway through Utopia Falls‘ season, Brooklyn realizes something new about herself… something that shakes her confidence and strips her of that swagger… and begins to look at The Exemplar in a whole new light. This competition isn’t just about her anymore, she says, it’s a gift to everyone who “second guesses themselves because of how they’ve been labeled.”

Rather than performing individually, Brooklyn joins the other finalists in The Exemplar and delivers a revolutionary message, even as the powers that be work to silence her: “no matter what others tell you or what labels they give you, you are in charge of your future.”

#10. Mich, La Flor Más Bella

Late in La Flor Más Bella‘s first season, Mich has some impossible choices to make: she can take her turn in the lead role of her school’s rendition of Alice in Wonderland or she can maintain her family’s legacy by competing in a local pageant. She can perform in the school musical or she can give up the taste of popularity that her cousin has (temporarily) granted her. But as impossible as those seem, they aren’t nearly as difficult as choosing between the three suitors — Dani, Mati, and Majo — that want to have relationships with her.

Ultimately, she decides to be in the play: she wants to forge her own path, rather than take the same one her family’s already travelled, and, above all, she wants to make sure the kids at school truly see her. But when her cousin’s manages to turn the entire school against her, Mich takes the stage to a chorus of boos. Thankfully, though, her friends are there and give her a pep talk and she climbs back on stage with a renewed sense of confidence. She absolutely slays and wins over the entire audience.


#8 seed Anais vs. #9 seed Sage 5

#8. Anaïs Davis, wtFock

SKAM began as a Norwegian web series about the real issues faces by teenagers — Fader called it “one of the best TV shows about high school ever made” — and it quickly became a sensation. SKAM broke new ground, integrating social media and technology into the stories, consistent with how kids use them but unlike anything seen on television before. It spawned different iterations across the globe, including in Belgium, where the show goes by the moniker, wtFock. While a lot of the SKAM series have ended, wtFock continues to push out new content with the Anaïs-centric season dropping just last year.

When we meet Anaïs this season, she’s struggling with her parents’ divorce and her dad’s effort to move on. Her parents split leaves her even more reluctant to create conflict… she withholds her opinions and refuses to stand up for herself. That habit becomes even more pernicious when she meets and falls for resident bad girl, Bobbie. But through it all, Anaïs finds a refuge in her music and even takes the stage to perform in front of all her cast mates in the season finale.

#9. Sage 5, Utopia Falls

Every year, the city of New Babyl — the last living colony on earth — selects 24 teenagers from across the city’s four sectors to take part in an annual musical competition known as The Exemplar. Sage is the only representative Utopia Falls introduces us to from the city’s Nature sector. She competes in The Exemplar with deep desire to make her family proud.

Sage is quiet and composed — very introverted — that is, until she steps out on the dance floor. When she’s dancing, Sage is at her most free. What she can’t express in words, she shares in her movements. It’s why her first flirtation with Brooklyn comes on the dance floor. It’s why her attempt to show Brooklyn that she’s not as closed off as she seems, it’s on the dance floor. That’s how much dancing means to her. It’s her preferred language.


As usual, you have 48 hours to cast your ballot in the Thesbians Region! This year, you can vote four times over the voting period (or to be more precise once, every 12 hours). After we tabulate the votes and update the bracket, we’ll be back to announce the results of this region and unveil the voting for our Round of 32!

Autostraddle March Madness 2024: Thesbians Region

#1 vs. #16
#2 vs. #15
#3. vs #14
#4 vs. #13
#5 vs. #12
#6 vs. #11
#7 vs. #10
#8 vs. #9
This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

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

Join AF+!

Natalie

A black biracial, bisexual girl raised in the South, working hard to restore North Carolina's good name. Lover of sports, politics, good TV and Sonia Sotomayor. You can follow her latest rants on Twitter.

Natalie has written 387 articles for us.

4 Comments

  1. I don’t have much to say about this round, so all I WILL say is that I lament the fact that Kit and Jade didn’t make the cut for this year.

  2. Wow this was so much harder for me than I thought it would be when you revealed the name of this region! However, of course, NO ONE could EVER compete with Santana Lopez. I can hear that screenshot you choose!

    • Oh my gosh, I don’t know where WordPress populated this picture from but that’s my dog Margaret! Oh! I haven’t seen this photo in YEARS! Marby, hello angel!

  3. I have been waiting for weeks to get to vote for Santana! I’ll be back every 12 hours!

Comments are closed.

Let’s Go Day Drinking With Kristen Stewart (and Seth Meyers, I Guess)

It’s time to go day drinking with Kristen Stewart! And Seth Meyers is also here…I suppose. JK, he can stay, because there’s clearly an Autostraddle fan in the Late Night writers room, given how often our headlines show up in one of my favorite recurring segments on the show: Jokes Seth Can’t Tell. In fact, our lesbian vampire films list recently got a shoutout. Another great recurring segment simply features Meyers day drinking with a guest, and Stewart is the perfect candidate! Last night, her day drinking segment aired, and it’s delightful! And gay! So I’m here to break down every minute of it. Watch and follow along, below!

The segment is shot in the Chelsea gay sports bar Boxers, so there’s fittingly lots of gay flags surrounding them while they day drink. We start off with some cocktails inspired by Kristen Stewart films. Here are their recipes:

The Panic Room
1 splash Celsius Energy Drink
An entire espresso martini
1 splash Mountain Dew Kickstart
1 splash Yerba Mate
1 “Xanax” (it’s just a Tic-Tac)

Stewart did proceed to chug what is surely a panic-inducing drink. Some immediately leaked from her mouth. As Meyers put it: Her body rejected it.

Kristen Stewart spitting out drink

Next drink! Meyers admits he hasn’t seen any of the Twilight films, and Stewart seems perfectly content to not talk about them.

Twilight Cocktail
Bloody Mary mix
Raw garlic cloves
Pálinka (the national liqueur of Transylvania)

Stir ingredients with a wooden stake

K.Stew’s review of the drink? “I hate that.”

Next up is a drink inspired by Kristen Stewart’s performance in Spencer.

The Royals
Ice
Crown Royal
Budweiser (the “king” of beers)
A Dairy Queen milkshake
Disney Princess-branded Yogurt

Add everything to a blender and blend.

I’m sorry to say I would try this.

Meyers next pays tribute to Kristen Stewart’s predilection for independent films with a drink caaaaalled:

The Independent Film
A 40 in a paper bag

“Here’s to Personal Shopper,” Seth Meyers says. “Thanks man,” Stewart says. “Pour one out.”

Kristen Stewart drinking from a 40 in a bag

Kristen Stewart drinking from a COLT 40

K.Stew is reeeeally feeling the Colt 45 vibe. She loves it! It suits her. I promise I’m not day drinking while writing this. I’m a PROFESSIONAL.

Next, there’s a little good where Meyers mistakenly thinks Stewart played Lizzie Borden in the movie Lizzie. He throws his writers under the bus. Stewart informs him she actually played Lizzie’s “friend” Maggie, and I can’t believe she just gal pal’d her own role!!!!!!!

Meyers invites Stewart to play a little drinking game where she either has to answer questions or take a shot. She also gets to ask him questions. He asks her to name a co-star she’d never work with again, and she informs him she’s not a little bitch and will work with anyone. She takes a shot. She also refuses to read a McDonald’s order in her Spencer accent, opting for a shot.

Stewart asks Meyers if he can remember what she was promoting the last time she was on the show, in 2015. He says he forgot…it was Still Alice…did he actually forget or did he fire off what is perhaps the only Still Alice joke to ever air on television?

Meyers challenges her to do the robot. Kristen Stewart hates dancing, apparently. She also has a good sense of humor about herself, reiterating the joke when Meyers says her robot is The Kristen Stewart Robot, meaning it’s tinged with her signature sort of floppy, shruggy physicality.

Neither of them know what a carburetor is.

In a very me coded moment, Stewart has suddenly done a costume change. She changed into a white t-shirt and says this is what getting drunk with her is like.

Kristen Stewart in a white tee

In my favorite portion of the segment, Meyers has Stewart read extremely stupid lines of dialogue that I won’t spoil here. He wants her to cold read them and give the incredible performance we’re all used to seeing from her. She’s very intoxicated, so she keeps breaking. Meyers is equally bad at directing. There are actually few things I love more than when great actors act badly. But also one of her line readings here is actually my favorite comedic performance of the year.

In a tribute to Adventureland, they shoot darts at balloons that then reveal things they have to take shots of, including a shot glass of nerds, pickle brine, tequila, water, and prune juice. Stewart tries to headbutt a balloon. Her vibe is very frat boy losing at the beer pong table, and I mean that as an absolute compliment, it’s working for her. “I was innnnnnn a fraternity,” Meyer sing-shouts after taking the Jager Bomb Stewart preps for him.

“Kristen, in addition to you being an accomplished actor,” Meyers says, Stewart trying to speak in unison with him. “You’re also–”

“A lesbian icon,” Stewart finishes for him.

“You are a lesbian icon,” Stewart emphasizes. “That’s right,” Stewart says with a confident shrug.

Which leads to the final part of the segment: Meyers provides Stewart with a bunch of iconic lesbian accessories and asks her to turn him into a lesbian icon. For the first time in Seth Meyers day drinking segment history, it’s: The Lesbian Makeover.

“This is all really dated, dude,” she says while flipping through the rack of clothes and accessories. “I guess it’s all coming back around though, right?” Yes, unfortunately, dyke fashion of the early 2000s is creeping on back, and I hate it!!!!!

Here are the final results of The Lesbian Makeover:

Seth Meyers dressed as a lesbian and Kristen Stewart on Late Night

Compliments to the chef AKA Kristen Stewart. She could definitely moonlight as a lesbian stylist. The cuffed sleeve on the jean jacket really takes it to the next level.

Well that was fun! I almost, almost feel like I was right there with them. They should probably issue a PSA saying not to actually drink the Panic Room cocktail though.

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

Join AF+!

Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya

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

Kayla has written 791 articles for us.

2 Comments

  1. It’s my lunch break, and I absolutely feel drunk by proxy.
    Also gold-rimmed aviators swoon.

  2. Ok that was actually pretty fun. I usually feel kinda awkward about these, but I guess Stewart makes many things better 😅

    And clearly I don’t know enough lesbian fashion!

Comments are closed.

No Filter: According to Towa Bird, It’s the Year of the Sapphic Sweater Vest

feature image of Towa Bird via Towa’s Instagram

Hello and welcome back to No Filter! This is the place where I find fun stuff from famous queers on Instagram and bring it here for your viewing pleasure!


This is a slay and I honestly might have to start watching Loot!


Folks, I think Chrishell is onto something, let’s all take a vacation!


If I am being honest, I saw this caption and my first thought was “To prune, or not to prune, that is the question.”


I love Golda and her style! And lord help me, I love a press tour!


Can we live??? I beg, please!


I have often wondered how people perform eight shows a week, glad to know the secret is simply “napping.”


Ali continues to win frankly, simply easy breezy and unbothered.


Chef JB! I would trust you to feed me, personally!


This might be the year I can longer resist a sweater vest?? So credit where credit’s due to Towa Bird.


Have YOU told King Princess how you are feeling yet??


“Simlish” is such an evocative caption, I often feel quite Sim like in my day to day life!


This Coveteur Fletcher photoshoot also comes with a fittingly chaotic interview that screams Gemini moon.

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

Join AF+!

Christina Tucker

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

Christina has written 278 articles for us.

‘Love Lies Bleeding’ and the History of Female Bodybuilding Reveal Society’s Fear of ‘Monstrous’ Women

feature images via cyd gillon, yaxeni oriquen

It might seem otherwise from the outside, but a bodybuilding show isn’t supposed to be about our traditional views of physical beauty or attractiveness. Bodybuilding — the literal act of building your body to fit a specific set of criteria — is about muscle composition and visibility, muscle size, muscular symmetry, muscular striation, and a competitor’s ability to pose down well enough to showcase the development of each different muscle group on their bodies. It’s not enough to just be the biggest competitor on stage. They also have to make sure the muscle groups on their body are in near-perfect proportion to one another. As a sport, bodybuilding is one of the most disciplined practices in the athletic world, one that takes great sacrifice and a willingness to live on a strict schedule both in terms of lifting at the gym and eating macro- and micronutrient dense foods several times a day. But unlike other sports, bodybuilding has always been so niche that people rarely, if ever, rack up a wild amount of cash or accolades doing it. It is, for most people other than Arnold Schwarzenegger and Lou Ferrigno, a true labor of love that mostly costs more than what it gives back.

