I received an ARC of So Gay For You in March, about a month into my paternity leave. I wasn’t planning to read it right away. I knew it was a book I’d be writing about for work, and therefore it’d make more sense to wait to read it until I was back at work, closer to the book’s release date, because I had promised myself, after all, that I wasn’t going to do work on leave.

But there it sat, on the dining room table — the book jacket with its stylized photo of Leisha Hailey and Kate Moennig in denim, their jean jackets buttoned to one another’s, their bodies angled outwards with the posture and facial expressions of precocious child detectives — and its scrawled promise of “Friendship, Found Family, and the Show That Started It All.”

Maybe I could just take a small little peek?

Twenty-four hours later, I’d devoured the entire thing, reading a lot of it out loud to my newborn. I’m sure he had a great time and hopefully will remember Mia Kirshner’s breakfast order.

But, you see — my inability to put it down speaks to a truth So Gay For You illustrates beautifully: sometimes, the work is the joy. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like work at all. Sometimes it feels like a blessing. “We couldn’t believe we got to keep doing it all,” Kate writes of her time spent in Vancouver, filming The L Word. “Living this utopian life for six months at a time, away from everyday stresses. I likened it to prolonged vacation because it rarely felt like work. There were moments where it was possible to think the good times were never going to end.”

“Every day on the first season of The L Word was a pot of honey,” Leisha writes. “I couldn’t believe I was a working actress on such a special show…. we had a shared goal, a collective mission, and that was to do right by the characters we had the honor of playing.”

So Gay For You excels in so many ways — as a loving portrait of queer community, as a roaming time capsule of queer pop culture, as a platonic love story, as a behind-the-scenes almanac to a groundbreaking show and as a juicy celebrity memoir. It’s a thoroughly entertaining read, conversational and introspective, full of pain and joy and wit and insider info.

But its most resonant achievement for me is its tribute to a workplace that actively fostered queer and female voices and stories, how those spaces can be crucibles of inspiration and, almost inevitably, disappointment. Between charming anecdotes of cast hijinks and collaborative character-building, both women chart their own long, winding roads of self-discovery and artistic purpose, much of it intertwined with creating a show that profoundly impacted so many of us — and them, too.

My unhinged, scholarly relationship to The L Word and Autostraddle’s L Word origins are well documented. I began recapping the original series in 2006, incorporating quotes and photos of my friends from our watch parties. In an era of minimal queer representation in the media, and with most of the queer writers and bloggers I followed writing anonymously behind pen names and gravatars, I wanted to make the most of the privilege we had to be visible. My friends became “characters” in my blog and recaps, their faces recognizable to readers, who told me my work offered a window into a more accessible, less economically advantaged “real life” L Word, with all of its talking, laughing, loving, breathing, fighting, fucking, crying, drinking and Uh Huh Her concerts. It didn’t matter that the show was bad a lot of the time, what mattered was that it gave online communities a reference point to start from to build connections with each other. My readership grew and eventually I parlayed the blogging and the recapping — including those friends I featured and met along the way  — into launching Autostraddle, itself. Later, I’d recap Generation Q, and launch To L and Back, a podcast that recapped the original series and the reboot. Did I feel like this book was written for me specifically? I did. But if you’re reading this, it was likely written for you, too.

The memoir’s early chapters, detailing Kate and Leisha’s formative years, are filled with familiar queer markers: the sartorial relief of Reality Bites-era androgynous grunge, Jo from The Facts of Life as a gateway, copying haircuts from girls in Gap ads, and the magnetic pull of New York City — that mythical, gritty land where you could really find yourself and your people. Iconic ‘90s moments abound — we breeze through Leisha’s freewheeling twenties in New York: working at a bakery, living across from the Chelsea Hotel, playing with The Murmurs, and roller-skating to the Cowboy Hall of Fame for discounted lunches with her girlfriend. We follow Kate getting high and dancing at the Limelight, doing summer stock theatre, and navigating the modeling world as “waify heroin chic” waned. Leisha is scouted for All Over Me, Kate does a gender-bending stint on the short-lived WB drama Young Americans, Leisha dates kd lang and plays Lilith Fair.

Leisha’s awareness of her sexuality bloomed earlier and more definitively than Kate’s; and while both are searching for something as they yearn towards adulthood, Leisha is headstrong and confident, while Kate is more uncertain and eager for guidance. But there’s a hunger that unites them, even before they knew the other existed — a hunger that prepares them and sets them on a path to meet each other, and become best friends forever.

Their candor about their romantic relationships and personal lives in general is remarkable. Prior to launching their podcast, both were relatively restrained when it came to discussing their personal lives with the press, Kate particularly. She writes about her understandable frustration with the press’ early focus on her sexuality when she wasn’t ready to talk about it. She writes about everything she had going on personally when the show first debuted and, with it, pressure to come out. Eventually, she chose not to officially “come out,” but just to “be out.” In these pages, she’s able to speak entirely for herself on her own terms, and does.

Their time on The L Word, much like our experience watching it, was a tapestry of romantic, artistic, and personal triumphs and tragedies. They loved it and each other. They felt heard and valued, like real collaborators, and invigorated by the seclusion of their annual Vancouver filming cocoon, where they built a vibrant social universe for themselves with the cast. They were frustrated and flabbergasted by Dana’s death, by Season Six, and, many years later, by Generation Q in general. Because it’s that intense love, that belief in the potential of the work and the awareness of how good it can be, that we are most primed for heartbreak when it lets us down, or when new leadership can’t capture the spirit of the original product.

What lingers is how unfortunately rare that experience is. In today’s television industry of rapid-fire cancellations and a seeming new standard that 8 episodes constitutes an entire season of television, with years passing between seasons, with renewals or cancelations coming months after a season airs — will we ever see another L Word? (The ruthless cancellation of A League Of Their Own suggests “no.”) How often do queer actors have the opportunity to enjoy sets and crews and teams like the one Kate and Leisha found, year after year? As the show ends, Kate begins a run on Three Rivers, playing a straight character, an event which required flying in a special wigmaker from France to heterosexualize her hair. “Was I feeling under-the-surface homophobia or was I just horribly miscast?” she wonders.

But what we do have, after this oft-medicore show brought them together and all of us together, is the work we keep on doing. For me it’s this website, and all the collaborations it has spawned. For Kate and Leisha, it’s their podcast. It’s this book.

For the record, when it came time to sit down and write about the book (yesterday) I decided to do a little flip-through just to refresh my memory. 24 hours later I’d read the entire thing all over again. Maybe you will, too.

So Gay For You is out now from St. Martin’s Press. You can read an exclusive excerpt from the book right here on our website.

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