Remember, spitting is queer!

September 08, 2022

What’s going on in queer TV land? Tig Notaro will be joining the cast of The Morning Show for Season 3. If any of you are still watching this show, please let us know. In case you were wondering what on earth is happening on She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, here’s your answer: Megan Thee Stallion and She-Hulk threw ass at the office together.

Also, Chrishell and G Flip attended the Creative Emmys and were serving sapphic chaos.

What makes a gay film historic? Last week, Billy Eichner (of "let’s go lesbians" fame) did an interview with Variety about his upcoming film "Bros." In the interview, Eichner said: "And this is not an indie movie. This is not some streaming thing which feels disposable...like one of a million Netflix shows...I needed to appreciate that...this is a historic moment'"

Twitter users were quick to take issue with Eichner’s statement, which seemed to overstate the significance of the streaming/theatrical and indie/mainstream distinctions, especially considering the recent success of Fire Island (Hulu) and the fact that Moonlight (a $1.5m budget indie) literally won Best Picture. (Moreover, though it was technically an indie, Imagine Me & You came out all the way back in 2005.)

Many were interested to know what Joel Kim Booster – who wrote and starred in Fire Island – had to say about Eichner’s comments. On Sunday, Booster took to Twitter to explain that he was in the desert with no phone and thus missed all the drama, but offered his belated thoughts. Booster wrote that “it seems like he was pretty inarticulate in his excitement about it getting a theatrical release,” but also noted that it was probably something his publicist had told him to highlight. Booster maintained that Eichner remains a good friend of his and there is no beef between them, adding that he is excited to see the film in theaters.

The moral of this story seems to be that discussions of various projects being “firsts” or “historic” tend to elide other, more interesting parts of the narrative, so perhaps we need new language with which to discuss representational progress?

Other dispatches from the little gay people inside the internet:

  • Maren Morris clapped back at Jason Aldean’s transphobic wife and called her “insurrection barbie.” We love to see it.

  • Hunter Schafer has responded to claims that she “hates non-binary” people after she liked a post someone made about the amount of space/visibility non-binary folks take up in discussions about transness. Spoiler alert – she doesn’t hate non-binary people, nor is she a transmedicalist.

  • Here’s the full rundown of the JoJo Siwa/Avery Cyrus relationship.

  • Jamie Clayton has revealed the first look at her role as Pinhead in the new Hellraiser movie. She looks cool as hell, but the real question here is why contemporary films and television are lit in such a way that we can’t even see people’s faces.

  • Barbie Ferreria and Ariana DeBose will star in a “Chef-Themed Psychological Thriller.”

  • HBO Max’s Harley Quinn – which is very sapphic and also unexpectedly sweet – has been renewed for a fourth season. #Harlivy forever.

  • Harry Styles kissed Nick Kroll at the Venice Film Festival. We can’t report on the rest of the drama from this event because it’s just too complicated and too straight. (Although spitting is queer.)

  •  Speaking of Harry Styles, NPR has a piece about t.A.T.u queer bating “Lena Katina and Julia Volkova (who were straight) were packaged as lesbians from the very outset.” (Our fave Jill Gutowitz weighs in)

Political Things:

  • Yesterday Human Rights Watch published this piece "How Targeting LGBTQ+ Rights Are Part of the Authoritarian Playbook." It's an important read. As is this opinion piece in the New York Times by Farhad Manjoo. Manjoo highlights, "in the run-up to the midterms, trans people — trans young people, especially — have become a hysterical obsession of the right."

  • Maura Healey, the attorney general of Massachusetts, officially became the Democratic nominee for governor of Massachusetts. Ms. Healey and another Democrat running for governor of Oregon could become the first two openly lesbian governors in the country if they win in the fall. Read more about it here.

Until next time,

The sapphic implications of Blake Lively refusing to wear a hair tie while playing soccer in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants

Written by Kira Deshler edited by Nicole Ripka