October 2021: What’s New, Gay and Streaming on Netflix, Hulu, HBO Max, Amazon Prime, Peacock and Apple TV

Well it’s October, a spooky little month for us all to stare at our television and say “where are the gay things? If I turn on Netflix, what will I find there? Or Amazon?!?!?!! Or HULU!?!?! What about HBO Max?? I am here to tell you!


Netflix Content for Gals, Gays and Theys in October 2021

The Baby-Sitters Club: Season 2 – October 11

Season Two of this sweet lil family series based on the YA novels that inspired lesbian entrepreneurship worldwide will be offering a lot more queer representation than the first but I cannot tell you exactly how yet. On a somehow unrelated note, Mallory and Jessie are finally joining the BSC. But with the new school year you can anticipate “booming business, new relationships, personal journeys and important lessons.”

Shameless: Season 11 (Showtime) –  October 11

The final season of this program, which managed to end its run with more LGBTQ+ female characters than any non-LGBTQ-focused television program ever, took place right in the gut of the pandemic and saw our lesbian lead Debbie make a series of absurd and frustrating choices! We also got a lot of gay Sandy Milkovich though, so.

In the Dark: Season 3 (The CW) – October 14

“In the Dark’s third season giveth – in the form of a new queer character, Leslie played by Marianne Rendón from Imposters – and it taketh away – by way of resident lesbian Jess being sidelined right off the bat. It’s a bonkers show with a band of problematic faves but it does technically have queer characters, so. Here we are.” – Valerie

Sex, Love and Goop: Limited Series – October 21

It appears that one of the six couples who have signed up to talk to Gwyneth Paltrow about their sex lives is a lesbian couple, and I wish them all the best.

Sex Unzipped – October 26

Saweetie is hosting a comedy special that focuses on “sex positivity” while featuring sex experts, horny puppets of “all sex and sexualities that exist in real life” and talking heads. Special guests include Dominique Jackson, Mae Martin, Sam Jay and Trixie Mattel.

Wentworth: Season 8B/Season 9 (Foxtel) – October 27

The final ten episodes of our beloved Wentworth, named Wentworth: The Final Sentence, will find Joan recovered her memory and assuming the identity of Kath Maxwell while attempting to control her desire to seek vengeance against Vera, Will and Jake. Allie returns to Wentworth and queer characters Marie Winter and Ruby Mitchell will also exist.


Gay Content on Amazon Prime Video for October 2021

My Name is Pauli Murray (2021)  – October 1

Non-binary Black Lawyer, Episcopal priest, poet and American Civil Rights Activist Pauli Murray — whose most significant romantic relationships were with women — was instrumental in arguing the equal protection cause of the 14th amendment outlawed sex-based discrimination. Analyzed in retrospect, Murray was aided in this perspective by their gender “in-betweenness,” and this amazing human is the focus of this special documentary.

Hightown: Season One (Starz) – October 1

Monica Raymund’s Jackie Quiñones is a hard-drinking and womanizing Provincetown townie who gets pulled into a drug-related murder investigation when she finds a body on the beach — another victim of Cape Cod’s opioid epidemic. This “funny, exciting, sexy crime drama” also sees Jackie on her own journey towards sobriety.

Leverage: Redemption: Season 1B (IMDB TV) – October 8

Eight new episodes bring the crew back together in a world where it’s gotten easier and more legal than ever for the rich to get richer and the powerful to destroy dissent. Aleyse Shannon plays Breanna Casey, a lesbian with skills in the realm of computers, robotics and getting into trouble.

I Know What You Did Last Summer: Season One – October 15

This mystery thriller series is based on the same 1973 Lois Duncan novel that inspired the iconic 1997 film. A year after a fatal car accident that haunted their graduation night, a group of teens bound together by a dark secret reunite for the summer to find that somebody knows what they did and wants to kill some goats and people about it. I did spend the first three episodes wondering if the lesbian tongue kiss between the popular/doomed Lennon (Madison Iseman) and influencer Margot (Brianne Tju) in the trailer was just a party trick, but in Season Four we confirm that it was indeed more than that!