When female bodybuilding started in the late 1970s, no one expected it to be as big as it became, and no one expected the women to get as big as they did, either. Emerging on the heels of second-wave feminism, the passing of Title IX, an explosion in gym and health club openings, and the subsequent rise in women’s involvement in “fitness” and other traditionally “masculine” sports like powerlifting, the early female bodybuilding shows — the first of which was held in Canton, Ohio by Henry McGhee — weren’t what you’d think of now as a bodybuilding show and certainly didn’t fulfill the definition of what the sport was supposed to be. Physically fit women competed in these shows, but the competition judges rarely followed the same sets of rules and standards set up for the men’s shows. As Tanya Bunsell writes about in her book Strong and Hard Women: An Ethnography of Female Bodybuilding, women had to wear bikinis and high heels, and they were prohibited from clenching their fists and striking a list of “masculine” poses — like the “crab most muscular”, the “double biceps”, and the “lateral spread” — during their pose routines. Although they purported to be judging the women based on the same expectations they had for the men, Bunsell notes that most of the women who won these competitions were exceedingly “slender” in size with “small, stringy muscles.”

Throughout the late 1970s, a series of small federations for female bodybuilding began popping up all over the U.S., including a short-lived federation called the Superior Physique Association (SPA) founded by Doris Barrilleaux (known as the “First Lady of Female Bodybuilding”), the only federation founded by a woman. With female bodybuilding competitions being held multiple times a year in different regions, people began to take notice, and in 1979, the National Physique Committee (NPC), a national governing body for amateur bodybuilding contests, held its very first women’s bodybuilding nationals competition. The International Federation of Bodybuilding and Fitness Professional League (IFBB), the largest and most prestigious governing body for professional bodybuilding contests, followed suit by creating and holding the Miss Olympia (now Ms. Olympia) contest, the female equivalent to its well-known Mr. Olympia contest, the next year. Soon after, in 1982, the IFBB Congress, the board of officials that creates and maintains both the IFBB’s official rules for bodybuilding competitions and their events, enshrined female bodybuilding as a fully recognized sport in the federation.

When Barrilleaux originally founded the SPA, she explained, “All they had were beauty contests, and I thought there should be recognition for women with healthy bodies as well as for those with pretty faces. I believe there can be a happy medium between women with extreme definition and the body-beautiful type.” What Barrilleaux and the SPA and the rest of the federations that followed would come to define as the “body-beautiful type” would continue to be up for debate throughout the early 1980s. Many of the early female bodybuilding shows were plagued with upsets where the women who won were given those titles as a result of something beyond their builds. It became clear that the women in these competitions were judged not only on their physique and the typical criteria expected for bodybuilders of the time, but also on their attractiveness and “femininity.”

Although the IFBB was very clear on what made a competitive bodybuilder a winner, the judges of the women’s shows were consistently awarding the competitors who most closely met their definition of what a “feminine” body is “supposed to” look like, as opposed to the competitors who were larger in size and had better defined muscles. With the rapid growth in the availability of competitions, many female bodybuilders began gaining national and international recognition for their accomplishments and, in response, female competitors began taking the competition to new levels. The early 1980s saw a drastic split in what was considered the “ideal” female bodybuilder’s figure with women like Stacey Bentley, Georgia Miller Fudge, Rachel McLish, and Carla Dunlap exemplifying the muscular but lithe build while other women such as Laura Combes, Kay Baxter, Cammie Lusko, and Mary Roberts were challenging people’s perceptions of just how big and defined female bodybuilders could be. Some women, like Claudia Wilbourn through people close to her for example, were outright told that spectators believed their muscularity was “gross” and they weren’t “pretty enough” to be winners.

In her book Bodymakers: A Cultural Anatomy of Women’s Body Building, Leslie Heywood observes, “Since the first women’s bodybuilding contests, the most controversial point in judging is just how far a woman’s body should be allowed to stray from the dominant cultural feminine ideal of smallness and delicacy.” This debate — a dilemma, really — over aesthetics versus size would perhaps come to be most notably documented in George Butler’s 1985 documentary Pumping Iron II: The Women, Butler’s follow-up to the massively popular 1977 Pumping Iron documentary that essentially made Schwarzenegger a household name. For Pumping Iron II, Butler and his crew, with the help of the IFBB, created a female bodybuilding competition (The Caesars World Cup) and then hand-picked the competitors he wanted to follow for the filming of the lead up to the competition and the competition itself. Butler’s choices included a mix of known professional and amateur bodybuilders — including McLish and Dunlap along with Lori Bowen, Shelly Gruwell, and others — and a few newcomers to the sport like Gladys Portugues and Bev Francis.

Prior to her involvement, Francis was a professional powerlifter in Australia who set world records as the first woman ever to bench press over 300 pounds in competition and the first woman in her weight class to squat 500 pounds in competition. As you can imagine, the differences in body type needed to move this kind of weight and compete in bodybuilding shows is substantial. Shortly after breaking the 300 pound barrier on bench press, a picture of Francis doing the “crab most muscular” in a bikini and showcasing her bigger-than-expected physique was circulated widely in muscle and fitness magazines discussing her record-breaking lift. As is shown in the documentary, Francis had never competed in a bodybuilding competition before and was personally invited by Butler to take on the challenge of competing because of that photo.

In the film, she is not only the strongest competitor in terms of what she can lift, but she is also the biggest, most muscular woman in the competition. Watching Pumping Iron II, it’s not difficult to see that this appears to be an intentional set up on Butler’s part. Pitting Francis against the likes of the other women — particularly McLish, who Butler specifically poses as a rival to Francis even though the two had never even heard of each other before the competition — brings out exactly what Heywood was getting at in her book. Throughout the documentary, Butler shows the other competitors, most of the IFBB judges, and other people involved in the filming and the Caesars World Cup commenting on Francis’s size and the “masculinity” of her body. Whether it was fully Butler’s intention or not, these discussions show over and over again just how deeply misogynistic (and, I would argue, transmisogynistic) people’s understandings of what a woman’s body should look like are, even in the context of a sport that was specifically created to bring people’s bodies to the most absurdly built proportions they can possibly get to. As is noted in Alan Mansfield and Barbara McGinn’s “Pumping Irony: The Muscular and the Feminine,” Francis was told, after her appearance in the film and as she went ahead with plans to continue competing in female bodybuilding, to “get feminine or get out of bodybuilding” — a demand that would come to haunt her throughout her career and would come to define the sport, even now.

The contentious and contradictory nature of the judging continued to plague the sport throughout the rest of the mid- and late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, even as female bodybuilding got big enough to be featured on ESPN. Francis, for instance, never came first in a single Ms. Olympia competition, and other women like her were continually neglected by the sport. And it spilled over into mainstream culture, as well. Conversations on what level of muscularity is acceptable for women intensified in the early 1990s with people declaring female muscularity that challenged their perceptions of what a woman should look like as “masculine” and “monstrous.” When Terminator 2 came out in 1991, for example, the majority of the conversation surrounding the film was about Linda Hamilton’s jacked physique. She was simultaneously praised for her body and criticized harshly for the muscularity she was able to achieve for filming.

As Heywood discusses in her book, what emerged from these continued cultural conversations on women’s bodies was another drastic split in both the strength sports world’s and popular culture’s beliefs of what a muscular female body should look like and what a woman’s muscular body represents. She says this is most notably represented by a switch in the way female bodybuilding shows were conducted — specifically with the addition of the “more feminine” competitive categories of “fitness” and “figure” competitions — and how fitness magazines began to showcase their muscular models in increasingly sexualized ways. In a section discussing these female “fitness” pictorials of the early 1990s in Flex magazine, Heywood writes,

The Flex layouts focus on making female muscularity sexually attractive, and the discussion has stayed on this level. […] As such, unnatural masculinity has to go, and the women are expected to conduct themselves more in terms of the feminine norm — that is, softness and openness. Paradoxically, according to Flex, women bodybuilders are unnatural when they are in competition shape, when they have reached the goal and end of the bodybuilding process. What are [women bodybuilders] “threatening” — perhaps the idea that gender is “natural,” that the “real, natural side of women bodybuilders” is “softness”? To reveal that masculinity is a set of characteristics that women can possess as well as men? While bodybuilding fanatically relies on the rhetoric of self-determination — that you can, in Sam Fussell’s words, “defy both nurture and nature and transform yourself…you can become the person you dream of being” — the Flex pictorial contradicts that dream for women, who are not allowed to have masculinity […] Despite the bodies women manage to create, the text says, they are really soft, “naturally attractive.” Hardness is a pose: these women really are women after all — soft, feminine, sexually available, corrected to cultural norms. But is this really all women are, all women can be?

Her question at the end has become even more poignant as the years have gone by. With the creation of those alternative and more “acceptable” fitness and figure competitions at both the amateur and professional levels, the female bodybuilding of the late 1980s and most of the 1990s has become even more niche than it was before. Women who look like Baxter and Francis and later, Lenda Murray, Iris Kyle, and Yaxeni Oriquen-Garcia, have not been and are not the stars of the women’s fitness and strength sports world, and they don’t even have a chance to be. Instead, they are relegated to the fringes of sport altogether, where even still, their bodies are constantly speculated on, belittled, and treated as an affront to how women are supposed to conduct themselves and construct their physiques. You can see this in countless sexist posts on the subject all over the internet. In these posts, the writers often discuss how female bodybuilding — especially with the use of anabolic steroids in the sport — became “uglier” over the years. Translation: these writers (and many other people like them) no longer find female bodybuilders fuckable enough to consider them “real” women, and these writers don’t respect them as real athletes either. A conclusion that can be applied to a lot of different kinds of women doing a lot of different kinds of things in our society. But I don’t think that’s the only thing going on here.

The more you look at this, the more it becomes obvious that the threat of upending people’s ideas of a strict binary between what is feminine and what is masculine goes beyond the way women look. When we see a muscular body at rest or in motion, we ascribe a certain level of expectation to it. More specifically, we expect that body to be strong, to be able to perform incredible feats of athleticism, and to be difficult to destroy. To me, this is what is most threatening to our culture about the “monstrous” female bodybuilder or weightlifter’s body. She challenges the stark contrast between what people believe is masculine and feminine and collapses the construction of masculinity and femininity into nothingness. You can tell just by looking at her or seeing what she does in a gym that she can’t be overtaken or controlled so easily. In 2024, you can most commonly see this in the comments section of social media posts made by women in strength sports. A dive into the abyss of those sections reveal people of all sexes and genders making it known that women “shouldn’t be that strong,” among many other disgusting criticisms. Seeing these female athletes doing what they do presents people with a quandary that instead of challenging their deeply held beliefs about gender, often just entrenches their patriarchal understandings of how people are supposed to exist in the world. The “strong woman” has always been a threat to society’s traditional understanding of womanhood, which in turn is also a threat to the very structure of our society, but the physically strong woman presents an additional threat: She can also, possibly, beat anyone’s ass if she wanted to. And people — especially men, but also a lot of other women and gender-expansive people — simply cannot deal with that.

In her new film Love Lies Bleeding, Rose Glass takes this idea and brings it to its most absurd (complimentary) end. The film is set in 1985 and follows a bodybuilder named Jackie (Katy O’Brian) whose hopes for bodybuilding glory come to a halt after she falls in love with gym manager Lou (Kristen Stewart) and makes a decision that upends both of their lives. In it, we see Jackie preparing for the competition through her diet and lifting regimen, and we also see Lou introduce Jackie to anabolic steroids as a kind of insurance to help her bring her body to the level of readiness she needs to win and, in her mind, completely transform their lives.

Jackie’s physical prowess is established early on through shots of her training inside of and outside of the gym, and also in an early scene where she punches a fellow (male) gym goer — a very large man, at that —- who’s hitting on her and insulting Lou at the same time. He punches her back, and she takes it well enough to get back up immediately, barely even bruising. But Glass strikes an interesting balance with Jackie. She isn’t just strong. She’s sensitive, she’s inquisitive, she’s sweet, she’s messy, and she’s sexy as hell. Contrary to how our culture has come to view women like Jackie, she’s desired, most notably by Lou but also by many of the men on the periphery of their lives, as well. In terms of how queer relationships are often defined, Jackie is the seductive, muscular femme bottom, and Lou is the anxious, scrawny butch top — a dynamic that is more common than people think but is underrepresented, even in some of the most underground queer media you can find. And on top of all that, she gets to be a little perverted (again, complimentary) and have a lot of hot gay sex.

