By Alijah
I vividly remember the moment I learned that gay marriage was legalized in the United States. I was a junior in high school, knee-deep in the Obama era and practically drowning in the neoliberal Kool-Aid. I immediately reposted That One Image of Joe Biden running around the White House with a rainbow flag alongside a caption that said verbatim “If you needed a smile today I really hope this does the trick! #LoveWins #MarraigeEquality <3 <3 <3 <3”.1 My own reckless hopefulness never ceases to amaze me.
Somewhere between self-insert fanfic, looking up “girls kissing” on YouTube and “Am i Gay??” quizzes, I found myself in my first relationship,2 and it wasn’t a straight one. For many young people, online relationships felt like a “safe” foray into dating, it felt natural for someone who grew up with one foot on solid ground and the other inside of Tumblr html. So much queerness existed unabashedly through the lens of being “boy crazy.” Girls could date girls over their shared love of boys who kinda looked like girls. (Gay Girls 4 Harry Styles)
If you had asked anyone around me between the ages of 11–25, they’d tell you I was positively stark-raving Boy Crazy. I had multiple blogs dedicated to the likes of Justin Bieber, Harry Styles, and a forgotten boy band called Mindless Behavior. Anything boy-related I was absolutely all over. But, at 12, I was also deeply invested3 in a romantic online relationship with a girl consisting of all night Skypes and texting like….allll the time. If you had asked me, I’d tell you I was straight.
I had spent most of my formative years turning inward, focusing on the things I liked and unwilling to consider that there was life outside of the four walls of my bedroom and my love of teen heartthrobs.
At some point in high school I simply started dating girls. I never really had a conversation with anyone about it or had any kind of grand declaration…I just did it. It felt normal, natural, and right for me. The first time I ever dated a girl her name was Suzanne and she told me she saw ghosts. I thought that was charming. We had met at a Pride parade, the first I’d ever gone to. We were sitting outside of a restaurant downtown chatting and blowing up those free condoms they give you. Days were spent texting during class, nights were spent staying up late talking on the phone (we were in Love). We had decided to go to prom together, which was a big deal since we didn’t go to the same school—I needed to get my guidance counselor and mom to sign a permission slip (we were basically married). Our text-based relationship ended just as quickly as it started. One moment we were kissing underneath a tree outside of a colonial-style hotel after stealing chocolate chip cookies from the lobby meant for guests (asking kindly for them), and the next I was staring at my phone with tears in my eyes re-reading a text that said something along the lines of “It’s not you, it’s me… seriously.”
I didn’t know anything about being gay; I just knew that I was. So, I figured I had done something wrong. I began researching in the best way I knew how: through media consumption. I had filled my days, nights, moments in between class consuming queer media. I watched But I’m a Cheerleader, and listened to Riot Grrrl music and read zines and manifestos about the righteousness of women loving women but I was yearning for something more substantive, something that would change my life. I felt like I was scraping the bottom of some barrel looking for something…for anything that felt resonant to my newfound interests.
At some point during one of my late-night Netflix tirades I found it: Blue Is the Warmest Colour. I’d watch it underneath blankets with the volume as low as possible. A continued motif throughout the film is eating (lol). My ideals of love were constructed around communion, the ritualistic breaking (partaking?) of body and bread. I thought that the highest form of love, the most romantic a person could be, is cooking for a lover or loved ones. It will always be late spring and the windows are wide open you’re preparing a big meal for someone other than yourself.
In college I had found my way back to lesbian cinema. Feeling particularly disillusioned by the government, electoral politics, and the state of the world, I turned back to lesbian media as a form of escapism. Watching Portrait of a Lady on Fire on my 13-inch Macbook screen in the student lounge alone while my roommate was asleep. I remember watching Happiest Season (also on my laptop) in bed at home during winter break. I was so disappointed. Booksmart, thank you Olivia Wilde.
