In nineteen eighty six, in the middle of an episode of the beloved sitcom The Golden Girls, a silly, simple joke.
Not Lebanese black.
Lesbia triggered that classic laugh track and a surprising legacy. That's because those four Golden Girls had an unsuspecting power, the power to influence public perception about a topic that remained taboo.
You have these four women living together in a chosen family. This is a really powerful relationship they have with each other, and I think that's subconsciously really good modeling for anyone really.
In shoulder pads and captans, the Golden Girls snuck positive gay representation into millions of living rooms across America, creating a ripple effect in writer's rooms and on screens for decades to come. I'm Jessica Bennett and I'm Susie Vana Karam, And this is in retrospect, where each week we revisit a cultural moment from the past that shaped us.
And that we just can't stop thinking about today.
We're talking about the Golden girls first encounter with a lesbian and the way it spawned an enduring gay joke, but we're also talking about the creative ways that Hollywood has written and sometimes hidden queer characters for decades. This is part two. So, Susie, we've been talking about the Lebanese lesbian episode of Golden Girls, which is actually called
Isn't It Romantic? That aired in nineteen eighty six, And in that episode, Dorothy's friend Jane comes to visit after the death of her partner Pat, and she develops a crush on Rose. As we spoke about, that episode was ahead of its time for many reasons. You know, it was a pretty tender depiction of a lesbian character at a time when that was pretty rare, and as we have left about its repetition of the word lesbian really drove home that that was a word we should feel comfortable with.
Yeah, and even the fact that there was a gay character at all was pretty significant for that time.
Yeah. And in order to understand how subversive that was for the time, what you really need to understand is the way that gay and lesbian characters were depicted back then. So I want to set the scene a little bit in terms of what was happening in this time. Prior to nineteen seventy, there really were very few, if any gay characters on screen, at all, and like that makes sense for the time, Like homosexuality was classified as a mental illness until nineteen seventy three.
It was I didn't realize it was that late.
Yeah, in the idea zone.
Pretty recent.
Yeah, But then you know, in nineteen sixty nine, Stonewall occurs. So the gay liberation movement is bursting forward in the early nineteen seventies and representation on television begins to shift as a result of that. So in nineteen seventy one, you have the first gay male character who appears on the sitcom All in the Family.
What do you think that your I can't even shit you, Steve, He's right, art Eh.
And that's interesting too because four years later, that same show has a recurring drag queen character that's actually played by an out drag queen.
I'm afraid you don't understand, missus Bunker, I'm a transvesti.
And then Skip I had a few years in nineteen seventy seven, you have a trans character that appears on The Jeffersons, and the plot line there is essentially George, who's the patriarch of the Jefferson family, goes to meet his old navy buddy Eddie, only to find out that Eddie has transitioned to Edie.
If you don't understand, George, I'm a woman deep down inside.
I've always been a.
Woman, even in a navy, even in the navy.
Oh interesting, And actually, you know, in nineteen seventy seven is the same year there's that show soap that appears with Billy Crystal playing a gay character. Right, Oh, okay, and I think that show was also made by Susan Harris who made Golden Girls, right and girls.
Oh, I hadn't realized that, Okay, so before the Golden Girls episode, she has already done this.
Yeah. And interestingly, that show initially got a lot of backlash for having an openly gay character, but then went on to become a huge success. So maybe that's why she felt so comfortable.
Maybe that in Bolden Yeah. Yeah, So nineteen seventy seven was I guess a big year because that also was the year that one of the first black gay characters appears on television. And this is in an episode of Sanford Arms. I didn't know this show, but it was a spin off of the popular black sitcom Sanford and Sons. Basically, the character in the show is this tall, handsome civil rights lawyer, so very much a positive depiction.
It's so interesting this is all happening in the seventies. When you told me that just until nineteen seventy three it was classified as a mental illness, you sort of feel like it's a sea change in terms of the way people are starting to think. Right.
Yeah, actually, that's a really good point, because what you're seeing in the seventies is pretty progressive. But then there's this kind of backlash or this erosion of that when you start to have the eighties emerge. Essentially, by the time The Golden Girls airs, this episode in nineteen eighty six, is a crisis.
A mystery disease known as the gay Plague.
AIDS appears to be a virus transmitted through body secretions.
Ronald Reagan as president. I think that abstinuce has been lacking in much of the education.