About a third of the way through the film, we learn that Lou’s abusive brother-in-law, J.J. (Dave Franco), has beaten her sister, Beth (Jena Malone), so badly that she has to be hospitalized. Lou and Jackie arrive at the hospital to find Beth’s face and body so bloody and swollen you can barely tell it’s her. When Lou’s dad and Jackie’s boss Lou Sr. (Ed Harris) arrives at the hospital to visit Beth, it becomes apparent this isn’t the first time J.J. has done this. Upon hearing this, Jackie leaves the hospital to confront J.J. at his and Beth’s house. When Jackie enters their home, she appears larger-than-life, towering over J.J. and almost hitting the ceiling with her head. She proceeds to smash J.J.’s head into a coffee table until he isn’t J.J. anymore.

Lou eventually finds Jackie in the bathtub of the house, disoriented and in shock about what she just did. For Lou, violence and the gruesome results of that violence don’t faze her. But for Jackie, this is all new. This isn’t who she ever expected to be. From there, J.J.’s murder initiates an increasingly violent reality for the two of them, one that tests their love for one another and threatens to get them both killed, and it isn’t the last time Glass uses this kind of magical realism to help them beat the odds and flip the cultural perception of the “monstrous” female body — and the “monster” who possesses it — on its head.

The idea that Jackie’s body is outside of the norm — and therefore, “monstrous” to other people — is brought home even further through the commentary of one of the film’s only other queer characters, Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov). From the beginning of the film, we know Daisy has an unrequited crush on Lou, and as the film progresses, we see Daisy watching Lou closely and speculating on what Lou’s relationship to Jackie is. At one point, she describes Jackie as “that big girl,” said in the kind of tone that implies Jackie’s “bigness” is abnormal, unsightly and something Lou shouldn’t be attracted to at all. Lou reacts with a frustrated wince, one that is supposed to signal to the audience that Daisy’s judgment is not only unwelcome but also ridiculous. Choosing to give this line to another queer woman is very clear in its intent: Even the people who should be more conscious about the way they interpret non-normative bodies existing in the world are often perpetuating the same kind of violence towards them that the rest of the dominant culture does.

Throughout the rest of the film, Glass continues to use this perception, along with Jackie’s steroid use, to play with, deconstruct, and redefine the idea of the “strong woman.” There are shots of Jackie’s muscles bulging to an unrealistic and obscene degree. She beats up a fellow competitor in the competition in what looks like a fit of “roid rage.” And at the end of the film, Glass literally makes Jackie a “monster” by turning her into a 50-foot woman in order to help save Lou from being murdered by her father. Jackie is physically strong, obviously, but it’s not for nothing. Jackie’s strength is only showcased in moments where she is doing one of the things viewed as quintessentially “feminine” in our society: taking care of the person she loves the most. That she is doing it in a way most people wouldn’t expect and probably wouldn’t define as “feminine” is what helps Glass bring these ideas to their most preposterous conclusion. Her actions, like her body and what her body can do, don’t easily fall into one gendered category or another. Jackie is just a woman in love trying to survive in the face of a world bent on destroying her.

In a piece in Empire about the film, Stewart is quoted as saying, “We are constantly watching movies about women triumphing over oppressive forces because we’re somehow ethically or morally superior […] It’s like, ‘No, fuck that. I’m so sick of that. I’m so sick of that fucking movie.’ And so this one just felt like we were allowed to pull our dress over our head and run down the street, use the boys’ toys and shove them in their faces – and then also be like, ‘We’re nothing like you.’” And I think that encapsulates exactly what Glass was able to accomplish in the film. She took our traditional definition of what it means to be a strong person and blew it up in our faces in a way that should push people to think more deeply about why she would need or want to do that in the first place.

In Love Lies Bleeding, the two main female characters exist outside of the dominant cultural ideas of what makes a woman and what makes a man, not just in their bodies and in their actions, but also in their queerness. They turn those ideas into a farce, into something that should discomfit people and make them reconsider how those definitions play out in their understandings of gender, sexuality, bodies, and everything they view as “natural” and “normal.”

Knowing what I know about female bodybuilding and about how people view queerness, it shouldn’t have surprised me that reactions to the film are colored with some of the same sentiments people have when they’re talking about female strength athletes. But unfortunately, it did. Social media, particularly on TikTok, has provided most of the weirdest commentary on the film so far. I have, to my great dismay, experienced it in my own life, too. These criticisms, for the most part, barely comment on the quality of the film or the way Glass is playing with people’s expectations and perceptions. Instead, they’re focused on Jackie’s body and her sexuality (“Love Lies Bleeding is a muscle mommy fetish film” said derogatively) or they’re focused on that and the audience (“Love Lies Bleeding is a muscle mommy fetish film for men”) or they complain about a lack of character development (which seems like a basic critical literacy problem to me, because becoming worse is, technically, a development).

With the first two, we can see specifically how the perception of the muscular female body as an object of horror and a slight to what people’s beliefs about what makes women desirable is still alive and well in our culture. Like the female bodybuilders and strength athletes who Jackie is modeled after, Jackie can’t possibly be seen as more than a freak or a fetish object because the dimensions of her body and what she’s able to do with it unsettle people’s understandings of desirability. Again, instead of making them reconsider those understandings, it makes them question how anyone could be attracted to something so grotesque outside of a perverse, sexual curiosity. Not only does this strip Jackie of the version of femininity she is granted in the film, even as she becomes a “monster,” but it also marginalizes her body and the bodies of women who like her even further. It proves, once again, that anything existing outside of what’s considered “normal” or “natural” cannot be sexually desirable. Women can be strong, but only to a certain extent; anything beyond that is offensive and undignifed.

Glass choosing to also make Jackie bisexual and in a queer relationship with another woman where they both unabashedly enjoy fucking each other brings in an additional element to these criticisms — one that many queer women and people are extremely familiar with. People’s internalized misogyny is so unchecked that they can’t see two women fucking on screen without labelling it as appealing directly to the male gaze. Similar to the way people speak about how female bodybuilding has gotten “uglier” over the years, these criticisms simply cannot imagine two women having sex with each other without the sole intention being to arouse the men in the audience.

Heywood writes, “Persons who ridicule female bodybuilders, who call them monstrous, unfeminine, and want to return the female form to weakness overtly refuse to grant self-realization and personal freedom to women. […] I have to believe that consciously or unconsciously, intentionally or no, any babe who sports a muscle symbolically strikes a blow against traditional ideas about male supremacy. […] A woman with muscles shouts out about female sovereignty, about women’s right to be for themselves, not others, about their right to exist, take up space.” And I think this is oddly fitting in response to these criticisms of Love Lies Bleeding, as well. Female bodybuilding, marginalized people’s participation in strength sports, and Love Lies Bleeding all present us with a unique opportunity to challenge these deeply held perceptions and understandings about gender, our bodies, and what we’re able to do or not do with them in our society. As the persistence of female strength athletes shows and as Glass demonstrates in the film, it is these ideas themselves — many of which are constantly being weaponized against queer and trans people in the current moment — not our pointed deconstruction and disruption of them that are a threat to our shared reality. And like them, we should be propelled to continue blowing them up in the most extreme, ridiculous ways possible.

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

Join AF+!

Stef Rubino

Stef Rubino is a writer, community organizer, and student of abolition from Ft. Lauderdale, FL. They teach Literature and writing to high schoolers and to people who are currently incarcerated, and they’re the fat half of the arts and culture podcast Fat Guy, Jacked Guy. You can find them on Twitter (unfortunately).

Stef has written 77 articles for us.

5 Comments

  1. Excellent article! I had no idea about the history of body building, nor have I been keeping track of the reactions around the movie. Very insightful and makes me love the movie even more. I’ve been even more inspired to get buff lol.

  2. Will come back to read this once I’ve watched the movie – it’s not coming out in the UK till May.

  3. This is exceptional. I am speechless. I hope this essay is read and taught and shared widely.

Comments are closed.

Uncommon Pairings: Wines That Go Beyond Grapes

Welcome back to Uncommon Pairings, a series all about wine! Take a trip through the archives if you wanna learn more about how wine labels work, what really makes vermouth different from wine, and how to age wine yourself for a fraction of the cost.


When I was first learning about wine, I learned about it from a really old school lens. We were taught the difference between “Old World” and “New World” wines — thankfully, the Court of Master Sommeliers has moved away from this language, but literally only a few months ago!! — and spent an entire class session passing around vials of scents that, if we found them in a wine, would indicate the wine had a fault. If we were to actually adhere to that logic, a lot of the natural wines I’ve had recently would be considered faulty (when in fact, they’ve been quite good!). Honestly, I think we do wine a disservice by teaching it in such rigid ways. It’s a fermented beverage! It’s supposed to be fun and playful, not precious and buttoned up.

I was taught that wine is fermented grape juice, but that’s way too narrow in my opinion! In fact, some of the most exciting things in the wine world are happening on the fringes of that definition. If we expand it slightly (and I think we should!), we can use Merriam-Webster’s second definition of wine: “the alcoholic usually fermented juice of a plant product (such as a fruit) used as a beverage.” I like this one better because while it still includes the grape-based beverage we know and love, it also leaves room for things like palm wine and pomegranate wine and banana wine… things that might not fall under the strict, Western definition of what wine is, but what culturally feel like wine siblings.


Fruit Wine

Fruit wines are wines that are made with more than just grapes, and often, without grapes at all! They’re nothing new; early homesteaders in America used to preserve seasonal berries by turning them into fruit wine. Palm wine dates back way further — to possibly 16,000 BC. However, what is new is the idea of taking traditional winemaking principles and applying them to fruit wine — like this Champagne method sparkling blueberry wine. Another modern development is that producers are leaning into co-ferments (making wine with more than one kind of fruit) to get some really interesting results that blur the line between cider and wine!

It’s a bittersweet development if you ask me. On one hand, we’re on the precipice of a fruit wine renaissance, but in many cases, it’s been borne out of necessity. Grapes are sensitive little guys, and because of climate change, we can’t count on grapes the same way we used to!

If you want to dip your toes into the fruit wine world, I’d recommend checking out your local farmer’s market! You might be able to find someone turning local produce into wine. I’ve heard rumors (read: watched TikToks) of a strawberry wine producer at the NYC Greenmarkets (and the bottles are apparently shaped like HEARTS), but I unfortunately haven’t seen one IRL!


Mead

I know that mead doesn’t fall under the definition of wine — not even the expansive, generous one — but I think we should just make room for it under the wine umbrella because honestly, it’s similar enough. Mead is fermented honey and water, and while the ways that mead can be made vary, a lot of them look similar to the winemaking process (racking, filtering, etc.). Like fruit wine, mead goes back for millennia. In fact, it’s managed to retain most of its name from its Proto-Indo-European ancestor!

Also like fruit wine, mead is seeing a resurgence in popularity. From 2003 to 2020, the number of US-based meaderies grew from roughly 60 to 450. And that’s just in the States! Apparently, terroir is just as much of a thing in the mead world as it is in the wine world. It’s not super surprising; where honey comes from can change how it tastes, and honey is the core ingredient in mead.

It’s easier to find a meadery than it is to find a winery that exclusively produces fruit wines (at least, that’s been my experience). I know that Enlightenment Wines (a local meadery in Brooklyn) ships to several states, but if you’d rather try things IRL, they have a bar aptly named Honey’s. I’m sure at least some of the 450 domestic meaderies (and honestly, maybe more — that number was from 2020) have tasting situations too!

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

Join AF+!

ashni

Ashni is a writer, comedian, and farmer's market enthusiast. When they're not writing, they can be found soaking up the sun, trying to make a container garden happen, or reading queer YA.

ashni has written 47 articles for us.

Mini Crossword Apologizes to Cameron Diaz for the Omission


Let’s get together and make a spectacle of ourselves.

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

Join AF+!
Related:

Kate Hawkins

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

Kate has written 38 articles for us.