Fairfax: Season One – October 29

This animated series is centered on a pre-teen group of stylish pals who dream of becoming influencers. The series’ title refers to the street in Los Angeles where long lines of humans regularly assemble for the latest drop at Supreme. In Fairfax, Supreme is Latrine, Canter’s becomes Schwimmer’s, and one of the kids engaging in madcap adventures is aspiring model-slash-activist Derica, who sports a big gay rainbow sticker on her bike helmet and is determined to save the planet in style. She’s voiced by Kiersey Clemons!


Hulu LGBTQ+ Content for October 2021

Grey’s Anatomy: Season 18 Premiere (ABC) – October 1

Season 18 will pick up in an alternate universe where COVID has been dealt with and is now gone and IDK that sounds pretty nice huh.

Station 19: Season 5 Premiere (ABC) – October 1

The premiere of Station 19 is gonna be a crossover with Grey’s Anatomy! I’ve never seen this show but I think it is about fire !!!!!!!!!!!!

Saturday Night Live: Season 47 Premiere (NBC) – October 3

Our favorite Kate McKinnon show returns in October! There’s also featured player Punkie Johnson, returning once again to the cast. The second episode features bisexual musical guest Halsey and the October 23 episode has got Brandi Carlile playing gay music for you.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show (2016) – October 3

Fox’s “hesitant mashup of the stage and film versions that somehow manages to extinguish the spark of both” stars Laverne Cox as Doctor Frank N. Furter, whose portrayal “isn’t near the queer revelation it oculd be.”

Dopesick: Limited Series – October 13

This eight-episode series based on the non-fiction book Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors and the Drug Company that Addicted America looks at the opioid crisis on a micro, macro and opulent level: its impact on a distressed Virginia mining community, the DEA investigation and the accumulated wealth of the Sacklers, the family behind Purdue Pharma. Cleopatra Coleman will play Grace Pell, described as “brash and funny” and “an out lesbian who isn’t afraid to be herself amongst the world of the coal miners.”

Queens: Season One Premiere (ABC) – October 20

Queens stars Eve, Naturi Naughton, Nadine Velasquez and Brandy as four former hip-hop legends in their 40s who come back together for a chance to recapture the fame they possessed in the 90s. Naughton plays Jill “Da Thrill,” who traded stardom and drugs for a quiet Catholic life in Montana but has now found herself embroiled in an affair with another woman!


Queer Shows and Films Joining HBO Max in October 2021

Pariah (2011) – October 1

One of the best lesbian films of all time, Dee Rees’ first feature tells the story of Alike (Adepero Oduye), a 17-year-old Black lesbian coming into her identity and exploring her first love while struggling with an intolerant family.

The Hours (2002) – October 1

Three women of different generations played by Julienne Moore, Meryl Streep and Nicole Kidman are interconnected through their relationship to Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway in this film based on Micheal Cunningham’s 1998 Pulitzer Prize winning novel. Topics include getting the flowers yourself, suburban ennui, suicide, AIDS and art. Great soundtrack!

Tully (2018) – October 1

This comedy-drama from Diablo Cody follows the strange developing friendship between an exhausted (bisexual!) mother of three, Marlo (Charlize Theron), and her new night nanny, Tully (Mackenzie Davis).

The Republic of Sarah: Season One (The CW) – October 6

After an incredibly valuable mineral is found under the ground of a small town in New Hampshire, a mining company swoops in to make a buck and is blocked by “rebellious high school” teacher Sarah Cooper, who ends up turning the town into its own nation. Nia Holloway plays AJ Johnson, a lesbian having an affair with the mayor’s wife.

