Are miserable middle-aged lesbians having a renaissance?

While lesbian icon Fortune Feimster is busy voicing a literal beaver in the newest Disney cartoon (it’s giving Globby!), thankfully some properties are content to give us the darker side of lesbian life. Two new shows are putting traumatized lesbian writers at the center of the story, and surprisingly, it’s the representation we all needed!

Last week, the lauded Clare Danes drama series The Beast Within Me dropped to universal praise, while Vince Gilligan’s new Rhea Seehorn-starring Invasion of the Body Snatchers update Pluribus is also serving sour lesbian writer realness. Both Seehorn’s Carol (a nod to Thee Carol?) and Danes’ Aggie are depressed writers mourning the loss of their partners and refusing to be who the world wants them to be.

How about we take this to the next level?

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Both shows feature lesbian lead characters whose queerness isn’t a main feature of the story, and both focus on the isolated, often miserable lives of queer writers who feel confronted by the people around them who somehow aren’t miserable—usually because they’re not fully living in reality. This trend—if indeed it is a trend—speaks to something that most mainstream sapphic representation hasn’t been very good at exploring. What happens when you’re out, gay, doing what you want to do in life, and somehow still made miserable by a world in total denial?

The past few years have given us no shortage of examples of complex, strong lesbian representation, from the cultish, bloodthirsty lesbians on Yellowjackets to the shady, gun-toting lesbians of Hunting Wives and the messy, ridiculous IRL lesbians of The Ultimatum: Queer Love. But all these characters have something weirdly unrealistic in common: they’re surrounded by community, and ultimately, they’re happy. In past films and shows—the miserable Virginia Woolf arc explored in The Hours, as well as the more recent Portrait of a Lady on Fire and Tár—exploring the lives of isolated, successful but traumatized women feels like breaking new ground, even if it’s not quite.

A few years ago, we were treated to the Final Boss of miserable single lesbians and gay men with Marielle Heller’s fantastic Can You Ever Forgive Me? In that film, Melissa McCarthy plays IRL lesbian and forger Lee Israel, who’s tired of “eating sh*t” from bad bosses and low-paying jobs. Faced with less-than-steady employment and her cat’s many health crises, Israel turns to a life of literary crime to pay the bills, and she ends up loving it.

Characters like Israel—and by extension, like Carol and Aggie—are important because they’re honest. When we’re fighting for representation on TV, we’re fighting for our entire lives to be onscreen, not just the fun, happy parts of gay existence. And in the current timeline, things are undeniably rough for queer and trans people. Why shouldn’t we have TV and films that reflect that, especially in an era when nearly half the queer characters we’ve grown to love over the past year won’t be returning to screens according to GLAAD’s annual “Where We Are in TV” report? Sapphic and trans characters, of course, are the first the get the chop, and in a much more conservative climate, who knows what kind of representation we can look forward to in the coming years.

In an era of already-beleaguered sapphic representation, it’s good to see that the characters we do still have aren’t defined by their queerness. Instead, they’re defined by their misery at finding themselves in a world full of sunny, smiling idiots. And if that isn’t the perfect summation of queer life in Tr*mp’s America, I don’t know what is.

Related

Disney’s newest “first openly gay character” is… a beaver voiced by lesbian icon Fortune Feimster
The jokes write themselves!

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