Can Straight Women Say ‘Lesbo’ and Other Questions From ‘House of Stassi’

When I pressed play on the new reality series House of Stassi, I had plenty of expectations that were ultimately satisfied, for better or worse. I expected vintage Stassi Schroeder meltdowns (check!). I expected Stassi to largely talk around the reasons she was cancelled and fired by Vanderpump Rules while taking empty stabs at accountability (check!). I expected the fourth wall to be practically nonexistent (check!). What I did not expect? A whole bunch of lesbos.

Or, more accurately, a whole bunch of lesbians and bisexual women, but we shall return to that term lesbos in a bit. First, a primer on what the fuck House of Stassi is. It is more or less a spinoff of the original Vanderpump Rules, which was a spinoff of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. It doesn’t technically bill itself as a spinoff, as the parent production company has changed hands: Vanderpump and RHOBH were classic Bravo series, and House of Stassi is on Freeform/Hulu or, in other words, made by Disney (hence the nonexistent fourth wall, which seems to be the preference for Hulu reality programs). But House of Stassi is from a lineage of reality and is built upon the premise that its star (Stassi) is returning home (to reality). If that seems like shaky foundation for a series, well, it is. Fortunately, fucked-up family, friend, and marital relations swoop in to reinforce that foundation.

I’ve written about both Vanderpump Rules and the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills before as part of my Bravo Dyke coverage, in which I have spent years spinning the web of sapphic shenanigans that have occured on these programs and their ilk. But House of Stassi easily out-lesbos them both, even if said lesbos are not the primary focus of the series.

Yes, House of Stassi is a house full of queer women. First, there are the queer women I already know: Katie Maloney and, briefly, Ariana Madix. If you’ve been reading my web of Bravo Dyke coverage through the years, you might recognized Katie Maloney from previous hits like Is Katie Maloney in Her Bisexual Era or Just Wearing Cargo Pants? (She was indeed both in her bisexual era and also wearing cargo pants.) Katie previously starred on Vanderpump Rules with Stassi, and the first episode of House of Stassi centers Stassi’s attempts to reconnect with her former close friend and castmate years after she effectively ghosted the relationship. But Stassi needs Katie to be her friend again, and Stassi needs Katie to be a part of the show, and she is determined to convince us those things are unrelated to one another. Katie does indeed agree to a reconnection with Stassi and becomes a part of the House of Stassi cast.

A couple episodes in, we see Katie with her business partner Ariana Madix, who is no longer best known for her multi-year stint on Vanderpump Rules, and I love that for her! You probably know her as the host of Love Island USA, a show I refuse to watch, but again, love that for her! Since I refuse to watch Love Island, I’m unsure if the topic of her bisexuality has come up, so in case you did not previously know this: She is bi! She came out on Vanderpump Rules, and I wrote about it. (Wow, I’ve been writing about bisexuals on reality television for a very long time.) Anyway, Ariana only appears in this one scene of House of Stassi, which takes place in Something About Her, the sandwich shop she and Katie own together and so functions as self-promotion, which is the only reason I can really see Ariana being part of anything on which the words Vanderpump Rules are ever uttered.

(Can someone who has been to Something About Her tell me if it was good? I just feel like a sandwich shop owned by two bisexuals has to be good.)

And now for the queer women who I previously did not know: House of Stassi introduces us to Taylor Strecker, Stassi’s best friend of about a decade who has not previously been on reality television. Taylor realized she was gay after her marriage to her ex-husband ended. She is a self-described “late-in-life lesbian,” and I’ll be honest, it took me a second to warm to the way Taylor speaks about queerness and gay sex in particular, but I’m chalking up a lot of her awkwardness to being new-ish to gay and very new to reality. I think sometimes she’s maybe just making jokes that aren’t landing? I also think production doesn’t really know what to do with Taylor, only allowing her to exist in relation to Stassi, who I suppose the show is named for.

Taylor’s wife Teddy, who is expecting their first baby, also appears in the series, and every time Taylor and Teddy are on screen, I want more! (At the very end of a scene in “Til Drag Do Us Part,” it’s revealed Teddy has a tendency to kiss drag queens?! I have follow-up questions!)

Taylor and Teddy’s main conflict together in the season revolves around Taylor’s decision to stay in Los Angeles for work while a very pregnant Teddy flies solo back to NYC. Taylor could be risking missing the birth of her child due to her work with Stassi (which includes not just the show but also a podcast they do together). Taylor just happens to be having some career breaks (the timing of which you can never plan!) at the same time as Teddy is about to birth their child, something that does take a lot of planning, especially when it happens between lesbians. No one is really in the wrong or right here; it’s just shitty timing. Reality television prefers more digestible and easily summarized conflicts (typically where there is a clear villain) though, so we don’t spend very much time dissecting this.