President Reagan was repeatedly booed at an AIDS research fundraising dinner last night.
And I think to some degree, Hollywood gets scared off from writing these fully rounded gay characters.
I mean, I think AIDS was used so much as a cudgel to push back on gay civil rights right I mean, it was just a way in which people stoked so much fear around gayness and gay people. So it makes sense that that actually pulled back on some of the games.
Yeah, pulled back. And then at the same time, if there are gay characters written into scripts, they're typically white gay men, and the plotlines usually revolve around aids in some way anyway, So this is very negative depiction.
Yeah, I guess it was either negative or very sorrowful. So you just never got any depictions of gay joy. But also where were all the lesbians?
So to a large degree in the eighties, lesbian visibility on film actually reflects life like it's very much in the shadows, even as lesbians are very instrumental to the fight for gay rights. A couple of things worth understanding are essentially how lesbians fit into the larger feminist movement, which was very charged at the time, in part because Betty Fridane called lesbians quote the lavender menace because she felt like they would derail the women's movement's other causes.
And so I love lavendar, I know what, I love the color level like whatever, And so lesbians felt marginalized within the women's movement, but they also felt pretty marginalized within the larger gay community. You know, the first Dike March, which is the lesbian march that happens every year around Pride, didn't even happen or become a thing until nineteen ninety three.
And I think that also shows just how groundbreaking that Golden Girls episode was in nineteen eighty because, in fact, the lesbian character Gene, the friend of Dorothy's, as we've discussed, was just the second lesbian character ever to appear on primetime TV.
Wow. Really, even in nineteen eighty six, it was the second time they had a lesbian character.
Yes, and the first happened just a few years before on a cops show called Hill Street Blues, and lesbian was a police officer.
I remember Hill Street Blues. Isn't that the show that spawned like be careful out there?
Oh my gosh.
Really yeah, with the Cops. They end the meeting by saying, be careful out there.
I had nose.
But I don't remember this character, so it must not have been a super prominent character.
Yeah, I mean that's probably by design. I don't particularly remember it either. But lesbian representation was also working against this thing called the Hayes Code, Susie, I feel like you probably know what that is.
I mean when you say that, I feel like I should know. But I don't know what that is.
I don't know that you should know. I just feel like you're a TV film whisper. But the Hayes Code was a set of content guidelines for American movie that existed between nineteen thirty four and nineteen sixty, with movies at.
Their lowest moral lib but riding high financially.
A new name appears on the national scene, Will Hayes and the Hayes Code basically outline moral codes for what could appear on screen. And so they kept this list of topics that were not allowed to be shown. Things like homosexuality, which was called in their words, sexual perversion, interracial relationships, drug use, scenes of passion that feels like it can be very hard to define, nudity, ridicule of religion, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so the Hayes
Code was for movies. But the point is it seeped into television. It goes on to set the model for what becomes the code of practices for television broadcasters. That's a mouthful, but basically that's the code that prohibited depictions of homosexuality.
Yeah. I didn't know any of this history, but it makes sense. I mean, a lot of those codes are still in place. There are a lot of things you still can't say on TV. And didn't you used to not be able to say hell for a long time on television?
Yeah?
And actually I want to reintroduce Maya Salam here. She's the culture editor at The New York Times who's written about this and who he spoke to earlier, and specifically she's written about how so much of this stuff ties back to the power of the Catholic Church. And it wasn't just words that you couldn't say. It was subjects too, so.
Divorce, abortion, home sexuality.
The church threatened to boycott movies if these strict regulations weren't applied, and so filmmakers and studios bowed to them. So that's why you know, characters were written as like Sissy's villains are sexual deviance is kind of the way that it's put. Then it was more acceptable. They would be more likely to allow it if they were cast in this really negative way.
So essentially, what Maya's saying here is that the only way to have content that the Catholic Church would disapprove of, like representations of homosexuality, was to write these characters as villains, so that behavior could basically act as a warning to viewers like don't do this, look what will happen to you.
And to get around that, writers and directors start doing something called queer coding, which is essentially create characters who appear to be queer but couldn't actually be out due to the codes.
That's actually kind of brilliant. So there's ways in which they're indicating that someone is gay, but not explicitly.
Saying it exactly. Here's my again.
That's when you really start to see the really clever ways that queerness was shown and explored in characters.
