1. Because the glass escalator apparently also applies to gay music, I guess.
2. There's a pervasive alt-dyke juvenile-butch-delinquent atmosphere that's apparent from the first shot that I can't quite define, but I know it when I see it.
Death Becomes Her
Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn as resentful exes playing an increasingly dangerous game of lesbian one-upmanship. One-updykeship. I don't know, puns aren't my strong suit. All of Bruce Willis' scenes are replaced with that shot of Isabella Rossellini wearing a necklace for a shirt and purring "You're scared."
I have long regretted that one of my first lesbian-antennae moments wasn't the result of a better movie. It was the scene where Andrea cuts her hair off to disguise herself as a boy in Motocrossed, a Disney Channel Original movie that ran continuously during the summer of 2001 that I saw, conservatively, four hundred times.
Why is there not yet such a thing as a lesbian icon? I'm not just talking about lesbians who have become famous — spare me your Melissa Etheridges, your Tracy Chapmans. Nor do I consider any of the zillion indie female vocalists who are beloved within the lesbian community to be candidates for iconic status—we all went through our Ani DiFranco phases, and the less said on that score the better. No, I'm talking about…
(Disclaimer: Obviously, I mean to take nothing away from genuine Songs About Lesbians, which are beautiful and frankly, not nearly as ubiquitous as they should be. Nor do I want to disparage the good work of anyone covering a pop song and not changing the pronouns, creating a de facto gay version. Heroes, every one of them. I guess what I'm saying is that the worship circle for Angel Haze's version of Same Love…
Recently, an anonymous Friend of the Toast who works at a university for humans somewhere on the North American continent informed us that at the end of every gender studies course, she asks her students to (among other things) define lesbians and modern lesbian identity, in light of the already-completed course reading.
There are gay movies like Pariah and Desert Hearts that are painful, transformative works of art; there are gay movies like Imagine Me & You and But I'm A Cheerleader and The Incredibly True Adventures of 2 Girls in Love that are flawed or occasionally cheesy but still delightful; and then there are gay movies like Latter Days and Kissing Jessica Stein and Were The World Mine that are so bad that you have no choice but to embrace them to your bosom like…
Here is your generous and delightful lesbian news for the day. Kimberly McLeod, who is magnificent, penned a lovely letter to LGBT celebrities of varying degrees of outness in Ebony (An aside. Do you follow Ebony on Twitter? You should. They have an excellent Twitter account) today: Like many lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) youth, I remember first turning to the media to find reflections of myself. The depictions, far and few in between, were oftentimes limited. (The lesbian…
Yesterday E! broke the news that long-running CBS series Two And a Half Men will be introducing a lesbian character for the eleventh season: E! News can exclusively report that the pivotal new role of Charlie Harper's illegitimate daughter has been written as 21 years old, "sexy and gorgeous," and gay. The new character, Jenny, will share many traits with her deceased father, including her love of women, per our sources. The Toast has procured…