‘Rent’ (The Film) Is Best Performed Live (By You)

In “Lost Movie Reviews From the Autostraddle Archives” we revisit past lesbian, bisexual, and queer classics that we hadn’t reviewed before, but you shouldn’t miss. This week is Chris Columbus’ Rent, based on the musical of the same name by Jonathan Larson.


This is supposed to be a review. Well, let me rewind that a bit. This will be a review of 2005’s above-average-to-mediocure film adaption of the beloved gay musical Rent. It’s just that I have found that most people already have their opinions about Rent well engrained into them before any conversation about the film even begins.

Musical theatre gays roughly born before 1990 long ago swore our allegiance to Jonathan Larson’s original Broadway production. Those of us in who were tweens and teens at the time of its premiere spent our adolescence memorizing the liner notes of its iconic two-disc rust orange CD set, even without being able to travel to New York to see the show, like it was a Bible to a community that we didn’t yet know how to find for ourselves (myself included). In that age group, the film is tolerated, if not also a little bit maligned.

Musical theatre gays born after 1990 grew up on Chris Columbus’ film adaption, and in my experience their relationship to both that film and the musical depends on if they had other gay media to choose from as a teen. For some the film is a cultural touchstone, remembered fondly, but I’ve never heard anyone ever defend Rent the movie on its artistic merits alone with their full chest.

It’s not that Columbu’s adaption isn’t solid — it’s a fairly straightforward recreation of the play, even though it loses some of its spark in translation. The majority of the original Broadway cast reunited for its filming (Daphne Rubin-Vega, the legend, was pregnant at the time and could not reprise her role as Mimi. There were concerns about Fredi Walker’s age to reprise Joanne that I think were unwarranted, no matter how much Tracie Thoms made the role her own over the last 20 years). Still, when you watch it, something feels… off.

Though Rent was always set in the late 1980s, at the time of its premiere in 90s, it felt infinite. By the time of its 2005 film release, already so much had changed in the gay rights movement and the progression of HIV/AIDS treatment, that storyline somehow instead feels crystalized in amber. There are nitpicks I have with the film adaptation’s script. I’ll never understand the decision to force the cast to awkwardly speak lines that anyone who’s ever seen the musical would have already expected to be in their original song form. Forcing an ahistorical gay marriage plot for Maureen and Joanne helps no one, and if anything, zaps the sensuality and heat out their infamous battle duet. But I think it’s the speed of time that most worked to Rent’s detriment. Being an outsider and finding your chosen family is timeless. Somehow with Rent, it felt as if the people who most needed it, now couldn’t quite relate.

That’s ok. Rent does not need to be “timely” to be relatable or adored. Though, 2024’s historic cost of living increases, rapid collapse of social fabric, razor thin margins to poverty, violent transphobia and homophobia, and lack of trust or faith in elected officials to fix these problems looks a lot more like bohemian life in the late ‘80s than we perhaps care to see. I think that 20 years after the film’s release, and nearly 30 years since the play’s premiere, Rent deserves to be reframed instead by looking at a different musical for freaks on the outside that’s stood the test of time, and yes I am talking about The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show, first released in 1975 as an independent musical comedy horror to panned reviews, has on lived for nearly 50 years in midnight showings with shadow casts who perform live in front of its screen. Every generation of gay seems to somehow find it, and themselves, anew under its bright lights and rainfalls of popcorn and promises to do the time warp. Even if the specifics of show have become outdated (and they have), the energy beneath has become eternal. And this is where Rent comes in.

Rent will never be a perfect movie. And it never needs to be. Because Rent is best enjoyed singing it loudly at the top of your lungs, dancing until you break a sweat, and the collapsing exhausted against your couch with your best friends. It’s meant to be communal. It should feel tactical and sticky and visceral, not neutrally appreciated from far away on stage or at a theater. For many of us, this is how we first fell in love with the musical in the first place – replaying the soundtrack over and over again until we broke it. And it’s time we return to our roots.

And thus and such, with my official review out of the way, I would like to also present you with this gift. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.


How to Perform Rent in Your Living Room as if It’s Rocky Horror Picture Show: A Participation Guide


Overall notes:

  • Singing along to all songs is always encouraged if you know it!
  • You will also need a sturdy chair (or your couch) to serve as a prop for lap dancing and pole dancing!
  • Other props: A glass to use for toasting (let’s be real, just use whatever you’re already drinking out of), a box of tissues

Song Order:

Seasons of Love Opener — Straight forward! You’re going to stand up high school chorus style and square your shoulders, and sing along! You did not escape being a teenage theater gay without learning this song, and now’s the time to show it off.

Rent/Tune Up #1 — In the film, Mark speaks his famous opening lines “December 24th, 9PM/ Eastern Standard Time/ From here on in/ I shoot without a script…” but in the stage musical he sings them, so guess what?? We are going to sing them here! And we’re not done! Any time that any one speaks a line that is sung in the musical, sing it over them!

Rent — When the high energy rock chords come in, HEAD BANG THE SHIT OUT OF IT AND VOCALIZE ALL THE GUITAR CHORDS, Perform at full energy for the rest of the song! Work up a sweat!

Angel and Collins Meet for the First Time — When the scene ends, yell “NOW KISS”

Would You Light My Candle — Mimi is going to blow out her own candle and knock on the wall before the second verse that begins, knock on a hard surface in tune with her beat. At the end of that same verse, Roger is going to say that he knows Mimi from her work at the Cat Scratch Club, but didn’t recognize her without the handcuffs. Use you hands to mime dancing with handcuffs.

Today 4 U, Tomorrow 4 Me — Give a loud, cheering standing ovation when Collins introduces Angel for the first time in her Mrs. Clause drag!! From here it is a choose your own adventure! Did you learn this choreography as a child? You have full permission to do it here! If you didn’t learn the choreography, beat Angel’s drum beat against a hard surface of your choosing (or vocalize it with your mouth). When Angel jumps off the table and back to the floor, EVERYONE CHEER.

Tango Maureen — When Tracie Thoms first appears in her suit and tie, howl (or whatever other respectful thirst sound of your choice). When the tango beat drops, do a bad mime of a tango across your floor. If you know how to do a good tango, do that. When Mark says “it’s hard to do this backwards,” join with Joanne by yelling back “you should try it in HEELS!”

Life Support Meeting — Stand still, listen to the message, repeat the affirmation “No Day Like Today” like it’s a pledge. From here on out, whenever anyone sings it, you’re required to either repeat it back or sing along.

Out Tonight — Mimi is going to slide a dollar between another dancer’s legs, and you will cheer! She will then lick her fingers and slide them between her own legs! Cheer or howl again! On the verse that begins “it feels too damn much like home when the Spanish babies cry” when Mimi crescendos to “so let’s to a bar so dark we forget who we are!” through “I wanna wail at the moon like a cat in heat”, wrap your legs around the armrest of your couch or the seat of hour chair (whichever is comfortable) and… well… lap dance if the mood takes you.

Life Support #2 — Join in the round robin of “Will I lose my dignity/ Will someone care?/ Will I wake tomorrow?/ From this nightmare”

Santa Fe — This is one of the few numbers that are improved by the movie version! Use the back of your chair or couch to support yourself like Collins’ subway pole during the chorus and mimic his dance with Angel.

I’ll Cover U — Give a yelp of joy for the kiss!

The Protest Scene/ Over the Moon — When Maureen shows up on the motorcycle and takes off her bike helmet, SCREAM LIKE A ROCK CONCERT.

Over the Moon — Follow all of Maureen’s instructions in real time. Boo Benny when the audience boos him. And yes, when Maureen tells the crowd to moo like a cow — you will be also mooing like a cow!! MOO

La Vie Bohème — You are not required to stand on a table! SAFETY FIRST! But if your couch supports your weight and you feel comfortable, you’ll know when to hop on it! If you’d rather not stand on furniture, dance around your living room! It’s the end of Act I,  have fun, work up one last sweat!!

La Vie Bohème, Part One — Raise a glass at the end of the first verse and toast “La Vie Bohème” with Mark. You are required to scream-sing “To being an us for once/ Instead of a them!” at full voice with everything that you have!!! Pump your fist in the air and back and yell back “Actual Reality! ACT UP! Fight Back! Fight AIDS!”

La Vie Boheme, Part Two —“To faggots, lezzies, dykes, cross dressers too!” “To people living with, living with, living with, not dying from disease!!”

End of Act I

Take or Leave Me — Sing along to Joanne if you identify as a top and Maureen if you’re a bottom (to get mad, this is just silly gay math!). Are you watching with friends or a partner? At the end of the song, pause the movie vote for a winner of the argument! Don’t know the words? Appreciate Tracie Thoms’ biceps when she takes off that suit coat.

Without You —  Get comfortable and bring close your box of tissues, from the Life Support meeting that thins out with each new round of the chorus, to Angel being sick on the subway with only Collin’s to hold him, to Angel getting admitted back into the hospital, it’s only tears from here.

Angel’s Funeral/ I’ll Cover You Reprise — See what I said above about tissues? Sing back the “I’ll cover you” chorus to Collins, if you’re lucky enough to choke it out.

What You Own — Admittedly, this isn’t my favorite number! But after all the intense emotions that proceeded it, it’s a welcome chance to shake off some of the sadness. I recommend that when Mark and Roger reunite at the rooftop at the end of the song, you hop off your couch and start jumping up and down in a circle to sing along with “We’re dying in America at the end of Millennium/ We’re dying in America, to come into our own/ And when you’re dying in America, you’re not alone!!”

The Finale: When Collins shows up and says that he’s reworked the ATM at the Food Emporium to give money to anyone with the code, repeat it back with him and raise a glass to the sky. A-N-G-E-L

I Should Tell You (Reprise) — When Mimi comes back to life, clap just like when Tinker Bell lives in Peter Pan!!

No Day but Today (Reprise) — When Mark starts screening his film, dance around while keeping an eye on the movie-within-a-movie. The milisecond the camera stops at Angel for the last full second… stop dead in your your tracks, no matter where you are, stomp your feet and scream your applause.

THAT’S IT! ALL 525,600 MINUTES! NO DAY BUT TODAY, MY LOVES!

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

Join AF+!
Related:

Carmen Phillips

Carmen is Autostraddle's Editor-in-Chief and a Black Puerto Rican femme/inist writer. She claims many past homes, but left the largest parts of her heart in Detroit, Brooklyn, and Buffalo, NY. There were several years in her early 20s when she earnestly slept with a copy of James Baldwin’s “Fire Next Time” under her pillow. You can find her on twitter, @carmencitaloves.

Carmen has written 692 articles for us.

4 Comments

  1. I don’t have a ton of personal connection to Rent, either the musical or the movie, but what I do have is pretty much all perfectly expressed in this article! I had friends who were deeply into the musical/Broadway album, and they were the same friends I went to Rocky with religiously towards the end of high school, so this melding makes 110% sense to me! So much so that I just shared this with one of them (though that’s not quite as random as it could be, since we are still in contact; it isn’t like we haven’t talked in the intervening 20 years…). 💜

  2. i am a total Rent-head (i saw the show twice on broadway) and the movie is fine. like you, my notes are nitpicky. i have never thought to do the movie like this, and now i may force my family into trying it. the kid already knows most of the music from road trips.

  3. This is literally amazing!

    Completely dating myself here, but I turned 19 several years before the movie was available. I don’t remember if I had seen Rent staged ever at this point, or simply memorized not only the liner notes but also the glossy, made-to-look-like-duct-tape commemorative book I had received for Christmas. But I spent my 19th birthday in a 24 hour Internet Cafe called Innovox in Atlanta performing Rent with the employees and my friend from school all night. We ran around and jumped on the couches and sang all the songs and absolutely blasted the Original Broadway Cast over the sound system. It was one of my favorite birthdays of all time.

    I am also a longtime fan of RHPS and have performed with live casts. Your guide is so spot on and it makes me very badly want to attend a screening of Rent with a live cast and do all of the above!

    Thanks for this huge smile on my face today!

  4. Sorry! One other thought…

    Is the movie as good as the original show? No.

    But before Hamilton changed the game by recording live and releasing it widely, this felt like an incredible opportunity to see the OBC perform the roles they created – albeit years later. They were so iconic in these roles that it was really hard to imagine being satisfied with “movie star” casting. I appreciate that Chris Columbus is a purist and wanted the real thing – even if it didn’t completely hit every note I wish that it had. It felt like an equalizer to be able to see the “real” cast for myself.