It was really this.
Under the radar only gaze maybe might pick up on it, you don't know unless you know kind of representation. One of my favorites is Calamity Jane, which is a nineteen fifty three musical western with Doris Day and there's a scene in the movie where she like walks up to sort of who would be her crush, and she kind of like almost tries to like look down her top and she's like, oh I think I might be in love with you or something like that.
Gosh, al money, the prettiest thing I ever seen.
And there's a wonderful song. It's called Secret Love.
First of all much secret Love, no Sea Coo witch, and.
It is the gayest.
Jess. It sounds like queer coding initially was a good thing. It was kind of a way to have gay characters hidden in plain sight and give them an opportunity to be part of the stories.
Right and Jean, the lesbian front of Dorothy's on Golden Girls is really a great example of this. Here's Drew Mackie again for.
A lesbian cacharacter. Gene is very found, like she looks like one of the girls, Like you would not look at her and presume she's a lesbian, So she is like sneaky And that sounds like a negative phrase, so I'm using it as a positive here. Like they did their homework. They tricked the audience into giving a shit about a gay person, which is remarkable.
Yeah, So the problem with queer coding is that in some cases it's easy for these characters to quickly veer from kind of like this. You know, wink nod. Example of representation to tropes.
So this positive thing can sort of turn negative when it becomes kind of stereotypical. So what does some of those tropes look like?
One of them is what Drew and his co host call it, the angel gay. That's this idea that you have to be perfect good in every way, like you're not allowed to have flaws if you are a gay character, because you can't possibly reflect poorly on your community in anyone. Oh.
Interesting, So this is sort of like the equivalent of a model minority.
Yeah, I think that's a really good comparison. Here's Drew talking about how this applies to that Golden Girls episode.
In some ways, Gene is sort of an angel lesbian in that, like she doesn't really have any flaws. She's aside from the fact that she is lusting after Rose, and angel gays normally don't get to want someone the way Gene wants Rose. So that's probably the one exception to it.
And Okay, it's because they can't show lust or desire.
They don't.
Yeah, they don't. You're there to like maybe make some snapping comments and that's it. Mostly you're there to help probably a straight female character achieve something in her life, and then you fled away and you never heard from again. There is this thing that happens on sitcoms where usually in the second season they'll do an episode that tells the audience, despite how things might look, this character is
not gay. And this is an example of that where if someone is watching, like, why are these ladies living together? Are they some sort of lesbians? This is the episode that will definitively spell out they are not lesbians. B Arthur has that voice, she is not a lesbian and they are all heterosexual. Don't worry, you're watching a straight show with straight characters.
Do you have a name for that?
I guess we're called the second season clarification.
Another troupe you might recognize, it's called buryer gaze.
That doesn't sound good.
The trope was originally used actually in books. It was a way for gay authors to write about gay characters without coming under fire for breaking laws. And so you see this a lot in lesbian pulp fiction of the nineteen fifties and sixties, and the idea there was that they could avoid the censors and the obscenity laws because if a queer character was given a happy ending, it would set off alarms. But if you just kill one off at the end, then it becomes a cautionary tale. Okay,
terror maybe God, it's so insidious, isn't that crazy? So it sort of starts as this sneaky positive but not totally positive thing, but then it just starts to become a broader trop.
Meaning they just eventually start killing off all their gay characters.
I mean kind of auto Straddle, which is a lesbian website, has a list that they update every year of currently it's two hundred and thirty dead lesbian and bisexual characters on TV and how they died.
It's interesting because that's a trope we hear about so much in horror movies about the black friend, Like if you're the black friend in a horror movie, you're going to die first. But I didn't realize this was also a thing. If you were a lesbian or bisexual character, you also were doomed. That's a really good comparison.
And yeah, there are a few that I remember, Like there's an example in nineteen ninety seven and NYPD Blue where Kathy, who is a lesbian, is shot by a hitman hired by her girlfriend's ex. There's another example on Buffy, which I think is more our generation. There's this scene where you finally get to see longtime girlfriends Willow and Tara in bed together. I forget how good this could feel,
us together, about the magic. There was plenty of magic, and yet then in that very same episode, Tera is killed by a stray bullet, so you don't get to see the relationship progress.
Wasn't that sort of a famous scene with Willow and Derek as they had shared a historic kiss.