15 Minutes of Shame: Limited Series – October 7

Roxane Gay and Kara Swisher are amongst the talking heads in this Monica Lewinsky produced docuseries about what happens to the Cancelled, the bullied and the shamed — and how tech companies are ultimately the entity that benefits most from social media pile-ons.

The Truth of Dolores Vázquez: Limited Series – October 26

Dolores Vázquez spent 519 days in jail for the murder of her ex-partner’s child in 1999 — and was handily convicted mostly ’cause there was a media circius and she was easy to villainize as a “dominant” lesbian, not because there was anything actually tying her to the crime. This six-part docuseries tells her story, which many may recognize from Netflix’s Murder by the Coast.

In The Heights (2021) – October 28

The film adaptation of the musical returns to HBO Max in October, with a key adjustment from the original: “Carla is also re-developed as Daniela’s romantic partner with quiet, lived-in moments across the week of one block’s summer heatwave.”

Love Life: Season 2 – October 28

Season One followed a millennial New Yorker played by Anna Kendrick (but it did include some gay stuff too!) and Season 2 centers on Marcus Watkins, a freshly divorced single Black man in his 30s navigating the New York dating scene. The preview suggests a threesome but more importantly, Marcus’s sister is played by SNL’s first out Black lesbian cast member Punkie Johnson.


Peacock’s New LGBTQ+ Stories for October 2021

Unidentified with Demi Lovato: Limited Series – September 30

This unscripted series follows Lovato, their BFF Matthew and their sister Dallas as they search for extraterrestrial life and UFO phenomena and investigate eyewitness encounters, secret government reports and UFO hotspot tests.

Home Sweet Home (NBC) – series premiere October 15
NBC shows premiere next-day on Peacock for Peacock premiere customers

Ava DuVernay’s unscripted series follows 18 families from diverse backgrounds who have signed up to swap lives with another to experience the world beyond their own upbringing. The premiere episode shows a Greek Orthodox family exchanging their home with a lesbian couple with kids who are “diblings” to their friends’ kids (siblings who are biologically related through the same donor) and LGBTQ+ representation is featured “across the series.”

The Girl in the Woods: Season One – October 21

Our heroine Carrie, a resident of Oregon, is attempting to escape the mysterious, cultish colony that guards the world from the monsters hidden behind a secret door in the woods. Non-binary actor Misha Osherovich plays Nolan, a charcter navigating their gender identity throughout the season and the trailer shows Carrie (Stefanie Scott) locking lips with Tasha, played by Sofia Bryant of I Am Not Okay With This.


Apple TV+ Queer Offerings for October 2021

Invasion: Season One – October 22

One of the network’s most anticipated series follows five people across the globe as Earth is visited by an alien species that threatens the future of humankind. Shioli Kutsuna plays Mitsuki Yamato, an aerospace engineer hiding a same-sex relationship with an astronaut.


The Maybe Gays of October:

I have invented this new section of the monthly streaming guide to inform you of shows that ping but unfortunately I could not confirm their queerness.

Maid: Season One – Netflix – October 1

There are two production stills that intrigued me: one includes a twentysomething girl with like a hot pink mohwak sitting in a support group, and the other (from episode 106) has two women, Vivian and Sasha, walking together in a position that suggests a history of lesbian romance. I do not intend to watch this program so if someone could just let us know. Furthermore there are a lot of social workers in this program and social work is a gay profession.

Guilty Party: Season One —  Paramount+ — October 14

Kate Beckinsale’s real-life friend Asia Kate is wearing latex and licking Kate’s feet in the teaser, but the reason I think somebody has to be gay in this dark comedy about a privileged journalist trying to get a woman out of prison for a murder she didn’t commit is because when this many women in a trailer are seen without men at their sides, one of them has to be gay! That’s math.

Night Teeth – Netflix – October 20

This is about female vampires and Megan Fox and Sydney Sweeney are involved. Are they vampire girlfriends? Will the “all vamps are pansexual” rule apply here? We’ll find out!

