Vacation Vixen: Anne Hathaway

Anne and Michaela Coel’s fashion designer/rock star lesbian lovers movie “Mother Mary” got a waiver to continue filming during the strike because its indie studio A24 agreed to all the WGA/ SAG-AFTRA contract conditions. The lesbian movie gods are union strong, obviously. And in a tank top, no less.

Vacation Vixen: America Ferrera

It is literally insane that America rose to fame on a show that called her ugly. INSANE. Also, her “impossible to be a woman” monologue from “Barbie" is a battle cry for whole new generation.

Vacation Vixen: Forever Sinead

I’m just still thinking about her. I hope, somewhere, she is at peace.

Vacation Vixen: Janelle Monae

Please, like I was going to start my summer vacation and not post the No. 1 Hot Them Summer ambassador.

Only Meryl in the Building

Hey, guess what, I’m going on vacation. I mean I’m still here, today. But tomorrow, vacation. (Don’t worry, I’ll leave you Vixens per usual.) But before I go, how about a little MURDER, but in another building. “Only Murders in the Building” is back for a third season. This time around it seems without a girlfriend for Mabel but with the addition of Meryl Streep. So, you know, you win some, you lose some. The series has been a frothy delight through its first two seasons, maximizing the unlikely chemistry between its star trio of Selena Gomez, Steve Martin and Martin Short. While I doubt that obvious “Father of the Bride” homage they preview will lead to any lesbian weddings, I at least hope they don’t drop all mention of Mabel’s sexual fluidity, because that would be lamer than her girl talk.

The Beautiful Suit Game

Hey, do you want to see the U.S. Women’s National Team in their World Cup team suits?

Of course you do.

I mean, that’s some serious drip. (Youths, am I using that right?)

Though, not to be outdone, Team England is coming in strong with the suit/vest/sporty jacket game.

Is this a soccer white party?

Sorry, futbol white party?

Like, why did we fight that whole war of independence thing again?

Not to be outdone, Team South African came with the full swagger.

So much swagger.

And song!

🇿🇦 Banyana Banyana always bring the style...and the tunes pic.twitter.com/Aj5yTkdlY5

— COPA90 (@Copa90) July 23, 2023

I love women’s sportball – and suits. Also, with all apologies to Portuguese kittens today, go USWNT!

Music Monday: Sinead Forever

I haven’t stopped feeling sad about Sinead O’Connor. She was at once the fiercest and the most vulnerable of superstars. She survived her abusive childhood. She made it out of the toxic 90s. She kept changing, searching, fighting to understand it all. She spent, by her own admission, about six years in and out of a psychiatric hospitals and struggled mightily with her mental health over the years (including multiple suicide attempts). But, as she told the Guardian in 2021:

“Clearly God thinks I’m such a pain in the arse that he doesn’t want me either. I’m a strong little fucker. I wasn’t meant to die.”

No, she wasn’t. But, alas, she has. And I will miss her brilliance, and all the messiness that followed along with it, forever.

But what lives on for all of us, I hope, is her brilliance. Not her perfection, because no one is perfect and she was obviously no exception. But how alive and how aware she was. How smart. How talented. How funny. How charismatic. And, yes, how freaking hot she was. Hey, we all mourn in our own ways. And one of the ways I am doing that is by sharing her stylish, cheeky and endlessly sultry version of Cole Porter’s “You Do Something To Me.” She sure did that voodoo that she did so well. She surely did. Happy Monday, kittens.

p.s. Also, did you clock the queer couples in that video? That’s no accident, as the song was recorded as part of one of the first major music benefits for AIDS. And it’s important to remember, this was 1990. This was before Ellen, Melissa, heck before k.d. came out. She’s been fighting the real enemy since the very beginning.

My Weekend (Pink) Crush

Honestly, I haven’t stopped thinking about the Barbie movie since I saw it on Sunday. What a glittery hot pink Trojan horse of a movie that promises the shiny plastic fun of childhood playtime (and delivers, thanks to its lovingly immaculate attention to detail) while also unpacking the social significance of the most famous doll in the world as she relates to our concepts of womanhood in our society. You know, girlie stuff.

I don’t know exactly what I expected with the news that Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie were going to make a Barbie movie. I’m not sure if anyone did. But what we got was a day-glo dance party wrapped in an existential crisis tied up with a bow of cultural awakening that came with a lovely card filled with generational healing. Again, girlie stuff.