Yeah, that's why I think it was so upsetting when she was killed off. But here let me go to Maya again, because she actually talks about how this plays out in a couple of different ways.
There is the obvious the person literally dies, it drops dead. But even if a lesbian character or any LGBTQ character, even the Golden Girl's character, in a way, they might not die, but you just never see them again. You Know, It's one thing to like come out on TV or be on an episode, say, it's a whole other thing to have a whole storyline and continue to be gay. So it's like one thing to come out and be gay on TV, but it's another thing to stay gay.
Okay, there's one other phenomenon I want to mention here, which is the lesbian kiss, and in particular the lesbian kiss episode, which becomes a thing in television and film where a seemingly heterosexual female character will kiss a possibly lesbian or maybe by character, and in many of the instances, like the potential for a relationship does not actually survive past this one episode, and you know, the lesbian or suspected lesbian is never to be heard from again, and
the other character goes back to their straight hetero.
So this would be the sort of like the lesbian kiss that's really purely for the male gaze.
I think that's exactly it. And one of the first big examples of this comes in nineteen ninety one on La Law.
Oh, I know La Law. I watched La Law. I'm beginning to think this episode is purely set up to make it look like I did nothing but watch TV as a child, which is not.
You too accurate, And maybe I didn't watch enough. It's like all I did about it because I don't remember this, But what happened is there's a kiss between these two lawyers, Lamb and Abby Perkins and It's widely regarded as the first romantic kiss between two women on a major network. And this is interesting because it's historic in a good way in that it's the first time two women kiss on TV, and also because you know, neither one of them dies or like kills anyone or is ostracized afterwards.
And I don't remember this character being gay at all, so that's fascinating.
And part of that is probably because it was never meant to be a real relationship that would develop.
You kissed me back, Yeah, I'd sort of like to forget.
The whole thing.
Even later on, as the actresses who played these characters were interviewed, they've described how essentially this kiss was included for race of course, like it was not meant to be developed, It was not meant to be expanded on. And that was it.
Wasn't there something similar on Picket Fences?
Yeah? So Picket Fences is another example where two teenagers kiss in nineteen ninety three, and then one of the big ones that's often referenced is nineteen ninety four on Roseanne, and this is a kiss between Roseanne Barr and maryo Hemenway, and it's in an episode titled don't ask, don't tell, get a hang out world.
I was thinking that too, but next time, let's leave the wives at home.
Read my mind.
Huh.
I don't actually remember this particular episode, but this must have been the Clinton era, right because don't Ask, Don't Tell was something he introduced in relationship to gays in the military, but it was very much part of the zeitgeist.
And this one actually ends up being a pretty big deal. The kiss lasts for three seconds, oh my god. Though of course, if you rewatch it, you can't actually see either of their lips, so you.
Know, I'm watch that because I don't know how you would have a kiss where you couldn't see any lips.
But it becomes a big deal. Like ABC didn't want to air the episode, and whatever we think of Roseanne bar today, at this time, she, to her credit, threatened to take her sitcom to another network if they wouldn't actually air, which I think is part of the beauty of being in charge of your own show, which she was at the time with her husband.
I mean, I think that is the sad thing about rose Enbart because that show really did break so many barriers and was so progressive in so many ways.
And actually that character becomes one of the first recurring bisexual characters on a show, so it really did have an impact. But for the most part, these lesbian kiss episodes were more just sweep stunts. And in many cases, these sweep stunts are dreamed up by a straight male show runner.
I mean, of course they are, because straight male showrunners still run most shows unfortunately.
And the thing is, these stunts are actually pretty effective in a lot of ways. Like they're visual, they are cheap, they're controversial, so people talk about them. And then the other thing is they're like easily reversible. You don't have to develop the relationship. You can, like you said, just like go vanish into the night and go back to the plotline as you had.
It before, right, So it's like the lesbians sweeps in, gives you your sweeps numbers, and then sweeps away exactly. You know what this reminds me of actually is do you remember when Brittany and Madonna and Christina Aguilera did that kiss at the MTV VMAs in two thousand and three.
I of course remember this moment, but I think I've forgotten the details a little bit. Like I remember there was a pretty lengthy kiss between Brittany and Madonna, And was Christina watching while that happened?
