Ruby Cruz Joins ‘The Sex Lives of College Girls’ and Shares Her Favorite Horror Movies

Ruby Cruz has wielded swords (Willow) and fist-fought football players (Bottoms) while always capturing a lady’s heart — whether her character got game or not. In the latest season of The Sex Lives of College Girls, Cruz lays down her weapons but she’s still bagging a baddie. She made her debut in the third season’s sixth episode, “Halloween & Oat Milk,” as Ash, a lesbian freshman at Essex and a love interest for the fierce fellow lesbian freshman Taylor (Mia Rogers).

In the episode, Taylor attends a queer speed dating event at Bela’s (Amrit Kaur) encouragement. What follows is a series of Taylor having not-so-fun dating partners, featuring cameos from comedian Haley Stiel to freaking Kim Petras. That’s all before Taylor laments on the weirdness of the ladies she’s paired with and a nearby Ash agrees. The two hit it off.

Upon the airing of the following episode ”The Rodeo,” which reunites Taylor and Ash, Cruz and I spoke on a phone call and discussed everything Sex Lives of College Girls and more, from landing her role, collaborating with Mia Rogers, and portraying distinctively different queer characters.

Rendy: What interested you about becoming part of the Sex Lives of College Girls world?

Ruby: I’m always down to contribute to more queer representation. Always down. I was honored and excited to be a part of this show that’s so beloved by so many people and to be another queer character on it.

Rendy: Did you do an audition process or did a casting director just watch Bottoms?

Ruby: Yeah, I think, well, it was super exciting, because it was my first ever straight offer. I was like, “What?” And then I get a call from Justin Nobles, who is the showrunner and co-creator and he also directed the finale. He was like, “I’m about to make a very queer episode of TV, would you like to be part of it?” And I was like, “Yeah!” So that’s how that came about and I simply was just honored and grateful that they thought of me.

Rendy: What was it like embodying Ash? Because she has this mixed aspect of the wardrobe of Hazel, but also the charm and rizz of Kit.

Ruby: That is so funny. Wait, I love that. Yeah, I think it was a cool amalgamation. I think Ash was a really cool character to portray. She’s super chill, she’s super understanding. She loves to listen. She loves to just experience the fiery energy of Taylor and it was really cool to just come to set and hang out and have it be a really laid back experience, honestly, because of who Ash was.

Rendy: What was the collaboration between you and Mia in finding the romantic relationship between your characters?

Ruby: Working with Mia was such a gift. She’s so wonderful to be around. She’s so fun and was really down to be really collaborative. We had just had a bunch of conversations about what this relationship meant to both of these characters and we were able to develop the importance of showing that these two people really care about each other. I think that was rare for both of them. I think Ash, a freshman, just meeting a bunch of people, meeting everyone she can, and then really finding that spark with someone was something that she wanted to follow, and then having that sort of disappear was a let down, but I think it was really exciting for her to get the chance to cross paths again.

Rendy: Within Ash and Taylor’s meet cute at the speed date, my friend Haley, who was in it, told me there was a lot of improv within that sequence. So I was wondering if you got to play with a little bit of improv during that scene as well.

Ruby: Yeah, that was super fun. Everybody was just making each other laugh and it was just such good energy on set. All the people who came in on different dates were so funny and so fun to talk to between takes. Getting to work with Kim Petras? Awesome. I’m such a big fan of hers and I love her very much. And I mean, working with Mia was really cool. We just got to be like, “Okay, here we are. We’re meeting right now. We are sort of at the perfect place in our real relationship just meeting to be representing two people meeting and getting to know each other.” So it was really fun to rely on and play with, and I remember them just sort of shooting, shouting lines out at us to play with, and that was really cool. I loved doing anything and improvising.

Rendy: Tell me about your approach to portraying various queer characters who are so distinct and yet we recognize people like them. We all know a Kit or a Hazel or an Ash.

Ruby: I feel really, really grateful that I get to play with all these different sides of myself. I mean, queerness and gender expression, all of that is such a spectrum and I love getting the chance to explore different sides of myself through characters, explore different sides of myself physically, emotionally. I mean, I feel like that represents who I am every day. I’m a different person in terms of how I express myself and how I dress. So I think it’s really cool to be able to, when I feel —I mean, this is getting kind of deeper about it — but it feels like there’s such a crazy pressure to be an actress and to be some ”femme, slay-like mama.” You know what I mean? Then being able to separate myself from that and get in touch with my more masculine side is, I couldn’t ask for a better career opportunity or life opportunity than to do that.

Rendy: Well, I’ll reciprocate those feelings: When I first came out as non-binary, I thought I had to project androgyny by default.

Ruby: Yes!

Rendy: Yeah, So after a little while I was like, you know what? I dress the way I do.

Ruby: Yeah. And it’s crazy. People will perceive that and then sort of tie you to that image of yourself that they are projecting onto you, but you can just become a new version of yourself the next day. I don’t know. I think it’s so fun to play around with that, and I’ve always done that since I was a kid, so it’s really cool that I get to do that in my career too.

Rendy: What particularly draws you to comedy? I see that as the form you’re playing in these days.

Ruby: Yeah, I mean, feel like I just, that’s funny. I don’t see it that way. I mean, I guess I have been doing a lot of comedies with Bottoms and then Sex Lives, but I just wrapped a show, For All Mankind. That was a very different, it’s scientific, scientifically accurate astronauts and historically accurate thing, you know what I mean? And that was really cool to sort of jump back and forth between genres. But I do really love comedy. I do just want to be laughing and making other people laugh, so I feel like that’s a real joy to get to do that as work.

Rendy: Since you star in several shorts too, what are some of the challenges in playing between different formats between features and television and even short films?

Ruby: I mean, each one requires a different set of skills and awarenesses, and I feel like features, you can really throw yourself into it. It feels like this sort of pocket of time space where you’re surrounded by all these people collectively working on one thing every day and sort of like a month or two of your life where it’s really saturated in this character and in this story. And then with television, Sex Lives and the other show I had mentioned and ones I’ve been in like Mare of Easttown and stuff like that, it’s sort of choppier. There’s a lot of ensemble where you don’t get to sort of follow a character’s storyline the entire time. You just pop in here and there. And same for how it actually works, where I’m working a couple times a week, if anything. And you sort of have to pick up where you left off and sort of jump back into different feelings or different headspace with time in between, which can be a little bit more difficult, honestly. But I mean, I love it all. I’m just happy to be making stuff. Shorts are so fun too. Jean, the short that we just made, was our first sort of dive into it, and that was a whole other story, like a 30 minute one take, which was crazy. But it all just requires different things for you to pull from different areas of your brain or whatever.

Rendy: What are some of your favorite genres to play in or genres you’d love to explore in the future?

Ruby: Yeah, I mean, I’ve loved everything I’ve done, but luckily I’ve gotten to sort of dive into so many different genres and stuff, but I would like to explore horror a little bit more. I’m working on getting scared more, and I feel like that would be a really fun thing to dive into. I’ve done a little bit with Castle Rock. It was a pretty scary moment, but that was a long time ago. I hope to sort of experience some more soon.

Rendy: What are some of your favorite horror films or shows?

Ruby: Ooh I need to look at a list. Let me think about that. I mean, I love The Shining. I love— let me look at my films. I watched a bunch of them during, what’s it called, Halloween.

Rendy: (laughs) Yeah, that one season.

Ruby: I just watched, oh my God, the Smile series is so good. I didn’t expect to love it and be as scared as I was when I watched it, but I really, really loved it. I watched this other movie called Le Vourdalak, which was, I’m pretty sure it was French. I could be so wrong. But it came out recently and it looks like it came out decades ago. Just the way that they filmed it. I don’t know what they did to, or what film they used for camera they used, but it was a really fascinating take on Dracula and they used a puppet to play Lord Vourdalak and that was really cool. I thought that was really creative and I want to research that more.

Rendy: What are some different projects in the future that people could look out for after Sex Lives?

Ruby: I just wrapped last week on For All Mankind, but I think they take a long time between filming and releasing, so I don’t know when that’s planning to come out. Probably in a year from now, they have a lot of CGI and little things to wrap up. So well made though. It’s such a crazy series and that’s another show that’s already established that has a machine that’s already been built, and I got to just enjoy and hop in on, you know what I mean? I don’t know what I’m trying to say, but you know what I mean.

The third season of The Sex Lives of College Girls is streaming on Max.

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Rendy Jones

Rendy Jones (they/he) is a film and television journalist born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. They are the world's first gwen-z film journalist and owner of self-published independent outlet Rendy Reviews, a member of the Critics' Choice Association, GALECA, and a screenwriter. They have been seen in Vanity Fair, Them, RogerEbert.com, Rolling Stone, and Paste.

Rendy has written 18 articles for us.

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What It’s Like To Get Divorced, Come Out, Fall in Queer Love, and Then Tell Jokes About All of It on Stage

all photos by JT Anderson

“So, last year I went through a little bit of a breakup. Some would call it a divorce. Kinda legally in the state of New York you would call it a divorce.”

This is how comedian, writer, and “U-Haul bisexual” Britt Migs begins in her solo show Dolphin Mode, which she performed at the New York Comedy Festival in November. Migs artfully takes the audience through a complicated year of her life featuring divorce, loss, and ultimately, love, all the while inviting people to laugh alongside her. The show depicts her “comically bad divorce and having to come out (and date) all over again in your 30s.”

“There’s nothing worse than a canceled date,” Migs says in the show. “The worst time it ever happened to me, I was already on the subway. And I’ll be real with you guys, I had shaved my entire body. Kinda snout to tail. Just sitting there like a smooth idiot. I was in dolphin mode.”

Britt Migs in Dolphin Mode

Dolphin Mode takes place over the course of 2023, a very chaotic year for Migs. Over Super Bowl weekend, she was laid off on Friday and getting a divorce on Sunday. But the worst part, Migs says, was missing Rihanna’s halftime show.

The choice to create the show felt obvious to Migs because all of her material was so chronological. “All of my jokes were like, hey, I got divorced recently, then I started dating, Now I am in a queer relationship,” Migs tells me. “It felt like it was thrust upon me, and it made so much sense to make a show around this year of my life.”

Migs began creating the show by combining her existing jokes and adding in emotional beats. With a more narrative show versus a quicker set, she was able to do different kinds of jokes that wouldn’t necessarily work in a regular show. Her director Taryn O’Connor helped her refine and polish the show. This involved doing a lot more choreography than would typically be put together for a stand-up set.

With each iteration of the show, the most recent being the NYCF performance, audience members reach out to Migs to share how her story helped them. “I have had divorcees come to the show and say that it has made them feel powerful,” she says. “I have had people in my DMs saying that my jokes made them feel really seen… I hope that I can make someone laugh or bring levity to a dark situation that they’re going through. Divorce is really sad and weird and fucked up. I’m glad that I can say ‘Hey, it gets better.’”

Britt Migs at Dolphin Mode

Creating the show helped Migs process the experience herself. “I was really sad,” she says. “Obviously, there are stages of a breakup. It’s the stages of grief. Sadness, anger, bargaining, whatever. But when I started joking about it, it freed me from a lot of the sadness and allowed me to– I don’t wanna say become angrier — but become angry-funny. Like, I actually can’t fucking believe that that guy did that! … I think that most comics, artists, whoever, would say that creating art is something that really helps you heal.”

Comedy helped Migs through this time period in both a metaphorical and more literal way. Her ex did not take her seriously about wanting a divorce until he saw her jokes online about it. He had been refusing to sign the papers, believing she would still change her mind. “He texted me when I posted the joke and he was angry, like, ‘Wow. You really did it,’” she says. He was angry about the post, but it convinced him to finally sign the papers. “And — this is so cheesy — he took so much from me… but the one thing that he couldn’t take was comedy. And in that way, it kind of saved my life.”

But Dolphin Mode isn’t just a divorce story; it’s also a coming-out story and a love story.

“I had to have a second coming out with getting back into dating because people really didn’t believe me that I was bisexual,” Migs says. She had mentioned to her parents that she was bisexual years prior, but no one took her seriously. When she started dating women after her divorce, everyone was shocked. “My family was like, ‘Huh? You’re gay now?’”

Migs felt immediately welcomed by the queer community. “I remember it being my first Pride as someone who was fully out and how exciting that was. [My friends] and I would be like, yeah, we’re gonna go be gay!! It was just so exciting and fun and new.”

Britt Migs at Dolphin Mode

Migs calls herself a “U-haul bisexual” because she re-entered the dating scene, explored queer dating, and then immediately got into a new relationship and moved in with her new partner after six months. “When I started dating my current partner, my family was like, ‘Ohh, she wasn’t fucking around. She was serious,’” Migs tells me.

Migs says she fell in love immediately. “This relationship is not only like the healthiest one I’ve ever been in, but it’s such a drastic shift from the often verbally abusive cheating relationship that I was in right before,” Migs says.

So what does “going Dolphin mode” really mean for Migs?

The show’s dolphin theme started off as a simple reference to her joke about “going dolphin mode” when dating again after divorce. But the dolphin motif has grown to be so much more. “They were actually a pretty perfect mascot for the show. They symbolize transformation, rebirth, freedom, and the importance of community,” Migs says. “Plus dolphins have been known to do gay stuff!”

“But really, post-divorce I feel like that meme where a dolphin is smiling, often through something difficult, with Lisa Frank rainbows and hearts around it. I am still swimming! Despite it all! And I’m loving it!”

Dolphin Mode will be featured in the Knockouts festival, in LA this summer, and hopefully, the 2025 Edinburgh Fringe. 

Before you go! Autostraddle runs on the reader support of our AF+ Members. If this article meant something to you today — if it informed you or made you smile or feel seen, will you consider joining AF and supporting the people who make this queer media site possible?

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Audrey Black

Audrey Black is an NYC-based writer and comedian. Originally from Dallas, Texas, she now resides in Brooklyn. You can find her on Twitter and Instagram.

Audrey has written 5 articles for us.

The Erotics of Masks

feature image photo by ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images

Strangers filtered into the dark basement. Mattresses, antique velvet furniture, a St. Andrew’s Cross, a spanking bench, a plastic-coated area cordoned off for the messier kinks. Queers entered the coat check and took off their street clothes to reveal harnesses, lingerie, and black underwear. I was an out-of-towner at the party alone. Cautious, a South Asian among many, many white people. I sat on a throne beside some of those white people. I could have talked to them, but I didn’t want to. In this space made to explore desire, I decided to not do things I didn’t want to do.

In this foreign environment, I allowed myself to be hesitant, to not be the cutest, most charming, eager person there. To people watch, and to enjoy the games. During one game, the room of 50 or so people was split down the middle. The center of the room became a runway. A volunteer from the crowd took the mic and announced their desire: I want, they began. One by one, people named their desires: to have a boot licked, an ass smacked, to paddle other people’s asses, insults and sneers from the crowd. It was practice, as so much of kink is. We practiced feeling and naming desire. We practiced skills on new, willing bodies. We practiced giving and receiving. We turned our asses for the paddle, we got on our knees for the boot, we shouted our most vile insults for those who asked. We, one by one, smacked ass.

One person stood out. They looked South Asian, and their cadence of speech reminded me of a friend raised on the subcontinent. They introduced themself as Nash and announced they were blind.

“I know there’s a rule about not being creepy and to not get too close, but if I do get close, it might be because I just don’t see you, and I won’t know until I am too close. I’m not a creep. I’m just…” They paused. “…disabled.”

I laughed. For the first time in the night, I really laughed. I don’t remember whether other people laughed, whether the able-bodied people in the room thought they weren’t allowed to laugh at the immaculate delivery, the thinly veiled fuck you to rules designed for people who can see.

I’m not blind, but I am disabled, and I have enough disabled kin to know we can and do find humor in our bodies and the way the truths of our bodies butt up against the capitalist, ableist cultures and structures we are forced to navigate.

I wanted to talk to them.

I wanted to, maybe, play with them.

Or, rather, I wanted to be played with by them.

When the games ended, pro-doms got to work on eagerly awaiting bottoms; couples made out until they moved to mattresses; those seeking liquid courage found their way to the bar; the restless, like me, wandered the multiple levels of play spaces, wearing our soles thin looking for something interesting enough to stop for.

Passing Nash in the stairwell, they reached their hand out. “I’m so glad you’re wearing a mask. I’m usually always wearing a mask.” By next time I saw them, two other people had noted I was the only person wearing a mask in the space. One of them said, “I would, but it’s so hard to be the only one wearing a mask.” I’d never gotten this much attention for this simple act of protection.

Every time I considered taking it off, I felt queasy. It wasn’t only about COVID, because I last had COVID a few weeks before traveling, or the flu, which I had over the summer. It was all the other things I liked about wearing a mask: that I did not have to show my face to strangers, or make facial expressions that weren’t genuine, or contort myself to another’s need for ease. By wearing a mask, especially when no else was, I showed, maybe, one other person in the room that it was okay to wear a mask and that it wouldn’t negatively impact the experience.

My mask was also a reminder that COVID happened, is happening. I refused to forget the millions who died and have been disabled by COVID. It signaled a refusal to return to pre-pandemic normalcy and sent a message to other disabled kin that I care about them. Wearing a mask allowed me to be publicly disabled and to publicly protect myself. It soothed my nervous system. I did not have to fear the air, the breath of those around me. A mask was a comfort, a protection spell, a disabled fashion statement.

Wearing a mask felt similar to how I usually identified as a stone top. I started identifying as stone because I wanted to change the defaults that had run my life. I wanted all sexual encounters to start with the premise that no one could touch me. I wanted my vulnerability, my receiving, to be a choice, to be treated as precious. When I wore a mask, I began with the premise that no one could see my face unless I allowed, that I did not give them the gift of seeing me unless I actively consented. At this play party, where the whiteness made me highly visible, my mask was a way to gift myself privacy.

The next time I saw Nash, we waited for the performance to start. They pulled out their own maroon-colored mask. They wore a baggy jumpsuit and talked about organizing for Palestine within the first few minutes. I wore little black shorts and a tiny black crop top with a floral mesh shirt over it. I identify most as a stone top, but for this person? Masked and talking about Palestine, a disabled person of color amongst what they would later describe as a blizzard?

I wanted to bottom.

//
On my way to the party, I had sent a selfie to my disaster bisexual group chat asking for compliments. I felt self conscious about my outfit because I didn’t have my usual array of slutty clothing options. Over my black shorts, I wore grey sweatpants. My fellow disaster bisexual quoted Trixie Mattel in their praise: “Grey sweatpants are the push up bras of the gay world!”

After the party, I realized my mask had sparked conversation, prompted Nash to put their mask on, and led us to playing together. This was its own kind of vetting. Who will put their mask on for me? To protect me, to meet me where I’m most safe? Could a mask be the push up bra of the disabled community?

A mask was not only about repelling certain people but drawing certain people closer. It signaled to disabled kin, “I’m disabled, too,” or, “I love disabled people enough to wear a mask,” or “I give a shit about you.” The care in itself was erotic. It was erotic to know someone cared about me enough to not get me sick, to not take the chance without talking about it first, to not pass something to me that could make me more disabled. It was erotic to not have to fear. It was erotic to feel safe with someone because I was not wondering what was hidden within the air they breathe.

By erotic, I mean in that Audre Lorde, “internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire,” way. But I also mean, it was hot. It was hot to play with someone knowing they orient their lives around care, in this material and fundamental way.

When I talked to Amanda, my friend who first brought me to POC play parties and who was the other disaster bisexual in the group chat, she shared her own stories of times she wore a mask and hooked up with, played with, or was propositioned by strangers. Times when she was one of only a couple people masking, times she met people who would become play partners and lovers through multiple masked encounters. I imagined it: eyes locked above KN95s, horny eye contact while still in the mystery of not being able to see a potential lover’s face. The implicit rebellion of wearing a mask in the bar, the play party, the club, when society has largely deemed masks too burdensome. The solidarity that comes from marking oneself as other. The fantasy of what the other person looks like, what led them to defy ableist cultural norms, what might happen when the mask is off. The magnetic attraction that leads one disabled person to talk to, play with, another.

Amanda said, “Masks are hot! There’s nothing hotter than going home with someone and knowing you won’t get COVID the next day.”

I thought about the time my girlfriend had COVID while visiting. She quarantined in the other room, but we watched all of Hunger Games masked on separate couches. On the final days of her quarantine, when it wasn’t clear whether she was contagious or not, we wore masks as she fucked me on the red rug in the living room. We took a bath together masked. I did not get COVID. Masked sex protected me, while still allowing for intimacy, care, and touch.

Masked sex and kink have taught me that I am worthy of touch and intimacy. The animal in me that needed to cuddle and be soothed through the physical presence of another animal body on mine — that body could have its needs met, even if sickness was rampant. My need for touch was not opposed to my need to be protected against contagion.

Masking is not a barrier to intimacy but a path towards intimacy. Wearing a mask allows me to find the people I’m meant to find. Yes, masks alienate some people. Some think I’m standoffish, unwilling to interact, overly cautious, perhaps even hostile, lingering in the past, hiding my face. And yet others will see my mask and think: This person stands out, this person is a potential play partner, this person is disabled, this person cares about disabled and immunocompromised people like me.