Roaring Twenties: Season One – Netflix – October 22

This is a reality show about eight twentysomethings “looking to live the best years of [their] lives in the biggest, boldest way possible” and it was casting in August in Austin, Texas; there’s no info anywhere about this program’s participants but are they really gonna shoot an entire show in Austin without any bisexuals, that feels unlikely!

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Riese

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

Riese has written 3179 articles for us.

21 Comments

    • yeah i devoted a solid hour to trying to figure out if this was queer or not but couldn’t find anything besides a bunch of articles that also mentioned megan fox being bisexual IRL, but i should add it to the maybe gays!

  1. Maybe I’m misunderstanding what the word “crossover” means but after watching the Station 19/Grey’s premiere last night, I would not at all call it a crossover event! … it was literally just a 1-hour episode of Station 19 followed by a 1-hour episode of Grey’s. No Grey’s characters on S19 or vice versa, as far as I could tell. Riese you are so correct about the fire aspect though!! That is absolutely what it’s about, in a literal and metaphorical sense bc all the firefighters are really hot.

    • ABC counted it as a “crossover” because the patients from the station 19 episode are treated in the Greys episode, and both episodes center around the “Phoenix Festival” in Seattle.

      Though, for the record, I agree with you! Those are loose ties at best.

  2. SNL also has Punkie Johnson returning as a featured player; she is gay. There is also a new featured player named Sarah Sherman (aka Sarah Squirm) who pings to me, but I can’t find confirmation.

  3. Thought I’d mention this to all the cinephiles out there: Criterion is releasing the work of Doris Wishman. (Never saw any of her work but her most famous quote is “when I die I’ll make films in hell” so I already love her.) she apparently made one of the first films about a trans woman in the 60s and her work has a lot of erotic feminist themes. That’s always fun.

  4. “Nancy Drew” is going to start up again next week. Presumably Bess, the lesbian girl in the main “Scoobie gang”, is still a lesbian. Maybe she’ll even get a new love interest after her romance subplot from the 1st season fizzled out off-screen at some point… (Note that this is much more a supernatural / mild horror series with some ongoing metaplot about small-town criminal shenanigans than it is a classic murder mystery show.)

    “Murdoch Mysteries” has just started up again in Canada, which will mean more guest appearances by Daniel Maslany as a gay detective with what is probaby meant to come across as Asperger’s. He even had a romance subplot last season, though if I remember correctly, that didn’t end happily. (Even if the writing is only tentatively queer-inclusive and repeating unfortunate storyline mistakes that should have been left behind by now, this show is still important in terms of queer representation, because it’s set in the Victorian/Edwardian era and it’s the sort of mild-mannered, inoffensive, slightly left-leaning, procedual murder mystery show that’s comfort TV for a lot of elderly people. There’s a reason this show has been running for 15 seasons by now. There also was a bisexual female regular character for a few seasons, who simply moved on to become a suffragette in Britain at some point – though her lesbian love interest character was hit by “Bury Your Gays”.)

    [By the way, this show’s more female-centric and light-hearted sister-show “Frankie Drake Mysteries” had a neat queer-centric episode last season called “Life is a Cabaret”, featuring Thom Allison as a drag queen with a dead gentleman-lover, and a lesbian night-club owner, in the 1920s. All the queer characters were presented as very sympathetic people. It’s in the nature of the writing or this show that the main characters are all unrealistically progressive and accepting, but surprisingly even the IMDb rating for this episode is 8.2 – a good deal above average for this show. Again, these murder mystery shows are designed to be watched by mostly middle-aged and older people.)]

    One of the 2 main characters in the British dark-ish comedy “Hitmen” is explicitly written as lesbian, just like the comedian/actress playing her (Sue Perkins). Just don’t expect an actual romance storyline – it’s not that kind of show. (The character is smitten with another female recurring character, but she’s more of a rival and also, you know, a professional killer who unlike the main characters is actually good at her job, and therefore likely a sociopath.) The 2nd season was just put online at the end of September. Apparently the 1st season was watchable in the US via Peacock, so the 2nd season should land there as well, sooner or later.

