Better than a calendar, a dependable way to be alerted to the start of Pride Month is to be on the receiving end of an inbox filling up with communiques from that sock company you ordered from one Christmas, or that place where you sometimes purchase scented candles, serving as the first trickle of a quick to follow deluge announcing the current year’s all-caps PRIDE COLLECTION. And with it, a social media feed peppered with lingering gay content from recent months past, and announcements for a new selection of upcoming films and TV shows made for and centered on happy, rich gay men, with just an afterthought of tiny, nibbled upon bones tossed down for the “L” in LGBTQ+, which usually have something to do with criminally insane nonmonogamous lesbians who have terminal cancer and star someone who recently made it known on TMZ that she kissed a girl once when she was drunk, alongside a straight actress who has, for one reason or another, been nominated as an honorary lesbian. But this year, something feels just a tad bit different. This year, in a rare twist, the #PRIDE scale seems to be moving a bit on the side that holds lesbian and lesbian coded content and, as far as I can tell, none of the characters in these upcoming sapphic offerings are being held in a mental institution or are candle-holding robed ghosts haunting their former homes — hand in hand — having died after just a page of dialogue between them.
This year, in a rare twist, the #PRIDE scale seems to be moving a bit on the side that holds lesbian and lesbian coded content.
As someone who identifies as a lesbian — and I do realize that’s a rather vintage label, these days, with more and more members of the community preferring queer, or no label at all — Pride Month has always felt like something not entirely for me because the majority of events scheduled for it, shows and films released during it and even marketing campaigns shoe-horned into the intended relevancy of the month are historically catered to gay men. Thinking back to the Pride events I’ve attended over the years, in various cities, they’ve matched the “we’ll take what we can get” energy that many lesbians are used to, where I spent many sweaty hours drinking warm, cheap beer concealed in a commuter mug, cheering in the street as float after float of shirtless gay men paraded by like a slap in the dewy face followed by a handful of chucked glitter and a reminder that, after the parade, lesbians on the sidelines could shuffle off to the nearest coffee shop or whatever and huddle over a shared alt-weekly or, when those ceased to exist, a cell phone, to hunt and peck for when the month’s sole lesbian event was taking place, and in what feminist bookstore or sports bar that slapped a rainbow sticker on the window to “welcome” us in for a select number of hours until the space shifted back over to something specifically for men when it would then be made known, either directly or via cold looks, that it was our time to leave.
Lesbians — or queers, if you’d prefer — deserve more. And thankfully, I’m seeing a trend towards the “more” direction, and I can’t just assume that it’s because my algorithm is feeding me what I want to see, because as we know, the algorithm has been broken for a while now.
Isabela Merced and Bella Ramsey in “The Last of Us” (Liane Hentscher/HBO)
“The first Pride was a riot” is a phrase that gets tossed around every Pride Month, and for good reason. The phrase is in reference to the Stonewall uprising on June 28, 1969, when transgender and gender non-conforming people were targeted by police at the Stonewall Inn in New York and Black transwoman Marsha P. Johnson is credited with retaliating by throwing a brick to ward off police officers attempting to rough up and arrest patrons — although the details of this story have been argued about ever since. We would not have Pride Month without the trans community. And I still want more lesbian representation during Pride Month. Both can be true, and both can be good. And in all of the sensitivities and often difficult to navigate narratives within those statements, I would wager that one thing — if not that — could be quickly agreed upon in any friendly argument taking place at any random remaining bar that caters to the LGBTQ+ community this time of year . . . cisgender gay men have plenty to call their own. What can we have that’s for the rest of us?
When you subsist on crumbs for long enough, you learn to make a meal out of them.
At the top of this, I wrote that I’ve noticed an influx of lesbian and lesbian coded content and the “coded” part there has a lot of weight to it, as does my mention that, as a community, lesbians have adapted to a “we’ll take what we can get” way of life, at least when it comes to the media we’re offered.
Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn) and Death (Aubrey Plaza) in “Agatha All Along” (Photo courtesy of Marvel Television/Disney+/Chuck Zlotnick)While it’s been tremendous fun to watch “Yellowjackets” get more and more sapphic as the series progresses, to receive the wondrous gift of a heavily lezbionic “Agatha All Along,” to witness Rosie O’Donnell lose her WLW V-card on “And Just Like That,” to sigh romantically at Bella Ramsey and Isabela Merced’s characters on “The Last of Us” — Ellie and Dina — throwing caution to the wind to have sex in the midst of a zombie apocalypse, and to see Hannah Einbinder run down a hallway in a very appealing way in the “Hacks” Season 4 finale, it’s still all just crumbs. And yet still, I’m sitting here happy, feeling as though lesbians are trending up this Pride. And why? Because it was announced in May that Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson will be starring in a slasher called “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma,” directed by Jane Schoenbrun? Because Margaret Qualley was cast as a lesbian detective alongside Aubrey Plaza in the upcoming Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke film, “Honey, Don’t!” I mean, yeah. That’s exactly why. When you subsist on crumbs for long enough, you learn to make a meal out of them. You’ve heard of “girl dinner?” Well, this all feels like a lesbian feast.
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Weeks prior to the official start of Pride Month, Prime Video — the Amazon streamer that canceled “A League of Their Own” after one season and nixed the previously dangled carrot of an additional four episodes to finish out the established storyline — debuted a new series, “Overcompensating,” starring Benito Skinner as a closeted gay guy struggling with his identity during his first year of college. Ramping up to Pride Month in 2024, gay media was abuzz about the UK’s first gay male dating show, “I Kissed a Boy,” making its U.S. debut on Hulu. 2024 also had, smack in the middle of Pride Month, Season 2 of “Interview with the Vampire” on AMC — centering on two gay vampires who defy the logic that erections rely on a functioning/alive circulatory system. Jumping back two years, to 2022, Hulu rolled out the rainbow carpet for “Fire Island” during Pride Month. The list goes on and on, back and back, and not just with television, but films and books as well. There’s a theme here, each year, and it’s that lesbians should be satisfied with reruns of “The L Word” and annual re-watches of “Carol” and “Bottoms” and call it a celebration. Hell, make a theme out of it and watch these in the back of a rented U-Haul while petting some cats and eating some hummus and . . . who needs Pride Month anyway!?!
Hannah Einbinder in “Hacks” (Kenny Laubbaucher/Max)
“The L Word” aired its last episode on Showtime in 2009 (yup, 16 years ago), and it’s still the first and last widely recognized cultural offering of its kind in that it was primarily about lesbians and, across five enjoyable seasons and one hilariously awful season, depicted a soap opera style glamorization of a group of lesbian friends doing normal lesbian stuff like having sex with a wall and waving goodbye to the ghost of their friend in a waterfall. Will we ever have another one like it? I’d like to think yes, but it sure is taking its time, isn’t it?
In the meantime, on the first week of Pride 2025, I’ll sit here and wait, hoping that Pride 2026 does a little bit better for lesbians while still being thrilled that we have the previously mentioned “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” and “Honey Don’t” to look forward to, as well as the also newly announced gay zombie movie, “Queens of the Dead,” starring Katy O’Brian. I’ll wait, highlighting passages from “L Word” stars Leisha Hailey and Kate Moennig’s new book, “So Gay For You,” about their experience making that show oh so many years ago, and tell myself that, finally, everything’s coming up lesbians.
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