//
I’d tell you about the scene with Nash, but, like with my mask, I give myself the gift of privacy. Instead, I’ll tell you about the performance.

Every time I’ve told this story, I’ve struggled with what words to use. It feels disrespectful to call one person top and one person bottom, because the way they moved with each other was so different than any kind of top/bottom dynamic I’ve ever seen. It was not through one person doing things to the other that marked one as top and the other as bottom. It was not through skill or the ability or lack of ability to do certain things. It was not through delineated roles of who was “giving” or “receiving.” It was not through one person being barely clothed while the other person was covered up.

It was, in part, through a mask.

The top wore a mask.

On the backyard stage, the performance began with a person, who, for simplicity, I’ll call “the bottom,” tying themselves. In tiny leather underwear, they wrapped rope around their torso. Their long brown hair flowed parallel to the red rope they gracefully slid around their body, creating simple, neat, and effective frictions to hold the rope against them. Beneath a suspension ring, they held me in anticipation: I knew the bottom would be suspended, but I didn’t know when or how.

The person I’ll call “the top” emerged, wearing a jock strap that framed their ass beautifully, a cut off ribbed white tank, and a denim vest. Their black hair was tied up and their face was covered with a black bandana. It was not, technically I suppose, a mask, but it was a kind of mask. Theirs was one of the only faces an audience could not see.

They lurked around the edge of the stage as the bottom tied. They crouched beneath the bottom, then loomed behind them as if they were determining the best angle from which to mutilate their prey. Occasionally, they touched the bottom. They grabbed the bottom’s hair, or throat; they wrapped their arms around the bottom, squeezed their ass. The bottom continued tying, smiling. They seemed pleased by the attention, but focused on their task at hand.

I could see the face of the bottom; I could not see the face of the top. The top’s performative skill came from curating an energetic charge. The top appeared unpredictable, dangerous, evil. The top could have been anyone: predator, killer, spy. In the context of this performance, I liked the mystery, the possibility of danger, the right kind of danger.

The top pulled a folding chair from the wall, and the bottom sat down. The top tied one simple tie, a double column knot around the bottom’s ankles. It was not complex, and as a rope top, I noticed the top was not the most technically skilled person in the scene. The bottom created a safe harness for themselves; their fingers pulled dozens of feet of rope through small spaces tight against their body. They felt their own body, assessed their own safety, were played with by another, and put on a fucking show. The skill of hotness, the skill shared with us.

The bottom then sanitized their torso and thighs, and began placing needles.

The top joined.

It seemed random at first. Each needle was either on the bottom’s chest, stomach, or thighs. Some of the needle placements felt intense, energy rippling through the crowd. This was only the second time I’d ever seen needle play in person, and I wondered how many people in the crowd were experiencing it for the first time.

After a dozen or so needles had been inserted, the bottom winked at the top and smiled. I gasped: I’m into kink not for the most extreme things we can do with and to each other, but for the tiny intimacies, the ways we crack each other open in our most vulnerable moments, for the inside jokes, laughter, and playfulness. They each picked up a needle, and clinked them together. Cheers, for the freaks.

I had the biggest grin on my face. I looked around like, did anyone else see that? I was enthralled by their silent banter, their dynamic. Still, the top’s face was hidden, still, the bottom was exposed.

At this point, they both began to place the needles with more speed. It was like a choreographed dance; I was experiencing the highs and lows, the emotional arc of the dancers, as they practiced their art.

Once the needles were in, they formed two rows down the bottom’s torso and thighs, with the tip of each needle pointed inwards. The top grazed a pre-cut length of red ribbon across the bottom’s body and wrapped it around each needle’s plastic end, so the bottom’s body was laced like a shoe.

Thighs held together in the lacing, the bottom stood and reached overhead with a length of rope. They connected their rope harness to the suspension ring above them and I imagined the tension on each needle as the ribbon stretched and shifted. The interplay of metal, cloth, and skin as soft, delicate fibers brought together all the sharp, hard things within their body.

The bottom suspended themselves, and where was the top? The top was grabbing the bottom’s neck, putting fingers in their mouth, licking them, squeezing their ass. The top was creating pleasure and pain, stepping away from the bottom and drawing close. Face obscured, the top was bearer of cruelty and delight.

Once in the air, the bottom spun on the ring beautifully. The top touched their body and they made pretty shapes. This is how rope bottoms are often portrayed: suspended, beautiful, in the air, at the will of another. Here, this lasted only a few moments.

Gradually, the top began to remove needles and blood began to flow. They unlaced the bottom. Drops of blood poured down the bottom’s thighs, chest, flanks. With the bottom’s body suspended in a perfect arc, thighs exposed to the room, the top lowered their mask.

They licked.

For them to taste the blood of their lover, they had to reveal themselves. To receive this  [gift] [temptation] [bliss] blood, they had to make themselves known to the audience. There was beauty in this gesture, this revelation, and it wasn’t until this moment that I thought of the top and bottom as lovers, rather than play partners. The gesture communicated love. It emphasized the gifts, and power, we give each other when we play: our blood, our faces, our vulnerabilities, our life force.

My eyes welled with tears. I thought of all the times I longed for gestures of vulnerability from tops, the times that stone had meant impenetrable, hard, a refusal of softness. This top created an energetic sense of cruelty through their mask, but then softened through its removal. It was as if they said, You, my prey, are worth it.

//
Masks are a conduit for intimacy. They make me feel more comfortable going into the world. They create the possibility of witnessing queer joy at the bar. They keep me well when in contact with sick people so that I don’t have to spend my days off recovering. Masks, like condoms, birth control, clean needles, STI tests, are means of harm reduction, ways for me to draw close, closer, with the people I want to, while keeping risks further away. They create the possibility of connection in a world where death has been woven into the fabric of our every day.

Masks are erotic tools. When I have sex or play with someone, I want to care, and be cared for. A mask signifies a willingness to care, to do the dance of care with each other, to engage with our erotic, sexual bodies. Someone wearing a mask doesn’t necessarily make them a good lover, but it can be a precondition to a good time. They allow us to keep secrets, hide ourselves, and offer ourselves to the right person. They remind us of the preciousness of revelation. They prevent infection so we can care for, love, play with, delight in, our beloveds as long as our bodies allow. They signal care to immunocompromised and disabled kin. They function to vet people. They can create an emotional experience, and protect our own emotional experience when we don’t want another to see.

They’re hot, because, as Amanda said, there’s nothing hotter than going home with someone and not getting COVID afterwards.

Before you go! Autostraddle runs on the reader support of our AF+ Members. If this article meant something to you today — if it informed you or made you smile or feel seen, will you consider joining AF and supporting the people who make this queer media site possible?

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Related:

MK

M. K. Thekkumkattil (they/them) is a trans disabled kinky writer and Critical Care nurse whose liberation is bound up with Palestinian Liberation. They are a recipient of a 2023 Rasmuson Foundation Individual Artist Award and a Lambda Literary Fellow. Their work can be found in Fence Magazine, Year Round Queer, & In the Future There Are No Hospitals, & @thekkumkattilmk.

MK has written 3 articles for us.

3 Comments

  1. “Wearing a mask felt similar to how I usually identified as a stone top. I started identifying as stone because I wanted to change the defaults that had run my life. I wanted all sexual encounters to start with the premise that no one could touch me. I wanted my vulnerability, my receiving, to be a choice, to be treated as precious. When I wore a mask, I began with the premise that no one could see my face unless I allowed, that I did not give them the gift of seeing me unless I actively consented.”

    I love this piece so so much; thank you for writing it. As someone who also still masks everywhere, this section particularly resonated with me. I didn’t receive much typical street harassment growing up, but I’ve been struck by how much mask harassment I’ve received, either from well-intentioned people asking to see my face, telling me I have to take it off for a photograph, that I need to get over my needless anxiety, or (from not so well-intentioned people) yelling out at me from their car to ‘take that shit off.’ Still masking has become such a direct way to refuse to participate in societal norms, to signal that I’ll protect myself and my community before I’ll bow to the pressure to be exposed and vulnerable with people who do not respect me or who have not earned my trust. I hadn’t really conceptualized it in that way before reading this piece, so thank you.

    A last related thought – masking has also become a way for me to free myself from certain gendered norms – I frequently skip wearing makeup at all now, and don’t need to continually be aware of my face, if it’s making a ‘nice’ or ‘pretty’ expression. I can just exist, as myself. I love the idea that masks might also allow us to create and participate in other norms, of vulnerability, of desire, of community, etc. That’s a positive I’d been struggling to find or articulate before reading this, when I usually just thought of masking as an irritating necessity that kept me safe, but also from freely engaging with others. The more I write this comment and reflect on your piece, the more I love it! Thank you again.

  2. I’m having trouble articulating my gratitude for you and this piece, but wow. As someone who occasionally worries that my masks make me seem standoffish, this connection between masking and intimacy was revelational to read. I feel much less alone and much more hopeful as well as plain freaking delighted after having my worldview just shifted like that. Masking up and caring about others is hot and I needed that reminder. Thank you thank you thank you

  3. I really love and appreciate this article. I’m someone who still masks whenever I’m in public, even as that’s become less and less common. And the feeling of automatic connection and solidarity when seeing someone else masking definitely resonates. I’m also neurodivergent, and the ways that physically masking means less having to “mask” in the sense of monitoring or adjusting my facial expressions has been a side benefit to masking to avoid illness. I’m currently only engaged in the link community through online stuff, but this does help the possibility of attending in-person events seem more possible/appealing.

    Thank you so much for writing this and to Autostraddle for publishing it!

Comments are closed.

What If The Girl You Made Out With On New Year’s Eve Becomes Your Wife?

make out month banner

January is Makeout Month at Autostraddle.com

It is nearly midnight on December 31, 2019, and you are drunk as fuck at a gay dance party in Silver Lake wearing a ten-dollar H&M jumpsuit, white Reeboks and lip gloss that makes your mouth feel like it was recently stung by a a dozen gentle bees. The building is sweating. You and your group of friends are regular attendees of this dance party, deeply familiar with the multi-level venue you’ve only ever seen blurry after dark — its coke-dusted photo booth, its filthy bathroom with an infinite line and no toilet paper, its two understaffed bars slinging $15 shots of tequila and usually, on nights like this one, a DJ committed to playing the hits. The real hits, the songs everyone actually wants to hear, you know the ones. I Wanna Dance With Somebody. Call Your Girlfriend. I Want You Back. Those hits.

“If we don’t have anybody to kiss at midnight, we should kiss each other,” you say to your best friend. You’re not sure where this idea came from but it feels very right and good. She agrees. You are on the same page.

It’s been a weird hard year and you’ve lost a lot this year including, at times, your sense of self and your sanity. You are rebuilding yourself into a better person, a person with a healthier relationship to work, a person with a work life balance, a person with a Strong Inner Core who doesn’t need Outside Affirmation.  These new friends, your group chat — the ones you are at the gay dance party with — are part of that rebuilding. For well over a decade you’ve generally made friends by leading with your work or some sort of creative collaboration, but these are friends you’ve made by leading with your personality, which was scary at first but feels less so every day.

You all have wild, outrageous amounts of reckless fun together, the kind of fun you’re having tonight. You laugh until your faces hurt. You blaze out into the evening with terrific nihilism. This nihilism and the binge drinking it engenders has an expiration date, but you don’t know that yet. You will never attend this dance party again but you don’t know that yet, either, don’t know what 2020 has in store for us all. For now you are living in the intoxicated  moment and this, too, you have charted as personal growth, an important embrace of “letting go.” These things take time, after all. (Maybe that’s the point of this story, is how difficult it is to know exactly how much time a thing will take.)

You think you love these friends that night but you have no idea how much deeper that love is going to grow when the world shuts down and you become each other’s family. You think you know each other now? You think you love each other now? You haven’t even scratched the surface.

And, of course, you love your best friend.

So at midnight, you kiss her. You do it. It happens, it’s midnight and you’re kissing and it’s really great? From that very first moment it feels like you’ve been kissing her all your life. You’d initially anticipated that the midnight kiss would last for 30 seconds, at most, if that. You would kiss and then you would laugh and everybody would laugh and it would be a funny story. But all the bees scatter and everything is buzzing and you’re kissing and kissing her feels like dancing to all the hits, except better because you are better at kissing than dancing. Sometimes it takes time, you know, there is a clash of different kissing styles, different go-tos for heads and hands and mouths and teeth and tongue and all of that but not with her, with her it just works, immediately.

You keep doing it — not for the danger or for the plot or for the possibility of ensuing chaos and the way chaos releases you from responsibility for yourself. You keep doing it because it is fun and exhilarating, actually. You could become addicted to this if you let yourself. You push her against a wall, and you yank her to your waist, and you smile and she smiles and it’s dark but your limbs are light. You feel weightless and made of stars. Her blue eyes sparkle with inevitability.

Only once before in your whole adult life have you dared to make out with someone with whom you were already very close, as friends — someone you love deeply and entirely, someone who knew you, really knew you, had seen you in all sorts of compromising situations and still wanted you, and what you learned from that moment and the moments and the relationship that came after is that sometimes when you break up with someone who was your friend before the relationship, you can’t just automatically go back to being friends like you were before. You are, at the time of this New Years kiss, still sorting through that specific situation, still trying to find a place with the ex where you can both feel safe and happy and the feelings you still have for each other won’t hurt so much anymore.

You can’t lose this girl, too, this best friend you are kissing at midnight. You can’t lose this new best friend who knows you, really knows you. So even though this make out has gone really well, really beat all expectations, you are very certain that it will not happen again.

It is now very late, maybe two in the morning, and you are tired, and probably sick because that’s what happens when you drink 12 shots of tequila in one night, and you say she should sleep over, but as friends, not “in a sexual way.” She could not agree more. You and your best friend are completely aligned on this point, that you will not be having sex, that you will be prioritizing the friendship.

And you tell everyone you see that night, including but not limited to all the friends you came with, another friend you run into, a stranger on the street, your dog and your Uber driver, that you are not going to have sex because you don’t want to ruin the friendship. This is personal growth!

You stick to it. You don’t make out more or have sex or anything like that. Not that night. Not for many many months afterwards.

Instead you go to sleep, together, as friends, and by the time you wake up she’s gone (but she has left a note because she always leaves the cutest notes), has made it home to Santa Monica, eaten a breakfast sandwich and laid back down in her own bed and has been participating in the group chat while you kept sleeping. You wake up to nearly 100 missed notifications, pictures of everybody’s hungover faces. The group chat is lit this morning. You’re recapping the year you all experienced together, like you are literally measuring your life in love on this cold January morning, sharing your archival photos and listing top moments. Already your makeout has become one of those moments, another shared anecdote.

You are a bit upset though because you, too, want a breakfast sandwich and Postmates says McDonalds is closed even though McDonalds is actually open and Door Dash knows that McDonalds is open but doesn’t know that they are serving all-day breakfast, and it is feeling increasingly unlikely that you will secure an Egg McMuffin this morning. But your hair still looks fantastic, somehow. Your shoes — not so much. Your white sneakers have somehow turned grey overnight. So your experience is similar in that way to what happened with Cinderella.

Once on a New Year’s Eve in Las Vegas, draped in beads and drunk off Captain Morgans and Pepsi, you kissed a boy with bleached tips who said “you know we’re going to get married, right?” and you said “yes” in return and now you don’t even know where the fuck that man is, or what he’s doing, or who he married. Or if he still has his tongue pierced.

Making out can be so casual, can be a thing you do with a stranger at a party or in a basement, with a friend playing a game, with someone you’re not even sure you like, someone you used to love but don’t anymore. But it can also be a type of opening, a sweet surrender, a shared hunger, an immediate connection, a thing that turns something into something else.

It did seem, that night, like something had opened between you and your best friend but that you’d both decided to close it afterwards, for safekeeping. It seemed like that for a good long while. You won’t kiss again until a game of spin-the-bottle with your pandemic pod (listen it was a weird time), but once that seal has been ripped off, it does seem to keep happening.

An entire year and a half will pass between New Year’s Eve 2019 and the moment you and your best friend sit down together on your sofa in the middle of the day and talk about what is happening between you, how you seem to be making out relatively frequently these days, and if maybe it’s time to call it something besides a friendship, like a relationship. Maybe it’s worth the risk.

Maybe the girl you kissed on New Year’s Eve is like my boyfriend with the tongue ring, or any of the exes I kissed on New Year’s Eve but don’t kiss anymore, including the ones I really loved, including the ones I still do. But maybe you will eventually fall in love with the best friend you kissed on New Year’s Eve, with her funny faces and extended bits and her jokes and compassion and generosity and enthusiasm and patience, and maybe five years later, by New Year’s Eve 2024, she will be your wife.

You won’t be drunk this New Year’s Eve because you rarely drink these days and she’s been sober since 2021. You will still be close friends and forever family with almost everybody from the aforementioned group chat / pandemic pod. You will be marginally better at work/life balance. You will live in a house with your wife in which the Christmas Tree is still up but you all know it’s living on borrowed time. You will be in the middle of converting the house’s smallest room into a nursery for a baby because after years of both of you trying, your wife is pregnant and the baby is due in seven weeks.

Sometimes what begins in chaos ends in chaos and sometimes what begins in chaos leads, slowly but eventually, into something more beautiful and stable than you ever imagined possible. 

You can make out whenever you want, now. And it didn’t, after all, ruin the friendship.

January is Makeout Month on Autostraddle.com and you can look forward to more thematic content all month long.

Before you go! Autostraddle runs on the reader support of our AF+ Members. If this article meant something to you today — if it informed you or made you smile or feel seen, will you consider joining AF and supporting the people who make this queer media site possible?

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Riese

Riese is the 43-year-old Co-Founder of Autostraddle.com as well as an award-winning writer, video-maker, LGBTQ+ Marketing consultant and aspiring cyber-performance artist who grew up in Michigan, lost her mind in New York and now lives in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in nine books, magazines including Marie Claire and Curve, and all over the web including Nylon, Queerty, Nerve, Bitch, Emily Books and Jezebel. She had a very popular personal blog once upon a time, and then she recapped The L Word, and then she had the idea to make this place, and now here we all are! In 2016, she was nominated for a GLAAD Award for Outstanding Digital Journalism. She's Jewish and has a cute dog named Carol. Follow her on twitter and instagram.

Riese has written 3284 articles for us.

14 Comments

  2. I feel like I needed to read this today, not because it is similar to anything in my own life but maybe just because it is not.
    So thank you on the well-put-together words.

  8. to kissing your friends and it working out! Did over here and we’ve been together for going on six years 💕💕💕

  11. This had me kicking my feet and making noises like an old fashioned boiling tea kettle, behaviour usually reserved for only the most contrived and drawn out of fictitious romantic plot point culminations. But this is real and it is beautiful. Thank you for sharing this Riese! 🥰

  12. Loved this. Made me nostalgic for this girl called automatic win in the best way. Thank you! And congrats!

Comments are closed.

Queer Horoscopes for the Year 2025

Every year, we venture through all 12 zodiac seasons. Your natal chart never changes, but the sky and how it interacts with your birth chart does. The Zodiac seasons are when the Sun is in that sign’s constellation and it takes an average of 30-31 days per season. The time in which these seasons change is calculated to the minute. It can vary between three days, with the center day being the most common transition day.

Along with the seasons for the zodiac, we have full moons and new moons, eclipse seasons, and retrogrades. All these things change every single year and can influence your life. Find your sign containing a summary of love, career, money, and health for 2025.

Make sure to also check your Moon for how your emotions may be affected, as well as your rising sign for what new things may occur in your life.

2025 Horoscopes for Each Sign

Aries


2025 is a transformative year for Aries, marked by challenges that bring growth. A lot of retrogrades begin in your sign this year, starting with Venus, which affects your sense of self, and encourages you to reflect on your values. Then there’s Mercury, which impacts your communication — think before you speak. The partial solar eclipse in Aries amplifies your natural traits of courage, action, and self-leadership, but it also challenges them to reflect and realign their path. Later in the year, Neptune goes retrograde, affecting your ambitions, pushing your goals and dreams. Only a few days later Saturn goes retrograde, affecting your discipline. Slow down and breathe but keep pushing. Overall, focus on introspection, domestic life, and shedding what no longer serves you. Embrace rest and self-regulation, and you will emerge with a renewed sense of purpose and clarity.

Love
2025 brings opportunities for deep introspection in relationships. There is a focus on domestic life. Prioritize emotional connections by healing old wounds and fostering closer bonds. With retrograde Venus and Neptune influencing your life, there may be tension or miscommunication with your connections.

Career
Test your ability to balance leadership and self-regulation. Use these moments to pause, refine strategies, and revisit long-term ambitions. Around February you’ll have a chance to recalibrate your priorities, ensuring your efforts are aligned with your personal values. Shed unnecessary burdens to create space for exciting, transformative opportunities by the year’s end.

Money
Aries’ natural drive for success will benefit from introspection about spending and saving habits. Focus on budgeting and planning for long-term stability. Look at shedding old habits of materialism or financial overextension.

Health
The call to take care of yourself is crucial in 2025. Tension from planetary retrogrades can manifest in stress or fatigue, making rest and self-care non-negotiable. Physical activity, mindfulness, and nurturing your home environment will recharge your body and mind. Aries should also watch for overexertion; taking breaks will ensure sustained energy for the year ahead.

