Give the lesbians what they want!

How Grey's Anatomy teased me with Sophia Bush then followed a trope that haunts queer representation.

Hi to my new followers and a big thanks to my friend Melody Thomas from excellent Substack Truly, Melody, Deeply and even more excellent, award-winning podcast The Good Sex Project for recommending this all-over-the-fucking-show newsletter. Apologies if you’re a straight person who wandered here this week, as you’re getting full-bore (not hardcore) lesbian content this week.

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If there is one topic that’s bound to get me foaming at the mouth like Joffrey at the Punch and Judy show, it’s lesbian representation in media. Specifically, a particular trope that I’m just now making up called: Lesbianus interruptus. It’s when an intimate scene between two women is interrupted by the bingo card of 1) a creepy man 2) a parent or 3) the husband or boyfriend. Or, the scene is intercut with a scenes of straight sex, which I particularly loathe when we have so few examples of queer sex on screen.

You may have heard of a different trope within queer representation called ‘Bury your gays’ – I mentioned it in my last post – which is where queer characters are killed off at disproportionate rate to their straight counterparts. This often happens after they finally ‘seal the deal’ with their lover, because of course, they must be punished for their transgression. Clexa from The 100 is often held up as the key example because it’s a storyline from 2016 that caused so much fan outrage that it got picked up on mainstream media outlets. But the one that comes to mind for me is Los Hombres de Paco, a Spanish telenovela that I spent hours watching in 2008 – in Spanish, which I do not speak – just to see the excruciatingly slow build between cops Silvia and Pepa. Finally, they got together, yay! Ooo, they’re getting married - how glorious, nothing bad could happen…. Silvia is shot and killed at their wedding.

Lesbian Interruptus is the less lethal but still damaging cousin of this trope.

Hold on wait, what’s a trope again?

Tropes are patterns or narratives that appear repeatedly in stories and genres. Like the hero's journey in fantasy or the damsel in distress in fairy tales. Sometimes a trope can be great, because it means you know what’s going to happen. Like, in a romance novel: if the two protagonists start as enemies, you know they’re gonna end up as lovers. There’s comfort in the predictability.

Other patterns are not so great, like queer characters ending up dead, separated, or rejected by someone who goes back to the security of heterosexuality. This particular pattern is a residue from an actual set of guidelines that Hollywood studio executives created in 1930, called the “Motion Picture Production Code” – but commonly known as The Hays Code. The Hays Code had it out for “sexual perversion” in films, which of course included homosexuality (but also included things like what women were allowed to wear on screen).

Under The Hays Code, gay characters were not allowed to have a happy ending. The 1961 film The Children’s Hour with Audrey Hepburn and Shirley Maclain is a classic example that ends in (SPOILER) Shirley’s character committing suicide, out of shame.

Don’t touch me! Touch me

Instead of canon queer characters during this time we had queer coded characters, who were often the villain. Familiar stereotypes like the flamboyant, flirtatious gay man came about because of the Hays Code, which was replaced in 1968 by the film rating system we use today.

Lesbian sex! Made you look

Anyone who has hungrily devoured all the classic movies of the queer canon may recognise another trope around the depiction of lesbian sex. For a long time our sex on screen was characterised by a lot of hand caressing, and gazing into each other’s eyes. Then came a more recent evolution: oral sex. TV and movies would have you believe that all we do is either drape various soft fabrics over each other and kiss each others’ hands OR go down on each other. And I’ve had sex a different way at least one other time.

Shamin Sharif is guilty of this more than once, like in her film I Can’t Think Straight:

YouTube won’t let me post the clip, which is SO homophobic

Here it is: Watch this clip with the sound off: it's even worse.

Unsatisfying sex scenes aside, here’s the trope that has me all riled up this week.

Lesbianus interruptus: or why I get stressed during intimate scenes

Since I was a budding lesbian, rocking my Stussy cap while going to hockey practice and lifting weights in the garage, I have been plagued by this trope. In fact, so many of the representations of queer women that I saw as a young person featured the women being ‘caught’ that the effects have found their way into how I view nearly any queer scene of intimacy. I find it really difficult to watch one of these scenes and feel relaxed, and I don’t think that’s the spectre of internalised homophobia sitting on my shoulder. It’s because I expect them to be interrupted. I can’t just relax and enjoy the scene. I have to fast forward and see how it ends, then come back. I have to check it’s safe.

Here are just a few out of many examples where this trope happens:

MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD!

1. Everything Sucks (2018): The two teens (one being a young Sydney Sweeney) about to kiss when one of their sisters busts in.

2. Lost and delirious (2001): Paulie and Tori are in love, Tori’s little sister busts into her room at boarding school with a bunch of her friends and finds them naked in bed together, Paulie eventually jumps off the roof to kill herself. Great.

3. Fire (1996): The first Bollywood film to feature a lesbian relationship. Two women, unfulfilled in their marriages, grow closer - you know how it goes. One guy arranges for the husband to bust them having sex.

4. The World Unseen (2007): Two women who engage in a dangerous relationship during South Africa's apartheid era – the husband nearly busts them kissing or nearly-kissing in a car.

5. Lizzie (2018): Kristen Stewart plays Lizzie, whose father spies creepily on her having sex in a barn with her servant lover and forbids her to associate with her (then he gets murdered with an axe, which is great).