Of course, the Right Wing nutters are against it because it’s not just about how pretty a perpetually tip-toed plaything with physically impossible proportions is. Yes, conservatives, Barbie has fallen to the Woke! Mind! Virus! (Just, lol forever at whatever GOP think tank thought that’d sound super scary). Any mention of the dreaded F-word, feminism, and P-word, patriarchy, makes them want to buy another assault rifle and ban abortion even harder. You know, MAGA stuff.

But for the rest of us, Barbie will make us laugh and feel and think and believe all in the pursuit of pure female joy and empathy. And unlike more overtly serious-minded films (again, it’s so weird to say this, but not that the Barbie movie isn’t serious-minded at times), this film swaddles its most cerebral arguments in the warm embrace of emotional resonance. In short, this movie has a whole lot of women in their feelings.

Its most clever trick is to lure us in with the nostalgia while critiquing what that same nostalgia has meant to us over the course of our lives. How since her creation in 1959, this hunk of shapely hardened fossil fuels has affected our everyday existence as women. We are all just America Ferreras trying to be liked by a world that makes that impossible by design.

Granted most women probably don’t go through their days critically examining those F- and P-words as they relate to their jobs and families and relationships. But they sure intrinsically know that they do, and the Barbie movie has connected to that core universality. Yes, we’re all different races and cultures and body types and sexual orientations and socio-economic statuses. But we all also never forget the it’s the men (particularly straight white men) who still run this world.

One of the funnier aspects of the backlash to the movie (well, not so much in a ha ha kind of way, but a not so funny when the roles are reversed kinda way) is how the manosphere keeps whining about how “man-hating” Barbie is. In the beginning, Kens are treated essentially like women have been since time in memoriam in the movies and real life, but without any of the constant threats of violence or expected domestic servitude. Men are just funny little guys who are kept around as, well, arm candy but are not otherwise central to the narrative. They are accessories. I know men understand this because they saw and loved Margot Robbie in “The Wolf of Wall Street.” (It should be noted that Martin Scorsese hasn’t directed a female-led film since the 1970s, ahem.)

With each film, Greta Gerwig has shown off and honed her innate understanding of the constant push/pull of womanhood. I know, I know, her catalog so far has centered largely white (and straight) women’s stories. But, look, it took Christopher Nolan 22 years of directing features before he cast his first Black lead — who was of course still male — and he has still only done it once. Yet no one really makes a fuss about that so, you know, context. (To be clear, both should be more inclusive in their storytelling. Everyone should.) And, to her credit, Barbie is represented onscreen as a seemingly endless array of womanhood, including a trans Barbie which is nothing short of amazing.

The Barbie movie is also proof that women’s stories have always been so much more than just romantic love stories, or at least love stories in their traditional sense. Yeah, this is a chick flick but it sure ain’t no rom-com. It’s the reinterpretation of a chick flick, which examines gender roles and the dynamics that put us into boxes from the moment the doctor exclaims, “It’s a boy!” or “It’s a girl!” Those confines hurt women and men and everyone. Period.

Granted those Gay Barbie rumors (SPOILER ALERT, but deep down you already knew) never materialize in the movie. Kate McKinnon’s Weird Barbie (I mean, the Birkenstocks alone) and Michael Cera’s Allan are heavily queer and/or nonbinary coded. (Speaking of gay, I hope the Indigo Girls made a mountain of royalties for the use of “Closer to Fine.) But, all satirical consumerism joking aside, it’s still freaking Mattel.

My greatest hope for the Barbie movie is that it allows more women to tell truly all types of stories about themselves. Because, hot damn, we are good at this shit — we really, really are. Though I fear that instead of letting us tell our own stories, Hollywood is going to decide to make more movies about toys and other plastic crap. Which, sadly, they already are. Deep endless sigh.

Still the wrongheaded lessons being learned can’t erase its accomplishments. Biggest opening for a female-directed movie, ever. Biggest movie opening of the year, period. Bigger than “Mission Impossible 7,” bigger than “Indiana Jones 5,” and even bigger than “Top Gun 2” (Also, try something original you absolute greedy dolts). Barbie was made for us and we made it big. That is much more than Kenough.

So go grab your best hot pink apparel, and don’t be ashamed of the joy and, yes, catharsis you feel while watching a movie about a 64-year-old doll who has become a generational icon and cultural lightning rod. This is the kind of girlie stuff that should resonate with anyone with an open heart and mind. Come on Barbie, let’s go to a patriarchy smashing party. Happy weekend, all.

