Welcome to the Pop Culture Fix, your weekly look at all the important pop culture stories you need to know about.
2015: The Year of Gal Pals
Riese has this working theory that we’re quickly approaching a day when all women will date other women, and that’s just the way the world will be, and deal with it, etc. 2015 seemed determined to back up her hypothesis; nary a fortnight passed without an always-assumed-straight celebrity casually making it known that she was now braiding another woman’s hair in an official Gal Pal capacity. As the year winds down, Transparent creator Jill Soloway continues the trend. In a profile in the New Yorker, Soloway revealed that she is “in the tight grip of new love” with Eileen Myles. They’re “touching each other’s backs and legs ceaselessly.”
Remember how Kayla told you that in the new season of Transparent, Cherry Jones plays Ali’s new Eileen Myles-esque graduate poet/professor? Yeah, well, when Soloway was researching the role, she got a Big Lesbian Crush on Eileen.
“So I go on sort of a deep dive of who Eileen is, watching videos of her,” Soloway told me. She felt the spiky blossoming of a crush. “I kind of get a feeling of, like, Oh, this is gonna be bad.”
And then they met in real life and had an instant connection and now they’re together, and that’s that. Turns out it wasn’t bad at all! The New Yorker profile is fascinating in the way all New Yorker profiles are fascinating, in large part because sentences like this exist: “Myles was wearing jeans and a button-down shirt, her hair silver and shaggy, her face set in a more lined version of the intense stare that Robert Mapplethorpe captured when he photographed her in 1980.” The profile is not without its bizarre, offensive, eyebrow-raising quotes about gender and identity, though, as all things related to Transparent seem — at least in part — to be.
Good Movies & Teevee Are Queer Movies & Teevee
The Screen Actors Guild Award nominations were announced this morning, and lordy, the SAGs are gonna be a queer old time next year.
Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara are both up for acting awards for Carol.*
Queen Latifah snagged a nod for Bessie.
Christina Ricci, too, for her portrayal of an extra-queer Lizzie Borden.
Viola Davis seems like a lock for Best Female Actor in a Drama Series, for her portrayal bisexual Slytherin badass Annalise Keating on How to Get Away With Murder.
Same for Uzo Aduba for playing Suzanne Warren in Orange Is the New Black, which is also up for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series.
And Transparent too.
* When is Carol coming to you? Here is that information.
UPDATE: Carol was also nominated for five Golden Globes, more than any other TV or movie. Lily Tomlin got two nods, for both Grandma and Grace and Frankie. Transparent and OITNB were both nominated for Best Drama, and Uzo and Viola were both nominated for Best Actress.
+ Queen Latifah will headline a new Lee Daniels drama on Fox about an all-female singing group from Atlanta!
Asked about his inspiration for the show, Daniels said, “It’s based on LaBelle, it’s based on the Supremes, it’s based on TLC, it’s based on Destiny’s Child. Same sort of inspirations, same sort of template when we created Empire … The new pilot has the possibility for a crossover with Empire, but there are no immediate plans yet.
Queer Women Out and About
+ You know who doesn’t give a flip if you like her, or the characters she plays? Lily Motherfucking Tomlin, that’s who. She and Amy Schuemer chatted about it for Variety.
+ Every queer women’s favorite imaginary girlfriend, Samira Wiley, will voice Michonne in Telltale Games’ new The Walking Dead: Michonne. The trailer, which premiered at the Game Awards last Friday, is chilling and also awesome. (Obviously I will never play this due to the blood, but you should play it and tell me what you think.)
+ Megan Rapinoe tore her ACL at USWNT practice on Friday, and now Hawaii’s Attorney General is stepping in to see if Aloha Stadium defaulted on its agreement to provide the women’s team with a “first class field.” After Rapinoe’s injury, the team wrote an open letter on The Players Tribune demanding access to facilities as good as those provided for the men’s national team, who never play on artificial turf. Abby Wambach took up this fight last year, and it seems like the USWNT is going to see it through. The New York Times published a lengthy look at how this fight has progressed and what it will mean for Rapinoe’s future.
It’s never not funny when interviewers physically describe their subjects. I mean, we all remember that one dude’s fascination with Cara’s Long Limbs.
Oh my god, one of the most cringe-y things I read this whole year!