Around 2019, there was a shared general sentiment amongst college film Twitter—there was a resounding question reverberating from all of the digital walls: “why is queer film SO SAD right now?” This was right after we were blessed with Call Me By Your Name and Portrait of a Lady on Fire, two extremely sad queer films. While I acknowledge it’s a broad statement, and there are a lot of less popular queer films that are not tragic, it’s still meaningful that the main narratives dancing around the silver screen are ones of deep unresolved pain and in some cases death. Like, let’s be so for real, the best outcome for Portrait of a Lady on Fire was that Marianne and Héloïse will silently and secretly pine for each other for the rest of their lives while having to pretend like they’re content in their career or their marriage and children. Enter: Chappell Roan’s newest single, “Good Luck, Babe!”, with flirty synth and vocals reminiscent of Cyndi Lauper or Kate Bush. The message of the song is pretty simple: WHEN YOU WAKE UP NEXT TO HIM IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT WITH YOUR HEAD IN YOUR HANDS YOU’RE NOTHING MORE THAN HIS WIFE AND WHEN YOU THINK OF ME ALL THOSE YEARS AGO I HATE TO SAY I TOLD YOU SO !!!
It feels like a continuation/conclusion (?) to Reneé Rapp’s “Pretty Girls,” wherein Reneé sings about how girls always kiss other girls when they’re drunk but it’s meaningless and they’ll go back to their boyfriends anyway…because it’s safe. Girls kissing girls, men deciding it’s okay for their girlfriends to kiss girls [but not boys] because they are homophobic and don’t believe their relationships with other women to be romantically legitimate.
Straight relationships are allowed to be messy, imperfect, and happy without questions around validity. Queer relationships are not held to that same standard: they either need to be absolutely perfect with no struggle or they need to end in tragedy. This is not rooted in reality but consistently replicated in media. WhyyyyY? So much of our identities are constructed around what we’re interested in and reinforced by our hyperspecific digital worlds. Attitudes around gender and sexuality seem to be changing colloquially but legally we’re regressing. What does it all meeeaaaaannnnnn.
Slowly, or maybe all at once we’ve entered into a post-lockdown world in which the cultural priorities have shifted and the stars have aligned to put queer narratives at the forefront of everyone’s mind. Maybe it was because a lot of people realized they were queer over the last four years after isolation. Maybe it’s because a new generation of young adults who grew into adulthood with legalized queer marriage finally have buying power, maybe it’s the cultural impact of MUNA/genius. Either way, I’m eating it up.4
Thinking through these artists who create work dedicated to uplifting and highlighting the queer experience in its messiness, its sweetness, its discomfort, and its love is really meaningful and powerful, and there’s been a clear shift in the way that this media is regarded, consumed, and critiqued. There’s more nuance here. It seems that room has been made to discuss more than whether or not straight men are allowed in lesbian bars.
I tried to be a lesbian once but it was just too wet for me in the end. Men are so lovely and dry.
I’m really interested in critiquing the mythologies around sapphic love, romantic labor, and sexual desire…but making it all about me and my personal lived experiences. With that comes this sentiment shared by many: tragic tropes rooted in sadness and misogyny misrepresent and erase queer women, their histories, and their romantic interiority. This is why the queer girl media renaissance is so important. If anyone knows me, you know that I am solemnly always in the pursuit of romantic fulfillment. At some point, I forced myself to believe that one of the most beautiful things in life is love. And then the sweet stimulating closeness melts away into just terrifying.
That said, we’re not in a perfect place. Blue Is The Warmest Colour, as important as it was to high-school-aged me, it was still a film created by a man for the male gaze even though it engages with queer subjects. The sex scenes were crafted by a man with the intended audience of other men, to the detriment of the comfort and wellbeing of the actors. This is why it’s so important that the types of queer work being explored today engage with different audiences, different viewers, and different ways of having sex.
In a recent interview, Kristen Stewart laments about lesbian lovemaking in Love Lies Bleeding: “The run of the mill, like, just-go-for-it simulated sex thing is so rote, and it’s like actors do have this default thing where, like, ‘OK we’re supposed to make out and have sex now.’ That’s just not how people have sex, and I’m so sick of seeing it,” she said. “Really nailing the details and talking about the physical experience more so than even seeing it, like verbalizing it, talking to each other, sharing space, like having it not be cut up into a ton of different shots, it felt like … a really beautiful thing to deliver an experience that was, like, literal instead of faux.” Twitter user ‘fruity king’ noted that during their screening of Love Lies Bleeding, fellow moviegoers were uncomfortably laughing during all of the sex scenes.