    Does anyone know if “The Rookie” intends to replace their only queer character, now that they’ve killed off Jackson West in the first episode of the new season? Or did the production team decide to completely give up on pretending that there can be such a thing as a progressive US cop show? (They say that the actor wanted out to pursue a music career. But I would think that if that were case, he would have stayed long enough to at least film his own death scene, or better yet make sure his character could get written out without getting unceremoniously shot in the back – e.g. by having him injured instead and then filming a few scenes in hospital where he explains that he’s “rethinking his life choices” or switching careers due to permanent disability. I think it’s much more likely that either the money people got scared because the audiences who typically watch cop shows in the US complained about too much “wokeness” and/or that the real LAPD – who could kill this show by withdrawing licensing rights to their uniforms/badges/etc – told the production team to kill the BLM / police reform storyline that this young black character was centrally involved in last season, now that public unrest is not politically useful for the Democrats anymore and they just want to sweep the entire topic under the rug. The actor likely refused to go along with this – and unlike the other black regular cast members in this show, he’s young enough not to have a mortgage relying on this job. I mean, it’s rather telling that there’s no exit interview with him about his character’s sudden death – you can slap a gag order on your actors to keep them from revealing why they really left, but you can’t force them to say something positive.)

  5. Sorry if this is double-posted; my browser was freezing up.

    “Nancy Drew” is going to start up again next week. Presumably Bess, the lesbian girl in the main “Scoobie gang”, is still a lesbian. Maybe she’ll even get a new love interest after her romance subplot from the 1st season fizzled out off-screen at some point… (Note that this is much more a supernatural / mild horror series with some ongoing metaplot about small-town criminal shenanigans than it is a classic murder mystery show.)

    One of the 2 main characters in the British dark-ish comedy “Hitmen” is explicitly written as lesbian, just like the comedian/actress playing her (Sue Perkins). Just don’t expect an actual romance storyline – it’s not that kind of show. (The character is smitten with another female recurring character, but she’s more of a rival and also, you know, a professional killer who unlike the main characters is actually good at her job, and therefore likely a sociopath.) The 2nd season was just put online at the end of September. Apparently the 1st season was watchable in the US via Peacock, so the 2nd season should land there as well, sooner or later.

    “Murdoch Mysteries” has just started up again in Canada, which will mean more guest appearances by Daniel Maslany as a gay detective with what is probaby meant to come across as Asperger’s. He even had a romance subplot last season, though if I remember correctly, that didn’t end happily. (Even if the writing is only tentatively queer-inclusive and repeating unfortunate storyline mistakes that should have been left behind by now, this show is still important in terms of queer representation, because it’s set in the Victorian/Edwardian era and it’s the sort of mild-mannered, inoffensive, slightly left-leaning, procedual murder mystery show that’s comfort TV for a lot of elderly people. There’s a reason this show has been running for 15 seasons by now. There also was a bisexual female regular character for a few seasons, who simply moved on to become a suffragette in Britain at some point – though her lesbian love interest character was hit by “Bury Your Gays”.)

    [By the way, this show’s more female-centric and light-hearted sister-show “Frankie Drake Mysteries” had a neat queer-centric episode last season called “Life is a Cabaret”, featuring Thom Allison as a drag queen with a dead gentleman-lover, and a lesbian night-club owner, in the 1920s. All the queer characters were presented as very sympathetic people. It’s in the nature of the writing or this show that the main characters are all unrealistically progressive and accepting, but surprisingly even the IMDb rating for this episode is 8.2 – a good deal above average for this show. Again, these murder mystery shows are designed to be watched by mostly middle-aged and older people.)]

