LGBT Archives - Page 15 of 16

Inara wearing a dress that was clearly repurposed from Tara's wardrobe.

Femslash Friday: I’ll Be In My Bunk For Kaylee/Inara

Daniel Mallory Ortberg Ancient Grains, LGBT Nov 08, 2013

Other entries in the series can be found here. Most recently: Ann/Leslie Are Endgame.

I feel nervous about this one, like Indiana Jones right before he stole that idol and got crushed to death by the giant rock. Talking about Joss Whedon shows on the Internet is a fraught prospect. And yet I am willing to put my head in the lion’s mouth, because for all the ink that has been flung about over Firefly over the last ten years, not nearly enough of it has been about lesbians in outer space.

[10,000-word {951 of which are “problematic”} essay about Joss Whedon and intersectional feminism]

Okay, moving on: it is my deeply-held personal belief that Kaylee Frye and Inara Serra from Firefly should be having lesbian sex (with each other) in outer space.

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Piper-in-Lost-and-Delirious-piper-perabo-633700_960_539

Watching Awful Gay Movies With Autostraddle: Lost and Delirious

Nicole and Mallory Ancient Grains, LGBT Nov 06, 2013

You were promised an intense and fevered discussion of bad gay movies; now you shall reap the whirlwind. We begin with 2001’s Lost and Delirious, a truly terrible movie about girls falling in love at the world’s least carefully monitored boarding school. First, let us meet the cast of characters. Myself and Nicole you already know.

From our Autostraddlin’ counterparts: “Riese Bernard, Laneia Jones and Rachel Kincaid are the editors of Autostraddle, where they write about themselves, each other, you and almost everything else that’s interesting and related to being a queer woman. Cumulatively, they have garnered two children, half an MFA, two dogs, one cat, publication credits including Jezebel, The Awl, Thought Catalog, Nerve, Marie Claire and Curve; five copies of Bastard out of Carolina and about fifteen dollars.”

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Femslash Friday: Ann and Leslie Are Endgame

Gaby Dunn Ancient Grains, LGBT Nov 01, 2013

Other entries in the series can be found here. Most recently: Sansa/Brienne on Game of Thrones.

Rarely, there comes along a great, well-written show with a central pair of fantastic female protagonists whose love and support for each other is a tentpole of the series (Rizzoli & Isles, Buffy & Willow, Xena & Gabrielle). Then, that show inevitably feels the need to throw in a couple of (fe)male love interests for each woman as if to say, “Hey! Nothing lesbo happening here. At least not between these two!”

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Femslash Friday: Little Ditty About Anne and Diana

Daniel Mallory Ortberg Ancient Grains, LGBT Oct 18, 2013

Previously: Mellie and Olivia on Scandal.

How does one even begin to write about Anne and Diana? Anne of Green Gables (the book and the film) is a sacred text for a certain type of bookish woman. There are rituals and invocations; there are chants to recite (Carrots, bosom friends, puffed sleeves; carrots, bosom friends, puffed sleeves); there is the Holy Land of Prince Edward Island. “Femslash” is the first Google auto-fill after searching “Anne Diana.” Megan Followes herself ships them.

(A brief aside about romantic friendships and Boston marriages: they existed. They provided a lovely cultural context! For a modern example, see She’s My Person: Christina Yang, Meredith Grey, and The Real Love Story of Grey’s Anatomy. Sometimes the existence of romantic friendships is tossed about to explain away the possibility of historical same-sex relationships, which I find both silly and boring. See also: We’re Just Really Good Friends (I Mean I Love Her But I Don’t Love Love Her Or Anything): The Story of Mallory’s First Girlfriend.)

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Tell Us About Your First Gay Bar

Daniel Mallory Ortberg Ancient Grains, LGBT Oct 14, 2013

This is by no means a new question, but it’s still one of my favorites.*

I was 19 or thereabouts, living in the San Gabriel Valley (not even THE Valley, the OTHER valley), half-heartedly attending Christian college, when I discovered a small contingent of students who would carpool into West Hollywood most weekends. The first weekend I decided to go along — strictly for observational purposes, of course, wink wink — they went to a tiny gay dive bar on the outskirts of Pasadena that was the most terrifying place in the world. Two important things happened almost the moment I walked in the door: a butch woman all in leather began roaring AC/DC’s “Big Balls” (it was a tiny gay bar, but not too tiny for a travel-sized karaoke stage), and a bartender poured us a round of rainbow shots.

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Celebrities At The Los Angeles Dodgers Game

Femslash Friday: Mellie/Olivia Forever

Daniel Mallory Ortberg Ancient Grains, LGBT, Television Oct 11, 2013

Listen, just because we had a little too much lesbian separatism in the ’70s doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have any now. For too long now has the word “slash” been used to exclusively refer to a set of pallid, languorous white-blonde youths semi-closetedly making out under the bleachers, and as much as I approve of Magic Twink Makeouts, one can tire of too much of almost anything.

Which leads me to Scandal, the greatest television program currently extant by our nation’s greatest showrunner, which leads me to my thesis: Look, I wasn’t placed on this earth to tell teens what to do on Tumblr, but in my humble opinion Mellie/Olivia should be at least as popular as Princess Bubblegum/Marceline (I ship Bubblegum/Marcelline like it’s my part-time job at the Orange Julius, but that is a story for another day)

This was all sparked when I recently discovered that the Google image search for “Mellie/Olivia slash” was abundantly disappointing.

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Sailor Jupiter, Gender Expression and Me

Becky Chambers Ancient Grains, LGBT Oct 11, 2013

“Sailor Moon is not a good show,” I said to my partner some weeks back. “I mean — I don’t know if it’s a good show. I haven’t seen it since I was sixteen. I have no idea if it holds up.”

“That’s fine,” she said.

“No, listen. It’s badly animated, and formulaic, and so melodramatic. We don’t have to watch it.”

“When have I ever been picky?” she said. She’d known for years that Sailor Uranus and Neptune’s alter egos were the first example of a gay couple I’d ever seen. But for whatever reason, we’d never dug into that corner of my adolescence until that night. Sailor Moon wasn’t part of her lexicon. It had never been a common point of reference.

“I’m just saying, we don’t have to watch it,” I said. I really wanted to watch it.

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Sing to Us of Your Bad Gay Movies

Nicole and Mallory Ancient Grains, LGBT, Movies Oct 10, 2013

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 a beloved but erring child. They are all worth watching. They are all worth loving. (Except for Chasing Amy. That is a bridge too far, and someday I will make Kevin Smith loudly and shiveringly sorry.)

As we mentioned the other day, Nicole and Mallory are joining with the ladies of Autostraddle to virtually watch bad gay movies together and then talk about them with a degree of intensity equalled only by the intense love depicted by said bad gay movies.

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