And that’s why it’s so exciting that this breadth of film, music, TV, etc exists because it’s so clear that we’re in the midst of a reclaiming or heightening or new level of respect afforded to women who love other women represented in popular media. For the first time, we aren’t being spoon-fed one queer film a year, we’re receiving Bottoms, Love Lies Bleeding, and Drive Away Dolls all in the span of six-ish months. And these films are allowed to exist outside of the realm of just despair, they’re allowed to be irreverent, funny, campy, and sometimes…bad. Until now, it felt like there was no room for queer mediocrity.5
My definitive ranking of all WLW film/TV ever (the ones i’ve seen and can remember in this moment):
The Handmaiden
Bottoms
Love Lives Bleeding
But I’m A Cheerleader
The L Word (sans Jenny and transphobia)
A League of their Own
Portrait of a Lady on Fire
Leighton Murray in The Sex Lives of College Girls
That kiss scene in Jennifer’s Body
Booksmart
Riverdale lesbians
Maya Hawke’s character in Stranger Things
Drive Away Dolls
MTV’s Faking It
The lesbian couple in Anyone But You
Happiest Season (yikes)
Between Bottoms, Drive Away Dolls, and Love Lies Bleeding, the girlies (me and the little gay people on my phone) are being fed. It isn’t just The L Word, Ellen, and Hayley Kiyoko anymore,6 there’s a breath of different kinds of sapphic media at different levels of seriousness and artistry.
Last weekend at Coachella, Reneé Rapp invited the cast of The L Word to Coachella to introduce her set against the backdrop of two enormous pairs of scissors. The same day, Chappell Roan performed to an enthused crowd who knew every line. Performers who aren’t afraid to say that they’re lesbians,7 and in Chappell’s case, unafraid to openly celebrate the drag performers that her stage persona is deeply inspired by. This feels really meaningful especially at a time of drag bans, abortion bans, and rampant conservatism rooted in hatred. It’s about a desire to tell stories that simply are not centered around heterosexual desires.
A few weeks ago I was at Henrietta’s with friends, dancing and sweating out my woes in a crowd of presumably queer people. Someone offered to buy us tequila shots, and when they finally arrived the liquor was presented in a hot pink Drive Away Dolls shot glass. While gay marriage has been legal for my entire adult life, I still remember when it wasn’t. I remember when I didn’t know any gay people and it didn’t even occur to me that I was allowed to forge a life for myself that was different, it’s sweet to think about how far we’ve all come since 2015.
I still really struggle to spell “marriage”; otherwise, I’m an excellent speller.
I actually have many relationships I consider to be firsts. I have a first IRL relationship, first “real” relationship (longer than 3 weeks), first internet relationship, etc…
We broke up after like 2 weeks and she immediately blocked me.
In a certain group chat called “pop divas” my friend Jake said that the lineup for All Things Go this year seems like they’re trying to go for a lesbian Coachella vibe. There’s another side of the coin which is the consumptive gaze of straight corporations capitalizing on girlies who desperately want to see themselves in artistic work (and rainbow capitalism, buying power, pandering etc)….but I’m not going to talk about that today
I feel this way about being a black woman too. There’s the old adage: you have to work twice as hard for half as much—thank you to Olivia Pope’s dad for always being in the back of my head with that one. As a black woman I so deeply want to be praised for my mediocrity, I want my failings and shortcomings to be seen as charming and “part of the journey” but I can only strive for perfection. It’s not lost on me that even though lesbian visibility in media is rising, it’s still centering whiteness.
I say with sooo much love except to Ellen
Unlike Jojo Siwa who hates the word lesbian and also invented gay pop music.
need pic at the end as a book cover
need the pic at the end as a book cover