Important Dates
Season: 3/20 at 5:01 am – 4/19 at 3:55 pm EST
Full Moon: 10/16 Harvest Moon
New Moon: 3/29 Pink Moon
Eclipse: 3/29 Partial Solar Eclipse
Retrogrades: all start with Aries and end in Pisces: Mercury 3/15 – 4/7, Venus 3/2 – 4/13, Saturn 7/13 – 11/28, Neptune 7/4 – 12/10

Taurus

TAURUS
A year of growth, 2025, focuses on transformation and alliances by staying open to change, focusing on your assets, and nurturing connections. Uranus retrograding early in the year and again in September will urge a reassessment of long-term goals. A rebellion against the status quo encourages openness to change. It is important to step out of your comfort zone and embrace unconventional dynamics. Trust your strength and structure to keep you moving in the right direction. In your personal life, you will be drawn to those who are also experiencing a time of discovery. Balance your drive with moments of reflection to emerge stronger and more aligned with your true purpose.

Love
This year emphasizes deep, reliable partnerships for Taurus. Your alliances, whether romantic or collaborative, will be built on trust and mutual support. You may be drawn to relationships that align with your evolving world and future aspirations. Look towards folks who broaden your perspective and explore new directions together.

Career
This is a transformative year for your career, with rebellion and bold choices paying off. Your focus on helping the world and aligning your work with your values will guide your decisions. Diversification will allow opportunities to expand your skills. Projects initiated or nurtured this year will bloom, bringing you recognition and fulfillment.

Money
Financial growth will come through a variety of resources. Take calculated risks and think outside the box regarding wealth-building strategies. Collaborative efforts, possibly with a trusted partner or advisor, will yield positive results.

Health
Spiritual exploration will play a significant role in maintaining mental and emotional health, helping you find direction and inner peace. Incorporate routines that support physical stamina, as periods of intense activity may challenge your energy levels. This will help you navigate this dynamic year with resilience.

Important Dates
Season: 4/19 at 3:56 pm – 5/20 at 2:53 pm EST
Full Moon: 11/5 Beaver Moon
New Moon: 4/27 Flower Moon
Eclipse: none
Retrogrades: Uranus 9/1/24 – 1/30 & 9/6 – 2/4/26

Gemini


2025 is a transformative year for Gemini, focused on resolving past issues and building authentic connections. Tying up loose ends in relationships will bring clarity and new beginnings while gathering a strong support team is essential for growth. Jupiter stations direct in early February unlocking opportunities in career and financial prosperity, and rewarding strategic planning and innovation. In September, Uranus goes retrograde in your sign — embrace change by cleansing old habits and focusing your energy on routines that promote clarity. Put a spotlight on uncovering your authentic self. Opportunities for love, career, and financial prosperity await, but success depends on focus, self-care, and calculated action.

Love
This year is the time to tie up loose ends in relationships, allowing for emotional clarity and new beginnings. Explore authentic connections, seeking folks who align with your true self. Try to rely on the support of others that walk with you on this journey.

Career
A bumpy start to the year invites you to approach your goals differently. Harness your impulsive energy to innovate and focus on success. Opportunities will abound, particularly after February, when Jupiter propels your career forward. Cleansing outdated methods while honing your expertise will bring prosperity.

Money
Financial growth depends on strategic planning and the avoidance of impulsive spending. Make it a goal to tie up past financial loose ends and explore ways to diversify your income. Changing old habits and embracing smarter investments will pave the way for abundance.

Health
With a busy schedule, channel your energy into routines that support mental clarity and physical well-being. Make sure you have an outlet that helps maintain focus and resilience. Harnessing your energy effectively will leave you feeling empowered and successful.

Important Dates
Season: 5/20 at 2:54 pm – 6/20 at 10:42 pm EST
Full Moon: 12/4 Cold Moon
New Moon: 5/26 Strawberry Moon
Eclipse: none
Retrogrades: Jupiter 10/29/24 – 2/4, Uranus 9/6 – 2/4/26

Cancer

CANCER
The year of 2025 is about self-empowerment for Cancer. Prioritize your needs, say “yes” to yourself, and let go of draining relationships. Career advancement and a renaissance await with Mars retrograde encouraging you to reassess your goals and own your ambitions. Embrace change, assert your needs, and trust in your evolving path. Jupiter retrograde in your sign in November, brings an introspective influence. With advancement in your career, personal growth, and healthy foundations, you’ll move into a new chapter of your life with confidence and clarity.

Love
As you embrace change, you’ll attract relationships that reflect your evolving self. Taking care of yourself will allow you to continue helping others. Your increased assertiveness and willingness to speak up will deepen your emotional connections and help you navigate the complexities of love.

Career
This year brings advancement and rejuvenation in your professional life. Mars retrograde will encourage you to reassess your goals. After February, momentum picks up, and what seemed distant will begin to materialize. Start to implement being more assertive, promoting confidence in your ambitions.

Money
Embrace new opportunities and confidence in your financial decisions. As your self-confidence grows, so will your ability to attract resources and investments. Keep track of your finances carefully, documenting income and expenses for future prosperity.

Health
The theme of personal growth extends to your health as well. Embrace the “new you” by making health a priority. Take control of your wellness and trust your body’s signals. Consider regular reflection on how you are feeling. Try to maintain a strong self-care routine to boost your energy and well-being throughout the year.

Important Dates
Season: 6/20 at 10:42 pm – 7/22 at 9:28 am EST
Full Moon: 1/13 Wolf Moon
New Moon: 6/25 Buck Moon
Eclipse: none
Retrogrades: Mars 12/6/24 – 2/24, Jupiter 11/11 – 3/11/26

Leo


2025 is a year of clarity and growth for Leo. You’ll contemplate relationships, seeking kinship and balance. Mars retrograde ends in February reigniting your ambition, helping you conclude past work and start fulfilling ventures. Finding the path to prosperity will require you to reflect on what matters. Focus on health through contemplation and self-care to maintain balance and well-being. Embrace conciliation and use your renewed energy to confidently pursue love, career, and financial goals with purpose.

Love
Contemplate the loyalty of your relationships. This may help clear any confusion or fog. You’ll be drawn to relationships that offer kinship and mutual understanding while focusing on maintaining balance. Expect a year of emotional conciliation and finding peace in your connections.

Career
Career growth will be fueled by drive and focus. Once Mars stations direct in February, your ambition will be reignited. Participate in projects you enjoy but stay focused on long-term goals. This year, you’ll find conclusions to past work and lay the foundation for new, more fulfilling ventures.

Money
Financial relief will come as you release unnecessary worries. Focusing on what truly matters encourages practical financial decisions. Replenish your resources by adding value and taking a spiritual approach to wealth.

Health
Health in 2025 centers around finding balance. Enjoy your life and focus on what nourishes you spiritually and physically. Use your tools of contemplation to help clear mental fog and promote long-term well-being.

Important Dates
Season: 7/22 at 9:29 am – 8/22 at 4:33 pm EST
Full Moon: 2/12 Snow Moon
New Moon: 7/24 Sturgeon Moon
Eclipse: none
Retrogrades: Mercury 7/18 – 8/11, Mars 12/6/24 – 2/24

Virgo

VIRGO
2025 focuses on connections for Virgo, with two eclipses prompting deep introspection to clarify your needs in love. The Lunar Eclipse in March will bring light to the direction for personal growth. Building community and practicing compromise will bring balance. This year is about restructuring and staying true to yourself. To achieve success, disregard others’ judgments. When the Solar Eclipse occurs in September, it will show you what details of your life need adjusting. Focus on mental and emotional well-being through self-acceptance and introspection. This is a year of self-discovery and realigning with your true goals, allowing you to thrive in all areas.

Love
This year is about your relationships taking center stage. The two eclipses in your sign will spark deep introspection, helping you gain clarity on your true needs in love. This period of self-reflection will support your goals but remember to stay true to yourself and not let others’ opinions influence your decisions. Building community and compromise in relationships will bring balance and growth.

Career
Achievements will need restructuring and redefining. With a focus on self-authenticity, you’ll find success by ignoring others’ judgments and following your true path. Your introspection will guide you to more aligned professional goals and deeper satisfaction.

Money
In financial matters, focus on long-term growth by compromising on short-term desires and taking practical steps toward restructuring your financial strategies. Stay true to your values and resist pressure from others to change your approach.

Health
Your health will be impacted by the balance of community and personal space. Your well-being is all about balance, self-care, and stress management. Given your tendency to overthink, prioritize relaxation techniques like meditation, mindfulness, and breathing exercises to maintain mental clarity and reduce anxiety.

Important Dates
Season: 8/22 at 4:34 pm – 9/22 at 2:28 pm EST
Full Moon: 3/14 Worm Moon
New Moon: 8/23 Corn Moon
Eclipse: 3/13 Total Lunar Eclipse, 9/21 Partial Solar Eclipse
Retrogrades: none

Libra


In 2025, Libra’s path is about dedication, balance, and commitment. As you align your actions with your true goals, expect to see your achievements recognized and celebrated. This year, embrace dedication, seek balance, and honor your commitments, creating a foundation for personal and professional fulfillment. The transformation you experience will bring you the satisfaction of seeing your efforts flourish.

Love
This year, relationships deepen as commitment becomes a key theme. Show dedication to those who bring light and joy into your life. Strengthen bonds with those who support your growth. Consider reconciling with connections that matter to you. Prioritizing those who uplift you will lead to more fulfilling and harmonious partnerships.

Career
Your goals for the future are a central focus this year. Slow down and refine your approach to ensure success. Dedication and consistency will pay off — you will be acknowledged for your efforts. Collaboration and showing commitment to your team will boost your professional standing. Expect your hard work to flourish. Stay focused and intentional.

Money
Financial success in 2025 comes from careful planning. Take a thoughtful approach to managing your resources. Remain focused on your long-term goals. Be strategic with investments and repairs, whether they’re related to finances or valuable assets. Your dedication will pave the way for steady growth and financial stability.

Health
Balancing your busy life requires you to slow down and prioritize self-care. Establishing routines can promote mental clarity and physical well-being. Staying close to people who bring you joy will positively impact your emotional health. Maintain a balanced lifestyle to avoid burnout and ensure your energy supports your ambitions.

Important Dates
Season: 9/22 at 2:29 pm – 10/22 at 11:50 pm EST
Full Moon: 4/12 Pink Moon
New Moon: 10/21 Beaver Moon
Eclipse: none
Retrogrades: none

Scorpio


For 2025, Scorpio’s journey revolves around balance, discovery, and design. Find a way to become more vulnerable, so you can open yourself to affection. By exploring new truths, and thoughtfully designing your career and financial strategies, you’ll experience personal growth and transformation. Later in the year, Mercury begins its retrograde in your sign, prompting introspection and a reassessment of thoughts, communication, and emotions. Prioritize self-care and embrace the changes ahead to thrive in love, work, and overall well-being.

Love
This year is about finding a balance between your head and heart. You will recognize your worth and open yourself to being loved without hesitation. Deep emotional exploration will help you shed doubts and let authentic connections flourish. Romance may be found in unexpected places, particularly during new experiences or journeys of self-discovery. Connections rooted in mutual understanding and respect will thrive.

Career
Your professional life this year will be guided by discovery and observation. Exploring new ideas or opportunities will lead to valuable insights and growth. Adjust your workflow or seek a new role. Your thoughtful observation and strategy will pave the way to success. Balance ambition with emotional well-being to avoid burnout and ensure sustainable progress.

Money
This year is about designing a stable and sustainable financial plan. By balancing practicality with intuition, you gain clarity on where to invest your time and resources. Be open to exploring different ways of earning or saving money. Thoughtful decision-making and careful observation of your financial patterns will lead to growth and security.

Health
How are you taking care of yourself? Balance intense pursuits with moments of rest and reflection. Incorporate mindfulness, exercise, and relaxation to keep your mind and body aligned. Exploring new wellness routines and making changes to your environment can have a positive impact. Pay attention to signals from your body and allow yourself the care and nurturing you deserve.

Important Dates
Season: 10/22 at 11:51 pm – 11/21 at 8:35 pm ESTs
Full Moon: 5/12 Flower Moon
New Moon: 11/20 Cold Moon
Eclipse: none
Retrogrades: Mercury 11/9 – 11/29

Sagittarius


2025 is a year of reflection, boundaries, and transformation. Begin by slowing down, setting clear limits, and nurturing meaningful connections. Then start laying the groundwork for lasting success in your life. Later in the year, Mercury wraps up its retrograde in your sign, prompting you to reassess your beliefs, plans, and how you express yourself. Focus on building strong foundations and align with communities that support your growth. Recognition and clarity await as you embrace this journey with intention and self-exploration.

Love
Start slowly with a period of reflection and regrouping for your love life. This offers you time to collect yourself and reassess your emotional needs. While passionate encounters are likely, only connections going beyond surface-level attraction will endure. Seek connections that offer depth, authenticity, and shared values.

Career
This year highlights boundaries and self-awareness in your professional life. Setting firm boundaries will help you avoid burnout and focus on meaningful goals. A shift in your ambitions may lead to a career change or a new path that aligns better with your values. Recognition for your hard work is on the horizon, especially if you maintain balance and confidence.

Money
Building a solid foundation at the beginning of the year establishes a base to build your resources and financial goals. Be strategic with your investments and cautious with spending. Focus on financial stability to support the changes in your career and personal life.

Health
Your well-being will benefit from establishing healthy routines that balance physical activity and mental relaxation. As you regroup, joining new communities or social circles that uplift and inspire you can boost your emotional health. Prioritize rest and rejuvenation to maintain energy throughout the year.

Important Dates
Season: 11/21 at 8:36 pm – 12/21 at 10:02 am EST
Full Moon: 6/11 Strawberry Moon
New Moon: 12/19 Sag Wolf Moon
Eclipse: none
Retrogrades: Mercury 11/9 – 11/29

Capricorn

CAPRICORN
2025 marks a transformative year for Capricorn. Stepping into a new chapter, leaving behind past burdens and embracing personal and professional growth. This year emphasizes reevaluating relationships, taking on leadership roles, and strategically managing your finances. Through self-reflection and clear communication, you’ll set the stage for long-term growth. Focus on maintaining balance in your health and making space for your own needs and those of the people you support. This is a year of deep reflection, realignment, and strategic action.

Love
Focus on evaluating relationships and finding your true role within them. Whether in romantic connections, friendships, or family dynamics, reflecting on how you contribute to these connections and what you need to feel valued. Establish a balance between supporting yourself and others. This ensures that you nurture both your own emotional well-being and the connections that matter most.

Career
Now that Pluto is finally out of your sign for good, it’s time to experience a release into success. The beginning of the year offers a chance to reevaluate your career direction and clarify what you want to achieve in the long term. Your ability to negotiate and manage responsibilities will be highlighted this year. You’ll need to take on leadership roles and stay organized as opportunities for advancement arise.

Money
You’ll benefit from strategic partnerships or aligning with individuals who can offer valuable advice or resources. Review your financial goals, assess investments, and create a budget that supports long-term growth. Be prepared to negotiate or make important decisions regarding your assets, especially if new opportunities for wealth or stability arise.

Health
The need to support others and maintain a sense of structure in your life may take a toll if you’re not mindful of your well-being. This year encourages you to evaluate your health routines while creating balance between your work and home life. Make time for relaxation and reflection, allowing yourself the space to breathe as you release past stresses and move forward with a sense of purpose.

Important Dates
Season: 12/21 at 10:03 am – 1/19/26 at 8:44 pm EST
Full Moon: 7/10 Buck Moon
New Moon: 1/18/26
Eclipse: none
Retrogrades: none

Aquarius


2025 for Aquarius is marked by profound shifts in your identity and aspirations. With Pluto settling into your sign until 2044, expect a period of deep self-discovery and change. When it retrogrades in May, it will bring to light hidden aspects of your identity or unresolved issues. This encourages introspection and letting go of what no longer serves you. This year invites you to balance social engagement, health, and personal growth while maintaining focus on meaningful commitments and transitions. Embrace change and stay true to your evolving identity, and you’ll thrive.

Love
This year encourages you to approach relationships with balance and patience. The early months may feel reflective but wait until after March before making any significant romantic decisions. This delay will give you the clarity to understand your own needs and the role others play in your life. Allow your authentic self to shine, so meaningful love can help you rediscover yourself.

Career
Expect major changes in your ambitions and how you present yourself professionally. You may find yourself drawn to new paths that align more closely with your aspirations. Networking and social engagement will help propel you forward but remember to balance enthusiasm with practicality. Success will come from clear direction and mindful dedication.

Money
As you explore new opportunities, be cautious about major investments or commitments. Retribution and rehabilitation suggest that any past financial setbacks or challenges can be corrected through careful planning and reflection. Create a balanced budget and investigate ways to establish long-term stability.

Health
Finding balance in your social life with self-care is crucial to maintaining your well-being. While it’s important to connect with others and enjoy life, avoid overcommitting and burning out. This year invites you to prioritize rehabilitation and balance both physically and mentally. Pay attention to your mental health and allow time for reflection and self-care.

Important Dates
Season: 1/19 at 3:00 pm – 2/18 at 5:05 am EST
Full Moon: 8/9 Sturgeon Moon
New Moon: 1/29 Snow Moon
Eclipse: none
Retrogrades: Pluto 5/4 – 10/14

Pisces


2025 is a year of emotional and professional growth for Pisces. By embracing change, setting healthy boundaries, and trusting your intuition, you’ll find deeper connections. Four retrogrades end in your sign this year. The planet of Venus goes retrograde bringing unresolved emotional matters to light and prompting a reassessment of what you truly value. That’s followed by Mercury making you feel more introspective, prompting you to revisit old ideas. Then in July, Neptune retrograding thins the veil of confusion, making it easier to see truths you’ve previously overlooked. Finally, followed shortly is Saturn, urging you to reevaluate the structures, commitments, and boundaries in your life. This year you have a lunar eclipse in September, which illuminates unresolved issues, and subconscious patterns, offering a powerful opportunity to let go of what no longer serves you. Learn to harness your inner wisdom, connect with your creative energy, and find harmony in all areas of your life.

Love
You’ll be drawn to relationships that provide both emotional depth and spiritual connection. This year encourages you to reflect on what you truly need in love and to be more open to vulnerability. Love may come from unexpected places, possibly through shared creative or spiritual interests.

Career
If you’ve felt stagnant in your career, you might experience an awakening that inspires you to pursue new opportunities or directions. Using your natural empathy and intuition will be valuable assets as you navigate these professional changes. Don’t be afraid to take risks or change course if it means moving toward a more fulfilling career path.

Money
Pisces tends to be more intuitive and less concerned with rigid financial planning. However, this year will require you to focus on setting a solid financial foundation. Reevaluate your spending habits, investments, and savings goals. Focus on building wealth through careful budgeting and aligning your finances with life goals.

Health
The year ahead will require you to prioritize your well-being, as there will be a lot of emotional shifts. Pisces is naturally compassionate, but it’s important to remember that you can’t pour from an empty cup. If you aren’t already, consider holistic or alternative healing methods. This will allow you to restore your energy and maintain mental and emotional balance.

Important Dates
Season: 2/18 at 5:05 am – 3/20 at 5:01 am EST
Full Moon: 9/7 Corn Moon
New Moon: 2/27 Worm Moon
Eclipse: 9/7 Total Lunar Eclipse
Retrogrades: all start with Aries and end in Pisces: Mercury 3/15 – 4/7,
Venus 3/2 – 4/13, Saturn 7/13 – 11/28, Neptune 7/4 – 12/10

If you would like to learn more about Astrology, check out my social media @Queerstrology or drop any questions or astrology facts in the comments. Let’s learn from each other!

Before you go! Autostraddle runs on the reader support of our AF+ Members. If this article meant something to you today — if it informed you or made you smile or feel seen, will you consider joining AF and supporting the people who make this queer media site possible?

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Related:

Deb Roe

Deb from Queerstrology is a queer celebrity astrologer. They think of astrology as a journey and your natal chart, the book of reference. Their brand of astrology doesn’t have the gender binary or a specific orientation. The content they produce both research based and fun pop culture astrology insights. They provide astrology readings, if you are interested in learning more.

Deb has written 6 articles for us.

January 2025: What’s New, Gay and Streaming on Netflix, Max, Prime Video, Peacock and Apple TV

It’s a new dawn it’s a new year and we’re feeling a tad bit closer to fine about what’s coming up with lesbian, queer, bisexual and/or trans characters on our television sets — mostly the return of so many shows we’ve been missing since 2024. So let’s get into it!

Netflix’s January 2025 New Gay Content

XO, Kitty. (L to R) Anna Cathcart as Kitty Song Covey, Gia Kim as Yuri Han in episode 206 of XO, Kitty. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2024

Courtesy of Netflix © 2024

Missing You // Limited Series // January 1
Trans actress Mary Malone plays “Aqua” in the latest Harlan Coben adaptation. Detective Kat Donovan’s (Rosalid Eleazar, who played queer sex worker Violet in Harlots) boyfriend disappeared eleven years ago. When he pops up on a dating app, her world goes wild all over again — her father’s murder and a current rash of disappearances twisted up with all of it. Aqua, a trans character played by trans actress Mary Malone, is one of Kat’s two best friends, and a close friend of her ex Josh.