Comments are closed.

The LGBTQ+ NYC Artists Archive Project Aims to Preserve the Unpreservable

Feature image courtesy of the LGBTQ+ NYC Artists Archive Project, photos by Richard Avedon, gifted to Lola Pashalinski

LGBTQ+ NYC Artists Archive Project: Side by side images shot by Richard Avedon of The Ridiculous Theatrical Company out of costume and in costume

The Ridiculous Theatrical Company: Bill Vehr, Black-Eyed Susan, Lola Pashalinski, Charles Ludlam, John Brockmeyer, Jack Mallory


I arrived at BAM to see their new exhibition highlighting the LGBTQ+ Artists Archive Project. But first, BAM’s director of archives, Sharon Lehner, insisted I see the theatre.

“What I love about this theatre is it’s partly found as is and partly created through stagecraft,” Sharon told me, before explaining its history. The Harvey Theater began as a playhouse in 1904, then it was converted into a movie theatre, then it was abandoned, and, finally, it was rediscovered by legendary director Peter Brook. Today, the walls still look worn, the ceiling medallion faded; a restoration that aimed to emphasize rather than erase its history.

But that’s the stagecraft Sharon mentioned. The medallion is original, but the worn walls were created. The theater itself is a set. It’s meant to give the impression of age even though some of its most prominent signifiers are pure design.

This is the magic of theatre. Where a play is shown is as integral to the experience as text or who is cast in the lead. Theatre is an experience, one that changes every night, and certainly changes production to production of the same work. This also makes its history difficult to preserve.

“Archiving performance is a theoretical notion,” Sharon admitted. “How can you archive something ephemeral that happened in the past? It’s always a lack, it’s always a pointing. We get that and we embrace it.”

BAM’s extensive performing arts archive makes it a fitting home for the launch of the LGBTQ+ NYC Artists Archive Project, a collective of downtown NYC artists who came to prominence in the 80s and 90s who are striving to share their archives and change the archival process for others.

For now, that means an exhibition at BAM Strong’s Rudin Family Gallery, a collection of photographs of the artists with brief bios, as well as a wall of video. It is not a display of their archives — that work has yet to be done — it’s, to steal Sharon’s word, a pointing toward possibility. It’s an education for those of us who may not know some of these names despite their importance and a fundraising plea to make complete archives a reality.

At the gallery, their mission is outlined on a newsprint handout that’s as much an artistic nod to the past as the theatre next door. (Sharon noted to me that newsprint is terrible for archival material, but that it does have a cool effect for these purposes.)

“In recent years, too many avant-garde artists have died leaving the prohibitively expensive task of caretaking their legacies to ill-equipped friends and family members with devastating results, erasing contributions and cultural history,” the handout reads. It then goes on to outline the planned archival process.

“Some of the artists here have already worked in interesting hybrid forms between performance and archives, so they were thinking it would be good to use a performance venue to launch the project,” Sharon explained. She also noted the diversity in styles and forms among these artists. Beyond being queer, downtown NYC artists from the same general time period, there are few other similarities. This is evident even from the small exhibit and samples of footage.

The artists involved in the collective are Ain Gordon, Five Lesbian Brothers, Ishmael Houston-Jones, John Kelly, Richard Move, Lola Pashalinski, and Carmelita Tropicana. If you’re not in New York and can’t view this exhibit, you can — and should — read about each of these artists and their accomplishments at the LGBTQ+ NYC Artists Archive Project website.

Queerness is in a perpetual state of discovery by the mainstream, but queer people and queer artists have always been around. This project is a reminder of the importance of preserving our history. It’s a testament to the power of collective and a reminder that sometimes as queer people we have to believe in our own importance before we can get the attention of others.

“History is remembered if it’s valued and supported,” Sharon said. “And the more voices we archive the better.”


The LGBTQ+ NYC Artists Archive Project exhibition is showing at BAM Strong through the end of June.

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

Join AF+!
Related:

Drew Burnett Gregory

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

Drew Burnett has written 498 articles for us.

I Want My Queer Representation To Be Messy — Even When it Comes to Real People

Against my own wishes, I woke up still thinking about Sufi Malik and Anjali Chakra, the influencer couple who recently called off their wedding in the wake of Sufi’s cheating allegations, which Sufi confessed to in a candid Instagram grid post and which Anjali also acknowledged, asking followers not to treat Sufi negatively. Anjali’s wishes went very unheeded. Hate and judgement have filled the comments sections for both women, most of the ire directed at Sufi: How could she do this?

Of course, that sentiment isn’t really directed at the intimate betrayal of hurting the person you love but rather at an imagined collective infliction of hurt. How could she do this to us? Many fans and loyal followers of Sufi and Anjali are reacting as if they’re the ones who have been hurt, citing the infidelity as an affront to their belief in love. And by condemning Sufi, they’re also indirectly implicating Anjali. How could they both do this to us? How could they make us believe in love and then take that away?

It would be a bit of an embarrassing exercise for me to investigate exactly how many times I’ve praised a television series or a film or a book on Autostraddle.com for featuring messy queers and, more broadly, the mess of life. But I wouldn’t be embarrassed by the inclination so much as my repetitive language — the inclination, I very much stand behind. I like mess. I like messy. This is an easy enough thing to get people on board with when it comes to fictional characters, though I’m always shocked to learn it doesn’t apply to everyone. Some people really do want their queer characters to be likable or good, whatever that means. And what about when it comes to real people?

Now, I’m a little mixed on how I even feel about the ability of real people to provide “representation.” Representation in general is often treated like this flat thing, a quota to be satisfied. I do not give a shit that Kamala Harris shares a first name with my grandmother, a middle name with my sibling. So long as she continues to support and manufacture consent for genocide, she does not even begin to “represent” me or anything I stand for. When it comes to influencers or content creators, I’m similarly dubious on the power of representation. The role of the influencer is, at its core, to sell you things — if not actual products then a lifestyle or way of being. Couples who influence together, in a way, are selling you the idea of love, the idea of what a relationship can look like. (They’re also, often, selling you trips to beautiful destinations.)

When Anjali and Sufi went viral twice for their photoshoot showing two queer and interfaith South Asian women in big, huge, movie-style love, it was for technically pure reasons of representation. They took up space where many felt a lack. Images of two women in lehengas kissing and embracing were rare in mainstream spaces. They perhaps showed some brown girls they could be in a thriving, picture-perfect relationship with another brown girl, and I’m not trying to diminish the value of that. Had I seen the photos earlier in my life — especially earlier in my queer coming-of-age process — perhaps they would have made me cry. Perhaps I would have posted them with words expressing something along the lines of this makes me believe in love, because there was indeed a time when I did not.

But to believe in love means to believe in its failures and missteps, too. I understand the desire to resist negative portrayals of relationships that have been historically and systemically marginalized. But this isn’t a portrayal; it’s real life. And hell, even in “portrayals” or fictionalized narratives about queer love or queer love between women of color, perfection shouldn’t be all we desire. In fact, perfection can set us up for failure. If we want representation of realistic romance from people we share identities with, we should want representation of romantic failure, too. Because that doesn’t mean our love is doomed or tragic; it’s just real. Relationships don’t always work out. To pretend queer relationships are immune to problems does us all a disservice. It keeps us in relationships we shouldn’t be in. It gives us unrealistic expectations. It also flattens love and romance. When a relationship fails, it doesn’t always erase or overwrite everything that came before it. Queer divorce representation can mean just as much as queer long-term companionship representation.

Anjali and Sufi could have announced they were calling off their wedding without noting the infidelity. Perhaps they’re wishing they had, given the extreme backlash to Sufi and the reduction of their big personal life decision to group chat fodder. But I’m almost glad they put the mess of it on display — not because I necessarily think influencers owe us the ugly alongside the impeccably curated but because messy representation can mean just as much as joyful, beautiful representation. Seeing someone familiar fail gives us permission to fail, too. Or, at least, to be softer with ourselves when we do fail. I’ve done things in life I regret, things that are perhaps explicable even if they aren’t excusable. I know very little about the interior lives of Anjali and Sufi, and I write this piece not to defend or explain anything about what either of them did or did not do but rather to defend the desire for visibility and representation that is complicated, that is messy.

This extends beyond romance. In my creative life, of course I want to see South Asian authors and queer authors and queer South Asian authors winning. It fills me up. But there’s something about seeing people like me losing, too, that is oddly helpful, not because it makes me feel better about myself but because it reminds me we’re all fallible. Often, those failures are rooted in real, structural reasons. But sometimes they’re just rooted in real, human flaws. I would never root for anyone’s demise, but when I do see other writers like me struggling or even fucking up, it means something just like seeing the successes does.

I want queer representation that is varied and dynamic and expansive. That’s what queerness is all about.

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

Join AF+!

Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya

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

Kayla has written 791 articles for us.

2 Comments

  1. “But to believe in love means to believe in its failures and missteps, too.”

    Yes. This. There’s like a dozen sentences I could highlight but I’m going to keep it to this one.

    Love isn’t a lie, but it’s messy and it takes work and it doesn’t always work out.

Comments are closed.

Marsha Warfield Takes Her Place in the Parthenon of Black Queer Women on Television

Marsha Warfield doesn’t think she’s a legend. “I’m old, that’s all,” she tells me over Zoom. But that’s it — Ms. Warfield has been around for decades. Many of us know her as a stand-up comedian or from her five seasons as Roz Russell on the hit 80s NBC sitcom Night Court. She reprised her role as Roz for the the Night Court reboot, a triumphant return that sees the character’s identity as a lesbian finally made cannon. And in tonight’s season finale, Roz is getting married! I had the pleasure of talking to Ms. Warfield about that, as well as her place in the Parthenon of Black queer women, and queer women on television.

“I started in 1974,” Warfield explained. “I started doing stand up and back then there wasn’t a lot of representation. Now, you go back in time and you say, well, there was this show and there was that show. But you don’t realize they were the only show and then a couple of years later is another show, but there wasn’t a whole lot of representation. Behind the scenes, there was even less — there were no Black women involved in much of anything. So to see where we are now from here, I’m very grateful to have been able to see these changes.”

She calls the fact that there are now so many more Black creators, be they writers, directors or actors, a “blessing.” She added “I looked at women like Pia Richards and Della Reese and those women who kicked down those doors. And you have young women say they see me that way. It’s kind of mind blowing. It’s like, really? I’m Johnny come lately in this game. There were a whole lot of other people who had to do a whole lot of other things for me to get the opportunity to be Roz and to be in sitcoms and guest starring roles and stuff.”

Roz Russell was the acerbic and no-nonsense bailiff in Judge Harry Anderson’s night court for five seasons. Personally, I loved Roz — she was one of the many female TV characters whose dry sense of humor helped to form my own appreciation of comedy and the fact that goofy wasn’t the only way to be funny. She was also a Black woman who was surrounded by mostly white people and was able to hold her own. In fact, people didn’t cross her; some may have even been a little scared of her.

When Roz joined Night Court’s fourth season in 1986, she couldn’t be an out lesbian for a variety of reasons. One was that it simply wasn’t done at the time. (It would be another 11 years before Ellen came out on primetime television.) The other big one was that Warfield had promised her mother that she wouldn’t come out while she was alive.

“I didn’t think it was unreasonable at the time, all things considered,” she admits, citing how many parents of queer kids are ostracized from their social circles. “I understood the pressures on her as a parent of a gay child, that so many people would perceive that as a failure of parenting.” Still, just because she understood, it doesn’t mean she liked it.

But the thing is, Roz didn’t have to come out, and neither did Warfield. It feels like an “if you know, you know situation,” and well, take one look at Warfield, and you know. When I tell her that I always knew that Roz was a lesbian, she bristles slightly. “People always say they knew, and that always pisses me off,” she says a bit curtly.

“My mother said that when I told her, she said, ‘yeah, well, I know.’ What do you mean you knew? If you knew, why did I have to go through that? Why did I have to go through that denial? If everybody knew, and they tell me online, ‘oh, we knew, it was never a big deal.’ If it wasn’t a big deal, why was it a big deal in my life? My whole life, people told me that I was different and that kind of stuff, but nobody ever explained anything or made me understand.”