    Does anyone know if “The Rookie” intends to replace their only queer character, now that they’ve killed off Jackson West in the first episode of the new season? Or did the production team decide to completely give up on pretending that there can be such a thing as a progressive US cop show? (They say that the actor wanted out to pursue a music career. But I would think that if that were case, he would have stayed long enough to at least film his own death scene, or better yet make sure his character could get written out without getting unceremoniously shot in the back – e.g. by having him injured instead and then filming a few scenes in hospital where he explains that he’s “rethinking his life choices” or switching careers due to permanent disability. I think it’s much more likely that either the money people got scared because the audiences who typically watch cop shows in the US complained about too much “wokeness” and/or that the real LAPD – who could kill this show by withdrawing licensing rights to their uniforms/badges/etc – told the production team to kill the BLM / police reform storyline that this young black character was centrally involved in last season, now that public unrest is not politically useful for the Democrats anymore and they just want to sweep the entire topic under the rug. The actor likely refused to go along with this – and unlike the other black regular cast members in this show, he’s young enough not to have a mortgage relying on this job. I mean, it’s rather telling that there’s no exit interview with him about his character’s sudden death – you can slap a gag order on your actors to keep them from revealing why they really left, but you can’t force them to say something positive.)

  6. I’ve seen “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” with Laverne Cox before. The best that can be said for it is that by casting an actual trans woman instead of a “crazy guy in funny drag”, they’ve made it that much more obvious how deeply trans-phobic the writing of that old movie really is. (Think about it: The Doctor is deeply selfish, to the point of sociopathy. He creates a sentient being just to be a sex slave for ‘him’. ‘He’ tries to rape-by-fraud the innocent ‘straight’ couple – they have sex with ‘him’ willingly when they figure it out, but that doesn’t change the fact that ‘he’ intended to deceive each of them. He murders someone – out of sheer spite or jealousy, if I remember correctly. And in the end ‘he’ gets killed and that’s presented as justified.)

    about “Leverage: Redemption”:

    So Breanna is supposed to be queer for real? They had only hinted at that in the first half of the season.

    I kind of have very little trust in the writers of this show when it comes to real queer representation, because this show is so very designed to be “middle of the road” and appeal to as many people as possible, and the writers still haven’t had the guts to make the fan-prefered OT3 shipping between Parker, Hardison and Eliot canon. The best they apparently managed to do after promising “Your OT3 is safe” is keep everyone alive and together in the intervening years, not give Eliot a long-term girlfriend (he still flirts with women-of-the-week, though now he denies wanting to go on a date with them), and to throw in the occasional shippy line when they think the straight guys in the audience won’t notice or when there’s enough plausible deniability in the situation. (I.e. they have Eliot casually call Hardison “baby” instead of amending it to “brother” – but only when repeating a long-standing catch-phrase that originally involved Hardison calling Eliot “baby” in a mocking way all the way back in the original show’s pilot episode.) But I don’t think it’ll ever really be canon – Eliot may be exactly the kind of guy who would keep his bisexuality a secret for years and years, so they could still believably have him come out now, but that’s because he was written specifically as a character for right-wing guys to identify with, so actually rewriting him as queer would most likely cause outrage with a sizable section of the old show’s fans. (Eliot isn’t offensive in his opinions, but he was raised in fly-over country, had a military career, is a womanizer – though with a clear preference for dominant women – and he had anger management issues, is always gruff unless talking to children, and his job on the team is to beat up antagonists and protect his friends. It’s all thanks to Christian Kane’s acting skills that he still comes across as charming, caring and brimming with emotion.)

    [For those unfamiliar with the old show: The writers weren’t even really queer-baiting, more like not interested in including any queer content at all. It just was a very “found family” kind of heist team series, with a lovely, drama-free, slow-burn romance between the non-neurotypical Parker and the sweetheart Hardison, with Eliot looking on fondly like a big brother, so there’s never any jealousy, just hugs and friendly bickering. Add to these writing choices the fact that Christian Kane could have chemistry with a rock and that he looks rather… smitten whenever the others do something that secretly amuses Eliot (which stands out even more due to his usual gruff tough guy behavior), possibly because the actors really were good friends, who went so far as to pretend to have a threesome for a gag reel. And, well, in the last season, there were a couple of episodes clearly designed to give the fanvid creators a bit more to work with, given that queer-poly-shippers were in the majority among the people engaging closely enough with the show to create fanfic and videos.]