Younger (Seasons 1-7) // January 7
Darren Star’s Younger was a delightful little Darren Star series that we covered pretty thoroughly when it aired. It stars Sutton Foster as a 40-something who pretends to be a twentysomething to get a publishing job working for Hillary Duff’s character. Debi Mazar as the lesbian best friend.

XO Kitty // Season 2 // January 16
One of the most delightfully surprising queer shows of 2023 found its protagonist realizing she doesn’t just have feelings for her former long-distance boyfriend Dae or boarding school playboy Min Ho but also for her dear friend Yuri, who already has a girlfriend. In Season 2 Kitty returns to KISS for new adventures — hoping to learn more about her late Mom but also to explore her bisexuality and date girls. Sasha Bhasin joins the cast as one of those girls, Praveena.

Liza Treyger: Night Owl (2024) // January 28
The stand-up special from bisexual comic Liza Treyger will include topics like “her friends who are parents, hating other people’s husbands, and lying to herself about how high she really is.”

New Peacock Gay TV and Movies in January 2025

THE TRAITORS -- "Let Battle Commence" Episode 301 -- Pictured: (l-r) Bob Harper, Ciara Miller, Gabby Windey, Bob The Drag Queen, Nikki Garcia, Chanel Ayan -- (Photo by: Euan Cherry/Peacock)

(Photo by: Euan Cherry/Peacock)

The Traitors // Season 3 Premiere // January 9
Bicon Alan Cummings’ reality competition show pits reality stars against each other in an “ultimate murder mystery game” where traitors are hidden amongst contestants and everyone else must sniff them out to take home the prize money. Contestants for season three include queers like Bob The Drag Queen, Selling Sunset‘s Chrishell Stause and The Bachelorette‘s Gabby Windey.

SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night // Docuseries // Jan 16
This four-party project will feature 60+ contributors and alumni from Oscar-winner Morgan Neville, looking at SNL’s legacy — its iconic sketches, auditions, writers room, etc. There have been gay people in this program so I anticipate seeing some of ’em in this series!

New Gay Max and HBO TV and Movies in January 2025

calamity jane

Reframed: Next Gen Narratives // Season One // January 1
There’s not a ton of info out there about this but what is out there looks amazing and super super queer! Six filmmakers take on classic movies with a contemporary lens: A Star is Born, Jack and the Beanstalk, Calamity Jane, The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Prince and the Pauper, and Rebel Without a Cause. 

Harley Quinn // Season 5 Premiere // January 16
The DC universe will open up in its fifth season, finding our beloved couple Harley and Ivy ditching Gotham for Metropolis — the home of Lois Lane, Superman and Lex Luther. But of course, they soon discover something chaotic and sinister is going on in their new home and they might be forced to save the city themselves.

Prime Video’s New Gay TV and Movies for January 2025

Camille (Meagan Good), Quinn (Grace Byers), Angie (Shoniqua Shandai), Tye (Jerrie Johnson) in HARLEM S3 Photo Credit: Emily V. Aragones/Prime © Amazon Content Services LLC

Emily V. Aragones/Prime © Amazon Content Services LLC

The Rig // Season 2 // January 2
The creator of The Rig hopes Season 2 effectively strikes a balance between “entertaining drama” and “tackling existential debates around climate change.” Season 2 takes the precinct to an Arctic glacier, where the trapped crew must deal with the emotional and physical fallout from the devastating tsunami that destroyed the Bravo. The show continues to star queer actor Emily Hampshire and feature “brash butch medic” character Cat (Rochenda Sandall).

Harlem // Season 3 // January 25
Season three promises the core four women of Harlem will be “on the precipice of change like never before.” Gail Bean is joining the case as Eva, a “driven, yet playful, venture capitalist” who’s started working with our beloved lesbian character, Tye. Also extremely exciting — Robin Givens will be playing her “no-nonsense” mother, Jacqueline. Sai loved Season Two so we are all very excited for this!

New Apple TV+ Queer TV and Movies for January 2025

girl in mythic quest

Mythic Quest // Season Four Premiere // January 29
In the long-anticipated and critically acclaimed series’s fourth season, the reunited team at Mythic Quest will “confront new challenges amongst a changing video game landscape as stars rise, egos clash, relationships bloom and everyone tries to have a little more work work life balance.” The queer storylines on Mythic Quest have historically been beloved by our community.

Before you go! Autostraddle runs on the reader support of our AF+ Members. If this article meant something to you today — if it informed you or made you smile or feel seen, will you consider joining AF and supporting the people who make this queer media site possible?

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Riese

Riese is the 43-year-old Co-Founder of Autostraddle.com as well as an award-winning writer, video-maker, LGBTQ+ Marketing consultant and aspiring cyber-performance artist who grew up in Michigan, lost her mind in New York and now lives in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in nine books, magazines including Marie Claire and Curve, and all over the web including Nylon, Queerty, Nerve, Bitch, Emily Books and Jezebel. She had a very popular personal blog once upon a time, and then she recapped The L Word, and then she had the idea to make this place, and now here we all are! In 2016, she was nominated for a GLAAD Award for Outstanding Digital Journalism. She's Jewish and has a cute dog named Carol. Follow her on twitter and instagram.

Riese has written 3284 articles for us.

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The Most Popular Autostraddle Posts of 2024

What did the people read and click on this fine year of 2024? Well, quite a few things. Let’s talk about what those things are!

Top Ten Most Popular Articles of 2024

are you gay?

1. Am I Gay? by Riese

2. The 100 Best Lesbian Movies of All Time, by Drew

3. Which Shondaland Gay Is Your Everloving Soulmate? by Carmen

4. I Had an Affair With My College Dean, by Olivia Swanson Haas

5. 37 Gay WNBA Players To Follow (And Thirst After) on Instagram This Season, by Carmen

6. 43 Christmas Movies With Lesbian, Bisexual, Queer or Trans Characters, by Riese

7. Kate McKinnon Moved to the Woods, Grows Her Own Food, Got Into Carpentry and Wrote You a Book, by Valerie

8. I’m In My Thirties and Can’t Make Up My Mind About Having Kids, by Nico, Riese, Sa’iyda and Em Win

9. Quiz: Which Chappell Roan Song Are You? by Drew

10. All 150+ Gay Women and Trans Athletes Competing In the 2024 Paris Olympics, by Natalie

Top Queer Celebrity News Posts of 2024

Queen Latifah and her partner Eboni Nichols walk the Met red carpet

(Photo by Aliah Anderson/Getty Images)

1. Kate McKinnon Moved To The Woods, Grows Her Own Food, Got Into Carpentry and Wrote You a Book, by Valerie

2. So It Definitely Seems Like Las Vegas Aces’ Kate Martin Hard Launched Her Girlfriend, by Riese

3. Renée Rapp Identifies as a Lesbian Now!, by Valerie

4. Queen Latifah Walked the Met Carpet With Her Partner Eboni Nichols, It Matters, by Carmen

5. In Time-Honored Musical Theater Tradition, Almost Everyone in the ‘Wicked’ Movie Is Gay, by Kayla

6. Sophia Bush Comes Out as Queer and In Love With Ashlyn Harris, by Riese

7. Abbi Jacobson and Jodi Balfour’s Beautiful Wedding Took Place In an Alternate Dimension of Gay Chaos and Sweaty Shoulders, by Riese

8. WNBA Superstar, Fashion Icon Arike Ogunbowale Is Officially Engayged!, by Carmen

9. Ali Krieger Soft Launches a New Boo!!, by Christina Tucker

10. Actor Maria Bello and Chef Dominique Crenn Got Married and Their Playlist Was Perfection, by Riese

Top Feature Stories of 2024

Rhys talks with his hands standing next to Margaret Qualley in orange light

Margaret Qualley and Rhys Ernst on the set of Adam

1. All 150+ Gay Women and Trans Athletes Competing In the 2024 Paris Olympics, by Natalie

2. All 37 Surviving Lesbian Bars In the U.S., by Riese and Kayla

3. For Many Queer People, Cutting Off Family Is Hard but Vital, by Kayla

4. We Went to Every Dyke Bar in NYC in One Day, by Drew and Kayla

5. What Can a Nonbinary Transition Look Like?, by Summer Tao

6. An Oral History of ‘Adam’ (2019), the Most Controversial Trans Movie of All Time, by Drew

7. The Best Chappell Roan Shows Are in the Midwest and South, by Kayla

8. We Spoke Up For Palestine and Got Kicked Out of the White House Pride Party, by Abby Stein and Lily Greenberg-Call

9. Trans Teen Pauly Likens’ Murder Haunts Her Rural Pennsylvania Community, by Nico

10. How A 50-Year-Old Lesbian Magazine Is Surviving Despite It All, by Sydney Boles

Most Popular Interviews of 2024

Nava Mau Baby Reindeer interview: a close up of Nava Mau with a bob looking serious.

1. Nava Mau Is Playing Her Own Game — And Changing the World Along the Way, by Drew

2. Lilly Wachowski Has Her Combat Boots On, by Drew

3. Meet Tricia Cooke, the Lesbian Activist Married to a Coen Brother and the Brains Behind “Drive-Away Dolls”, by Drew

4. Meet Kelley Heyer: Actor, Fashion Queer, and Creator of the “Apple” Dance, by Drew

5. Vivienne Medrano (aka VivziePop) on “Hazbin Hotel,” Her Favorite Musicals, and Giving People Second Chances, by Rendy Jones

6. Want To See a Movie Where Buffalo Bill and Norman Bates Are in a T4T Situationship? Well, Do We Have Some News for You!, by Kayla

7. Brigette Lundy-Paine Is Making Their Own Kind of Trans Art, by Drew

8. Anarchist Author Margaret Killjoy Crafts Trans Worlds in the Woods, by Nico

9. The Polyamorous Devils of “Couple to Throuple” Are Ready to Blow Up Gender Norms, by Gabe Dunn

10. Jinkx Monsoon Is Filled With Rage — and a Lot of Hope, by Drew

Most Popular Sex & Dating Posts of 2024

cartoon: chaotic gay in a "rad dad" hat in a orange van stuffed with a surfboard, a donut, a bookbox and more, calling for their girlfriend to get in we are going to vegas!!!

“Gay Chaos” from The 12 Lesbian Love Languages

1. The 12 Lesbian Love Languages, by Riese

2. Rumors of Our Lesbian Divorce Rates Have Been Greatly Exaggerated (But They’re Still Pretty True), by Riese

3. How To Kill Lesbian Bed Death, by Kayla

4. How Do I Ask My Girlfriend To Freshen Up Before Sex Without Killing Our Sex Life?, by Ashni

5. Broke and Lonely? “Lavender Marriage” May Be For You!, by Riese

6. Help! I’ve Gotten ‘The Ick’ for My Girlfriend, by Nico, Kayla, Riese and Em Win

7. Is Monogamy Cool Again?, by Gabe Dunn

8. You Need Help: I Don’t Get Excited To See My Girlfriend, by Kayla

9. Things I Do To Feel Submissive Even Though My Partner Isn’t Super Dominant, by Summer Tao

10. ‘The Lack of Physical Affection From My Girlfriend Is Becoming Unbearable’, by Summer Tao

Most Popular Movie & TV Reviews and Recaps of 2024

screenshot from "tracker"

1. Abby McEnany and Robin Weigert Are a Lesbian Couple on Network TV???, by Natalie

2. “Love on the Spectrum” Fails to Give Its Queer Woman the Dates She Deserves, by Nico

3. “True Detective: Night Country” Is a Mediocre Network Procedural Masquerading As Prestige TV, by Drew

4. “Hightown” Fails to Fulfill Its Potential In Its Final Season, by Natalie

5. Good Trouble Series Finale Recap: It’s Not Where You Come From, It’s Where You Belong, by Natalie

6. ‘Arcane’ Delivers a Steamy Gay Sex Scene and an Epic Finale, by Valerie and Nic

7. ‘Emilia Pérez’ Is the Most Unique Cis Nonsense You’ll Ever See, by Drew

8. Night Court Rights a Historic Sitcom Injustice, Brings Roz Back for Her Gay Happy Ending, by Carmen

9. I Watched New Reality Show ‘I Kissed a Girl’ and I Liked It, by Sally

10. Last Night’s ‘Agatha All Along’ Was the Gayest Thing The MCU Has Ever Done, by Valerie

Most Popular Personal Essays of 2024

1. I Had an Affair With My College Dean, by Olivia Swanson Haas

2. Et Tu, Laura Ingalls Wilder?, by Autumn Fourkiller

3. Was Ozempic Right For Me?, by Em Win

4. Always the Daddy, Never the Dad, by Milo Longenecker

5. All Girls Want To Eat Each Other, by Mallory Pearson

6. I’ve Spent a Lot of Time Pretending Not To Know What I Want, by Swan Huntley

7. I Am Not Lorelai Gilmore But I Also Kind of Am, by Kristen Arnett

8. Five Years Ago, Lesbian Visibility Day Was the Best Day of My Life, by Drew

9. A Heartbeat At My Feet, by Riese

10. I’m a Psychologist Who Didn’t See My Own Divorce Coming, by Ahuv Ne’eman

Most Popular Books Posts of 2024

Please Stop Trying To Leave Me by Alana Saab, Horse Barbie by Geena Rocero, and Wish You Weren't Here by Erin Baldwin

1. Embracing the Dark Pleasures of Dystopian Literature: 10 Novels That Inspired Me To Write My Own, by Gabrielle Korn

2. All the Most Anticipated Queer Books Lists: Spring 2024, June 2024, Fall 2024, July and August 2024, December 2024 and January 2025, by Kayla and Riese

3. 13 Sapphic Holiday Romances To Devour This Winter, by Sai’yda Shabazz

4. An Exclusive Preview of “Critical Role: Mighty Nein Origins,” Featuring Our Resident Disaster Lesbian, Beauregard Lionett!, by the Critical Role Team

5. Which of These Books Are Better Than the Lesbian Movies Based on Them?, by Kayla

6. The Best Queer Books of 2024, by Casey

7. Anarchist Author Margaret Killjoy Crafts Trans Worlds in the Woods, by Nico

8. How Gay Are the Books These Queer Shows Are Based On? by Kayla

9. Feeling Feral? Here’s 17 Novels For The Weird Girls, by Riese

10. 17 Queer “Celebrity Falls For Normal Person” Romance Books If You Liked ‘The Idea Of You’, by Riese

Most Popular Quizzes of 2024

chappell roan looking very hot and glittery

1. Am I Gay? by Riese

2. What’s Your Lesbian Love Language? by Riese

3. Which Shondaland Gay Is Your Everloving Soulmate? by Carmen

4. Which Chappell Roan Song Are You? by Drew

5. Which Contemporary Queer Singer Are You?, by Kayla

6. Which Emotionally Intense ’80s/’90s Lesbian Song Are You?, by Riese

7. Which Iconic Lesbian TV Couple Is Your Soulmate?, by Riese

8. Quiz: Which ‘Conclave’ Character Are You?, by Drew

9. Which Lesbian Shoe Are You?, by Riese

10. Which Lesbian Bag Are You?, by Riese

Before you go! Autostraddle runs on the reader support of our AF+ Members. If this article meant something to you today — if it informed you or made you smile or feel seen, will you consider joining AF and supporting the people who make this queer media site possible?

Join AF+!
Related:

Riese

Riese is the 43-year-old Co-Founder of Autostraddle.com as well as an award-winning writer, video-maker, LGBTQ+ Marketing consultant and aspiring cyber-performance artist who grew up in Michigan, lost her mind in New York and now lives in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in nine books, magazines including Marie Claire and Curve, and all over the web including Nylon, Queerty, Nerve, Bitch, Emily Books and Jezebel. She had a very popular personal blog once upon a time, and then she recapped The L Word, and then she had the idea to make this place, and now here we all are! In 2016, she was nominated for a GLAAD Award for Outstanding Digital Journalism. She's Jewish and has a cute dog named Carol. Follow her on twitter and instagram.

Riese has written 3284 articles for us.

If I Don’t See Snow Soon I’m Going To Scream

No matter how many times I listened to the Carpenters version of the classic Christmas song, I wasn’t dreaming of a white Christmas this year. I know better than to dream of the impossible.

I guess you could say I’m longing to be up north, as the song goes. But it also isn’t quite that simple.

I have nothing to prove 2023 was the first year of my life when I didn’t see snow on the ground other than my memories. I could attempt to fact check. Go through all the places I was in during winter months and check snow records. It would take time and also, maybe, money? You can pay for a lot of services online these days including, I just learned, detailed daily snow records for any zip code in the U.S.

It’s tempting to do all that instead of writing about how not seeing snow actually makes me feel. How it makes me fear. But what would that really add to this essay? Some numbers, some dates, some facts. I already have some of all that. It wouldn’t help me better arrive at the answers I’m driving toward. It feels like driving in a blizzard without snow tires. A bit on-the-nose, I know.

As 2024 ends, I’ve done another year on this warming planet without seeing snow on the ground. There were some flurries at the tail end of a trip to New York in January. They fell fat and wet as we rode a taxi to LaGuardia and melted as soon as they met pavement. Right now as I write this, there’s snow on the ground in New York, according to some of my group chats. Hearing about it fills me with a strange sense of homesickness, an affliction I almost never experience because home for me has always been a moving target rather than a fixed place.

I miss snow more than I can explain, and I guess this essay is my way of trying to figure out why. It’s not like I grew up somewhere exceptionally snowy. And it’s not just about the snow.

My wife and I have just returned from Christmas in Richmond, Virginia, where my parents live and where I grew up nearby in the suburbs. It was, at times, cold enough to snow, but the sky remained clear, full sun. My wife got so cold at one point, she declared she could never live there. She’s a Florida swamp creature, and I love her for it. I keep taking her to Chicago, a city I love, in May and June, because I know the city will show off for her, no longer too cold to bear and not yet too sticky-hot.

There have been fewer than a dozen recorded instances of white Christmases in Richmond’s history, most of them occurring decades before I was born. But two happened in my lifetime: once in 1993, the second Christmas of my life, and again in 2010, the last time it snowed on Christmas in my hometown, 14 years ago. We got almost three inches.

The twist? We weren’t there. We were up north in Vermont at my aunt and uncle’s house, where we also had a white Christmas. We spent many Christmases at my mother’s brother’s house in Vermont exactly for this reason; it felt like real winter when we were there. But as our grandparents, who live a few doors down from the house I grew up in in central Virginia,  got older, Christmas in Richmond just made more sense. We haven’t been back to Vermont for Christmas in over a decade. The last time we did was probably the last white Christmas I’ll have seen in a very long time.

***

Mount Fuji went its longest period without snow in 130 years this year. In other words, we’re fucked. No, I know, I’m not supposed to lean into climate doom. I’m supposed to remind myself, remind you too maybe, that we can still do things to stop this. I think I would find it easier to remind myself if I were to finally see snow again. It would reset something in me, fill a quietly expanding void. I need to touch more than grass; I need to touch a snow-covered field of it.

I know I’m just making excuses. Finding snow is hard these days; slipping into doom is not.

Of course I know there are far, far worse side effects of our compounding global climate crisis than the plain fact that I haven’t seen snow in a couple of years. Deadly side effects, for humans and so many other species. I’m not trying to be self-pitying or overly romantic about snow. I’m not Lorelei fucking Gilmore. But it’s like all my compounding fears about the climate crisis have been hard-packed into a snowball in my chest. I’m projecting all my fear onto snow leaving my life.

I remember times when snow made my life very fucking hard, like tromping through the snow a mile to get to the nearest L train stop the first winter I lived in Chicago and wondering how the hell am I going to do this over and over again, year after year. 

I also know I can’t just blame the lack of snow in my life on climate change alone. Snowfall and snow cover are decreasing all over the globe, but climate change is complex. It has been responsible for some of the worst snow and freezing temperatures I’ve ever experienced, including the two polar vortexes I lived through, one powerful enough to cancel classes at my university for cold temperatures for the first time in four decades.

It may be snowing less in many places, but it still snows. New York City, where I used to live, had its first white Christmas since 2009 this year. Like the white Christmas in Richmond in 2010, I only didn’t see it because I wasn’t there. If I want to see snow so badly, I could have traveled to the northeast or upper Midwest this fall and winter instead of to Key West, Palm Springs, Portland, all places where it doesn’t really snow unless you’re way up a mountain in the latter two.

I’m being dramatic when I call my dreams of a white Christmas impossible. It’s possible, just not in the current context in which I exist, which is annually spending the holiday with my family in Richmond. I could change the context, convince my family to do Christmas somewhere colder, farther north, maybe go back to Vermont. The first Christmas without snow on the ground in my uncle’s city was 2020 though, which means there could be future years of the same.

I could see snow if I lived somewhere other than Florida.

Until 2020, I always lived in places where it would snow at least once every year, often in places where it snowed much more than that. I still remember the year we woke up to a sudden snowstorm on April 1 in Ann Arbor, a cruel April Fool’s Day joke. We thought we were in the clear; we’d already unpacked shorts because the temperature had hit fifty degrees in the months prior (now that I’m in the South, that’s when I unpack sweaters, not shorts).