Even though both Warfield and Roz’s sexuality was a pretty open secret, it’s hard not to think about what it would have been like for Black women and girls to have seen Roz get to have the same kind of romantic entanglements that her straight peers did on a primetime sitcom, on what was then the biggest network for prime time TV. That’s why it matters so much that 30 years after Night Court went off the air, Roz is an out lesbian, and it’s not a big deal.

Reboots are hit or miss, if you ask me. (Usually I’ll tell you they’re a miss.) But the reboot of Night Court, starring Melissa Rauch as Judge Abby Stone, daughter of original judge Harry Stone, retains the fun formula of the original, down to the Black female bailiff. There are so few of the original cast members still alive, it’s not a surprise that they would bring Roz back as a guest star. And the show wasted no time making Roz a lesbian, and not only that, but a happily partnered one — in her first appearance, she is arrested for getting into a fight at her bachelorette party.

Roz is back for the season two finale, which airs tonight, and it’s finally time for her to get hitched. Except there’s a problem: her wedding venue has been double booked and she has nowhere to hold the wedding. Of course, Abby — and others at the court, including Roz’s old friend Dan Fielding — step in to make Roz’s day as special and perfect as she is. Warfield tells me that she “loves” that Roz marrying a woman isn’t the story at all. “This is just a character that the cast loves who is getting married,” she says. “The point is our Roz is getting married.”

Warfield is also particularly buoyant talking about Roz’s wedding, because she herself got married back in August! And it’s not something she ever envisioned happening to her. She and her wife got married in Vegas (as someone who recently married her wife similarly, I have to say, go team elopement!), but she says that now her wife wants to have a ceremony where they can jump the broom.

“We might be stepping over the broom, there ain’t going to be no jumping involved. I’m far too old to jump,” she quips, and we both laugh. It’s clear that Warfield never thought she’d live in a world where she gets not one wife, but two, and that she and her most beloved character would both get their happy ending.

“I think a lot of times, younger people, they see how far we have to go, and they don’t appreciate how far we’ve come. And when you’re standing on the mountain, and been climbing it as long as I have, you can look back and say, ‘no baby, we’ve come a long way,’” she tells me seriously. “We’ve come a long, yeah, there’s work to do, but we’ve come a long way.”

You can watch the second season of Night Court, including the season finale, on Peacock.

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

Join AF+!
Related:

Sa'iyda Shabazz

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

Sa'iyda has written 110 articles for us.

1 Comment

  1. I’m beaming! I didn’t even know Night Court had a reboot. I always loved when Roz was on screen. It was my lullaby for many years.

    Thank you for this!

Comments are closed.

You Need Help: How Do I Get More Comfortable With Dirty Talk?

Q:

I really struggle to be vocal in bed. It’s not that I’m not having a good time, but I have a bit of anxiety — hangups about being too loud and end up being so quiet that my partner will sometimes ask me multiple times if I’m okay. I really enjoy it when my partner makes sounds and moans and I think if I could relax more and speak more that would be hot for both of us because I want them to know I’m enjoying myself too. I’d love any practical tips on how to feel more confident to get louder in bed and maybe if there’s any recommendations on trying a bit of dirty talk?

A:

This is a very common problem, so fear not! A lot of things factor into a fear of making noise in bed, but I promise you can overcome them. Being vocal doesn’t mean you need to be screaming; you can whisper or speak in hushed tones, and it will still count (and be totally hot!). We learn so much about how people act during sex from TV and movies, and those people always seem to know exactly when to moan or how to say the right thing during sex. Of course they do — it’s been written for them! It’s not always so easy for us regular folks.

Think about where your anxiety comes from. Do you have thin walls and you’re afraid your neighbors might hear? Did you have sexual encounters with people who made you feel bad about making noises? These are barriers you can work through, especially if you can identify them.

Find things that can help you get out of your head and into your body during sex. Music is great for this. You can find lots of playlists out there that are full of sexy songs. Lighting candles or dimming the lights are also ways to create ambiance. Do you have an outfit that makes you feel really sexy? Maybe try wearing it and focus on how good it makes you feel.

One way to get more comfortable with making sounds is touching yourself and seeing what kind of reactions you naturally have. Even if you’re not moaning loudly, try to be aware of what makes you breathe a little heavier or what makes your pulse race. Sounds during sexy time are usually involuntary, so just feel it out in a no pressure situation, like while you’re taking a shower or bath and no one can hear you.

Another way is to get your partner involved! It may sound counterproductive, but it could be extremely hot to go on this journey together. Tell them a little bit about your dilemma and ask them to help you out. Instead of them asking if you’re okay, have them ask “how does this feel?” or “do you like this?” Then you don’t have to think much about your response. If something feels good, don’t be afraid to ask for more. If there’s something you want or need, say so! “I’d like you to touch me here” is a great one, and then show them where and how you want to be touched. Asking for what you want is super hot and a way to start communicating a little bit more. I find that words are often easier than moaning at first.

If you want to start feeling more comfortable with making sounds, mimicking (but not mocking) your partner is a good way to start. Match their sounds while kissing or touching, and after a while, you’ll find yourself naturally reacting without thinking about it.

This leads me to dirty talk. It can absolutely be hot and sexy, but it’s also easy to get stuck in your head with the “right” things to say. A great way to start with dirty talk in bed is to articulate your wants out loud. “I want to touch you (insert place here),” or “I love when you do x,y,z” are solid openers. Asking your partner if they like what you’re doing to them is also a great jumping off point for dirty talk as well! Dirty talk also doesn’t have to be explicit to be hot. I’m a naturally sweary person, so the word “fuck” naturally finds its way into my bedroom talk, but that’s not always the case either.

Experiment with pitch and tones too. Like I said before, whispers can be so hot. Get on top of your partner and whisper in their ear what you want to do to them. Take a deep breath and speak on the exhale. That breathiness is sexy as hell, too. Scream into a pillow if you want to. The possibilities are endless.

Remember, this is an active practice. You’re not going to feel comfortable for a while. If it feels ridiculous, don’t be afraid to laugh! Laughing is also a sound. It doesn’t always have to be serious. My wife and I laugh during sex a lot, and it’s still incredibly hot. Just take your time! This is meant to be fun.


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

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

Join AF+!

Sa'iyda Shabazz

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

Sa'iyda has written 110 articles for us.

Jump Into Pen-and-Paper Roleplaying With These Free and Simple Systems

I’m gonna come out and say it: Nerds are hot. I’m a nerd. I’m hot. If you’re a nerd and you’re reading this, I think you’re hot. So it follows that we sexy, sexy nerds should try an archetypically nerdy activity: pen-and-paper roleplaying games (RPGs). I love them. I get to use my imagination, make friends, and do it all in a way that is ultra-budget friendly. The communities are usually queer-friendly, and I’ve made long-running friendships through these games.

I also know RPGs can be a little daunting if you’re not already ‘in.’ It’s committing to a whole new form of entertainment. It takes socializing, imagination and, worst of all, basic arithmetic. I totally get it. So if you’re at all interested in this awesome hobby and have those worries, I’m here to help.

Here’s a bunch of easy-to-learn roleplaying systems that are still packed with love and detail. They’re also better than cheap. They’re free. Which is more than I can say for board games nowadays.


Offworlders

Offworlders is about scoundrels and outcasts finding their way through the universe. You’ll need someone to be the Game Master (GM) and facilitate, and at least two other players up for sci-fi adventure. The game has really straightforward character creation and core mechanics, but leaves the world open-ended for the players to develop.

As my group’s forever GM, I adore Offworlders because it’s a tightly written ruleset that’s super easy to modify. I’m currently running it for my girlfriend and our bestie. I was able to rewrite the whole book for a unique setting and run it without fear. Offworlders is also very friendly to inexperienced GMs. The latter third of the 26-page book contains crisp guidance for GMs, and the whole game is wrapped in a single book. All you need are a few six-sided dice.

Offworlders is free, but you’re politely encouraged to send a few dollars to the creators if you like it. Get it from the official site, or DriveThruRPG.

Cairn

Cairn is a dark fantasy game about adventurers trying to make a living. If they’re really good at surviving the world, they might even make a difference. This is one of the best lightweight alternatives to Dungeons and Dragons out there. It captures the feel of fantasy adventure without a $60+ ticket price or piles of reading to catch up on. To play Cairn, you’ll need a GM (known as the Warden), player(s), and 20-sided dice. As always, the Warden should be up for running the adventures and adjudicating.

Just like Offworlders, Cairn shines because it’s easy to get into and not tied to an established universe. As long as everyone is cool with dark fantasy, the game can be whatever you make it. The game’s framework is easy to pick up but has all the structure you’d want to run investigation, horror, or epic adventures for a small group.

You can get Cairn from DriveThruRPG or the official site. The official site also has loads of extra resources and pre-packed adventures to jump into.

Her Odyssey

Her Odyssey is a solo journalling game about overcoming adversity and finding home. While all of the other entries need at least one other player, Her Odyssey is played by one. It’s part of a new generation of solo journalling games where one person crafts a story through journal entries. The game mechanics are resolved using a four-sided die and a standard deck of cards. Since the game’s medium is journaling, you’ll also want a way to record the wanderer’s story. A paper journal is traditional, nobody begrudges a digital option.

In Her Odyssey, you craft a character who is on a journey to find home. Each day, you draw a card from the deck to determine the challenge they’ll face. They’ll try to overcome the challenge using a set of simple attributes and a die roll. The outcome is written in the journal and the story continues. By the end of your solo adventure, you’ll be looking at an in-character account of the road home, or the path to damnation.

Solo journalling games like Her Odyssey are ideal for people who want to craft a story on their own. They can be a literary routine that turns into a compelling story, or a relaxing commuter pastime. Her Odyssey is free (or pay-what-you-want) on itch.io. The developers have even compiled a vibey playlist for inspiration when playing.

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

Join AF+!

Summer Tao

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

Summer has written 23 articles for us.

Pop Culture Fix: Lily Gladstone and Archie Panjabi to Star in Murder Mystery “Under the Bridge,” Gays Rejoice

Lily Gladstone, Archie Panjabi, and Riley Keough Team Up to Find Missing Teens in Under the Bridge

Riley Keough, Archie Panjabi, and Lily Gladstone from Hulu's Under the Bridge

KISS KISS KISS

Lily Gladstone and Riley Keough are set to star in an upcoming murder mystery Under the Bridge, which is made by the creators of Little Fires Everywhere. In the trailer, the teens at the center of the mystery say that the local police call them Bic Girls, like the lighters, because they’re disposable. But not to Lily Gladstone’s character, Cam Bentland! Cam is determined to solve this, and might get some help from Riley Keough’s Rebecca Godfrey, who has come to town to write a book. It’s based on a true story written by the real Rebecca Godfrey, who sadly passed away from lung cancer just after the series was announced. She is still credited as a producer on the show, and worked on the project for years leading up to her death.

On top of Lily Gladstone (metaphorically), LGBTQ+ fans will also delight to know Archie Panjabi will be there. She’ll play Suman Virk, and from the Wikipedia I do believe she might be the mother of the victim that kicked this investigation off. Now, I know Archie herself might not be queer (as far as I know) but she has become a queer icon playing characters like the badass bisexual Kalinda in The Good Fight, bisexual boss Jane Lesser in Personal Affairs, and probably-gay-but-never-confirmed-as-such Pinky Bhamra.

The show looks dark and mysterious and extremely my jam, so I personally can’t wait to check it out. Under the Bridge will be premiere on Hulu on April 17, but you can watch the trailer now:


More Links for You To Investigate

+ Fletcher continues to get messy on main with her ex Shannon Beveridge (and also was briefly involved in a cult? But she’s out now, apparently)

+ Reneé Rapp is going to Sesame Street to meet her childhood hero, Elmo

+ Rebel Wilson will be calling out Sacha Baron Cohen in her memoir for toxic behavior on set

+ The Last Thing He Told Me has been renewed for a second season despite originally being a limited series; here’s hoping Aisha Tyler reprises her “fun gay aunt” role

+ Check out the full story of Katy O’Brian, the body builder from Love Lies Bleeding

+ Someone has once again taken up the brave task of trying to make a Hollywood L Chart (and an accompanying TikTok) — it is not the first, and certainly won’t be the last

+ The next Mad Max movie about Furiosa will premiere at Cannes and… it HAS to be gay right? Right??

