As the wise Kelly Clarkson once sang: some people wait a lifetime for a moment like this. In this case, people is me, a certified Bravo Dyke AKA lesbian longtime viewer of the Bravo extended Housewives universe. And the moment? The moment is a lesbian affair scandal between two Housewives. Folks, we have a certified lesbian affair scandal between two Housewives. Specifically: Real Housewives of Miami castmates and former best friends Julia Lemigova and Adriana de Moura slept together while on a cast trip to the Hamptons.
This information was initially revealed by Julia in part one of the season seven reunion, which aired last week. The reveal was made at the very end of the episode. Now, a Housewife has to do quite a lot in order to actually shock Andy Cohen and also myself. We’ve seen it all. We’re pretty unflappable. But Andy’s jaw was on the floor at Julia’s confession, and so was mine.
Now, let me rewind a bit. It’s not the first time there’s been lesbian drama on Real Housewives. Beverly Hills has had its fair share. And there have been some messy moments on Atlanta that have amounted to “accusations” of lesbianism. It’s often framed that way — as an accusation. As if being a lesbian is some scandalous thing in and of itself. This time, however, the scandal is not the lesbianism itself but rather the fact that the hookup amounts to infidelity and has also apparently been influencing a lot of the dynamics between Julia and Adriana all season, at least according to Julia.
Julia has been an out bisexual woman for a long time. I wrote about her first season as a Housewife after Miami‘s return to television. Her bisexuality was often treated in weird ways by the other women on the show, who seemed to conflate her queerness with inherent hypersexuality. I also wrote at the time about her seemingly codependent best friendship with Adriana, which had a hint of queerness to it in just how obsessive they were with each other. I also picked up a vibe that Adriana wasn’t wholly straight. Well, I think I got a lot of that right.
Since 2014, Julia has been married to tennis superstar and TERF Martina Navratilova. Their marriage has often provided storylines for the show, and a big reason I don’t write about those storylines is because I continue to be frustrated by the uncritical platforms Martina is given — by Bravo and by sports networks that employ her as a tennis commentator — despite her rampantly transphobic positions on trans women in sports. Like many famous TERFs, she has made the issue a HUGE part of her public persona, down to the fact it’s somehow worked into her Twitter bio? Andy Cohen seemingly only started caring about Martina’s bizarrely anti-LGBTQ beliefs when they were directed at him: Martina is anti-surrogacy, and Andy has had two children using surrogates. Anti-surrogacy and anti-trans beliefs often go hand-in-hand. Julia has noted she does not share Martina’s anti-surrogacy beliefs, but it’s unclear where she stands on the inclusion of trans women in sports.
All that to say: Julia is indeed married and married monogamously. So, why is she telling on herself for cheating on her wife on such a huge public stage?
Well, according to Julia, Adriana has been holding the cheating over her head all season, threatening to expose it and ruin her life if Julia doesn’t act the way Adriana wants her to. Julia makes all sorts of wild accusations about Adriana, saying she has been essentially puppeteering her since the beginning of the series. Indeed, the fractures in their friendship were on clear display all season long, though the question of why lingered. I couldn’t figure it out. I never would have guessed the answer was that they SLEPT TOGETHER.
Julia says she decided to come forth about the hookup because it means Adriana can’t hold it over her anymore. One way to make blackmail go away is to just deliver the blackmail yourself. We don’t have all the details on how Julia decided to go through with this, but my guess is she privately confessed to Martina, knowing it would likely get out and back to her eventually, especially since Adriana is a loose cannon. But Julia effectively gets ahead of it by telling Martina and the world first.
In part two of the reunion, we get a lot more details. Julia specifies that the hookup indeed happened on the cast trip to the Hamptons, which took place before the moment that season when Julia did a “friendship proposal” to Adriana to ask her to be her best friend forever, a moment that signaled at the time, uh, yeah, something a bit more than typical friendship. Adriana sort of bizarrely laughs through Julia’s entire confession, which includes the fact that Martina knows about it, confirming my theory that Julia decided to get out in front of it.
Julia also says she’s ashamed of what happened and confirms she was never in an open relationship with Martina. She claims Adriana came into her life when she was at a low point, especially in her married. Adriana knew Julia was struggling in her marriage, manipulated her, and blackmailed her.