These Lonely Tears

Sinead was right. All along. She was right. Sinead O’Connor’s tragic death at age 56 yesterday should remind us all what an otherworldly talent she was, what a fearless truth teller she was, and what embarrassment we should all feel about how our culture at-large treated her for that talent, that fearlessness and that truth telling.

I fell in love with Sinead, like so many others, when her unadorned face and unwavering eyes burrowed into me with “Nothing Compares 2 U,” and she has been a life-long favorite ever since. She was, in fact, the first live concert I ever went to (Peter Gabriel was there too but, you know, whatever). I still know all the lyrics to all the songs on “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got” verbatim. Her exquisite freight train of a voice could be all iron or all gossamer or somehow both at once. At times it felt like she was pulling from another dimension altogether.

Yes, everyone talks about her 1992 “Saturday Night Live” performance when she tore up a picture of Pope John Paul II while imploring us all to “Fight the real enemy” in protest over the then not-yet widely uncovered rampant child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. For the so-called sin of being too right too soon, she was banned for life from SNL and NBC and became a public pariah and universal punching bag.

The Catholic Church, it should be noted, did not issue a formal generalized apology to all Catholics worldwide for its at least seven-decade-long legacy of covering up unchecked child sexual abuse until 2018 — yes, 2018! Previous apologies were all specific to individual countries around the world where they covered up sex crimes, as one does in the name of the Lord apparently. By the Vatican’s own conservative estimates, hundreds of thousands of children were abused by the Church. That apology letter came 26 years after Sinead first sounded the alarm — more than a quarter century later. Damn.

Less than two weeks after her SNL protest (which sparked insane backlash and hate and all the other bullshit people do when art makes them uncomfortable), she played a Bob Dylan tribute concert at Madison Square Garden in New York. When she came out on stage, the amassed audience jeered and booed her for almost three minutes straight as she stood stone-faced. Then she launched into a righteous a capella version of Bob Marley’s “War” and strode off the stage.

Kris Kristofferon famously was the only other artist to come on stage to offer any comfort as the hatred rained down on her from the crowd. By his own telling, this is what he said transpired:

“Don’t let the bastards get you down,” I told her.
“I’m not down,” she replied.

Then she told them to turn up her mic, ripped out her ear monitors and fucking wailed.

The Catholic Church scandal wasn’t the only time Sinead was prescient. She protested the playing of the American anthem before her concerts. She protested police brutality and killings. She protested sexual harassment. She protested the racism, sexism, and materialism of the Grammys/recording industry. She protested fucking war. She protested injustice and suffering, seemingly everywhere.

For all that, Sinead became probably the first modern celebrity to be canceled — well before we had ever heard of the term cancel culture. Still, through it all, she was stunningly clear-eyed and painfully self-aware. She has been excruciatingly honest about her own many mistakes and struggles, from her PTSD stemming from childhood abuse to her bipolar disorder and everything else. I worried for her when I heard about her 17-year-old son’s suicide last year, I really did. Nothing can stop these lonely tears from falling.

But she expressed absolutely, positively no regrets whatsoever about the act that supposedly ended her career.

In 2021 she told The Guardian when they asked if her act of protest against the Catholic Church had defined her career:

“Yes, in a beautiful fucking way. There was no doubt about who this bitch is. There was no more mistaking this woman for a pop star. But it was not derailing; people say, ‘Oh, you fucked up your career’ but they’re talking about the career they had in mind for me. I fucked up the house in Antigua that the record company dudes wanted to buy. I fucked up their career, not mine. It meant I had to make my living playing live, and I am born for live performance.”

Instead she called herself a protest singer, and that is what she will remain for eternity. Read her interviews, any of them, and you’ll come away deeply impressed and likely deeply moved by her intellect, her openness, her vulnerability and her conviction. Plus she was damn funny, too. So Irish, being able to hold untold tragedy inside her while still being charismatic as all get out.

Also, just to be deeply, shamelessly superficial for a moment, she was so breathtakingly beautiful. All that bravery and fierceness packed into this tiny package of raw energy and pure heart. And, of course, her hair or lack thereof. God, she was hot. So fucking hot.

Also, that thing flapping in the back pocket of her ripped jeans above her stomping Docs during her first-ever primetime American TV performance? It was her infant son Jake’s onesie. She wore it as a fuck you to record execs who had told her motherhood wasn’t good for her career.

Oh yeah, and she was queer. Her sexual fluidity, her search for spirituality, her endless quest to understand herself and our collective humanity was worn like a badge for anyone to see. Her refusal to be the pretty pop star they wanted her to be made her a threat. See how much society hates women who won’t conform. That bald head. Those unapologetic opinions. That unrelenting voice.