+ A book sharing stories from trans teens is coming out this year

+ Jack Black wants to do School of Rock 2: Electric Boogaloo which would be great, especially since a few of those kids turned out to be queer like Rivkah Reyes and Z Infante

+ Related, when checking to make sure I was spelling Rivkah Reyes correctly, I noticed that IMDb has a feature where if the credit doesn’t exactly match – like for some of Jennifer Love Hewitt’s old movie it might say “(as Love Hewitt)” because she used to be credited like that when she was trying to drop the Jennifer – but the person is trans, instead of deadnaming them, it can say “(as a different name)” which is neat. It definitely hasn’t blanket-applied to every trans person on IMDb, but it’s cool that it’s an option and hopefully anyone who wants it in place can make it so pretty easily.

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

Join AF+!

Valerie Anne

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

Valerie has written 543 articles for us.

6 Comments

  1. Maybe it’s because I’m both Canadian and old enough to remember when the Reena Virk case was in the media non-stop, but is it odd to anyone else to hear Under the Bridge described as a “murder mystery” rather than true crime?

    Maybe that’s not a huge difference in pure genre terms, but it feels a little off to me.

    • I had never heard of the case, but I think true crime stories can also be murder mysteries, especially when highly dramatized like this seems to be. Like I would never call a documentary about a crime a murder mystery, but this is decidedly not a documentary. Like you said, I think it’s mostly semantics.

Comments are closed.

“At Her Service” Is a Sweet Sapphic Romance With Crucial Lesbian Kickball Representation

The first thing I need to say about Amy Spalding‘s sapphic romance novel At Her Service, her second in the nascent Out in Hollywood series, is that it really nails its depiction of the the Los Angeles lesbian kickball scene. The unceasing group chat, the off-the-field hangs, the weird nicknames, the violently competitive nature of an allegedly non-competitive league: it’s all there. But what it gets right most acutely and more abstractly is the precise spirit that has led to the runaway success of recreational lesbian kickball in Los Angeles: queer women and non-binary people who are various degrees of desperate for community and an unceasing group chat. And although At Her Service is technically a rom-com, I was most drawn to its depiction of a young lesbian not just looking for love but also for friends and direction and an authentic place to grow within a town and an industry known for its superficiality.

Max, the 26-year-old heroine of At Her Service, wants her career at LA talent agency Exemplar to move forward. She wants Sadie, the bartender she’s crushing on, to return her affections. And, like so many L.A. homosexuals, she wants her life to more closely resemble The L Word episodes she binged as a budding queer in Kentucky. Her roommate, Chelsey, a popular influencer, thinks she’s got the answer for Max: Chelsey’s been offered a spon-con deal with self-actualization app “You Point Oh” but because Chelsey’s already living a bit of a dreamy life, she’d like Max to be the subject of her sponsored series. (Although Max did reap some material rewards and a free personal trainer from the deal, I was appalled that Chelsey did not offer Max a financial cut of what she was making for this sponcon deal! But that’s none of my business!) It turns out that with a little bit of support and introspection and a lot of being pushed out of her comfort zone, Max may in fact be capable of moving her own life forward in the directions of her dreams.

At Her Service can absolutely be read as a standalone novel, but Max getting her own book will be a particular delight for those who met her in the first book in the Out in Hollywood series, For Her Consideration, a delightful love story between rising lesbian movie star Ari Fox and Nina, the girl who writes emails for Exemplar’s clients, including Ari Fox. Max was the assistant to Joyce, the high-powered agent Nina also worked for. I obviously envisioned Ari Fox to be Kristen Stewart, as I do every time there is a lesbian movie star in a novel. (see also: Plain Bad Heroines). I plowed through For Her Consideration in a few days last year and had a fantastic time doing so. (Even though I did not understand this paparazzi-and-fandom-free version of Los Angeles in which Ari Fox’s romantic activities were seemingly rarely of interest to anybody in her physical vicinity!) I was therefore thrilled when Heather told me Spalding had a new book coming out soon, this one centered on Max. When Nina and Ari show up periodically in Max’s story, you can really feel the pieces of this world taking shape, and I’m eager for future books!

Honestly, until last year I’d overlooked this entire genre of literature. You know the kind — bright covers, illustrated lesbians or gay men eyeing each other with Low-Stakes Romance Energy, handwriting-inspired typography. Then, I picked up Red, White and Royal Blue and realized that in fact, reading a queer romance novel was similar to lying down on a cloud and drinking a sugar soda, and who doesn’t want to do that? Sure, sometimes they’re too cheesy for my dark soul and I’m often surprised to read that a character was cracking up or otherwise succumbing to unbearable fits of laughter after a line that barely registered to me as a joke. But they’re also just so fun, and so gay! And I wish more books like this had existed when I was younger!

At Her Service and For Her Consideration are both fantastic sugar sodas. Spalding’s writing is engaging and well-paced, and all of Max’s layers and contradictions, as well as her journey towards self-actualization, felt real and earned. I can imagine this book will be especially relatable to queers in their twenties and to any human being who, like me, has such a loud internal monologue of insecurity that they lack any awareness whatsoever of how they are actually perceived by others (for better or for worse!). Max and her crush, Sadie, are also both masculine lesbians, a pairing sadly rarely represented in sapphic fiction. I was rooting for Max with my whole heart all the way through.

While Max wishes her life was more like The L Word, it’s actually not unlike Generation Q — just a little bit more down-to-earth and a little bit lighter, and with a more traditional adherence to the passage of time. It’s also a more sanitized version of gay Los Angeles than I see in my own life and on Showtime, but that’s typical of the genre regardless of setting, and it didn’t distract or bother me — if anything, it calmed me. (But ask me for my 10-minute monologue on the absolutely maddeningly cloying version of New York City portrayed One Last Stop!!!) 

Still, At Her Service has got so much of what actually worked on Generation Q: ambitious twentysomethings working Hollywood-adjacent jobs and earning wildly variant incomes, a bar where everybody knows your name, seemingly unattainable crushes and the looming specter of social media. It’s peppered with lively, specific details that reflect a deep knowledge of the city and history and its gays (including, much to my personal delight, a reference to smash hit podcast To L and Back) and, most importantly, how we like to name our kickball teams. Spalding’s Los Angeles is charming and serendipitous and sexy and heartwarming, and I think we all deserve a bit of that sunshine.

Buy At Her Service.

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

Join AF+!
Related:

Riese

Riese is the 41-year-old Co-Founder of Autostraddle.com as well as an award-winning writer, video-maker, LGBTQ+ Marketing consultant and aspiring cyber-performance artist who grew up in Michigan, lost her mind in New York and now lives in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in nine books, magazines including Marie Claire and Curve, and all over the web including Nylon, Queerty, Nerve, Bitch, Emily Books and Jezebel. She had a very popular personal blog once upon a time, and then she recapped The L Word, and then she had the idea to make this place, and now here we all are! In 2016, she was nominated for a GLAAD Award for Outstanding Digital Journalism. She's Jewish and has a cute dog named Carol. Follow her on twitter and instagram.

Riese has written 3164 articles for us.

4 Comments

  1. I am intrigued by the book and also VERY much want that 10 minute monologue on sanitised new york!!!! And I say this as someone who really enjoyed One Last Stop regardless

      • ok so with the caveat that i read it two years ago, i remember i really enjoyed the jane storyline and all the time travel stuff, and jane’s story about her past, and i was deeply invested in all of that! but the rest of august’s storyline drove me a bit bananas, it seemed like she lived on some kind of queer sesame street (except without the roots in her community like they had on sesame street) where she’s instant friends with her cadre of super eclectic and eager-to-befriend-her queer neighbors and gets a job at this magical local pancake place that has deep ties to its community but somehow is willing to employ her, a person who literally never goes to work and just showed up with nothing special about her compared to the 500 other people on her block who also need a waitressing job, and idk, it felt like a fantasy written by someone who saw RENT a lot!!

        on goodreads there’s a review by a user named Nim that breaks down a lot of what’s frustrating about the book to her as ‘a bisexual nonwhite new yorker with roots in flatbush’ and i feel like probably if we are being honest and we are, she knows what she’s talking about better than i do

  2. “I wish more books like this had existed when I was younger!”

    This is always my overriding statement when I’m breezing through these kinds of books, and I am very glad you have discovered the high drama of the low stakes romances. As I am so more worldly when it comes to these books (I think I started reading them a whole 3 years ago) I can reveal that the covers used to be so much worse!

    Anyway, I will definitely put this book on my to read list. I’ve read one of the author’s YA books and wasn’t totally grabbed, but there’s no way I can resist a lesbian romance featuring niche sports.

Comments are closed.

The Anjali Chakra x Sufi Malik Breakup and Cheating Confession, Explained

Queer South Asian couple Anjali Chakra and Sufi Malik, who went viral several years ago for their gorgeous photos together, have set sapphic group chats ablaze this weekend by announcing not only a called off wedding but also a cheating scandal. Even friends I have who were previously unaware of Anjali Chakra and Sufi Malik have suddenly become aware of their breakup.

Who Are Anjali Chakra and Sufi Malik?

Anjali Chakra (@anjalichakra) and Sufi Malik (@sufi.sun) are two queer California-based influencers. Malik has worked as an artist and teacher, and Chakra has worked as an event planner. They met in the place where many great lesbian relationships of our time began: tumblr. It took seven years before they began officially dating. Anjali slid into Sufi’s DMs according to a Business Insider profile of the pair: “I DM’d Sufi one day asking if we could talk about her experience as a queer South Asian woman, and she agreed,” Anjali said in the profile. They met in person in New York and started dating in 2018.

In 2019, Anjali and Sufi were in an ad campaign for Borrow the Bazaar, a company that rents out South Asian outfits for special events. (Fun Fact: I browsed Borrow the Bazaar while planning my own wedding.) Sufi and Anjali had two weddings to attend in the same weekend (I imagine being in a double desi relationship often leads to this predicament!) and agreed to do the shoot in exchange for free rentals.

When the shoot’s photographer Sarowar Ahmed tweeted out the photos, they promptly went viral. Sufi is Muslim and Pakistani, and Anjali is Hindu and Indian, and the underrepresentation of queer South Asian couples in media and art led to an outpouring of enthusiasm and joy for the couple’s love.

The couple went viral again a week later when Sufi posted anniversary photos of both women posing romantically in lehengas on Instagram.

In 2022, the couple got engaged, with Anjali posting it was the easiest yes of her life. Presumably, up until recently, wedding planning was going smoothly. On January 1 for New Year’s, they posted they were in their bridal era. Both have been posting updates about the wedding planning process, which as a recent queer South Asian bride brought me genuine joy!

As of this weekend, the wedding has recently been called off. Which brings us to…

Why Did Anjali Chakra and Sufi Malik Break Up?

Yesterday, Sufi dropped a shocking Instagram text post on her grid. It reads:

Hey everyone, there has been a major turn of events in my relationship with Anjali. I made an unrecognizable mistake of betrayal by cheating on her a few weeks before our wedding. I’ve hurt her tremendousbly, beyond my own understanding. I’m owning up to my mistake and will continue to do so. I understand the gravity of the situation and can only ask relentlessly for forgiveness, from Anjali and Allah.

I’ve hurt the people I love and care about the most through my actions, including our family and friends; our community that I cherish. Thank you so much to everyone who supported us all these years, we owe everything to you all. We ask you all for privacy and respect at this time.

With humility,
Sufi

The post was coupled with a second text statement on Anjali’s feed, which reads:

Sufi & I have been blessed to spend the last 5+ years together in a loving and beautiful partnership that we have been so honored to share with all of you.

Since the beginning, your outpouring of love and support has played such a special part in our journey and we will continue to carry that love with us moving forward.

This may come as a shock, but our journey is now shifting. We have decided to call off our wedding and end our relationship due to infidelity committed by Sufi.

As we close this chapter, I wish for absolutely no negativity to be shown towards Sufi, and that you respect this difficult decision. What we have shared has been so full of love and nothing short of magical — I will choose to remember it this way.

All my love,
Anjali

How Are People Reacting to Anjali and Sufi’s Breakup?

Let me tell ya: IN NOT VERY NICE WAYS. Listen, I am the last person to pen a defense of cheating, and that’s not what I’m going to do here. But the backlash against Sufi — especially given that Anjali herself has called for no negativity to be shown towards Sufi — has been outsized and mean. There’s no way for us to know the details of people’s relationships, and the way people love to gobble up the scandal of infidelity when it comes to public figures and celebrities often lacks nuance and empathy. I say this as someone who devoured Scandoval discourse!