  7. I’ve seen “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” with Laverne Cox before. The best that can be said for it is that by casting an actual trans woman instead of a “crazy guy in funny drag”, they’ve made it that much more obvious how deeply trans-phobic the writing of that old movie really is. (Think about it: The Doctor is deeply selfish, to the point of sociopathy. He creates a sentient being just to be a sex slave for ‘him’. ‘He’ tries to rape-by-fraud the innocent ‘straight’ couple – they have sex with ‘him’ willingly when they figure it out, but that doesn’t change the fact that ‘he’ intended to deceive each of them. He murders someone – out of sheer spite or jealousy, if I remember correctly. And in the end ‘he’ gets killed and that’s presented as justified.)

    about “Leverage: Redemption”

    So Breanna is supposed to be queer for real? They had only hinted at that in the first half of the season.

    I kind of have very little trust in the writers of this show when it comes to real queer representation, because this show is so very designed to be “middle of the road” and appeal to as many people as possible, and the writers still haven’t had the guts to make the fan-prefered OT3 shipping between Parker, Hardison and Eliot canon. The best they apparently managed to do after promising “Your OT3 is safe” is keep everyone alive and together in the intervening years, not give Eliot a long-term girlfriend (he still flirts with women-of-the-week, though now he denies wanting to go on a date with them), and to throw in the occasional shippy line when they think the straight guys in the audience won’t notice or when there’s enough plausible deniability in the situation. (I.e. they have Eliot casually call Hardison “baby” instead of amending it to “brother” – but only when repeating a long-standing catch-phrase that originally involved Hardison calling Eliot “baby” in a mocking way all the way back in the original show’s pilot episode.) But I don’t think it’ll ever really be canon – Eliot may be exactly the kind of guy who would keep his bisexuality a secret for years and years, so they could still believably have him come out now, but that’s because he was written specifically as a character for right-wing guys to identify with, so actually rewriting him as queer would most likely cause outrage with a sizable section of the old show’s fans. (Eliot isn’t offensive in his opinions, but he was raised in fly-over country, had a military career, is a womanizer – though with a clear preference for dominant women – and he had anger management issues, is always gruff unless talking to children, and his job on the team is to beat up antagonists and protect his friends. It’s all thanks to Christian Kane’s acting skills that he still comes across as charming, caring and brimming with emotion.)

    [For those unfamiliar with the old show: The writers weren’t even really queer-baiting, more like not interested in including any queer content at all. It just was a very “found family” kind of heist team series, with a lovely, drama-free, slow-burn romance between the non-neurotypical Parker and the sweetheart Hardison, with Eliot looking on fondly like a big brother, so there’s never any jealousy, just hugs and friendly bickering. Add to these writing choices the fact that Christian Kane could have chemistry with a rock and that he looks rather… smitten whenever the others do something that secretly amuses Eliot (which stands out even more due to his usual gruff tough guy behavior), possibly because the actors really were good friends, who went so far as to pretend to have a threesome for a gag reel. And, well, in the last season, there were a couple of episodes clearly designed to give the fanvid creators a bit more to work with, given that queer-poly-shippers were in the majority among the people engaging closely enough with the show to create fanfic and videos.]

    • I will actively revolt if she’s not, LOL, just based on her wardrobe and disinterest in her friends’ romantic relationships. But only the premiere and finale are centered on Kristy (based on episode titles), so that makes it seem less likely. I guess I’m okay if they push it off until S3, but it seems inevitable and I’d much rather have that story line sooner than later. Of course.

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