Pop Culture Fix: The Queerish “Heathers” Pilot Is Here To Get Your Goat and Other Stories Best Approached With Trepidation

… This just in: the Heathers Pilot is available on Paramount’s Website. I haven’t watched it yet but reports suggest that it will be offensive and probably upset everybody, maybe even me (I am very hard to offend, so wish me luck!). I stay tuned for your feelings.

The Charmed reboot has cast a lesbian witch: Melonie Diaz, 33, will play “Mel,” who is described as a “strong-willed feminist lesbian,” who will have a police detective girlfriend, Soo Jin. Diaz previously played a queer character in 2007’s Itty Bitty Titty Committee, made a splash with her indie darling 2002 debut in Raising Victor Vargas, and co-starred in Fruitvale.

… We have been waiting for so long: Lena Waithe’s Autobiographical Comedy “Twenties” Gets Picked Up By TBS: “TBS has ordered a pilot for Lena Waithe’s autobiographical comedy, Twenties. The single-camera show tells the story of Hattie, a queer black twenty-something trying to make her way in L.A. alongside her two straight BFFs, Marie and Nia.” (Brittani wrote about “Twenties” for Autostraddle in 2013)

… The creators of Everything Sucks! talk about making one of Netflix’s lowest budget shows, how they wrote a lesbian character, their influences (including the incredible ’90s Swedish film Show Me Love!) and their process:

Michael Mohan: In 1996, even Ellen DeGeneres hadn’t come out yet. So to try and sensibly depict a 15-year-old girl living in Oregon, it just seemed like a very compelling coming of age story that we hadn’t quite seen.

Jones: We had a writers room that was as diverse as we could make it, and everybody contributed to the character of Kate and lent a voice to her arc. We had a representative from GLAAD come in and we got to pick his brain a little bit about what some of tropes were in this kind of depiction. You know, what we might want to steer toward, and what we might want to in turn avoid.

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… The Hollywood Reporter talks to the Roseanne team, which apparently includes out lesbian comedian Wanda Sykes: Roseanne Returns: Is TV Ready for a Trump-Loving Comic With “Nothing Left to Prove”?

Sally Potter’s ‘The Party’ Invites You to London’s Worst Dinner Bash Ever: Though inspired by the cast (which also includes Patricia Clarkson as Janet’s catty gal pal) and Potter’s relevant material, Jones is still amazed that she can be an out lesbian playing a lesbian. “Things have changed,” she says. “Our stories aren’t just being told. Today, we can tell them.”

Black LGBTQ visibility in media has made strides, but we need more than representation: “We can no longer just be OK with seeing more of us on the screen. We must continue to make things uncomfortable for institutions who love Black culture but not Black people. This isn’t about putting one Black executive at the table, or giving us the green light on more projects. This is about us, pulling more of us in and requiring them to have us in front of the screen, behind the scenes, and making the decisions. It’s also about investing in our own community structures to dismantle the ideals we learned through colonization, and fight the homophobia that continues to hurt Black and brown people at large.”

‘Every Day’ is a Body-Hopping, Gender-Defying Love Story: It’s a fundamentally queer romance, with A’s consciousness manifesting itself in different races, heights, weights, and genders — Ian Alexander (far left), the trans Asian breakout from Netflix’s The OA, makes an appearance. And while its premise is a bit twee, in our current climate the movie’s message feels downright necessary. “The story is about being seen,” Sucsy says. “Love transcends binary categories. Falling in love with the essence of a person is what love is really about.”

Queer Latinx Voices Are Front And Center On Starz’s “Vida”

Meet the Openly Gay Producer Behind Your Favorite LGBT-Inclusive Viral Videos | PRIDE.com

… The purest reactions to the Queer Eye Netflix reboot 

TV Shows Reboot With Newfound Diversity in 2018 | Observer: Party of Five’s reboot will have parents who were deported rather than killed, as in the original.

Meet Deitre: They’re Brooklyn’s Queer Glam Rock Band, and They Proudly Live Their Truth

… This’ll go great I bet: Stewie Griffin Will Reveal His Sexuality To Therapist Ian McKellen In Upcoming Episode Of “Family Guy”

Watch A Teaser For ‘Claws’ Season 2 but be aware that there is no lesbian content in it, which’s sad.

Why you need to watch this French-Canadian webseries about queer women

Trans Actress Daniela Vega, Star Of “A Fantastic Woman,” Presenting At Oscars

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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 3164 articles for us.

10 Comments

  1. 1.So Mel has an Asian (or particulary Korean) girlfriend? That’s great. Maybe it’s just me but I have the feeling that seeing an Asian lesbian is pretty rare, so I am happy about this. ^^

    2.Yeah Netflix, *Everything Sucks!* is one of your lowest budget shows, so a second season would be great right? :D

  2. Wait, the article says Twenties is going to TBS but the summary on the homepage says HBO! I’m excited either way, but it is TBS, right?

    (feel free to delete this if there’s a correction made- just trying to clarify for myself and not to nitpick!)

  3. I could rant about the evils of Charmed… But instead… Everything Sucks is adorable. Too het heavy towards the beginning, but the ending made me cry. Katie felt so believable and wonderful…

  4. Watching the Heathers pilot just so that I can know how bad it is, and the answer is bad, they’re like trying their damnest to be offensive, and they’re trying to hard and the result is just bad.

    • Second this, it is like a parody. Every character is an over-the-top caricature designed specifically to offend. Maybe they hope to ride a wave of bad press to good ratings… I don’t really know what’s going on.

      It may possibly be black magic designed to consume our souls…

      • I just don’t really get the point of villainizing minorities when the original was poking fun at privileged members of society.

  5. I watched the Heathers pilot the way you do when a friend tries a taste of something gross, and they’re like “here try this, it’s gross” and you know it’s going to be gross but you try it anyways to confirm. Can confirm-Heathers pilot is gross.

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