Truly, the most interesting considerations throughout House of Stassi are on the notions of gender roles, labor, parenting, careers: Who gets to choose their career over family? Stassi often chooses work over parenting while her husband Beau finds himself doing much of the caretaking and housekeeping (I mean, alongside their hired nanny and other staff, let’s be so for real). Stassi doesn’t forbid Beau from going back to work but doesn’t really want him to either. Stassi knows what you’re already thinking: If Stassi were a man and Beau the wife, this arrangement would be more encoded in what’s considered “traditional” American life and those who ascribe to those norms wouldn’t bat an eye. Indeed, it is Stassi’s long-time friend Kristina Kelly (also a former Vanderpump Rules castmate) who relates most to Beau as a stay at home parent who often feels undervalued. But is it really feminism to just flip the gender roles? Societal expectations here are not necessarily bucked but rather just perfectly inverted, and when Stassi’s friends organize a poorly planned and poorly executed “Friendtervention” with the intention of bettering Stassi and Beau’s marriage, they lack the nuance and critical thinking skills to articulate this in any clear way.

But wow have I wandered far from my point on the queer women (fitting, as the show often changes the subject from queerness every time we’re just about to get somewhere interesting with it). So, we have Taylor and Teddy. But we also have Georgi, Stassi’s sister. Georgi’s living arrangement immediately struck me as queer or at least non-normative: Until she’s later able to get an apartment of her own, she spends the first parts of the season living in the same room — same bed, even! — as Beau’s sister Georgia. Yes, Stassi and Beau’s sisters are also roommates! And even if this is just for the sake of production, I don’t know, you can’t tell me that isn’t some queer ass family structure anarchy. Their mirrored names really seal the deal.

Georgi, as it turns out, is bisexual, too. She was also, like Taylor, previously married to a man. She now is open to dating anyone, and in “Staycation from Hell”, the queerest episode of the season, she has Katie, Taylor, and Teddy wingwoman her at lesbian night at the queer bar Mother Lode, where she talks to all sorts of women, many of them tall and conventionally attractive in a sort of boring way, which is exactly what I experienced in lesbian nightlife while living in LA in my early twenties. She ultimately does not find a girlfriend — or even a hookup, to our knowledge.

We have a range of queer women experiences represented in House of Stassi: Taylor and Teddy as the married lesbians navigating pregnancy and impending parenthood through career shifts; Katie Maloney in her post-divorce bisexual era, which has her DJing at Emo Night and in what I have assumed is a bi4bi relationship with a man? (right? that short king with bright pink hair is some flavor of queer, no?); Georgi as another bisexual divorcée who is eager to meet a tall lady lover at lesbian night (while, meanwhile, hooking up with her sister’s husband’s best friend Rob, it should be noted). We might not necessarily get a bunch of girl-on-girl makeouts, but the queer drama threaded throughout the series is flavorful, if subtle and quickly crowded out by the straight people who have no interest in those flavors.

This is best demonstrated in “The Ungrateful Wench”, in which it is revealed Georgi likes girls. Katie announces the upcoming lesbian night and refers to herself as The Lesbian Plug, which rubs Taylor the wrong way as one of the lesbians sitting on the couch during the scene. Kristina Kelly pulls Taylor outside for a one-on-one conversation, which Taylor starts by saying she feels like it’s weird the lesbians aren’t hosting lesbian night and instead it’s being planned by the bisexuals. Juicy! Intracommunity drama! This could go a whole bunch of directions, many of them messy! Give it to me! But Kristina both doesn’t want to talk about that and also doesn’t know how to talk about that. (Hilariously, in the early days of Vanderpump Rules, I was in that obnoxious Baby Gay phase of projecting queerness onto women if they so much as glanced at each other, and this included an ongoing theory that Kristina Kelly was in love with Stassi.) We quickly move along, Taylor’s frustrations quickly over-ridden by Kristina’s petty complaints.

Earlier in the season, Taylor plans an entire birthday party where the theme is GAY, hosted at drag brunch hotspot Hamburger Mary’s. But the central scene at this GAY-THEMED BIRTHDAY PARTY is…a reconciliation between Beau and Rob after their falling out over football. I can’t think of a more on-the-nose example of queerness being overshadowed by trivial straight shenanigans.