It was the first time in my life when snow disappointed. Before then, snow was always exciting. My new college friends grew up around Michigan and other parts of the Midwest, and they were shocked to learn only an inch of snowfall canceled school for me back in Virginia. The three-inch snow “storm” I missed on Christmas in 2010? School would have been out for multiple days if it wasn’t already a holiday break. From a young age I knew 32 degrees and lower was the sweetspot for snow that sticks, and I loved checking the outdoor thermostat at my grandparents’ house to see if we were there. To this day, if I see any city in my weather app at 32 degrees or below, I’m thrilled. The possibility of snow!

When I was a kid, the possibility of snow meant staying up to watch the local news to see if school would be canceled. And if it was, it meant my best friend and cousin could sleepover on a “schoolnight.” In the morning, my mother would make Norwegian waffles, and we would gear up in snow pants, long thermals, hats, scarves, mittens and sweaters knit by my grandma, waterproof boots. We always had more winter gear than any other kids in the neighborhood, so we shared, everyone trying on things to see what would fit. We’d walk to the best hill in the neighborhood with a saucer, two cheap plastic toboggans, and a fancy wooden one that only really worked if the snow was hard-packed and deeper than a couple inches. We went sledding until our faces and feet were numb from the cold, and then we teetered back to the house and stripped out of our top layers, laid them out in front of the fireplace to dry. Snow days were the best days, the ultimate embodiment of the Norwegian word koselig, which means something like cozy but also more than that. Comfort, connection, closeness. Koselig is a hard feeling to find on a warming planet.

It’s not the magic of childhood snow days that I’m chasing when I long for snow. And I don’t regret my decision to live in Florida. Hell, the last personal essay I wrote for this magazine was about how committed I am to Florida, how much I love it. That’s all still true. Living here has only made me feel more connected to the natural world, more aware of the threats to it.

Sure, I wish it didn’t cost so much — to me financially and to the environment — to travel north whenever I want to. I’m not sure that would fix it either. There’s something about not seeing snow for two years that stokes the flames of my climate anxiety in ways I still don’t fully comprehend. I thought writing this would help; it has, a little. I’m still driving in the blizzard, no clear endpoint, no answer in sight.

I hear people are moving to the Midwest to escape record-breaking heat and because the winters are getting more temperate and livable there as a result of climate change, and I want to scream. I hated Chicago winters; I need them to keep being miserable, for the sake of the planet even though, yes, I want there to be relatively safer places for climate refugees to flee to when parts of the country sink further into the ocean.

I need to see snow, and maybe when I do again, I’ll finally figure out what made that need so urgent. That’s the problem, isn’t it? It’s hard to write about the absence of something in anything but the abstract. For now, the snowball in my chest remains. It’s an ache I can live with.

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Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya

Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya is the managing editor of Autostraddle and a lesbian writer of essays, short stories, and pop culture criticism living in Orlando. She is the assistant managing editor of TriQuarterly, and her short stories appear or are forthcoming in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Joyland, Catapult, The Offing, and more. Some of her pop culture writing can be found at The A.V. Club, Vulture, The Cut, and others. You can follow her on Twitter or Instagram and learn more about her work on her website.

Kayla has written 951 articles for us.

8 Comments

  1. I have been waiting on 1 good snowfall where it’s more than 1″ deep and stays around for more than only 1 day too but that’s only because I no longer have to drive to and from work any longer. Being retired is nice that way, for sure. Thanks for sharing such a nice overall article. I enjoyed it.

    • I grew up in Naples, born in Gainesville, family from (and currently in Tampa). I’ve never seen proper snow. We got flurries on Thanksgiving in North Carolina, when I was 12–we scraped the whole car to make 1 snowball afterwards and ceremoniously threw it. On my 15 birthday, on an art school trip to Paris, we got flurries just after midnight. And that’s it. All I’ve ever seen of snow.

      As a Floridian I pray every year for a “cooler” Christmas. It used to get cool starting in November when I was a kid, even in Naples. Now it can feel as bad as summer in mid-January. I keep my little girls’ summer and winter clothes crammed together in their drawers. My almost-6-year-old longs for snow, as a lifelong Frozen fan. Every year I have to give the “No white Christmas for us” talk.

      It’s on my bucket list to have a white Christmas someday.

      • this winter in central FL has been so warm so far!!! hoping for some cooler temps soon. tonight is actually nice!

  2. i miss the snow too. as a kid we’d go to ohio for christmas and stay in my grandparents’ big farmhouse and i know i sound like a norman rockwell painting when i say this but i remember there being snow, a lot of the time, back then. i think what was particularly awful about this experience in the midwest is that it didn’t stop being cold, it just stopped being pretty when it was cold. because snow is so pretty. i think it can be even prettier than the ocean

  3. As someone who grew up in northern Virginia (and who very much remembers the extremely snowy winter of 2010) but who has spent the last ten years in Phoenix, I feel this in my bones. To add insult to injury, the daily highs haven’t even gotten below 70F this entire December, and it’s supposed to hit 81F this weekend. I’ve been completely deprived sweater weather this year.

    • yeah the weather keeps boomeranging here! we’ll have a couple days in the 50s but then it’s back to 75+ 😫

Comments are closed.

‘I Want To Be With a Woman, but My Inexperience Makes Me Feel Really Insecure’

Q:

I’m going to try to write something that makes sense, though it’s hard because I’m a mess right now.

Here is the thing, I’m a cis woman in her early 30s who has always labeled herself as bi. It’s something I have always said without giving it much tought. I have said it, but I haven’t really explored it in any way.

When I was in highschool and college I didn’t have any real crush for anyone (or at least I’m sure I didn’t have it for any man), and I only dated for a while one person (a man), though I couldn’t make myself do anything physical with him appart from a peak on the lips now and then.

Time passed by and I spent my 20s focused in myself (mainly self-esteem and work), I had an objective I wanted to reach. After much work I finally got to the point where I wanted to get, but, on the other hand, I avoided dating or getting physical with anyone. I really found no man I was interested in, and the girls I had crushes on were heterosexual.

The thing is that I now find myself in a point where I want to finally be with someone and I just want to meet girls, so I am questioning my label as bi, which, at the same time, makes me feel guilty because of internalised homophobia (yeah, such a great thing). I opened up a dating app profile because I don’t really know how else to meet women. However, everytime someone asks me about my dating history, I feel sick. On the one hand I want them to know about it (just because it would explain a lot if anything physical ever happens) but, on the other, I fear being “made fun of” or “rejected” in a way. I’m not naive, I know a lot of stuff, I have simply not really done anything with anyone or by myself (something I’m working on). I want to be with a woman, but my inexperience makes me feel really insecure and I don’t really dare to take the lead.

I know my story has brought up a lot of different issues, but I guess I ultimately want to ask whether my situation is that unusual and if you have any advice to finally dare to be with a woman and stop feeling like I am doing a bad thing for not “trying hard enough” to be with a cis man.

A:

Hello! Everything you’re feeling is incredibly common — from the internalized homophobia to the label questioning to the anxieties about your relative inexperience. So to start, no, I don’t think your situation is unusual!

If you want to meet girls, then I think it’s time to meet girls! If it helps, I think you can press pause on figuring out exactly how you want to label yourself. There’s no reason that needs to be perfectly figured out now, and sometimes the experiences we gather from dating around actually help us explore and settle into ourselves. If thinking about labels is kicking up too many sticky feelings, then let’s step away from that for now. You’re putting so much pressure on yourself!

We get questions from people who fear reactions to their lack of sexual history and experience all the time. But here’s the thing: In all my years of being gay on this planet, I’ve never heard of someone being rejected or made fun of for their lack of sexual experience. I think especially when it comes to queer dating, it’s quite common to encounter people with short or nonexistent sex and dating histories because a lot of us spend chunks of time in the closet or otherwise have a lot of shame around sex. I’ve been people’s first queer sex experience, and for me that’s more exciting than it is anything else.

If you don’t want to take the lead, you don’t have to. It’s best to be clear about where you’re at upfront, because it’ll make it easier to find people who are a good match for you and who will be more than happy to take the lead. I think your instinct to let them know is right, and even though I understand your fears, I think they’re largely unfounded. And for what it’s worth, just because people do have experience being physically intimate doesn’t automatically make them experts, especially because sex can vary from partner to partner.

The only way to gain experience is to put yourself out there and give the dating app a real go. I think you’re being held back by questions of identity and some insecurity about your past, but I don’t think we have to figure it all out before we jump into dating. You’re going to learn so much about yourself from the actual process of dating around, and I’m excited for you to get out there and meet some women! There’s no better time than New Year’s to make a new commitment to yourself and really put yourself out there. I’m wishing you so much luck!

You can chime in with your advice in the comments and submit your own questions any time.

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Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya

Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya is the managing editor of Autostraddle and a lesbian writer of essays, short stories, and pop culture criticism living in Orlando. She is the assistant managing editor of TriQuarterly, and her short stories appear or are forthcoming in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Joyland, Catapult, The Offing, and more. Some of her pop culture writing can be found at The A.V. Club, Vulture, The Cut, and others. You can follow her on Twitter or Instagram and learn more about her work on her website.

Kayla has written 951 articles for us.

Every Pedro Almodóvar Movie Ranked

Pedro Almodóvar is the gayest filmmaker to ever achieve mainstream success. Beginning his career in the aftermath of the Franco regime, Almodóvar has always pushed boundaries whether he’s portraying societal outsiders or excavating the absurdities of heteronormative life. He has a talent for turning the trickiest subjects into delightful entertainments through humor, drama, and those bright, bright colors.

His latest film, The Room Next Door, is his first feature film in English. At 75, he’s continuing to push himself as an artist — and push political boundaries with this exploration of euthanasia. While so much of his work astounds on its own, he’s an artist whose films feed into one another, the context of each enhancing the next.

To celebrate his latest, I’ve ranked all 25 Almodóvar films — 23 features plus his two latest shorts. (I’m not including any curios like his one available early short Salomé or his pasta commercial.) More than maybe any other filmmaker, I have a fondness for everything he’s done, so if you think I’ve ranked something too low, just know I agree with you. Every Almodóvar film is worth a watch.

25. Broken Embraces (2009)

Every Pedro Almodóvar movie ranked: Penélope Cruz is embraced from behind by an older man.

Even “bad” Almodóvar is better than most movies. For me, this lands at the bottom, because I find Harry Caine/Mateo Blanco (as played by Lluís Homar) to be Almodóvar’s least interesting protagonist. Whenever Penélope Cruz is on-screen, the movie comes alive, but Almodóvar has done this kind of melodrama far better in other movies — several of which also feature Cruz.

24. I’m So Excited (2013)

A woman bends down with her hands on the chests of two pilots as a flight attendant looks on

If Broken Embraces was a controversial bottom pick, this is a very not controversial near-the-bottom pick. But I think people are too harsh on this one! No, it’s not Almodóvar’s best, but it’s a lot of fun, and the off-plane sequence with the phone call elevates the whole film.

23. The Human Voice (2020)

A close up of Tilda Swinton in a red sweater in the bottom left corner with her fancy apartment behind her.

This is not the first time Almodóvar adapted Jean Cocteau’s The Human Voice, but it is the first time he did it as a direct adaptation stand alone film. An experiment during Covid, this feels like Almodóvar stepping into a new phase of his career. With a strong performance from Tilda Swinton and gorgeous-even-for-Almodóvar production design, this was a real treat to receive during lockdown.

22. Dark Habits (1983)

Two smiling nuns stand side by side, one holding a chicken.

While nuns behaving badly may seem readymade for farce, this is actually Almodóvar’s first foray into melodrama. It’s a tone he does better later on in his career, but with a cast of regular collaborators including Carmen Maura and Marisa Paredes this is still a deeply moving film.

21. Strange Way of Life (2023)

Every Pedro Almodóvar movie ranked: Ethan Hawke looks at Pedro Pascal in Strange Way of Life

Okay, fine, this is basically a Saint Laurent commercial and Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal don’t really have chemistry, but I’m sorry I liked it! While marketed as Almodóvar’s response to Brokeback Mountain, a film he almost directed, I think it’s actually most interesting in the context of his career-long portrayal of law enforcement. Within this scrumptious gay trifle of a Western, he raises questions of illegality, immorality, and loyalty. What does life look like when we create our own moral codes instead of leaving them to the state?

20. Kika (1993)

A woman clutches her face while looking in a mirror as another woman looks on.

I would argue this is one of Almodóvar’s most interesting films, one of his funniest, and one of his most unpleasant. But does it all work? That’s another matter. This is a film for hardcore Almodóvar fans, a work that illuminates and deepens some of his other films, while potentially being baffling and off-putting to the uninitiated.

19. Live Flesh (1997)

Javier Bardem clutches another man by the sweater as the other man screams.

The opening of this film with Penélope Cruz giving birth on a bus is one of Almodóvar’s best sequences. The rest of the film never quite reaches these heights, but it’s interesting as one of Almodóvar’s most overtly political films from this era. The oppression of the past lingers long into the present.

18. Bad Education (2004)

A close up of Gael Garcia Bernal in drag

I don’t love this film quite as much as most — maybe its depiction of transsexuality rings false in a way that disconnects me emotionally? — but I do think it’s one of the most important films in Almodóvar’s filmography. The most challenging aspect of his work is his frequent depiction of rape and other forms of sexual violence. But what others find gross or immoral, I’ve always found deeply personal. Yes, Almodóvar is a male director — he’s also a gay man who grew up in the Catholic church. This film depicts that trauma and through its meta-textual narrative even the transness acts as a confession: Trans or cis, the women of Almodóvar are often a hidden way to explore the lives of gay men. (I doubt there’s a market for this but I deeply want to write a book about that via both Almodóvar and Tennessee Williams…)

17. What Have I Done to Deserve This? (1984)

Two women sit side by side - a sexy blonde and a frump brunette

Not all of Almodóvar’s women feel like stand-ins for gay men — instead here he pays tribute to his mother and other women in his life. This is such a tender, magical film about surviving patriarchy through solidarity. Probably the most compelling case for murdering your husband in cinema history.

16. The Room Next Door (2024)

Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton sit on the couch and talk.

Most of the discourse around this film has revolved around it as Almodóvar’s feature English-language debut. But I think it’s most interesting for the ways expanding beyond Spain has expanded Almodóvar’s political interests to something more global. Yes, this film very explicitly takes on euthanasia but it’s also interested in climate change and war. Far from didactic, it instead focuses on an intimate friendship. With time, I think people’s esteem of this film will only rise.

15. The Flower of My Secret (1995)

Every Pedro Almodóvar movie ranked: A close up in Marisa Paredes in a red blazer.

This feels like a transitional film for Almodóvar from his early work to his most famous melodramas. But this is still a wonderful movie even if he’s trying some things out that he’ll do even better later. This film might just contain frequent collaborator María Paredes’ best performance, so if you’re looking for a way to celebrate her after her recent passing, I highly recommend.

14. Julieta (2016)

A woman in a blue sweater reads a book on a train.

The lack of fanfare around this magical movie has always baffled me. Sure, it’s more Almodóvar doing Almodóvar than the risks of his next films, but he does it so well! There are multiple sequences in this film that stun me and they mostly come together for one complete portrait of a mother and daughter.

13. Labyrinth of Passion (1982)

A young Pedro Almodóvar sings on stage in a leather jacket and femme punk makeup.

This movie is bonkers. It’s offensive for a dozen reasons, but doesn’t take itself seriously enough to actually offend. It’s just a weird, dangerous work of outsider art that does nothing to hint at the more serious, Oscar-winning Almodóvar in the decades to come. Also the director makes a cameo as a flamboyant punk singer!

12. Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1989)

Victoria Abril dabs at Antonio Banderas injured face.

The films of Alfred Hitchcock are felt all over Almodóvar’s work, but this is the first to directly engage with the horror genre. At one point, a film director character comments on the thin line between horror and romance and this portrays that with sickening complexity. Less a “look at Stockholm Syndrome” and more a satire that suggests heterosexuality is the real syndrome. Very okay to find this too unpleasant to enjoy — even if it has some very funny moments — but I don’t know how anyone can watch the final moments and think Almodóvar is saying this relationship is good.

11. The Skin I Live In (2011)

Antonio Banderas operates on a woman with a white face covering.

Twenty-two years later, Almodóvar finally re-teamed with Antonio Banderas for another complicated riff on the horror genre. Watching this before I knew I was trans, I felt guilty about how much I envied the fate of its central victim. I even googled “what do trans people think of the skin i live in.” Well, I can say this trans person thinks it’s use of horror and sci-fi makes me less concerned about its realism. In a world where Emilia Pérez is going to be nominated for Oscars with a similar understanding of trans surgeries, I’d always rather something like this that’s actually interesting in its exploration of gender and sexuality.

10. Parallel Mothers (2021)

Penélope Cruz places her hands on the shoulders of a young woman with short blonde hair.

These ten films are the masterpieces. Parallel Mothers is Almodóvar’s latest — and among the most direct — to reckon with Spain’s past. This is a film about accountability for individuals and accountability for a nation told through characters that are more than mere metaphors. Almodóvar’s work is getting even more political as he gets older and it’s thrilling to watch a great artist use his experience to grapple with Big Issues.

9. High Heels (1991)

Bibiana Fernandez in a tied up shirt and jean shorts leads a group of woman in a dance in a jailyard.

This is Almodóvar’s best mommy issues movie. And, considering his filmography, that’s saying something!  While not as famous as some others, I think this ends the peak of Almodóvar’s early period. It riffs on Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata while being as fun and poppy as Almodóvar’s breeziest comedies. With a score by Ryuichi Sakamoto and Bibiana Fernández’s most memorable role, I hope casual Almodóvar fans make sure to check this one out.

8. Matador (1986)

A woman frames her eyes in the loops of a gold metal gate.

There are the Almodóvar films I’d recommend to everyone and the ones I would not. This is the latter but God what a film! Within the uncomfortable it finds so much beauty and curiosity and even eroticism. This is a bold film, a difficult film, and — if you’re up for it — a deeply rewarding film.

7. Talk to Her (2002)

Two men hover over two unconscious women in sunglasses.

While Matador is the most challenging of his early period, Talk to Her is the most challenging of his prestige period. It’s wild to me that this movie won an Oscar. And it’s also a film I completely understand people hating. But taken within the context of his body of work, I think there’s value in art that tries to understand violence and misogyny — even when shielded by a false kindness or love. The original Sleeping Beauty fairy tale ends with a woman — pregnant from rape — waking up during childbirth. Is the Disney approach to changing that to true love’s kiss better for our world than engaging deeper with the implications of a foundational cultural myth? Again, I do understand thinking this movie totally fails or that its narrative is impossible to salvage. But, taken as a modern fairy tale, I think it has much to offer.

6. Volver (2006)

Penélope Cruz smells a fresh green herb.

I don’t believe Almodóvar is ever apologizing for his work, but Bad Education and Volver are fascinating as follow-ups to the worldwide success of Talk to Her. If sexual assault in the first film doesn’t seem to hold the weight it should, his next films treat it with the utmost severity while still holding onto complexity. Volver is film about women that holds trauma and guilt and forgiveness all at once. While the violence of men is a driving force, male characters are hardly seen. This film has given up on them, instead offering its women the chance to heal together. Re-teaming with Carmen Maura after decades apart and featuring Penélope Cruz’s best performance, Volver is not only one of Almodóvar’s greatest films — it’s also the easiest to love.

5. Pepi, Luci, Bom (1980)

Carmen Maura looks on as another woman gets peed on.

Maybe I’m just a dyke and therefore am overrating Almodóvar’s first (available) feature due to its focus on queer women. Or maybe I’m a filmmaker absolutely in awe of the messy freedom and bold choices made by Almodóvar when he was just starting out. The still above shows Carmen Maura watching as a policeman’s wife gets peed on erotically by another woman as revenge for the policeman raping her. This is an anarchist farce that holds a depth of sadness underneath its comic tone. Being yourself in the face of fascism takes a toll and that’s why it’s so important to be friends with lesbian punk singers.

4. Pain and Glory (2019)

A close up of Antonio Banderas looking over his shoulder styled like Pedro Almodóvar.

By turning to the personal, Almodóvar made one of his best. Antonio Banderas — styled like Almodóvar — plays a filmmaker grappling with illness and mortality, the past and a burgeoning heroin addiction. Alternating between this present consumed with the past and flashbacks to a past consumed with the future, Almodóvar crafts a tender self-portrait that opts for realism over melodrama or farce. There is so much love in casting frequent collaborators Penélope Cruz and Julieta Serrano as the younger and older versions of his less-than-perfect mother and so much possibility in depicting the difficult through cinema. I love this movie and I know I’ll only appreciate it even more with every decade I age.

3. Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988)

Carmen Maura looks sad as she clutches a red phone.

If you’ve never seen an Almodóvar movie, this is where you should start. It’s just so much fun from its first second to its last. It has a comic pace unmatched by any film outside the very best of Old Hollywood screwballs and a craft that awes you with beauty while your’e laughing. During his recent directors on directors interview with Halina Reijn, Almodóvar revealed that this film started out as his an adaptation of The Human Voice. That context only deepens a film all about love and betrayal, desire and desperation.