They pilloried her for it all. But she seemed made from the stuff of the witches they could not burn. So her sudden passing leaves a void, leaves the world a little less brave, a little less honest.

I pulled out all of my old Sinead CDs (yes, I still keep my CDs, heck — I still have some tapes!) yesterday to listen to them again and again. I also went down so many YouTube rabbit holes — as you can no doubt tell. So many live performances still reverberate like little earthquakes. So alive, and so aware of all the indescribable beauty and unexplainable cruelty of this world. If they hated me, they will hate you.

It’s true, we humans only have one ending, and it’s coming for us all sooner or later. I wish it had been so much later for Sinead. I wish she died of righteous old age still raging for what is right and using her instrument against what’s wrong. But may her memory be a blessing for every victimized person, for every brutalized person, for everyone who has ever been an outcast or cast out. May her music watch over all of us who deserve grace, and even for those who don’t. Except Andrew Dice Clay, because fuck that guy.

Thank you, Sinead. I will love you and your music forever and beyond. Rest in power, and hopefully finally peace. Truly, nothing compared to you. Who knows if anyone will again.

Welcome to Deadloch

Hey, do you have an Amazon Prime subscription? (Yes, yes, I know - stop feeding the billionaires, I know!). Anyway, you probably do and if you do you should definitely look up the series “Deadloch” on Prime Video. Yes, I realize I’m being bossy about things you should watch. But given the recent mass culling of queer female-led shows (like, seriously, we’re in a full “Bring out your dead (lesbians!) plague right now…), I’m trying to support the few we have left. And while we’re on the topic, how about giving us more than just four measly episodes of ALOTO, Prime? How about that?

Right, where was I? Deadloch. It’s ostensibly a crime drama, but also a black comedy with a hearty dab of satire, set in a rural Tasmanian town on a lake with a name that literally translates to Dead Lake Lake. The town is transforming from a small podunk village into an idyllic lesbian cultural mecca. (Yes, you read that right, an idyllic lesbian cultural mecca.) Except, gosh darn, all these dead white men keep popping up. Put it all together and this is your perfect man-hating lesbian crime show complete with two female detectives leading the investigation/series. Did I mention it starts with the accidental setting of a dick on fire? Because it fucking does, it really fucking does.

Also did I mention one of said female detectives is introduced by her with her going down on her wife? And then they put a sweater on a dog. Because it fucking does, kittens. It really, really does.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Are both the detectives queer? Well, alas, no. And not the one you think, either. Which I believe is intentional (but more on that later).

Now, granted, the show isn’t perfect. They set up a well-worn odd-couple pairing with the two detectives (one is by the book, the other wears cargo shorts to crime scenes). And, quite honestly, the show takes too long setting up their clash and making sure we realize they’re Very.Different.People. But then, about half way through the eight-episode series, it calms the fuck down and settles into the fun female-led crime show/black comedy of our dreams.

Honestly, if the cargo-short wearing detective had been genderswapped I would have almost immediately stopped watching. But the slight shift, by making it an obnoxious slob rule-breaking FEMALE detective we tolerate it because we haven’t seen those kinds of redemption arcs unlike their overused male counterparts. But, yeah, Eddie is definitely grating at the beginning (honestly so were some of the supporting characters), but then it found its groove about midway through.

I also enjoyed the show’s sometimes subtle, sometimes grand caricaturesque details. I don’t know if either series creator Kate McCartney or Kate McLennan are gay (but, if they were and a couple wouldn’t that be cute? The McKates!) But if they aren’t then they at least know a lot of queer women because some of the jokes are just *lesbian chef’s kiss* (Any Aussie kittens out there? Help us out, what’s the 411 on the McKates?)

Anyway, back to my original point., did I mention this is a crime show with two female leads, one who is a lesbian, and they’re solving crimes in a town FILLED with lesbians? Yeah, you know you are going to watch it.

Tank Top Harley

Please tell me you’re watching this fun, outrageous, sexy, violent, outrageous some more and INDESCRIBABLY GAY show! And not just gay like, “Oh, I have a girlfriend who we never get to see and only gets mentioned once.” But like kissy facing, super(duper) sexytiming, cutsie coupley criming/ crime-fighting gay. Like forget animated shows where you have to watch five whole seasons before they do any lesbianing together. Watch the animated show where they’re lesbianing now. And a lot. And all over the place. Did I mention they wear a lot of tank tops too? What? It’s a Tuesday.

p.s. Don't worry, we are gonna get into Deadloch tomorrow, kittens. We certainly are!