The only drama dealt with at lesbian night has nothing to do with queerness at all. To Katie “Lesbian Plug” Maloney’s credit, she does bring former Vanderpump Rules cast member Dayna along, and Dayna recently came out as a lesbian. So I think Taylor was jumping the lesbian shark by accusing Katie of lesbian erasure or co-opting lesbianism or whatever she would have gotten into with Kristina during their one-on-one conversation. To be clear: I didn’t want to hear Taylor out because I necessarily would agree with what she said. I believe bisexuals should feel more than welcome at lesbian night, obviously! And bisexuals can be Lesbian Plugs, too, probably, though I’m unclear on what exactly being a Lesbian Plug is (just knowing other lesbians? in Los Angeles? that doesn’t seem to be that special of a skill?). I wanted to hear her out because even if it got messy or problematic, it would indicate that House of Stassi offers more mess than just the mess we expect.

It’s time to address the elephant in the headline. The lesbo of it all. Stassi asks Katie over drinks if she’s allowed to use the word lesbo. Katie confirms she knows plenty of people who use and like the word lesbo, but they are for the most part lesbians. So Stassi wonders: Can she, a straight girl, say “lesbo”? She phones a friend: her lesbian best friend Taylor, naturally. And Taylor says yes, sure, Stassi specifically has her permission to say the word “lesbo.” I imagine many readers will disagree about this permission granted, and sure, I am ideologically opposed to the idea of straight women — perhaps Stassi especially, given her history of straight white girl bullshit — wielding the word “lesbo” whenever they want, but I actually found this moment strangely endearing and real. It has been a very long time since I had a straight best friend (they all, eventually, came out), but I can imagine privately telling a straight bestie she could say lesbo in certain contexts, especially as a term of endearment for me. I don’t know, y’all! I sometimes struggled to really understand the Taylor/Stassi friendship throughout the series, and this was one of the rare moments where something real and intimate shone through, goofy as it may be.

So no, I don’t think Stassi Schroeder should be allowed to say lesbo. But I do not fault Taylor here. I think she answered in the way she would have if cameras were not rolling. That’s the paradox of reality television though: Sometimes being “real” means actually reinforcing a potentially harmful message. If this phone call had truly happened without cameras rolling, it wouldn’t really have an impact beyond their lives; since it did happen with cameras up, I suppose it could tacitly give straight women permission to say “lesbo” or deepen a queer viewer’s internalized lesbophobia. If I sound like I’m writing in circles about this, it’s because I am. This isn’t even a full storyline or fleshed out scene, and yet I’m twisting into rhetorical pretzels over this supposedly insignificant “lesbo” moment. I just think it’s the core of the show’s contradictory queer representation: There are many queers here, but they are forced into formulas that do not really allow for authenticity, and when they are being “real,” it comes at a cost.

Production doesn’t really give Taylor enough screen-time for any of her storylines to land, perhaps because queerness is continually relegated to the background. That background positioning is confusing, because queerness would make for a very useful lens for deepening the series’ questions on parenting, family, and self-discovery. I am asking too much of the Hulu reality television realm though, which platforms the Mormon Wives (hey, at least one of them came out and has a girlfriend, though!).

I am also asking too much of Stassi, and I’ve been doing so for a decade (in 2016, I boldly suggested she functioned on Vanderpump Rules in a way that mirrored Alicia Florrick’s arc on The Good Wife). Stassi controls the narrative on House of Stassi, and you feel her hands pushing people exactly where she wants them. Only what she’s interested in makes it to the surface, even when that’s to her own detriment. In theory, she loses narrative control in the final episode when all her friends confront her on the Queen Mary to tell her she needs to be nicer to Beau. Even that feels like a self-fulfilling prophecy rather than a full-on mutiny: Did the Friendtervention backfire or did it do exactly what it was meant to do, sending Stassi into a meltdown that produces the exact entertainment she wants to deliver, clinching a second season.

OH WAIT: CHRISHELL STAUSE ALSO SHOWS UP? In the same episode that features Lesbian Night, Stassi sits down with Chrishell to discuss renting out a mansion property for the staycation she’s planning for her friends, which will double as a Taylor/Teddy babymoon. Chrishell was paid to do a scene and we can’t even get her in the same room as the other late-in-life lesbian on the show?! What a completely wasted opportunity. Chrishell has navigated not only coming out but doing so after many seasons of starring in reality television, entailing a complete shift in the ways she presents herself to viewers and how she talks about relationships and identity. A conversation between her and Taylor would be fascinating on so many levels, especially given the absence of a fourth wall throughout the season.

We’ll have to wait and see about that second season renewal. I’m hearing reviews have been quite negative, though I’ve avoided them so I could write this overlong pronouncement on the surprising queerness present in House of Stassi. I do think a lot of the questions raised by the first season are compelling; the answers just end up rushed and tidy and, as often is the case for reality television aimed at the masses, there’s a massive disconnect between what production wants to highlight and what makes for surprising storytelling. Allowing the queer cast members to deviate too much from the formulas of the genre is likely considered too risky, and reality television is diametrically opposed to risk.