2. All About My Mother (1999)

A woman in red stands in front of an ad with the face of another woman in close up

“To Bette Davis, Gena Rowlands, Romy Schneider… To all actresses who have played actresses, to all women who act, to men who act and become women, to all people who want to become mothers. To my mother.” Almodóvar’s most perfect film is a tribute to women: mothers, dykes, transsexuals, sex workers, actresses. It’s a story about grief and reinvention and the possibilities found in community. This was the first Almodóvar film I saw as a confused teen boy and it made me the woman I am today.

1. Law of Desire (1987)

Every Pedro Almodóvar movie ranked: An older man and a younger man both in colorful shirts embrace by a door.

In 1988, Almodóvar released Women on the Verge and achieved global success. But the year before he made this very gay, very trans, very unpalatable masterpiece. This feels like Almodóvar’s most personal film until Pain and Glory and within the story of a horny filmmaker lies his most effective exploration of love and violence. But while the complicated sexual relationships and explicit sex scenes are great, my favorite aspect of the film is the dynamic between the protagonist and his trans sister. She is engaged in her own psychosexual nightmare off-screen and together they find tenderness amid their separate chaos. All About My Mother may have made me the woman I am today, but Law of Desire made me the filmmaker. It’s everything I want from cinema, that I aspire to achieve with cinema, and it remains the Almodóvar film I return to most. I love it so much I could kill.

Before you go! Autostraddle runs on the reader support of our AF+ Members. If this article meant something to you today — if it informed you or made you smile or feel seen, will you consider joining AF and supporting the people who make this queer media site possible?

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Drew Burnett Gregory

Drew is a Brooklyn-based writer, filmmaker, and theatremaker. She is a Senior Editor at Autostraddle with a focus in film and television, sex and dating, and politics. Her writing can also be found at Bright Wall/Dark Room, Cosmopolitan UK, Refinery29, Into, them, and Knock LA. She was a 2022 Outfest Screenwriting Lab Notable Writer and a 2023 Lambda Literary Screenwriting Fellow. She is currently working on a million film and TV projects mostly about queer trans women. Find her on Twitter and Instagram.

Drew Burnett has written 634 articles for us.

7 Comments

  2. I want to make 2025 my year of Great Cinema so this is a great place to start! I know I should’ve but i’ve never actually seen his work – now i know where to start!

    • It’s really nice to revisit all of these.
      One thing that would be helpful: write a sentence for each film that gives a short synopsis of the content. Right now some of the verdicts are opaque if one hasn’t watched the movie.
      I loved Pepi.. and Dark Habits when i saw them way back. Maybe it’s time for a rewatch..

  3. Loved this, Drew, thanks! I’ve seen 9 Almodóvar films — loving most, and liking all of them enough to want to watch everything he’s made eventually, so I’ve been going slowly through what I haven’t seen, in chronological order when I can. I just checked my Letterboxd stats for 2024 and Spain was my second country for films after the USA (4 of the 14 were by Almodóvar).

  4. just finished watching all (minus The Room Next Door, which I will be seeing in theaters next week) Almodóvar’s work after falling in love with him last year–and this list is a gorgeous chaser! Genuinely need more filmmakers to be inspired by the like of Almodóvar–I am bubbling over with excitement over his body of work and begging to watch anyone with such purposeful, stunning vision. I struggle with making ranking lists but it delighted me to know that Law of Desire is number one on this list as it has remained number one on mine!

  5. Almodovar has more than a consent problem, his films frequently make light of SA. Sitting in a cinema with people laughing during these scenes (surely an intention in their set-ups) has honestly chilled me to the bone. I feel like this is quite often overlooked because he’s a gay man with a vision.

Comments are closed.

Your Gay Aunties Elphaba and Glinda Enjoy Train Snacks, Plan Oz Itinerary, Take Cat Nap in Deleted “Wicked” Scene

Wicked Deleted Scene Shows a Romantic Train Ride Between Gal Pals Elphaba and Glinda

glinda and elphaba on the train

It’s hard to imagine that the Wicked movie could possibly be a) longer, or b) gayer, but according to some deleted scenes, it could have been both. With the the digital, DVD, and Blu-ray releases of the movie right around the corner, it has been announced that all versions of the film will come with extras such as deleted scenes. Some of them have already landed on the internet, including a montage of Elphaba and Glinda (the a freshly dropped from her name) taking the train to the Emerald City. In this montage, they toast tiny snacks, enjoy the sights, and plan the itinerary for their one short day.

The moments I am most sad we lost though are when they take turns falling asleep on each other. First, Glinda naps while DRAPED over an unbothered Elphaba’s lap, as if this is perhaps not the first time this has happened in their “friendship,” and next, Elphaba falls asleep on Glinda’s shoulder, the gifted hat pulled over her face. When Glinda relaizes she’d one reading the Ozconomist and wants her attention again, she startles Elphaba awake…something I’m sure Elphaba is used to rooming with Glinda at Shiz.

The scene looks unfinished as it pans at the end to a set instead of whatever Glinda is enthusiastically pointing to, and I understand why, but as someone who watched all three hours of the Wicked movie and was still ready for more, I wouldn’t be mad if someday we got a director’s cut with more of these scenes in it.

Check out the romantic train ride here:

More queer pop culture news from the hoi polloi:

+ Towa Bird wants to look like “a lesbian Mick Jagger” and dare I say, she’s succeeding

+ Let’s look back on some iconic sapphic pop culture moments of 2024

+ British sitcom Outnumbered confirms Karen is queer in Christmas reunion special

+ 2024 was the year of the bisexual in media, according to The Cut

+ Even though they already had a wedding in Italy, Rebel Wilson and her wife officially got married legally in Australia this weekend

+ Here is a list of TV shows with queer characters we’ll be saying goodbye to in 2025

+ During a Carpool Karaoke Christmas Special, Chappell Roan discusses growing up in a religious environment while being queer

+ Lena Waithe also has Wicked songs stuck in her head

+ Lesbian photographer Cathy Cade died at age 82

+ Rapper/singer Doechii discusses bisexuality and stands up against people interpreting her songs with a biphobic lens

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Valerie Anne

Just a TV-loving, Twitter-addicted nerd who loves reading, watching, and writing about stories. One part Kara Danvers, two parts Waverly Earp, a dash of Cosima and an extra helping of my own brand of weirdo.

Valerie has written 613 articles for us.

The Ultimate Queer Workout Playlist To Get You Actually Excited About the Gym

If you’re anything like me, you’ve avoided The Gym because it’s a scary place. Or, at least, because the people there are scary. Or the machines. OK, something about going to the gym is scary. But now it’s about to be a new year, so new you! Right? Maybe you’re motivated with the rest of the world to hit the gym as a New Year’s Resolution, or maybe you read our recently published queer guide to starting strength training written by my very own personal trainer, but either way… you’re ready to put in the work. What next? Aside from all of the apparel, equipment, and literal exercises you’ll have to learn, there is a key element to working out: your playlist.

I’ve noticed that when I search for a “queer work out playlist” I get a lot of great playlists filled with songs queer people love but not necessarily made by queer people. Lately, I’ve really just had a heavy rotation of both Megan Thee Stallion and Doechii’s discographies, but there’s a lot more where that came from in terms of queer music that’ll hype you up in the gym. With artists like lesbian DJ COBRAH and electro-pop bicon Tove Lo to high-tempo indie band MUNA and the numerous queer female rappers we have on the scene right now, there’s no excuse not to listen to queer music at the gym.

So, I put together the ultimate queer workout playlist to get you actually excited about the gym and yes, a few allies are featured, but you can count on it being 99.99% queer. Even better, it has a little bit of every genre. Here’s some of my favorites.

Listening to Megan Thee Stallion makes me feel like I am That Girl and folks… I’m not even a girl! There isn’t a single song in her entire discography that I’d skip during my workout, which is fitting, considering she’s always putting in time at the gym.

Tove Lo has seamlessly transitioned from my putting-things-up-my-nose college pre-game playlist to my putting-testosterone-in-my-belly workout playlist. The majority of her discography is so fun and horny and makes me want to sweat from head to toe.

Listening to COBRAH will get you ready for anything, including the daunting workout ahead of you. Her electronic music is so playful with pulsing synths and cunty lyrics… great for cardio AND weightlifting.

When you think of MUNA, you don’t typically think of workout music. More like sapphic yearning and crying. However, they have a couple of songs that serve as a really nice balance between all of the electronic and rap on the playlist. It’s a nice relief when shuffling through without taking you completely out of it.

Full Queer Workout Playlist:

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motti

Motti (they/he) is a New York born and raised sorority girl turned writer, comedian, and content creator (whatever that means these days). Motti has been featured on We're Having Gay Sex Live, The Lesbian Agenda Show, Reductress Haha Wow! Live, the GayJoy Digest, and even played the role of "Real Life Lesbian" on Billy on the Street. In 2022, they wrote about how clit sucker toys are a scam, sweet gay revenge, chasing their dreams, and getting run over by a pick up truck in their now-abandoned newsletter Motti is An Attention Whore. Motti has a Masters in Public Administration and Local Government Management, you'd never know it from the shit they post online (see previous sentence), but occasionally he'll surprise you with his knowledge of civic engagement and electoral processes. They live in Brooklyn with their tuxedo cat, Bo, and their 20 houseplants.

motti has written 35 articles for us.

New Years Resolutions but It’s Just Cool Things Shane Did in ‘The L Word’

New Year’s Resolutions can be tough! It’s hard to imagine the version of ourselves that we haven’t met yet. What kind of bullshit and trauma will the new year bring us? How can we possibly decide who we want to be or what we want to do if we don’t have a crystal ball showing us what’s to come? Well, we can’t. New Year’s Resolutions are all about aspiring to something… or in this case… someone. While the future can feel scary and unsure, we can always fall back on a universal truth: We all want to be Shane McCutcheon. So, I’ve put together a list of New Year’s Resolutions you can steal for 2025 that are really just things Shane has done or been in the original The L Word.

Disclaimer: I cannot be held responsible for any broken hearts, shattered friendships, incomplete weddings, or sexual discoveries that may occur as a result of using these resolutions. 

In 2025, I will wear more leather vests as shirts. 

In 2025, I will have more pool sex. 

In 2025, I will have an affair with an older married woman. 

In 2025, I will quit my job. 

In 2025, I will propose to my girlfriend. 

In 2025, I will be my own boss. 

In 2025, I will land a huge underwear modeling contract. 

In 2025, I will fall in love with a woman at a PTA meeting.

In 2025, I will be a really good older sibling. 

In 2025, I will always be the hottest and the sluttiest person in the room. 

In 2025, I will attract, not chase.

In 2025, I will resist any external pressure to adopt they/them pronouns just because I look androgynous.

In 2025, I will help closeted women realize they’re queer. 

In 2025, I will prove that misfits deserve love and compassion. 

In 2025, I will confront the trauma that exists outside of my queerness. 

In 2025, I will date and fuck beautiful bisexual women. 

In 2025, I will stop trying to be in monogamous relationships. 

In 2025, I will pull off some of the ugliest outfits simply because I am hot. 

In 2025, I will be a good and loyal friend. 

In 2025, I will ooze sex appeal.

In 2025, I will be a complete, complex individual who is not defined by their looks.

In 2025, I will actively work on being a better person (for myself).

In 2025, I will become independently wealthy. 

In 2025, I will teach at least one woman how to eat pussy. 

In 2025, I will not become my father.

Before you go! Autostraddle runs on the reader support of our AF+ Members. If this article meant something to you today — if it informed you or made you smile or feel seen, will you consider joining AF and supporting the people who make this queer media site possible?

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Related:

motti

Motti (they/he) is a New York born and raised sorority girl turned writer, comedian, and content creator (whatever that means these days). Motti has been featured on We're Having Gay Sex Live, The Lesbian Agenda Show, Reductress Haha Wow! Live, the GayJoy Digest, and even played the role of "Real Life Lesbian" on Billy on the Street. In 2022, they wrote about how clit sucker toys are a scam, sweet gay revenge, chasing their dreams, and getting run over by a pick up truck in their now-abandoned newsletter Motti is An Attention Whore. Motti has a Masters in Public Administration and Local Government Management, you'd never know it from the shit they post online (see previous sentence), but occasionally he'll surprise you with his knowledge of civic engagement and electoral processes. They live in Brooklyn with their tuxedo cat, Bo, and their 20 houseplants.

motti has written 35 articles for us.

8 Comments

  1. I’d take out have an affair with a married woman. That’s only funny if you haven’t been the betrayed one in the marriage. Then it’s not really something to aspire to. Just a thought. Otherwise, HNY!

    • Don’t worry, this is a comedy piece! None of them are meant to be taken seriously. It’s just a list of things Shane has done.

      – someone dating a woman whose spouse had an affair

      • Ermmmm, I know it’s a comedy piece. I just don’t find it funny because I was cheated on by my now ex-wife who had an affair with a younger woman. What a god-awful clueless response you’ve just made. Christ, it sounds like an excuse my teenage son with his still-developing brain would make. Real mature.

        • I think maybe you misread my tone, I didn’t mean to be dismissive, just meant to say I have empathy for that situation (my girlfriend experienced the same thing and it was deeply traumatic) and would never imply that it’s acceptable behavior. When I say it’s just a comedic piece, what I mean is I’m not seriously endorsing it, and it is referencing a fictional situation in which the hot older married woman was married to a really bad guy! There’s also a jab in here about they/them pronouns, which are pronouns that I myself use. There’s also mention of quitting a job, which I did once and it financially ruined me. Another line is about not becoming your father, but I love my father and hope to be just like him! These are not meant to resonate with everyone or really anyone. That’s what I mean when I say it’s a comedy piece.

          A huge part of Shane’s character is her draw towards self-destruction and ethical gray areas, and a lot of what she does (a lot of what L Word characters do in general) is objectively bad for a whole range of reasons. I also don’t think parents/guardians should fall in love with teachers at PTA meetings!

          I’m sorry it struck a nerve, that wasn’t my intention. Hope we can all be friends and not take intentional jabs at each other. Happy New Year.

          • Ok, not sure we see eye-to-eye on this one but I appreciate you taking the time to explain your take. Thank you. Over and out on this particular matter ☺️.

    • Canonically, Shane has slept with over 1,000 women. So, statistically, many are going to be bisexual. But specifically to what we see throughout the series, ex-gf Paige’s sexuality is fluid.

Comments are closed.

Quiz: Which Iconic Gay Character of 2024 Are You?

It was a year chock-full of iconic lesbian moments — the rise of Chappell Roan, a record-breaking WNBA season, Love Lies Bleeding — and amongst these moments were a variety of characters and performances — fictional ones and “real” ones — that emerged into the public consciousness and upon which we now, today, will gaze upon and determine which one is in fact YOU.

Which Iconic 2024 Gay Character Are You?

2024 was as always an iconic time to be a lesbian. Who did you embody this year?

























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Riese

Riese is the 43-year-old Co-Founder of Autostraddle.com as well as an award-winning writer, video-maker, LGBTQ+ Marketing consultant and aspiring cyber-performance artist who grew up in Michigan, lost her mind in New York and now lives in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in nine books, magazines including Marie Claire and Curve, and all over the web including Nylon, Queerty, Nerve, Bitch, Emily Books and Jezebel. She had a very popular personal blog once upon a time, and then she recapped The L Word, and then she had the idea to make this place, and now here we all are! In 2016, she was nominated for a GLAAD Award for Outstanding Digital Journalism. She's Jewish and has a cute dog named Carol. Follow her on twitter and instagram.

Riese has written 3284 articles for us.

11 Comments

  1. Ava from Hacks! This seems like an excellent result for me, especially as pop culture and I were on different cycles this year, but I definitely know who she is!

    • this definitely does feel accurate and i look forward to you knowing even more about her in the coming calendar year

  4. You’re Elpheba from “Wicked”!

    You’re wickedly talented and great at flying, dancing, hats and animal husbandry. In 2025 we will all be looking to the western sky whenever we care to find you and you will be right there, defying gravity, fighting for what’s right!

    My life has revolved around nothing but Wicked since the film was released so this tracks.

    • every time somebody misspells my name (which happens in like 50% of the emails and communications i receive in my life) i think to myself “this is my punishment for being wholly unable to consistently correctly spell anybody else’s name, ever”

Comments are closed.

20 Iconic Sapphic Pop Culture Moments of 2024

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We’ve had quite a fascinating little year as a queer community, one in which we were not alone in declaring ourselves at the very forefront of cultural production. In April, Cosmopolitan magazine suggested 2024 was ‘the year of lesbianism’ in an article boldly headlined, The lesbian pop culture boom is in full swing. Buckle up! In September, Vogue Australia asked if we needed to talk about the “lesbian renaissance. In June, Rolling Stone christened 2024 Sapphic Pop’s Banner Year.

As the year came to its natural conclusion, this phenomenon was again certified and celebrated in yearly retrospectives. At The Cut, queer culture writer Cat Zhang called 2024 “The Year of the Bisexual,” tracing accurate lines between cultural phenomenons like Miranda July’s All Fours, that sexy Challengers Love Triangle and the ongoing excellence of Hacks. The New York Times declared 2024 the year in which “Sapphic Stars Ruled Pop Culture,” citing evidence like Chappell Roan, Renee Rapp and Kristen Stewart proudly embracing the lesbian label, reality TV stars coming out and dating other high-profile queer artists as well as the rise of the Handsome Pod and irresistible power couples like Niecy Nash-Betts and Jessica Betts. Gay Star News affirmed 2024 as The Year of the Lesbian Renaissance. Them.us noted that in 2024, due in part to widespread celebrity adoption, “the word ‘lesbian’ was so back.”

As a publication devoted to this topic full-time and thus possessing a great deal of data, we can affirm that most of these statements are in fact true, but not necessarily across every field of pop culture — it wasn’t an exceptional year, volume-wise, for television inclusive of a diverse array of queer women and trans characters, although we certainly had some stand-out moments in both genres. But when it came to music, sports, literature, podcasts and celebrity visibility, we definitely did rule the year.

We’ve been working on this piece for a few weeks — and it’s a list that could be one hundred items long (with at least 20 of those items being WNBA-related), so we had to settle for presenting just some of the many iconic, transcendent, important or otherwise memorable pop culture events of 2024 that involved bisexual, queer or lesbian humans or characters. The moments that changed us and surprised us, the times in which we looked around and thought “yes, that behavior is on brand for our community.” Let’s get into it.

That Close-Up of Tracy Chapman’s Fingers At The Grammys

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA - FEBRUARY 04: (FOR EDITORIAL USE ONLY) Tracy Chapman performs onstage during the 66th GRAMMY Awards at Crypto.com Arena on February 04, 2024 in Los Angeles, California.

(Photo by Amy Sussman/Getty Images)

The 2024 Grammys were pure gay glory. Boygenius swept the awards in their white tuxedos and trophies were bestowed upon Miley Cyrus, Victoria Monét, Meshell Ndegeocello, Brandy Clark and Brandi Carlile. But somehow more important than all of that (and that’s a lot) was the gay glory enabled by close-up of Tracy Chapman’s fingers as she played the opening chords of her 1988 hit “Fast Car” with Luke Combs. The entire lesbian community was riveted, and we may in fact never recover.

Kristen Stewart Says She Wants To Do “The Gayest Fucking Thing You’ve Ever Seen In Your Life” on the Rolling Stone Cover for Love Lies Bleeding

BEVERLY HILLS, CALIFORNIA - MARCH 05: (L-R) Jena Malone, Kristen Stewart, Rose Glass, Katy O'Brian and Anna Baryshnikov attend the Los Angeles Premiere Of A24's "Love Lies Bleeding" at Fine Arts Theatre on March 05, 2024 in Beverly Hills, California. (Photo by Emma McIntyre/Getty Images)

(Photo by Emma McIntyre/Getty Images)

“As a community, we’ve all known Kristen Stewart to be a sex symbol for a long time now, but that sentiment finally went more mainstream during the Love Lies Bleeding press tour, during which K Stew was able to not just be extremely hot but extremely hot in a gay way. Her Rolling Stone cover is one of the most sapphically erotic mainstream magazine cover photoshoots I’ve seen since Vanity Fair’s iconic kd Lang/Cindy Crawford cover. The fact that the cover made conservative men upset? The cherry on top.” —Kayla

WNBA Stars NaLyssa Smith and Dijonai Carrington’s Relationship Heats Up the Court

D'Jonai Carrington and NaLyssa smith after the Suns-Fever game

Photo by Erica Denhoff/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images

Like does everybody realize the quality of the lesbian storylines currently being told in the WNBA? In May, Dijonai Carrington (Connecticut Sun) and Erica Wheeler (Indiana Fever) almost got into a fight after a shot block but NaLyssa Smith (Fever) got in between them to shut it down. Wheeler gave Smith a nod of acknowledgement. “As she should,” Carrington tweeted after. Carrington was, after all, Smith’s ex. (Maybe — the timeline on “when they got back together” is fuzzy, and some internet sleuths suggested that game was a turning point after which both girls re-followed the other on social media.) Then the whole internet revisited the transcendent moment from the 2023 season when Smith helped Carrington up with a little extra linger. By the time the Fever played the Sun in the WNBA Playoffs, Carrington and Smith were publicly back together. Also on the Sun? Actual engaged couple, Alyssa Thomas and DeWanna Bonner. Earlier in 2024, DeWonna Bonner passed her ex-wife Candice Dupree on the WNBA’s all-time scoring list. After the Sun defeated the Fever to advance to the next round of the tournament, Carrington and Smith didn’t just slap hands like they did with all the other opposing team’s athletes — they hugged and they posed for pictures.