Music Monday: Closer to Barbie

Yes, I saw the Barbie movie. And, yes, I loved the Barbie movie. I basically haven’t stopped thinking about it. But, more on that later (like Friday, promise). But, before that, I think I need to send an important reminder to all the straight women who watched the movie this weekend. “Closer to Fine” is ours. Well, it’s ours and Weird Barbie’s. And don’t you ever forget it. You’re of course welcome to sing along. Of course. But, again, ours.

Just in case you were thinking of forgetting it, please enjoy Brandi Carlile and her wife Catherine Carlile singing THE lesbian classic for the Barbie soundtrack. Mini-Spoiler: The Indigo Girls version appears in the film, Brandi and Catherine’s rendition is on a bonus soundtrack. But hey, the more lesbian-sung Closer to Fines the better, I say. Happy Monday, kittens.

p.s. Here is them doing it live — as the now completely culturally irrelevant Bill O’Reilly used to say — and being super cute. And sounding great! Go see Barbie!

My Weekend Solidarity Crush

Forgot Hot Girl Summer, we’re celebrating Strike Solidarity Summer this year. For the first time in six decades the writers’ and actors’ guilds are striking together to get a fair contract from Hollywood. The AMPTP, which represents the major studios and streamers, has refused to share the wealth –quite literally – with the people most responsible for creating the television and movies we all love and makes them billions of dollars.

This fight is an actually not so small micorcosm of all of our struggles in this moment (and truly most of history). The rich get richer. Periodt. The rest of us, well, we just keep working harder for less. I can rant about Late Stage Capitalism with the best of them. But all we really need to know is that the already obscenely wealthy CEOs of these massively profittable media companies are purposely making decisions (like not releasing whole-ass movies and pulling rafts of too titles from their streamers) that further enriches the already rich (keep in mind, the richest 10% of Americans own 89% of all the stock/mutual funds). So, essentially we’re watching two rich dudes who already hae megayachts keep throwing money at each other as they keep buying more megayachts.

And, no, I am not bullshitting you with these numbers. In fact, they’re even worse than you think. The 1% (a.k.a. the grossest wealth hoarders of them all) own 53% of all stocks/mutual funds. Yes, you read that right – 1% owns more than half of the stock market. Think about that the next time a megacorporation does anyother major stock buyback. That’s all going to the Elons and Marks and Jeffs of this planet.

Look, we all know the concept of capitalism meritocracy is a lie they tell to get us to work harder. Of course, people can have success by working hard. But as they say, exceptions prove the rule. For too long, the American Pull Yourself Up By Your Bootstraps mythology has been just aspirational marketing for trickle down economics. Profit has become too divorced from the labor that makes something profitable in the first place. And that’s wrong.

Instead, these companies pray at the altar of endless growth/stock market expectations at every single worker’s expense. Again, workers make these company profitable and then as thanks these companies turn around and give those profits to people who had absolutely no hand in making anything and are already insanely rich. Vive la revolution!

And, we haven’t even talked about the most insidious undertones of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA current negotiations that will soon bleed out to almost every industry: AI. If these rich bastards can find ways to cut us out entirely and just hand money directly back-and-forth between each other they will have achieved their ideal society of infinite wealth for the already infinitely wealthy being propped up by a chronically underpaid worker class of everyone else. Yes, I do belong to a union and have sat across the table during contract negotiations many, many times. Why do you ask?

As I was saying, it’s Stike Solidarity Summer and we should all be hot and extremely bothered. Pay your writers. Pay your actors. Pay workers everywhere. Solidarity forever. Go get ‘em, Fran! Happy weekend, all.

Pinky Swear

Well, well, will you look at Christen Press and Tobin Heath on the red carpet, AGAIN. Twice in a row means it’s indisputable, right? I believe, to even the most obtuse straight onlooker, coming to the Espys awards in back-to-back years while holding pinkies on the red carpet means they’re officially official, right? Like, this makes holding pinkies on the red carpet the new Time magazine cover, right?

Look, I know that this is rather ancient news to the Preath diehards (also, please don’t come after me for not knowing their exact relationship timeline, I am just a casual yet appreciative observer of their apparent love). And I know they have posted plenty of coupley stuff before and after. But I truly think we can probably put every last questions of their status and public acknowledgement of such to rest if we all just direct our attention to Tobin’s shoes. Wearing sport slides to a sports awards show red carpet while holding pinkies with your longtime girlfriend? Yeah, it doesn’t get more lesbian than that. We will not discuss the white socks. We will not.