Pop Culture Fix: The Fosters Is Ten Years Old, It’s Still As Revolutionary as Ever

Hey it’s still Pride out there! How about that! I hope straight people are sending you pies and ice cream! I’m sending you this Pop Culture Fix!


+ The Fosters creators look back on the groundbreaking series ten years later. “Bradley Bredeweg and Peter Paige wanted to fill the void of LGBTQ representation within the world of family drama. They initially thought gay dads could work, but that was seen on shows like Modern Family and Glee. ‘Then it hit us like a ton of bricks. Almost every lesbian couple we know has kids,’ Paige explains. In addition to that, Bredeweg and Paige wanted the show to feel as modern as possible, so Stef and Lena were an interracial couple. For co-showrunner Joanna Johnson, who has a multiracial family having adopted two children with her wife, there was an authenticity to writing The Fosters. ‘I related so much to the family. For me as a writer, I loved the opportunity to write about something that was true to my own life,’ she shares.

+ 62 Years Later, Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine’s The Children’s Hour remains relevant.

+ Reality TV has finally discovered messy lesbian drama.

+ Elliot Page reveals past relationship with Kate Mara in upcoming memoir Pageboy.

+ 27 TV characters who should have been queer.

+ Isis King is taking Hollywood by storm, from America’s Next Top Model, to Prime Video’s With Love.

+ Hulu is releasing its queer psychological horror Jagged Mind here in Pride month.

+ NYT profiled Alison Bechdel and her new Audibile adaptation of Dykes to Watch Out For.

+ Marlene Dietrich: Early Hollywood’s “joyous bisexual” and her most daring on-screen roles.

+ How the youths are finding themselves on queer TV.

+ Disney’s Globby is real — and he’s bisexual!

+ 11 celebrities, actors, and reality stars who have come out in 2023.

+ Why Queer Eye season seven is so relevant.

+ And, finally, Padma Lakshmi is leaving Top Chef which is THE WORST NEWS I HAVE HEARD IN A LONG TIME!

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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 1719 articles for us.

4 Comments

  1. Wow, wow. Okay, so I read the Children’s Hour article and have chills because of how close the hatred and shaming from the Aunt reflects that of the conservative Southerners I know. I was in The Children’s Hour in High School and I don’t remember it being traumatizing (even though it absolutely is–CW for the ending. I think that is mainly because this specific type of hatred felt very far away to me back then. This was the early aughts and in a pretty liberal city and things felt pretty progressive. I feel much closer to this type of homophobia today. It’s such a good barometer for how things have changed and as we are all saying/seeing getting worse.

    What a powerful play and WOW scary that it seems even more relevant to me now than it did 20 years ago. I’ll have to re-watch the whole thing. Thanks for including that link.

    PS: I’m floating Chef Melissa King to replace Padma! It’s the only right answer. <3

    • Kristen Kish is the (: other :) only right answer …

      your children’s hour reflection has me doing likewise. i grew up in a city among the most liberal in the 70/80s, and recall the tension between homophobia and acceptance. like, people who said ‘i don’t have a problem w/ gays’ also really needed to say ‘i’m not gay, but’ at the same time. i can’t really tell what feels more vs less between now and then, except i might feel somewhat less safe being out now vs the aughts with some folks feeling so entitled to violence.

      i’m really hoping that fellow citizens realize legislative agendas which curtail queer lives don’t make life less expensive or climate change go away.

  2. Carrie Brownstein and Roberta Colindrez as queer besties in Dykes to Watch Out Four is the audio foreplay I didn’t know I was missing

    (Not to mention an excellent stroke of persona and voice casting)

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