6. The miseducation of Cameron Post (2018): Busted making out in a car by her boyfriend, shipped off to conversion camp. Fantastic film by a great director Desiree Akhavan, and an awesome book btw.

7. Below her mouth (2016): Terrible movie but with a graphic sex scene of the kind we NEVER get (hello strap-on, in a bath) – interrupted by the husband/boyfriend.

Men about to spoil their (my) fun. The World Unseen, The Miseducation of Cameron Post, Lizzie

Here’s the thing: it’s not just the bad and sad queer films and shows with lesbian characters that fall victim to this trope. It’s also shows where the the queer representation is otherwise pretty great, like Grey’s Anatomy. I can forgive them for having Callie and Arizona interrupted while making out naked in the shower, because they are unapologetic in response to the intrusion. It’s not about being caught in a transgression. But the thing is, I’m just so tired of it. Let me have my sex scene. And please, let that sex scene be something from start to finish without a record scratch moment. And I don’t just want implication in my sex scene. I want a sex scene that looks like sex.

Ah, one second of two women getting it on, what a week that was for the gays

Guess what? Silvia and Pepa from Los Hombres de Paco have the hat-trick: all three tropes.

Hand-holding, interrupted and dead, oh my

Then came Grey’s this week. Spoilers ahead.

What you need to know about my relationship to Sophia Bush is that she was one of my early crushes (that voice, those dimples, the passing resemblance to my first love, the queer make-out in 2006 film John Tucker must Die and in Nip/Tuck – the signs were there, people).

GAH! *Faints in lesbian*

I literally clenched my little fists and squeaked with joy when I first saw her appear in this season’s Grey’s Anatomy and figured she was going to have a ‘thing’ with Teddy.

They had amazing chemistry, a perfect slow burn with Teddy being all like ‘No I can’t, I love my giant ginger man husband’ then being unable to stay away from her. As far as storytelling goes, I want all build up, and then once they’re together, I’m bored. So I was loving it.

Shonda Rhimes has given us at least 20 major queer characters in the course of Grey’s, and dozens of minor or episodal characters. This season we have FIVE queer female characters alone, which is absolutely unheard of. So I wanted to believe we were finally going to get a good resolution when they got together.

Then Teddy pulled away. After weeks of flirting and a day of chemistry-ridden build-up that the camera followed hungrily. It made no sense. It was nearly as crazy as the scene in the recent TV series Class of ‘09 where Gigi from The L Word and always-playing-gay Kate Mara have a very hot, chemistry-ridden make out, only for Kate Mara’s character to shrug and say that kissing women wasn’t for her. WE HAVE EYES.

Sepideh Moafi looking at Kate Mara with absolutely noooooo chemistry visible

I was so angry this week with that Grey’s Anatomy scene. Not just because it didn’t make sense within the story but also because of this history of queer representation where the characters are foiled in their pleasure again and again. I know that writers can’t be expected to know about all the nuances of historical representation, but when it comes to writing minority characters, it’s irresponsible not to do your research about tropes to avoid.

Thankfully, Vulture’s review of the storyline has made me feel vindicated that I’m not the only one who’s pissed.

“Frankly, I feel cheated. For months, this show played in our faces and teased us with the possibility of Teddy hooking up with Sophia Bush, a.k.a. Cass Beckman. They hinted at a couple’s spa day. They steeped the romantic tension in lingering stares. Then, Teddy asked Owen if they could give non-monogamy a try, and it seemed like we were a go for steamy massages and hot hookups. Wouldn’t you know it, this week sent Teddy off to a medical conference with Bailey while Owen hung back and (surprise, surprise!) ran into his old friend Nora, who tried to kiss him just a couple weeks ago. But just when it seemed that Teddy and Cass were ready to make our dreams come true, Teddy pulled back. To that I say, why? Seriously, why?!

“While I greatly respect Teddy for wearing a lacy teddy to an all-day medical conference, I cannot fathom what made her pull away from Cass at the very last minute, after hours of longing looks and leg nudging, and one seriously steamy elevator make-out session. She even got to watch Cass fix another slideshow, and we all know she loves watching Cass fix slideshows. (Is this the nerdiest form of foreplay on earth? Probably — but it worked for them, and we’re not here to kink shame!) And yet, just when things were getting serious, Teddy pumped the brakes and said she’d realized this would not fix her marriage. To that I say, who cares?!”

“Does this hookup really need to fix the marriage? Do I care about the marriage? I do not! And the worst part — the shittiest layer to this whole crap cake — is that of course Owen went about things differently. After hemming and hawing and yelling at the couple’s therapist for even suggesting he and Teddy open things up, he did not hesitate before jumping into bed with Nora, who stopped by the hospital with a friend who apparently had a bunch of food stuck in her esophagus. (Evidently, medical issues are their weird form of foreplay.)

I hate this. Owen gets what he wants while Teddy denies herself? This is my worst nightmare.”

Me too, reviewer! The man got to have sex while the queer women didn’t. This is some 1930s Hays Code bullshit and I demand a redo.

Here are the scenes from this week’s Grey’s episode. See if you’re with me on this one, and please, give me your examples of lesbian interruptus in the comments.