Good ol Cara “Tangle-limbs” Delevingne!
Fun fact: the New Yorker profile is especially queer because it’s written by Ariel Levy.
jileen?? moloway? something needs to happen, i’m having a lot of emotions about this
hopefully this trend will continue in 2016: Year of Gal Pals, part 2.
The New Yorker profile is also ESPECIALLY awful and cissexist. From equating people with penises and men, to mocking “they” pronouns. It implies that there were NO trans television writers before Jill trained them all (patently false), and paints her as a hero and savior to trans people everywhere.
i thought the problem wasn’t that they were mocking “they” pronouns, but that they almost deified “they” pronouns, saying that we should try using them for everyone and implying that when you do, it’s more radical than calling a trans woman (or any other woman) she. But yeah, i had a lot of problems with cissexist and transphobic things said in that profile.
I am so upset about Pinoe’s injury! Poor thing! I don’t know what I will do if I don’t get to see her play in the Olympics next year (even if her absence might give the Canadians a fighting chance). It’s really frustrating that it takes a star playing suffering a major injury for people to actually begin to care about the inequality that female atheletes experience. Pinoe was a KEY part of the USWNT win at the World Cup this year. If her injury had happened a year ago there’s a very real possibility that might not have happened.
All of this! Yes. Exactly.
AND Abby has to play her last match without Pinoe! THE INJUSTICE.
Also the team wrote a really sweet letter to their fans expressing their “frustration” and it was really very classy.
But also… too classy?
I mean, I know they are angry. You have to be angry when your boss shows no respect for your safety and an injury can end your career. I am livid and I’m just a fan.
But they talked about frustration. Their letter was not at all angry and I felt like if they were men they would have expressed anger. I approve of being gracious towards fans and everything, but I hope fans show enough fury with US Soccer on their behalf that this sort of bullshit doesn’t repeat itself.
Anyway, I have been rage tweeting about this since Friday. I have no followers left and I don’t feel any better. So.
The link to the Carol tumblr page is broken (redirects to Tumblr log-in page). Can you please correct this? I’ve been dying to see Carol, but haven’t been able to track down a place or date that it will be playing near me!
Done!
Yes, it has been such a tease to hear how wonderful it is when it hasn’t reached my city yet! Link also didn’t work for me. Thanks!
I thought Eileen Myles was dating Leopoldine Core? Are they poly? :) Or did they break up? :( As an enthusiast of what poets are doing in their relationships, I need to know! :P
I think they broke up. :(
I feel like Freeheld is getting completely overlooked and this will be a pattern going into the rest of awards season. Almost as if “well, we can only award one lesbian film at a time so lets go with the more glossy Carol”. They do this a lot with so-called “black films”(ugh I hate calling them that but you know that’s their thought process) as well. I’m going to be really annoyed if Ellen and Julianne don’t get any nominations for that film.
You had me at “Samira Wiley is a zombie slayer”.
Pretty sure Carol will never come to my town. :(
Mine either. Virtual viewing party when it’s released online? :-)
Yes! I’m down.
Yes!!
Instead, just read Patricia Highsmith’s book, The Price of Salt. It has actual lesbians in it. ;-)
I am crushed about Pinoe’s injury. I think US Soccer is downplaying this, but there’s a very real chance her international career is over. She is almost certainly out for the Olympics, and she will be in her mid-30s by the time the next world cup comes around… and all because US Soccer couldn’t provide a good enough practice field to the world champions.
Ugh, the Pinoe injury annoys me so much. And Rampone was injured in HI as well (albeit, not as bad as an ACL tear). This team isn’t asking to get the same treatment as the men, they’re not asking to be flown around in first class or whatever, just literally to have playing conditions that don’t terribly injure their players. It absolutely sucks.
Considering what ACL tears are like combined with Rapinoe’s age and the fact that the US has a lot of depth in terms of their winger midfielders, this very well could end her international career, all because of US Soccer’s lack of respect for their world-champion women’s team.
And I could rant about this for hours so I’m gonna go ahead and stop myself now.
And tonight they are playing in San Antonio… on another turf field… where one of Australia’s players tore her ACL a few years ago seconds after entering the game…
Please no injuries.
is it too late to make the “oh so that’s how lesbians have sex” joke about the solloway/miles back and leg touching?
It is never too late to make that joke.