It’s complicated, because by posting about the cheating in the first place, Anjali and Sufi are definitely opening the floodgates for people to judge and react to the infidelity and the breakup. Calling off a wedding is an intensely personal decision, but there’s also of course a ton of pressure on the couple to be transparent and honest with their followers who have been inspired by their relationship. But it’s possible to be inspired by a couple’s love without fully projecting onto them and hinging your own feelings and desires onto them. The breakup and the cheating doesn’t change the fact that I felt moved by Anjali’s posts about shopping for her wedding lehenga.

These are real people who were in a real relationship, and even though they often created content based around their relationship, that still doesn’t give people unfettered access to scrutinize or demonize. Cheating is a betrayal, but it is not a betrayal of anyone outside of the people it directly impacts.

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

Join AF+!

Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya

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

Kayla has written 791 articles for us.

7 Comments

  1. Thank you for this summary, I have so far been trying to piece it together through pithy memes shared by my more chronically online friends. 😂

  2. This is the flipside of choosing to live your life online. You can only exert limited control over how followers react when things go wrong.. The whole nature of parasocial relationships is that people have invested so much they feel betrayed when the public figure does wrong act accordingly. A backlash is inevitable and it seems naive to expect anything different.

  3. I spend way too much time on TikTok watching lesbian content and they never popped up on my fyp, that’s weird. I just hope she cheated with a woman, we don’t want this to have an even bigger effect on south asian queer women.

    • It shouldn’t matter whether she cheated with a woman or a man. It wouldn’t make her sexuality less valid if it was a guy. There isn’t a superior way to be queer.

  4. muslimah cheat because family doesn’t recognize and she in ways no believe her courtship is real. internally hating oneself and cheat because not real is sadly common in our culture. lesbians in love sometime it can be so hard and even some acceptance from family we still have feeling that we are just friends but more and a little wrong. it’s not wrong we are ok but yes cheat often and it’s not ok

  5. If you don’t want any negativity to be shown towards your partner you obviously shouldn’t put out a statement announcing she cheated, that is so wildly disingenuous lol

    • Yes, it’s fine to drop the truth bomb and wanting to hurt her publicly but don’t do it while saying you don’t want her to suffer negative consequences.

Comments are closed.

Will “Euphoria” Season Three Ever Happen? Show’s Future Uncertain With Another Delay

It’s official. Euphoria season three is delayed once again.

During a recent press tour, Sydney Sweeney mentioned her next project was the third season of Euphoria. Could it really be happening? Well, turns out the answer is… no. Or, at least, not yet.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, filming has been delayed and the cast is free to pursue other opportunities. This doesn’t mean it won’t happen eventually. In fact, in their statement HBO insists: “HBO and Sam Levinson remain committed to making an exceptional third season.” But it’s easy to view this delay as a step toward cancellation.

The pandemic already caused a big gap between season one and the much-maligned season two. And then the SAG and WGA strikes caused another delay between season two and season three. In the mean time, the show’s young cast blew up.

Zendaya was already a star, but between Dune and next month’s Challengers, that star only continues to rise. If Euphoria was her tool to convince the world she was a serious actress, Zendaya and her two Emmys have succeeded. She doesn’t need the show anymore. Nor do fellow stars Hunter Schafer, Sydney Sweeney, and Jacob Elordi whose IMDb pages are growing at rapid rates. Even adult actor Colman Domingo has gone from respected in the industry to A-list Oscar nominee.

It’s not uncommon for actors on a hit show to became mega famous and still return to their starmaking role. But Euphoria‘s problems are not merely its cast’s schedules. Barbie Ferriera is already confirmed not to return after conflict with Sam Levinson. And, of course, the show was fundamentally altered by Angus Cloud’s tragic death.

And, on top of all that, Sam Levinson has faced much critique over his failed show The Idol and reports of poor working conditions on Euphoria. There’s a world with no pandemic and no strikes where Euphoria had a successful and complete four seasons before its actors got too busy and the reality of the working conditions were revealed. But that’s not the world we’re living in and in the real world it seems like maybe Euphoria has run its course.

Sometimes a show is meant to launch half a dozen careers and a makeup trend and then quietly end. And so the question is not only whether Euphoria season three will happen. We also have to ask: should it?

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

Join AF+!
Related:

Drew Burnett Gregory

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

Drew Burnett has written 498 articles for us.

3 Comments

  1. i’m already over it. the end of season two was a mess, and there’s no point in going forward without Angus Cloud. i think it’s time to call it

  2. I really hope it’s canceled. Season 1 was addictive, but Sam Levinson’s ego made season 2 unwatchable, especially by the end. I think I’d only be willing to watch more if there was an entire writing team and not a solo Levinson project.

Comments are closed.

15 Tips for Creating Accessible Gatherings and Anti-Ableist Spaces

Often when I leave my apartment, my accessibility needs become an instant obstacle. I plan around — and stress about — things like my ability to open a door while navigating a scooter through it, my ability to eat at a restaurant, and my ability to get into and move around buildings.

I know that I will inevitably be excluded from things that other people have easy access to and my life will be made more inconvenient and difficult because of it. I once spent an hour trapped in a Washington, DC metro station because the elevator was turned off – not broken, just off. I had a week-long work retreat where I couldn’t eat any of the provided food and had to order and pay for my own delivery even though I was assured they would be able to accommodate me. I have missed out on concerts, pride parades, family weddings, funerals, and more because the event plans simply failed to include people like me.

So when I recently made plans to visit queer couple friends and they actually provided me with a range of accessibility information without prompting I felt seen, validated, and valued as a whole person. I want to live in a world where disabled people get to experience that feeling often at all sorts of events ranging from small social gatherings to large public events. That will not happen unless abled people make the effort to learn, proactively plan, and communicate about accessibility.

This list of considerations is just a starting point, a resource to remind us to listen, learn, and try. It’s not about perfection — it’s about showing up with open hearts and open minds.


1. Ask about language and needs

Just as some LGBTQ people regularly use the word queer and some find it offensive, disabled people have different language preferences as well. Some people prefer to be called disabled and some prefer people with a disability. Some people will still say handicapped and while I would say that is outdated and offensive, if a friend tells you they prefer to be called handicapped then you should follow their lead. If you’re planning a large event such as a pride celebration it’s best to reach out to a local disability non-profit to get guidance on the local preferences in your community. It’s also okay to specifically ask about the accessibility needs of your guests or local community. For example, when I got married I included access needs as one of the questions on my RSVP form.

2. Ensure physical access

Can everyone get inside the building, into the bathrooms, into the places where food is? Are there wheelchair accessible ramps, elevators, and wide doorways? Preferably the ramp will not be in a side alley next to the dumpster. If the answer to these things is no because you’re planning something at your house then the best option is to communicate. For example, let folks know how many steps there are to reach the bathroom and the front door. If the answer to these things is no and you are planning a larger public event then you should find a different venue.

3. Confirm accessible parking and transit

Are there accessible parking spaces and is there enough space to unload a mobility device like a wheelchair or scooter? Can you reserve a spot in your driveway for a guest with mobility difficulty? Is it transit accessible, or is it next to the metro station that doesn’t have an elevator and only has stairs and escalators?

4. Welcome service animals

Understand that service animals are medically necessary and often life saving. They need to be welcome and will need a rest area to take breaks and use the bathroom. Service animals do not need a registration or certification. That is a myth. Service dogs do need to be trained to do specific tasks to assist one disabled person with their disability, but that doesn’t need to be through any special program.

5. Accommodate diverse communication preferences

Offer assistive listening devices, captions and/or ASL and Braille for attendees as often as possible. For example, use live captions for video meetings. Respect and accommodate diverse communication preferences, such as written communication or alternative communication methods. Use visual and auditory alerts for important announcements. Use clear and visible signage with large fonts and high contrast for easy navigation. Consider using the dyslexia-friendly font in any designs. Verbally describe visual materials if there is a program, menu, or presentation.

6. Be COVID conscious

Many disabled people are still masking, sticking to mostly outdoor activities and getting regular vaccines. Of course, the disabled community is not a monolith and you will find anti-vaxxers who protest mask mandates too. However, people with disabilities often have underlying health conditions or compromised immune systems, placing them at higher risk of severe illness, death, or complications from COVID-19. As such, measures to prevent the spread of the virus, such as wearing masks, practicing physical distancing, testing, use air filters, and increasing air flow, are essential not only for personal safety but also for protecting the health and well-being of the disability community. Be sure to communicate the steps you will take to keep COVID at bay and consider inclusive options like outdoor dining that ensure that even immune compromised people can fully participate. Make sure these outdoor spaces are accessible as well (grass can be difficult for wheelchairs.)

7. Provide a variety of seating

Include options for seats with armrests and back support and seats that are easy to transfer into from a wheelchair. If you are planning a large event consider bringing in ergonomic seating. Reserve accessible seating areas with good sightlines for attendees who use wheelchairs or scooters because it is hard to see if you are seated and someone is standing up in front of you.

8. Allow for rest and breaks

Designate quiet areas for individuals who may need a break from noise, medical symptoms, or sensory overload.

9. Pay attention to temperature control

Many chronic illnesses and neurodivergent conditions cause temperature regulation challenges. It may not always be possible to control the temperature, but take steps to make people as comfortable as possible. Cooling stations, fans, shade, water stations, and misters can help in the heat and blankets, heat lamps, fire pits, and warming products like Hot Hands can help with cold.

10. Supply food options

Inaccessible or inadequate food options can create serious risks for individuals with allergies, sensitivities, and medical special diet needs, limiting their ability to participate fully in social gatherings, community events, and public spaces. Food is an accessibility need that’s crucial for ensuring equitable access. Provide a range of options and consider common allergens and sensitivities like tree nuts, soy, gluten, sugar, and shellfish. Labels food clearly. Consider making sure that people with food restrictions have first or exclusive access to these foods because some foods, like gluten-free and sugar-free items, can be trendy in the diet industry and may be taken by people who do not need them in the same way that someone who has Celiac or Diabetes might need these foods.

11. Plan inclusive activities

Remember that tasks or activities that may seem effortless for you can present significant challenges for others. For instance, I once participated in a work retreat where the only group social activity was a hike. I couldn’t participate because of my mobility limitations and I felt very alienated while I sat alone at the retreat center for hours and missed out on group photos and experiences. Being mindful of such differences in abilities can help ensure inclusivity in planning activities and events. If there is a large group, offering a variety of activities can help ensure there is an option for everyone.

12. Be prepared for an emergency

Have a plan in place for emergency situations and ensure it is communicated to and inclusive of the needs of all guests, including those with disabilities who are often overlooked. Ensure that first aid supplies are easily accessible and clearly labeled. For large events, have on-site medical care. Provide a secure and accessible area for attendees to store medications if needed, including medications that need to be refrigerated. If you are planning a large event be sure that safety plans for things like earthquakes, fires, and other emergencies include plans for disabled folks.

13. Train people in anti-ableism

Train any staff or helpers on ableism, disability etiquette (like do not touch or move a person’s wheelchair without asking) and how to assist guests with disabilities. Take time to learn about these things if you are hosting as well .

14. Consider sensory needs

Sensory considerations such as lighting, sound levels, and smells are an accessibility issue. These factors can profoundly impact individuals with sensory sensitivities, sensory processing disorders, autism spectrum disorder, migraines, PTSD, and various other neurodiverse conditions. Reduce scents and loud noises and use natural lighting and lamps (rather than overhead lighting) as much as possible.

15. Provide detailed information up front

It’s crucial to be mindful of these considerations and communicate about them. Communicating about accessibility enables individuals to make informed decisions about their participation and allows for the implementation of necessary accommodations or adjustments. Include accessibility statements in event information or simply send a text or email to your guests.

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

Join AF+!
Related:

Katie Reilly

Katie is a disabled queer writer, creator, and activist who spends her days fighting online misogyny, hate, and disinfo and her evening playing with her dog, designing for her Etsy, reading 5 books at once, or collecting too many kinds of tea. Find her across social media at @imkatiereilly.

Katie has written 17 articles for us.

4 Comments

  1. Thank you for this! And thanks for including being covid-cautious as an accessibility need!

Comments are closed.