Adriana then tries a really bizarre deflection tactic. She confirms she and Julia slept in the same bed many times. When Andy asks if they had sex, she replies that she doesn’t have a dick, as if that somehow disqualifies any chance of sex. Oh, okay, so she’s gonna go a homophobic route to deny this it seems! Andy is indeed like…you can have sex without a dick. “It’s called scissoring!” Stephanie says, and she’s so real for that.
“I never scissored anybody,” Adriana says. Quote of the episode!
Adriana says they slept in the same bed and kissed and leaves it at that. Okay, girl.
She denies she ever blackmailed Julia. She tries to spin a narrative that Julia is two-faced and pretends to be someone she’s not. There are layers of queerphobia/biphobia to that, too! Later, Adriana says Julia wears a mask and is promiscuous. She’s leaning into some extremely biphobic stereotypes.
Andy asks who believes Julia and Adriana hooked up, and everyone except Lisa and Guerdy raise their hands.
Julia says Martina cried when she told her, and Julia has been carrying around so much guilt about the whole thing. Also, this is indeed why Julia didn’t even consider Adriana as a potential godmother to her newly adopted sons, a decision that initially seemed somewhat cold given their history but now makes sense. You don’t really ask your lover to be your kids’ godmother…
But Adriana claims that when she was threatening to tell the truth on camera earlier in the season, she hadn’t meant this, because she loves Martina and would never want to break up a marriage. (Okay, if you only kissed, though, why were you so concerned about breaking up a marriage? There are inconsistencies to Adriana’s positions, which all circle back to the fact that yeah, they obviously hooked up, even if Adriana wants to pretend queer sex “doesn’t count.”)
Adriana’s next deflection tactic is to bring up that Julia was sleeping with other people, including a cop and a “Haitian mortician.” This was Andy’s face @ these reveals:
Adriana doubles down on the narrative that Julia is a cheater and therefore cannot be trusted. But Julia says not only does Martina know everything, but her daughters do, too. Again, she decided to get ahead of all of it knowing Adriana could out it all at the reunion anyway. She says she told Adriana these things in confidence and now clearly she’s trying to shame her with the information, which again, her family already knows.
On a cast break from the reunion, Andy follows Julia out to get a bit more information. Julia says they slept together once and then fooled around at Alexia’s bachelorette party at the Versace mansion. Alexia says she gets that, because being at the Versace mansion was a hot time.
In their dressing room, Lisa twice makes a scissoring hand gesture at Adriana to ask if that’s what they did, and Adriana says no, never, and furthermore she isn’t into that and would say if she was. She says Julia was the one trying to come at her. Again, she’s casting the queer woman as the predatory, manipulative liar.
Alexia asks Julia exactly what happened. She wants deets. She wants to know who went down on who, if there was fingering, etc. Julia says she has too much respect for Adriana to share the details but reiterates that what they did counts as sex.
When we come back from the break, Andy tries to ask Adriana AGAIN if they had sex. Adriana, now a champion deflector, answers by going all the way back to the first time she and Julia met. She says Julia developed a crush on her right away and was in her “seducing mode.” She really wants to make the story that Julia came onto her and manipulated her.
Okay, but did you hook up!!!!! Adriana says Julia…patted her. As in patted her pussy? Andy is delighted by all this delusion, and so am I. Adriana says there was “heavy petting” but that was all. “Did I have this lesbian affair she’s accusing me of? No.” There it is! The language of “accusation.” Julia is not “accusing” her of anything. She’s just stating what happened between them. And she has way more to lose from it than Adriana does.
The questions Julia has for Adriana about all of this are frankly heartbreaking. She wants to know if Adriana actually liked her for who she was and if she was ever actually her friend. She loved Adriana. Was any of it real? Adriana insists she too loved Julia.
And, in fact, she has a gift for her now. Adriana loves a theatrical moment, and she delivers a classic one here. She presents Julia with a box that contains…her heart. Where in the Etsy-rushed-order did she get this ugly wooden heart in a box?
“I loved you with all my heart,” Adriana says, and now Julia can keep her heart. Hmmm Adriana, I would say you are NOT beating the lesbian “accusations” here.
Assuming Miami gets another season and Adriana and Julia are both part of it, it’ll be fascinating to see the long-term impact of these revelations continue to unfold, especially if Adriana is gonna stick to her biphobia-laced narrative. I wonder if Julia won’t return because of the damage this has all done to her marriage. A third part of the reunion will air next week, but it seems like we may have wrapped discussing the lesbian drama of it all.
What do you think? Should I go back and watch/recap the Hamptons and Versace mansion episodes with this new intel?
