Songs to Come Home to: A Pandemic Friendship and Loneliness Playlist

We’ve talked a lot about navigating love and romance during this pandemic. After all, lesbians love an excuse for longing. But lately my longing has shifted towards the platonic.

I’ve always had a complicated relationship to friendship. It’s the source of most of my trauma and the theme of my deepest insecurities. Whenever I think I’m done learning lessons about friendship the world presents me with a new one. I think this is why I place so much emphasis on dating and romance — it makes sense to me in a way platonic friendship never has.

But this pandemic and all the isolation has really underlined my dearest friendships. I think it has for a lot of us. Casual relationships of any type are suddenly more difficult and that provides a newfound clarity.

Playlists are one of my favorite ways to express a barrage of feelings, so I decided to make a pandemic friendship playlist. This isn’t a collection of songs about friendship (sorry Randy Newman) but rather an attempt to capture all my complicated and gooey friendship feelings — the biggest feeling being I REALLY MISS MY FRIENDS.

As stated previously on this site my playlists have a narrative arc, because that is simply Who I Am. Did I have to retrofit some songs beyond their intended meaning? Absolutely. But trust me it all checks out — at least in my brain.

Also yes the title of this playlist, “Songs to Come Home To,” is inspired by a Jinkx Monsoon song. I’ve been binge watching Drag Race with one of my best friends. Also someday I would like Jinkx to be one my best friends. Anyway…

The Playlist

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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 617 articles for us.

2 Comments

  1. ‘I’ve always had a complicated relationship to friendship. It’s the source of most of my trauma and the theme of my deepest insecurities…I think this is why I place so much emphasis on dating and romance — it makes sense to me in a way platonic friendship never has.’

    – thank you for writing this, I feel very similar but the exact opposite way around, friendship makes sense to me but I have a difficult relationship with dating and romance!

    Its really nice to get this insight into someone else’s persective!

    Also I too want to be friends with Jinkx Monsoon

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