Well, I mean, I guess Christina was watching, But really what it was was that the three of them performed a song Brittany, Madonna, and Christina Aguilera, and at the end of the song, Madonna leans over and gives Brittany kind of a peck. Actually it's not like a lengthy kiss, although there was a lot of debate at the time of whether or not there was tongue or whatever. And
then she does the same with Christina. But most people don't remember the Christina part because the camera immediately panned to Justin Timberlake, because Brittany and Justin had recently broken up, So you know, all the audience cared about was his reaction, or all the director thought the audience would care about
was his reaction. So, you know, Brittany wrote about this in her book about how this becomes kind of a big cultural moment and it's for the same reasons, right, It's salacious and it gets attention because it's two women kissing.
And actually Maya said something really interesting about how growing up during this time, these random performative kisses felt so prevalent that they actually influenced how she felt about using the word lesbian.
I mean, I will admit that it has not always been the most comfortable word for me to use, depends on the setting. In the eighties and nineties and the aughts, it was like a phrase that represented it just went hand in hand with like pornography and what The word lesbian was like a word kind of owned and used by like men to represent like what they wanted to see.
It was.
It was like titillating to say the wordless exactly exactly.
You don't always want to conjure up images of like lesbian sex and people's.
When you use the word.
So I used to just rely on using the word gay because I didn't feel like I own the word lesbian in the way that I wanted to the way that I feel like I do now.
But some real lesbian characters do you start to emerge. Right in the late nineties and the aughts, we start to see this improve in a way.
Yeah, there were a few. One that I really remember is on Friends, where you have Ross's ex wife Carol, who has an affair and leaves him for Susan. Yes, Friends, Family were gathered here today to join Carol and Susan in holy matrimony, and Susan and Carol go on to get married, and the three of them cope parent their son, which is actually a really nice example of a blended family.
I really remember that it was often sort of a joke at Ross's expense, right that his wife had left him for a woman. But they did air Susan and Carroll's wedding nearly a decade before same sex marriage was legal in the United States.
Yeah, so all of that was great in a lot of ways, but there were still limits, like they didn't kiss at that wedding. The wedding episode was banned in several markets, and like you said, the relationship was really used as a punchline at the expense of Ross, like sometimes in a funny way, but also as a punchline. It seems like.
Ross is the kind of guy who would marry a woman on the verge of being a lesbian and then push her over the ash.
Another thing that happened was later on the actress who played Susan actually did an interview where she talked about how she was cast for the role because basically she didn't look like a lesbian, so she was palatable enough for the friend's audience.
You know, that's kind of a parallel to Jane in the Golden Girls episode, right, that in some ways it's progress to have lesbian characters who don't look like some sort of stereotype, the same way it's progressed not to have gay men who always have to be like sassy best friends. But on the other hand, it's also about making them accessible to a quote unquote mainstream audience.
I guess, yeah, exactly. And actually, I want to go back to Jane for a moment and that Golden Girls episode that started all of this, because yes, on the one hand, like Jean is the perfect not too lesbian lesbian, but there are also some things in watching the episode now that really stood out to me. The first thing is that Jean's character is pretty well developed for a gay character at that time, Like she's comfortable with her sexuality,
she's uninterested in hiding it. At one point, when Dorothy is telling her that she wasn't sure she should tell the other girls, Jane says, well, you know, I'm not embarrassed or ashamed of who I am.
Hey, you know your friends better than I do. If you think they're the kind of people who can handle it, I'd.
Prefer to tell them. And also she's always been a lesbian, like she's not just trying this on, which I think is how in later years a lot of the gay characters were depicted as just trying it out and then going back to the way they were. And even when you know she has the hots four Rose, it's not treated in like a predatory sense or even so much
like a joke. And then when the episode closes, after we've learned that Rose doesn't share the feelings, but she says this really lovely thing, which is she gently tells Jean, if I were like you, meaning a lesbian, I'd be proud and flattered that you thought of me that way.
That is actually a really lovely way to respond. I think we all wish that, you know, when we were presented with something uncomfortable, we would respond in such like a gentle and sweet way.