Chappell Roan Becomes the Kentuckiana Pride Headliner, Sells Out the Festival

LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY - JUNE 15: Chappell Roan performs during the 2024 Kentucky Pride Festival at Waterfront Park on June 15, 2024 in Louisville, Kentucky. (Photo by Stephen J. Cohen/Getty Images)

(Photo by Stephen J. Cohen/Getty Images)

“Chappell Roan’s meteoric rise in popularity following her Coachella sets meant the rest of her appearances this year were extremely big events. She wasn’t even supposed to headline Kentuckiana Pride, a typically well attended but modest Pride event held in Louisville. But headliners Icona Pop dropped out at the last minute, and Chappell stepped into the position, resulting in an attendance record-breaking crowd in Louisville that highlighted just how much the artist means to her Midwestern and Southern fan bases. I spoke to some of the people in attendance — including my sister and her girlfriend! — for my look at that subsection of her fans.” —Kayla 

Queen Latifah Takes Eboni Nichols to the Met Gala for Date Night

NEW YORK, NEW YORK - MAY 06: (L-R) Eboni Nichols and Queen Latifah attend The 2024 Met Gala Celebrating "Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion" at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on May 06, 2024 in New York City. (Photo by Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images)

(Photo by Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images)

Queen Latifah’s gradual coming out story has been a long one, and in recent years we’ve been gradually blessed with acknowledgments and a few red carpet walks with her partner Eboni, including the 2022 Oscars. But their appearance on the Met Gala red carpet and their interview with Emma Chamberlin, in which Queen teased Eb about her burning desire to attend the gala, went straight for the heart of so many fans of this titan of entertainment.  “On some level I intellectually know… we have been here before,” wrote Carmen at the time. “But somehow still, the Met felt different. Walking the world’s most famous carpet, with every camera trained on you and your partner in matching black & white gowns, felt different. [My tweet about it] ended up with over 45 thousand likes in a day. And that’s when I knew — I wasn’t alone.”

Reneé Rapp Gets Introduced at Coachella by L Word Stars

Renee Rapp performs onstage at the 2024 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival at Empire Polo Club on April 14, 2024 in Indio, California

(Photo by Emma McIntyre/Getty Images for Coachella)

“It’s hard to choose just one standout Reneé Rapp moment from the year, as she had quite the good time on the Mean Girls press tour. But one of the most delightfully bizarre moments has to be when she brought out Leisha Hailey, Kate Moennig, Jennifer Beals and Ilene Chaiken to the Coachella stage. Reneé was four years old when The L Word premiered, but the impact of Shane echoes across generations. To make the whole moment even more surreal, there was a giant pair of scissors on the stage behind them.” —Kayla

‘I Kissed a Girl’ Out-Lesbians Itself

I Kissed a Girl finale: a masc and a femme sit on a couch and both talk with their hands

Priya and Naee were the first couple to lock lips on the UK’s lesbian dating reality show I Kissed a Girl, sharing an immediate attraction that wasn’t necessarily dimmed by Priya’s revelation that she’d very recently gotten engaged to someone she’d been dating for two months whomst she’d never met. At the reunion, the vibes on Priya and Naee’s sofa were… off. Turns out that after the show, Pirya checked out of the relationship, flew to the US to meet her ex-girlfriend, and got married two weeks later.

“This really did leave me open-mouthed that things soured so incredibly quickly for the show’s golden couple,” wrote Sally. “As miffed as I was on Naee’s behalf, I was mostly worried about Naee’s mum who deserves only happiness! Moral of the story: Never underestimate ex-appeal!”

Gracin Inspires Julia Fox to Come Out

gracin and julia fox screenshot

In one of many iconic TikToks , queer comic @emgwaciedawgie (aka Gracin) remarked “I love when I see a lesbian with their boyfriend. It’s like, aw you hate that man. You literally hate him.” Imagine her surprise when Julia Fox stitched it, declaring, “That was me. I was that lesbian. So sorry, boys, won’t happen again,” thus effectively coming out. Of this surprising turn of events, Gracin told Betches: “I thought I was hallucinating or on drugs. It’s literally so funny and random that I’m part of such a big moment in lesbian pop culture. I love it though! Seeing my name or my face, randomly next to ‘Julia Fox has come out as lesbian’ is so funny and not real.”

Jonquel Jones Gets Her Flowers

New York City, N.Y.: New York Liberty Jonquel Jones holds the MVP trophy during the ticker-tape parade at New York City Hall ceremony honoring the team as WNBA Champions, on Oct. 24, 2024. (Photo by J. Conrad Williams Jr./Newsday RM via Getty Images)

(Photo by J. Conrad Williams Jr./Newsday RM via Getty Images)

She was the WNBA’s reigning VIP in 2022, but as a Black, masculine lesbian, Jones never got the attention or brand deals that she deserved. “She has the game; she has the personality,” wrote Katie Barnes in 2022. “She even has a compelling origin story. Yet few people outside of the WNBA faithful even know who Jonquel Jones is.”

Now they know. After the New York Liberty won the WNBA Championships after a series that saw uneven performances from Jones’ popular teammates Breanna Stewart and Sabrina Ionescu, Jones secured the MVP trophy. She’s was at the head of the victory parade in New York City, she got a hero’s welcome and a 30-foot mural back in her home country of the Bahamas and now she’s got a new State Farm spot with fellow queer icon Ellie the Elephant. She always takes time to thank her fianceThe third slide in this carousel from the Liberty’s appearance on The Tonight Show where Jonquel is in her best Lesbian Dad ‘fit and Megan Thee Stallion is laughing with her whole body and everyone is so happy??????

Delayed but NEVER denied.

The MCU Finally Lets Two Women Kiss in Agatha All Along

death and kathryn hahn in agatha alll along

“With Agatha All Along, the MCU finally lets two women kiss,” headlined Valerie’s final review of Disney+’s buzzy, twisted, star-studded, gay-as-fuck Agatha All Along. This was mere weeks after another noted headline, “Last night’s Agatha All Along’ was the gayest thing the MCU has ever done.” Aubrey Plaza playing death (the role she was born to play), Kathryn Hahn as Agatha, subtext becoming text? As Nic wrote: “How I’ve dreamed of this!” (Also exciting was Agatha star Sasheer Zamata coming out!)

Megan Thee Stallion Raps About Her Strap

megan thee stallion freestyling to like a g6

“This May, Megan Thee Stallion dropped her weekly #MeganMonday freestyle to the classic “Like a G6.” This one caught us off guard in the best way possible by opening with the line, “You know I gotta stay fly like 36. Got the strap in my bag like a freak bitch.” I beg your finest pardon, Miss Pete? With a flow and cadence that already assert her dominance, these opening lyrics make us blush in the best way possible. Right when we thought we couldn’t love her anymore, she reveals that she loves to give as much as she likes to take.” —Tima

Tima’s Tiktok about Megan’s G6 freestyle was our most viral TikTok of the year.

JoJo Siwa Allegedly Invents Gay Pop With “Karma”

jojo siwa in her karma outfit

JoJo Siwa’s new single Karma was going to be ADULT and was going to be SEXY and was going to be HUGE and nobody believed in “Karma” more than JoJo Siwa herself, cruising L.A in her Lamborghini, telling us that she was entering her adult era, as if just saying it could make it so. Her frenetic, aggressive Karma dance went wildly viral. Everybody dragged JoJo because it was easy and people are mean and seemingly starving for low-hanging fruit. But none of it stopped her from continuing to hype herself, hype her music video, and even confidently declare she was inventing a new genre of music, “gay pop.” It was easy to forget that underneath it all, Siwa was a young, 20-year-old lesbian who wanted to be seen as hot and cool, who wanted to be taken seriously, and wanted to do something new. The music video was wild, the product of an unprecedented type of lesbian celebrity — one with the privilege, wealth and nerve to take some pretty big risks. She is resolutely unapologetic about who she is, and who she is is very gay. Nothing she does makes sense to me but bless her heart. The “Karma” music video currently boasts 51 million views on YouTube. I wrote this thing about all of the discourse around it and I think it was pretty good!

That Women’s-Only Usher Tribute at the BET Awards

US singer songwriters Teyana Taylor and Victoria Monet perform on stage during the 2024 BET Awards at the Peacock theatre in Los Angeles, June 30, 2024.

Photo by MICHAEL TRANAFP via Getty Images

“The BET Awards had a star-studded women’s-only tribute to Usher that brought the house down. However, we did not expect such a perfectly sapphic moment between icons Teyana Taylor and Victoria Monét. Taylor, rocking a slick suit, serenades and yearns after Monét with a cover of Usher’s Bad Girl. Any R&B head knows that this song is usually performed with a retro Smooth Criminal-esque heteronormative flair, so the fact they opted to use two talented women was absolutely everything. With sexual tension thick enough to slice, Monét and Taylor show us that bad girls aren’t just for the boys.” —Tima

Queer Creator Kelley Heyer Gives Us and Charli xcx the “Apple Dance”

kelly doing the apple dance

“Even if she still only has bi vibes, Charli xcx gave us plenty of viral queer moments this year. In addition to the gay feelings she inspires in me every time she does anything, she also toured with Troye Sivan and released a cheeky remix with Billie Eilish. And then there was the “Apple” Dance. It was such a joy to find out Kelley Heyer, the person all over my FYP due to their viral dance, was queer and an even greater joy to get to chat with them about their acting, their fashion, and going viral. To quote Greta Gerwig in Damsels in Distress, “I’d like to do something especially significant in my lifetime, the sort of thing that could change the course of human history — such as starting a new dance craze.” Congrats, Kelley. You did it.”  —Drew

Anjali Chakra and Sufi Malik Break Up

“Now, normally I wouldn’t really want to include a scandal like this on a list like this, because I don’t want people to assume I’m just feeding the toxic gossip machine. But the reason I wanted to highlight it is because I actually really liked what I ended up writing about the situation, because I avoided taking sides and actually celebrated the fact that we were seeing authenticity, vulnerability, and mess from influencers instead of a carefully packaged and curated view of their lives. I mean, sure, we still don’t and can’t know what really happened, but the way this breakup played out on such a large stage made me think a lot about the current culture of queer influencer couples and what we expect from them. I find the whole scandal to be really emblematic of the limits and dangers of this type of “representation” and “visibility.” —Kayla

I Hate Gay Halloween: Chappell Roan and the Passenger Seat Costume Goes Viral

Motti and Britt dressed as Chappell Roan and a passenger seat for Halloween

“There are three types of Halloween costumes: basic, esoteric, and then esoteric done so well it needs no explanation. That last category is a rare feat and what a thrill for this year’s most viral gay example to have been done by my very own coworker. Motti and his girlfriend Britt Migs — both comedians obviously — won Halloween this year as Chappell Roan and a passenger seat. It was an incredible idea executed to perfection and I’m thrilled they got the praise they deserved.” —Drew

Racquel Chevremont Throws a Ballroom-Themed Engagement Party on Maligned Season Of Real Housewives

ballroom party

Kayla wrote in November that Season 15 of the Real Housewives was “hands down the dykiest a Real Housewives series has ever felt.” RHONY welcomed its first lesbian cast member, Jenna Lyons, last year — and this year doubled the amount of lesbians on its program by introducing model and art curator Racquel Chevremont (and her hot wife Mel), and they’ve gone so far as to take their pals to a dyke bar.

Of course, it’s happening again — a franchise finally gets gay just as overall fandom sours on it. Don’t blame the lesbians for this one, though —that manufactured Rebecca Minkoff pregnancy rumor / prank was not our doing.

Meanwhile in our own private heaven, Racquel brought not just queerness, but queer culture, to Real Housewives, inviting her heterosexual cast mates and Brynn to a Ballroom-themed engagement party. The degree of “understanding the assignment” varied dramatically, of course. It’s one thing to have lesbians on the show, but another to present them with actual queer culture and history. Let’s just hope they take Kayla’s advice and “just gradually replace everyone in the RHONY cast with dykes.”

Billie Eilish Wants Her Face in a Vagina

Billie Eilish at the listening party for her new album Hit Me Hard and Soft

Photo by Emma McIntyre/Getty Images for ABA

“It was a great year for queer Billie Eilish fans, and even though the artist didn’t seemingly come out on her own terms, once she started talking about her queerness, she didn’t stop. In her interview for Rolling Stone, she even said she wants her face in a vagina. It was a perfect interview to coincide with two of my favorite lesbian pop releases of the summer: “Lunch” and her guest spot on the “Guess” remix with Charli.” —Kayla

Rugby, Football, Hockey and Basketball Compete For Gayest Sport at the 2024 Olympics

New Zealand's players perform a haka as they celebrate with their gold medals during the victory ceremony following the women's gold medal rugby sevens match between New Zealand and Canada during the Paris 2024 Olympic Games at the Stade de France in Saint-Denis on July 30, 2024. (Photo by CARL DE SOUZA / AFP) (Photo by CARL DE SOUZA/AFP via Getty Images)

(Photo by CARL DE SOUZA / AFP) (Photo by CARL DE SOUZA/AFP via Getty Images)

The 2024 Olympics were a triumphant moment in sports history, particularly for us as lesbians due to how gay everybody was. In fact there were so many lesbian, bisexual and queer women competing in the olympics that we had to break out our list of athletes into three separate lists, with special posts devoted just to football and just to basketball. There were even multiple couples! 55 LGBTQ+ women athletes took home medals from this year’s game. It was a huge year for Rugby, in which we as a community really took notice of

New Zealand pulled off a triumphant gold medal for Rugby, as they did in Tokyo. Portia Woodman-Wickliffe, an lesbian athlete of Māori descent who also competed in Rio and Tokyo, retired after the Paris Olympics. Her Rugby Sevens went viral for performing the Haka after winning their second straight gold medal in a match against Canada.

Thailand Legalizes Same-Sex Marriage as Thai “Girls Love” Series Explode Worldwide

Thai Girls Love series collage

Many factors aligned in the U.S. this year to lead to a decline in Sapphic representation on television: corporate consolidation, shifting content objectives, and the intolerable pay inequity that led to lengthy SAG and WGA strikes in 2023. Meanwhile in Thailand, a whole different set of industry conditions led to an explosion in sapphic content, all of it easily accessible worldwide on YouTube. After several years of growth for BL (“Boys Love,” gay content), the success of the 2022 GL (“Girls Love”) series “The Gap” inspired ramped-up GL production, leading to the “Thai Girls Love Renaissance” we’re all lucky enough to be alive to experience. GL caught on here the old-fashioned (read: early ’10s) way we used to discover under-the-radar gay content —  through gif sets on tumblr and twitter and fanvids on video sharing platforms. If you are queer and used social media, at some point in 2024 GL content has crossed your path. As a search term, “Thai GL series” charted briefly for two days in 2020 and one day in 2023, but has remained steadily popular since June of this year. The percentage of Thai production company GMMTV shows produced each year focused on queer storylines skyrocketed to 55% in 2024, up from 5% in 2016. Then, in September, Thailand became the first country in Southeast Asia to legalize same-sex marriage, a law that will go into effect in January of 2025.

Ludmilla and Brunna Gonçalves Announce Their Pregnancy At a Live Show

It was another banner year for babies — Brittney and Cherelle Griner welcomed their first, Francesca Farago and Jessie Sullivan created twins named Locket and Poetry. Brazillian superstar Ludmilla and her wife, Brunna Gonçalves, delighted fans with their extremely gay announcement of their pregnancy at her Numancie 3 show in São Paulo — the singer projected a gauzy highlight video of their relationship intermixed with some footage of Ludmilla painting a picture that turns out to be a picture of the baby. The crowd went wild!

LESBOPALOOZA

Janelle Monáe performs at the All Things Go Music Festival held at Forest Hills Stadium on September 29, 2024 in New York, New York. (Photo by Nina Westervelt/Variety via Getty Images)

(Photo by Nina Westervelt/Variety via Getty Images)

Washington-area indie music festival All Things Go landed in Queens for the first time since its 2014 launch for a lineup in which every top-billed act and most of the rest were LGBTQ+ women and/or non-binary people — Janelle Monae, Julien Baker, Ethel Cain, Muna, Reneé Rapp, Remi Wolf, Maren Morris, Towa Bird, Allison Ponthie, Soccer Mommy. Perhaps most lesbian of all was the packed-to-the-gills stadium singing Chappell Roan in the rain, led by onstage drag queens — Roan herself had to skip the festival for mental health reasons, but the community inspired by her existence didn’t let them stop them from having a good-ass time.

In 2018, All Things Go partnered with the Women’s March to book a womens-only day of its festival. The commercial success of that initiative inspired them to keep going in that direction, with subsequent festivals including queer acts like Tegan & Sara, Fletcher, Girl in Red and boygenius. Now fans affectionately call it GAYCHELLA.

Queer Media Holds Space for Defying Gravity

ariana grande and cynthia erivo

Tracy Gilchrist has been a journalist for LGBTQ+ publications since as long as we’ve been doing the work here — heading up SheWired (RIP) and now writing for and doing on-air coverage for Out and The Advocate. But this year she became a household name by pioneering one of the year’s most viral moments, telling Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo in an interview about Wicked that in the wake of the presidential election, she’d seen many people “holding space for the lyrics of Defying Gravity.” She followed up Cynthia and Ariana’s reaction with the seemingly speaks-for-itself assertion, “I’m in queer media, so.” It was one of so many life-changing moments from this legendary press tour. (We got another gift when Cynthia and Ariana broke the moment down for us.) Were we holding space for the lyrics of defying gravity in the wake of the election? Truly no. But this meme did wonders for the internet’s post-election mental health.

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Riese

Riese is the 43-year-old Co-Founder of Autostraddle.com as well as an award-winning writer, video-maker, LGBTQ+ Marketing consultant and aspiring cyber-performance artist who grew up in Michigan, lost her mind in New York and now lives in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in nine books, magazines including Marie Claire and Curve, and all over the web including Nylon, Queerty, Nerve, Bitch, Emily Books and Jezebel. She had a very popular personal blog once upon a time, and then she recapped The L Word, and then she had the idea to make this place, and now here we all are! In 2016, she was nominated for a GLAAD Award for Outstanding Digital Journalism. She's Jewish and has a cute dog named Carol. Follow her on twitter and instagram.

Riese has written 3284 articles for us.

Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya

Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya is the managing editor of Autostraddle and a lesbian writer of essays, short stories, and pop culture criticism living in Orlando. She is the assistant managing editor of TriQuarterly, and her short stories appear or are forthcoming in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Joyland, Catapult, The Offing, and more. Some of her pop culture writing can be found at The A.V. Club, Vulture, The Cut, and others. You can follow her on Twitter or Instagram and learn more about her work on her website.

Kayla has written 951 articles for us.

6 Comments

  1. Thank you for this list! I’m still not over Tracy Chapman playing at the Grammys.

    For #3, is it Harrington or Carrington?

  2. Goodness Riese, what a year!
    Thank you for making a list. Visualizing and rewatching the videos made at those moments. A happy new year to you and all the people at AUTOSTRADDLE.
    Wan bun nyun yari we say in Suriname.
    Soso lobi!

  5. i love a lookback and this one was especially sweet because i am SO SCARED OF NEXT YEAR but at least we had this year, right?

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Baopu #130: Flying Past Local Stops

someone daydreaming on the train about possibilities

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Yao Xiao

Yao Xiao is a China-born illustrator based in New York City. Yao Xiao creates artwork depicting a poetic visual world where complex concepts and human emotions are examined, amplified, and given physical form. Her work has helped people all over the globe connect at unique moments, from the celebration of the 20 Year Anniversary of the SXSW Interactive Festival, to the grand release of pop singer Katy Perry's single 'Dark Horse.' She has created deeply emotional and beautiful graphics for editorial print publications, pop music record covers, concert posters and book covers. Yao Xiao's serialized comic Baopu currently runs monthly on Autostraddle. It is an original comic exploring the nuances in searching for identities, connections and friendships through the fictional life of a young, queer emigrant. Baopu stands for 'holding simplicity,' a Taoist ideal of wishing to return to a simpler state. Find her on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Etsy or her website.

Yao has written 136 articles for us.

Good Boys Bonus Episode: Good Boy… Friends

Welcome back to Good Boys, a For Them original podcast hosted by Kylo Freeman, an actor, and Motti, a comedian. If this is the first you're hearing about the podcast, Good Boys is all about two trans guys reflecting on what it really means to be a "good boy." You can stream all of Season 1 anywhere you listen to podcasts and check out our first AF+ bonus episode here.
Why are bonus episodes being published on AF+? Great question! Kylo and Motti often discuss vulnerable topics like hormone replacement therapy, relationships, addictions, and trauma, and we felt these would be great topics to include with the other members-only content published on Autostraddle. These bonus episodes are not available to stream to the public, so AF Media and AF...

