Pop Culture Fix: Booksmart’s Beanie Feldstein is Queer IRL, FYI

This is a Pop Culture Fix! I made it just for you!

+ My friend Anna the Super Sleuthing Lesbian Journalist Genius alerted me to the fact that Booksmart star Beanie Feldman is queer in real life!

“The only love scene in the film is a queer love scene, and that’s so radical. By doing that, you’re asking that to be the norm. By showing queer sexuality, and making heterosexual people relate to it is actually really deeply meaningful… For me in my life, it is a part of who I am but it is not at all my defining feature. It doesn’t mean I don’t love my girlfriend, it’s just part of who I am. And [the character]’s the same way. To see that in Amy and how beautifully Kaitlyn plays her and how beautifully Katie [Silberman, screenwriter] and Olivia [Wilde, director] crafted her, it’s gonna change a lot of people’s lives.”

+ It would appear that Allison Williams and Logan Browning play lesbian cello rivals/axe-murderers in this new Netflix movie called The Perfection that landed on Friday. Valerie Anne is watching it right now to confirm this and will report back in the form of a full review ASAP.

+ Claws is back in a little over a week and here’s the trailer for season three!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gFpqT7cumM&feature=youtu.be

+ Pose is also back soon! June 11! Al(aina) showed you this new trailer in the Sunday Funday and now I’m showing it to you again because it’s so good!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPujB1Mi8yc

+ Also, Jessica Jones, which, I’ll be honest with you, every single person on our TV team forgot exists until this trailer dropped.

+ Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors has joined the writers room for season two of Good Trouble. (If you missed any of last season, Natalie’s recaps were brilliant and you should check them out.)

+ Amber Benson’s playing gay again in a new movie called The Nightmare Gallery which lands on-demand on June 18.

+ Killing Eve! 1) How Jodie Comer found the honesty in a lying, murderous psychopath. 2) Sandra Oh on what that finale means for season three. 3) Emerald Fennell: “All obsession is sexual.”

+ Five black queer web series The L Word reboot could learn from.

+ Booksmart makes a compelling case for “PC comedy”:

Is the film’s portraiture of progressive attitudes among this generation too idealistic? Maybe. (There are, lest we forget, plenty of Trump teens out there.) But what Blockers suggested and Booksmart confirms is you can make a funny movie about people like this; if you set up the right situation, and have Beanie Feldstein delivering it, then “Are you judging me for dabbling in pornography? I thought you were a sex-positive feminist!” can be a huge laugh line. And even better, it might still be funny – and not embarrassing – a few years from now.

+ Regina Hall refused to do a Whitney Houston joke on Black Monday, which she talked about in a recent Hollywood Reporter roundtable with Tiffany Haddish, Jane Fonda, Natasha Lyonne, Alex Borstein, Maya Rudolph and Phoebe Waller-Bridge.

+ How one intersex woman is fighting for visibility in the LGBTQIA community.

+ Ellen speaks out about being sexually assaulted by her stepfather when she was a teenager.

+ Gentleman Jack has been renewed for a second season! (Is this my all-time favorite TV show? I think maybe yes.)

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Heather Hogan

Heather Hogan is an Autostraddle senior editor who lives in New York City with her wife, Stacy, and their cackle of rescued pets. She's a member of the Television Critics Association, GALECA: The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics, and a Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer critic. You can also find her on Twitter and Instagram.

Heather has written 1718 articles for us.

11 Comments

    • Me too, I didn’t think it would be so good, but I’m seriously hooked *.* Especially that I saw a movie about Anne Lister years ago and as much as I liked Anne as a historical figure I wasn’t necessarily impressed. But what Sally Wainwright did is a whole other take on her story and I very much enjoy that interpretation.

  2. I definitely thought we weren’t getting any more Jessica Jones, I assumed Marvel/Disney wasn’t gonna give them one more, given how all the other netflix series got an abrupt end.

    • They had already finished filming this season when Netflix announced the cancellation of all the Marvel shows. It was always supposed to be the last on the schedule so it should wrap up fairly cleanly.

  3. I ended up watching Booksmart and The Perfection back to back *without* even realizing the latter was going to do… whatever it did. I was overwhelmed and yet, delighted.

  4. I didn’t know what The Perfection even was until I walked in on my mom watching the end of it. My mom is REALLY bad at paying attention to movies so when I asked her what was going on she seemed really confused. It only took me about 2 minutes to figure out what this movie was really trying to say and I’m surprised she missed it. That movie fucked me up and I only watched like 10, 15 minutes of it.

    Wow. Lesbian Patsy from Call The Midwife was the showrunner of Killing Eve S2? I knew she wrote books but i’m definitely mad at myself for missing that bit of info as well.

  5. The Perfection was b a n a n a s and, IMO, maybe the worst movie that has ever been made, but it has been getting wildly different reviews than what I would’ve imagined and I’m truly excited for Valerie Anne’s take on it!

  8. just a quick note that you have Beanie’s last name correct in the title of the article but in the body of the text you have it has Feldman

  9. How and why have we not read about Skam Espana on autostraddle yet? Had to register just for that alone.

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