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Good Boys is a podcast from FOR THEM about two trans guys, Kylo Freeman (actor) and Motti (comedian) reflecting on what it means to be a “good boy."

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10 Queer Animation Wins in 2024

2024 was a weird year for animation. Many industry artists went on strike and fought to get rightful protection against AI and fair wages for the shows they work hard to make. These bold artists are also responsible for some of the year’s best strides in queer representation. We had some gay weddings, lesbian endgames, the end of Velma (thank God), and devilish queer demons making showtunes.

2024 in animation saw miraculous updates on beloved characters like X-Men’s Morph and Bob’s Burger’s Marshmellow, CaitVi became canon and then kinky, and Nimona was Oscar nominated. And did I mention, Velma ended?

Here are ten queer animation WINS from this year. (I’m sorry there’s no anime here. I wish I had time to watch more yet the medium evades me! I am open to recommendations though.)

Korvo and Terry Get Married on Solar Opposites

10 Best queer animation moments of 2024: the wedding from Solar Opposites

Solar Opposites is a humorous and raunchy satire on suburban life with a sci-fi twist that managed to distinguish itself from its sister series, Rick & Morty. This is because of the romantic relationship between the aliens Korvo, the hot-tempered scientist, and Terry, his eccentric partner. The show has improved for the better since disgraced co-creator/voice actor Justin Roiland was replaced by dreamboat Brit Dan Stevens as Korvo. During the Valentine’s Day Special, An Earth Shatteringly Romantic Solar Valentine’s Day Opposites Special, the two tied the knot and officially became husbands, not before they had to bang to save the world from a mess they caused.

Hazbin Hotel adds an H in LGBTQ

Two demons smile back to back in Hazbin Hotel

Vivienne Medrano’s portrait of hell is full of demonic sinners of different humanistic and animal features. They are all proud queer people. You have demons who are gay, bisexual, ace, and all kinds of demons who are sexually fluid. That includes Charlie Morningstar, the princess of hell. With the help of her loyal girlfriend, Vaggie, they try their best to create the best hotel to rehabilitate sinners and send them straight to heaven. As abrasive and raunchy as the series is, Hazbin Hotel takes an empathetic examination of toxic queer relationships and strides in exploring compelling interpersonal dynamics. Did I mention it’s a dope musical with many great songs? Like legit R-rated earworms that’d rival Disney’s? Hell yeah.

Morph Shapeshifts Into Their Nonbinary Identity

The 10 best queer animation moments of 2024: Morph from X-Men 97

The long-awaited return of the X-Men in X-Men 97 saw Xavier’s students make notable updates. Morph, the shape-shifter mutant, is one of them, for they have a new voice actor in genderqueer actor J. P. Karliak and is depicted as non-binary. Although it may be 1997, the X-men’s ahead-of-their-time members refer to them as they/them. Additionally, Morph is deeply in love with Wolverine/Logan, their closest companion. During the season finale, Logan is out of commission, but Morph takes the form of Jean Grey to express their love for him. Let’s hope the second season does something with that. But for now, we’re here for our shapeshifting mutant enby update.

Nimona Gets Her Oscar Nom

Nimona lfits her hands in the air surrounded by pink animals.

Nimona, the shapeshifting punk-rock rebel and walking allegory for trans tolerance, whose animated movie lived and died and lived again, got an Oscar nomination. If you are not aware, the film based on ND Stevenson’s acclaimed graphic novel was initially adapted into a film by Blue Sky Studios, which also produced Ice Age and Rio. Subsequently, the acquisition of Blue Sky by Disney resulted in the closure of the studio and the cancellation of the film. And also reports stated that execs weren’t fond of its LGBTQ representation. Then came, Annapurna Pictures and DNEG to bring it back to life. I wrote an article about it at Rolling Stone if you’d like to take a gander at it. When Disney dropped Wish, a self-congratulatory misfire, they thought the industry would love it. NOPE! Wish didn’t make it to this year’s Annie’s and didn’t make it to the Oscars. But hey, Nimona did. I’ve never felt prouder.

CatVi Get It On

A close up from the CatVi sex scene in Arcane

The second and final (ugh) season of Arcane was like a kaleidoscope of animation styles and steampunk action. It also followed through with Caitlin and Vi (Caitvi) becoming official. Throughout the season they made out, broke up, and had rough make up sex. And in a prison while an original King Princess song plays in the background. The lesbians were fed that evening as the sex scene pushed the limits of the TV-14 rating. In fact, the animators at French-based Fortiche went so hard on CaitVi’s big romantic display that they had to cut out a few shots. But somewhere out there on a hard drive lies the full scene. Who’s going to be the brave soul to leak it? And speaking of leaks…

“The Gatekeeper” Gets Unlocked by Leakers

A girl holds a trans flag volleyball in front of a pride flag background

If there’s a running theme within this listicle, it’s that Disney is a bunch of bitches regarding LGBTQ content. I mean, what else is new. But this year, they really took it to the next level by shelving a trans-centric episode of their Marvel animated series, Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur, because of Trump’s anti-trans ass winning the election. That’s until one brave soul leaked it to the masses. The mouse house was criticized on social media platforms by former Disney animators and the LGBTQ community. Fortunately, the episode isn’t lost. But will it make its television debut in the near future? Only time will tell but I sure hope so.

Adam Elliot’s Gay Arsonist

Gilbert puts stickers on apples in Memoir of a Snail

Adam Elliot, an Australian stop-motion animator, takes great pleasure in putting individuals through biblical trials more than God herself. (Yes, God is a woman, as per Ariana Grande.) His long-awaited feature followup to Mary & Max, Memoir of a Snail is no different. The film depicts the story of twins Gracie, an introverted girl who enjoys snails and stop-motion, and Gilbert, a boy who loves starting fires, who were separated during childhood and struggle to reconnect with each other in the following years. Gilbert’s sections are probably the cruelest because his adoptive family were a bunch of Jesus freaks that took issue with his rebellious nature. Later on, the film reveals that he’s gay after being caught by his adoptive mother, Ruth, making out with his adoptive brother. And right when you think Elliot, being the madman that he is, would smash the “bury your gays button,” he does a fake out and lets Gilbert and Gracie find their happy ending after all! Woo!

Marshmallow’s Magnificent New Voice, Jari Jones

Marshmellow opens her mouth in surprise in Bob's Burgers

The shows by Loren Bouchard (Bob’s Burgers, Central Park) haven’t been the best when it comes to representation, voice acting wise. Usually, Bouchard would cast white actors to voice characters of color. After the pandemic and the George Floyd protests, Bouchard, and the rest of Hollywood finally started listening to voices of color, getting the right people to fit their character’s voices. Jari Jones, a Black trans actress and model, is now the voice of Marshmallow, Bob’s Burgers‘ most — as Bob describes her — “beautiful” character. In the episode “Hope N’ Mic Night,” Jones got to shine as Marshmallow during a scene as she sang and played electric guitar to a soulful composition of Alessi Brothers’ “Seabird.”

Harley Quinn & Renee Montoya’s Romance in Batman: The Caped Crusader

Harley and Renee kiss in The Caped Crusader

Batman: The Caped Crusader transformed The Dark Knight into a noir-styled crime thriller with episodic adventures that gave his rogue gallery of villains a new identity. One of them is Harley Quinn, who takes businessmen and gives them torturous brain lobotomies to correct their corruption. We stan. But also she’s very into girls on main. Under her physician Harleen Quinzel persona, she asks out Renee Montoya and sparks a cute, but brief romance with her in the episode “The Stress of Her Regard.” We love how in every universe, Harley is still bagging the Gotham ladies.

JayVik Were Endgame

Viktor and Jayce make intimate eye contact in Arcane

Forget everything Arcane writer Christian Linke says. The Riot Games account knows it, the queers know it, we all know it. Viktor and Jayce were meant to be. At the end of Arcane, we saw Viktor become a God. He becomes a celestial being and an unstoppable threat within the final battle. But leave it to Jayce, his “hex-tech” bro, to reach him in space and bring him back to Earth. They sacrifice their lives to save Zaun and Piltover, and together they embrace and disappear into the stars. At their end, Jayvik became inextricably linked. Despite Linke’s statements on Twitter, as he continues to dispel those who perceive their relationship as romantic and refrains from allowing it to be open to interpretation, Jayvik was the endgame we got and we all deserved.

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Rendy Jones

Rendy Jones (they/he) is a film and television journalist born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. They are the world's first gwen-z film journalist and owner of self-published independent outlet Rendy Reviews, a member of the Critics' Choice Association, GALECA, and a screenwriter. They have been seen in Vanity Fair, Them, RogerEbert.com, Rolling Stone, and Paste.

Rendy has written 18 articles for us.

4 Comments

  2. The Arcane writers need to GTFO of social media for a while. They are rapidly losing good will from every corner of the fandom.

  3. I’m really impressed by the intimate eye contact between Viktor and Jayce in Arcane. That moment was so powerful, despite the build now gg creators’ attempts to downplay it.

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Am I a Self-Hating Lesbian for Crushing on a Straight Woman?

Finally made it to the Straight Girl Crush Party
Q
I’m a grown-ass lesbian who’s spent a couple of decades gently mocking friends who’ve had crushes on straight women because I thought it was (sorry!) pathetic and sort of self-hating. I mean I’ve privately psychoanalyzed them without mercy — this person is actually femmephobic, this one is afraid of intimacy, this one loves drama and gets off on rejection, this person has something to prove, this person is a straight trans man (I was right about him!), etc. Well now it’s time to pay because I have finally, in my mid-forties, developed a crush on a straight woman, and I am fucking miserable. 
I won’t bore you with how perfect she is because I’m assuming you already know, because you’ve alrea...

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The Best Theatre Films of 2024 Weren’t Musicals

The film releases of recent years telegraph an interest within the industry to return to its theatrical roots — or at least a belief that there’s money to be made by turning to Broadway for inspiration. The latter impulse is proving itself to be true, with Wicked grossing over half a billion dollars worldwide in under four weeks. Wicked (ahem, Wicked: Part One) isn’t alone in 2024’s year of musical releases: The screen adaptation of Mean Girls the musical captured the theatre kid hearts of TikTok, Joker: Folie à Deux and Emilia Pérez have presented original, arthouse musicals for an adult audience, and Disney continues its attempts to recapture its renaissance era with Moana 2 and Mufasa: The Lion King — while perhaps more successfully replicating the vibe of direct-to-video sequels. For all these flashy celebrations of theatre on the screen, the resulting products are often empty sketches that are more interested in capitalizing on Theatre Kid Energy than understanding why the art form has persisted for centuries. These films view theatre as an artifact to improve upon rather than embrace. This has led to an influx of musicals afraid to be musicals — and arguably even films afraid to be films. In defense of the color-grading and lighting choices in Wicked, director Jon M. Chu said, “I think what we wanted to do was immerse people into Oz, to make it a real place. Because if it was a fake place […] then the real relationships and the stakes that these two girls are going through wouldn’t feel real.” This quote reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of what made classic movie musicals like Singin’ in the Rain and the original Wizard of Oz great, but the legacy of theatre’s interplay with cinema isn’t absent from our screens. What would 2021’s Drive My Car be without Uncle Vanya or Past Lives’ artistic sensitivity and Challengers’ sense of drama without power-couple Celine Song and Justin Kuritzkes’ background as playwrights? Wicked may serviceably adapt the source material, but it’s so bogged-down in its self-consciousness that you can sense the TikTok 9:16 aspect ratio closing in. Other than The Piano Lesson and La Cocina, the best films of 2024 may not be direct adaptations of stage works, but many are still indebted to the medium. Their interplay with theatre brings us closer to a real-life emotional truth — and an understanding of the audience’s role as spectators — that’s missing from many of these more obvious references to theatre. A decade before Annie Baker’s feature debut Janet Planet, her Pulitzer-prize winning 2013 play The Flick began with the projection of a film. Baker’s stage directions describe, “Images that we cannot decipher are being projected. Dust motes are illuminated by the light.” The film occupies the fourth wall between us and the movie theater set, filling the space within. “Film is a series of photographs separated by split seconds of darkness,” a character will later say, meditating on the transition to digital that now almost exclusively dominates cinema. “Film is light and shadow and it is the light and shadow that were there on the day that you shot the film.” Baker’s indisputable affection for cinema is felt in Janet Planet, an intimate snapshot of a mother-daughter relationship through one summer in the early 90s. At first blush, Janet Planet isn’t noticeably cinematic. Baker’s body of work includes nine plays produced in the span of 15 years, and her tendencies as a playwright — even considered radical for the stage — are in full form. Dialogue is sparse amidst stretches of quiet. Like several of Baker’s plays, Janet Planet is about characters who long for intimacy but who are trapped within their interiority. In theatrical terms, Janet Planet more closely resembles a “memory play” than a movie. The movie isn’t narrated à la The Glass Menagerie by our 11 year-old protagonist Lacy (Zoe Ziegler), but undoubtedly we are in her point-of-view, seated within her memories. Baker takes the quiet realism of her plays and uses light, shot composition, editing, and sound to heighten that reality in the way memory often does. It is when the movie draws the most attention to this heightening that we feel even more grounded in our connection to its truths; when light hits mother Janet at just the right angle and she glows; when the camera lingers on her hand across a boyfriend’s belly, rising and falling with his breath; when the bathroom mirror fractures the image of Janet and Lacy; when the sound of the air in the trees is particularly loud, or the tone of the sun particularly yellow. These aren’t quite images of reality, but rather tableaus of memory, immersing us in Lacy’s keen observation of the adults around her. We leave Lacy’s point-of-view for possibly the first and only time in the moment Baker describes as “the center of the movie.” Janet listens as a possible suitor recites an excerpt of Rainer Maria Rilke’s fourth Duino Elegy. “Angel and puppet! Now at last there is a play!” reads a line in the poem, reflecting on what to make of life once it reaches the end. Baker commented on the inclusion of the poem to Filmmaker Magazine, sharing, “to me, that poem captures some kind of ambivalent spirituality of childhood, and the feeling of being watched and being the watcher.” “Watching” is recurrent through Baker’s plays, and even in Janet Planet, Baker never tries to make us forget that we are watchers. Not only do we watch the world through Lacy’s eyes, but we watch Lacy — perhaps the only ones watching Lacy through these moments, a responsibility underscored in the final frame of the film. Janet may be the center of Lacy’s universe, but we see Lacy in the light, too, and for nearly two hours, she is the center of our focus. Janet Planet isn’t this year’s only release concerned with the intersection of parenthood, memory, and theatre. Alex Thompson and Kelly O’Sullivan bring a metatextual awareness to Ghostlight as grieving patriarch Dan Mueller stumbles into a starring role in a community production of Romeo and Juliet. The tradition of the ghostlight is to tend to the hauntings that superstition suggests take place in every theater. Some believe we leave the single light on to ward ghosts away, but others believe the light guides spirits through the dark. As the events preceding Ghostlight and their impacts on the Mueller family are slowly revealed (played by the Mallen-Kupferers, a real-life family of Chicago actors and theatremakers), the production itself becomes Dan’s ghostlight. Dan sees theatre as an opportunity to escape and be someone else despite barely understanding himself. But the deeper he sinks into playing Romeo, the closer he is to the ghost he’s trying to escape. The beauty is in how he finds a way through the light. Ghostlight isn’t interested in playing for the balcony. Like Janet Planet, Ghostlight is intimate and meditative while using the camera to show gestures that might otherwise be lost on the stage. But if Janet Planet is about looking back, Ghostlight is about the impulse to avoid the past, and how theatre’s guise of “make-believe” is a way back to ourselves and a way to understand the ghosts as they once were. For as much as Ghostlight finds the theatrical process a source of healing, Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man is as equally attentive to the navel-gazing that occurs when looking to make-believe as escape. But even so, the movie’s mean, frantic, genre-bending spiral is fully immersed in the theatrical stylings it pokes fun at. Stylistically, A Different Man refutes realism. Bizarre strangers stare with exaggerated facial expressions. The bronze Abraham Lincoln in the park is not really a statue, but a man. The doctors speak with the affectation of mad scientists. A Different Man’s New York is a dishonest city, and we follow Edward, a man who believes that his appearance is what hinders him from honestly and vulnerably sharing himself with others. Postmodern may not be the right word to describe A Different Man, but there are present shades of Antonin Artaud’s The Theatre and Its Double; the relationship between performer and audience, the splitting that results in the actor’s “double,” and the relationship to watching. If watching is a tender act in Janet Planet, A Different Man’s take on spectatorship holds a far more malicious tone. A miracle drug that “cures” Edward’s disfigurement provides him an opportunity to kill the version of himself that he hates, but as time zooms forward, Edward — now rebranded as Guy — can’t resist the temptation to connect with his former neighbor Ingrid under his new identity (the reunion is unknown to her) and integrate himself in the play she’s written about his past life. It’s an opportunity to learn if another person — particularly one he’s attracted to romantically — sees him for his honest self. Instead, he only encounters the shadows of who he once was and who he’s trying to be. Artaud writes, “Every real effigy has a shadow which is its double; and art must falter and fail from the moment the sculptor believes he has liberated the kind of shadow whose very existence will destroy his repose.” And thus, Edward, wearing the effigy of his old face, is confronted by the double of Edward that exists in Ingrid’s play, ripe to be rewritten, and Oswald, a man who Edward feels has stolen his life. For centuries, human beings have always found a way to reality through heightened works of art. It’s easy to believe that the artifice inherent to theatre or cinema is an obstacle to be overcome in order to reach something true. We are but humans plagued by our own main character syndrome — why shouldn’t a “realistic” world have the saturation we add in our memories, the warmth we imbue in our joy, or echoes we hear in our worst paranoia? Do we not look back at our life or forward toward our dreams as spectators? “When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools,” Shakespeare writes in King Lear. From Shakespeare, to Rilke, to Annie Baker, there has never been a more apt analogy for what it means to experience real life than the theatre. That King Lear quote is the entrypoint that brings Divine Eye (played by the real life Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin) to the Rehabilitation Through the Arts program in Greg Kwedar’s Sing Sing. The true-story nature of Sing Sing runs the risk of falling into the traps of inspiration porn that flattens the nuances of its characters’ circumstances into a story that services the spectator, inviting us to tend to our sympathy as we watch a group of incarcerated men transformed by the power of theatre. But the movie’s emphatic urging to “trust the process” indicates more nuanced intentions. The film takes great strides to make clear that theatre won’t change the conditions that suppress the men incarcerated at Sing Sing. If anything, the “rehabilitation” program is revealed to only provide the legal system with further cause for scrutiny — a feel-good story isn’t enough to overcome biased distrust. But as explored through many of this year’s films, it is through theatre’s promise of escape that one can be closest to themselves and their collaborative community. This is not a group of men who need to be changed, but liberated from all that suppresses them: Anger, insecurity, legal hurdles (both Sing Sing and Ghostlight draw subtle comparisons between theatre and the American legal system), isolation, and scarcity. Also like A Different Man, we witness the mirroring of two men, but unlike Aaron Schimberg’s film, the stage is not a colosseum for adversaries, but a place for these men to coach one another through their shared experiences. Over 10 years later, it’s hard not to feel for The Flick’s eulogy to celluloid; the absence of light in contemporary cinema has been a point of contention for cinephiles in recent years. Sometimes jokingly described as the “Netflix sheen” — the desaturated, glossy but underlit look disguising the seams of CGI that Wicked suggests is realism. The sense memory Baker describes in The Flick of the projector’s light is a production trick that reminds us of the everyday beauty of the movies. These films not only understand theatre nor the spectator, but they understand the value of light. Sing Sing is a much different movie if the rays of light captured on 16mm film aren’t filling the isolating, concrete cell blocks. Janet Planet doesn’t work as a memory play without the hazy glow of summer. The production of Romeo and Juliet in Ghostlight doesn’t carry the same fleeting beauty of resurrecting a ghost if the low-budget set-construction isn’t backed by the glow diffused by the scrim. Adam Pearson’s performance of “I Wanna Get Next to You” in A Different Man doesn’t quite taunt Edward the right way if it isn’t lit with the same magnetic hues that illuminated Isabella Rossellini in Blue Velvet. Light is not about the walls or the performances, but the senses that make up the space in between. Light, like theatre, is a fleeting process. Film has the unique power to capture the brief, wordless emotions that we feel rather than articulate. It’s time more filmmakers begin trusting the process.
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Daniella Mazzio

Daniella Mazzio is a Chicago-based writer, communications and accessibility consultant, and performer. Though you may know her from her brief stint running Lydia Tár's Twitter account, Daniella is a culture writer and critic interested in how decisions regarding distribution and exhibition affect film accessibility and the future of movie theaters. Daniella has made podcast and radio appearances, moderated panels, and lived a former life as a stand-up and musical comedian. Follow her almost everywhere @DaniellaMazzio or visit her website at https://www.daniellamazzio.com/.

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3 Comments

  3. How do the films discussed in this post use light and cinematography to enhance the Buckshot Roulette emotional truth of the story, and how does this compare to the traditional use of lighting in theater?

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