And so it's interesting looking back and trying to analyze I guess what is going on here, and like how much the writers were actually conscious of what they're doing, because on the one hand, Jean, she appears she's like very attractive, she's super palatable. She looks like the other girls. You know, she's got her own caf dan. She's not butchered. She's not playing into the stereotype we might have of
what a lesbian looks like. At the same time, the writers are not shying away from the fact that she is who she is, Like they say the word lesbian in that episode over and over and over again, like if you were confusing Lebanese and lesbian before, you will not be confusing it after you watch this, And that was really not common at that time.
We've finally seen an evolution to some degree with how lesbians are depicted on TV. But I'm curious if anything else comes of the Lebanese lesbian joke.
Well, yes, so, just to recap after Golden Girls, the joke first re emerges in nineteen ninety one on the Rose O'donnald Show in a conversation with Ellen DeGeneres, and then again it appears in Me and Girls as a kind of wink wink inside joke about janis Ian the hot goth Lebanie is lesbian. But this is the best part. The joke keeps coming up.
It really does have a life of its own.
It is again in twenty eleven episode of Glee. This is an episode titled Born This Way, which is the Lady Gaga queer anbum. Yes, I'm guessing you also watched Clee Okay.
Yes, obviously I'm familiar both with Lady Gaga and Lee.
Okay, And so in this episode there's a scene of Santana and Brittany, and Brittany gets a T shirt made that's supposed to say lesbian, but instead it says Lebanese Way.
Was that supposed to be lesbian? Yeah? Isn't that what it says?
And it's supposed to be I guess this kind of airhead moment or mistake, but there it is again, Lebanie is lesbian.
I probably watched this and it didn't register for me because I didn't know that this joke was like a thing, So I probably was just like, yes.
He's very did see Then later on in twenty seventeen, there's actually an episode of Master of None. This is the show created by Azi's I'm Sorry, and they devote this entire episode to the coming out story of Denise, who's played by Lena Waith.
We finally found a show that I did not watch, but I do remember that Lena in an Emmy for this, right, I've been meaning to watch this show.
Yeah it's Leena Way want an Emmy for this. But the interesting thing here is that this joke appears again, but this time it's a little bit less of a joke here. I'm gonna let Maya explain this.
I talk about this episode all the time because I do think it's pretty much the greatest, one of the greatest episodes of.
Television in like the last ten years.
But in this episode, the Lebanese lesbian joke kind of takes like a little bit of a different spin, even though it's used in a similar way, but it's not as jokey Lena Waite as the adult Denise. But here you have like the teenage Denise speaking to dev the childhood version of Ziz and Sorry's character.
But they have this conversation, where are you trying to tell me that you're you know?
She says, like, you know, I'm Lebanese?
Lebanese? Wait, you're from Lebanon? No wat, I don't know how to fet comfortable with the word a lesbian.
And she kind of uses that as a cover because she's not ready to use the word lesbian or say the word lesbian even as refer to herself who she is or in conversation, because she's still kind of like grappling with that reality, so she uses it as kind of a substitute word that she's more comfortable saying.
I just love that so much because it's like we've seen this plan words go from haha, wink wink, that's what she said, joke to this actually really poignant moment that allows this character to say how she identifies without having to say it.
Yeah, it's really sweet in a way that this joke that now that we've traced the history sort of started in a way that was throwaway, really has become meaningful for some people.
Okay, I have one other thing to tell you, which is that as I was interviewing Maya, she'd been watching RuPaul's Drag Race where this joke came up again, and I couldn't believe.
When this happened.
It seemed like I was dreaming in a way because it was so perfect, And.
So what was happening is Maya was watching this episode of Drag Race where the queens are tasked in this challenge with giving some lesbians a makeover.
Ruined Michelle have this exchange where Michellevissage asks, you know, why are we.
Remaking, you know, Lebanese women, and it's.
Like, not Lebanese, Michelle, Le's bit lesbian.
And then you really have the full circle moment where Michelle is like.
That sounds like fun.
Thanks, Golden Girls, and she looks at the camera and wigs and I'm like, we're living in a simulation.
Oh my god, I mean it's perfect.
It's almost too perfect. And so I guess I don't know. Somewhere in writer's rooms all over America, people are still deciding that this is a joke worthy of telling.
That is beautiful. And I have to say that going on this journey with you about this joke has made me love the Golden Girls even more than I did before, which I did not know was possible.
I love that and I'm so glad. And I also have one more surprise for you, Yea, though it's not actually for you, But do you remember when I told you that Maya this is Maya Salaam. New York Times culture editor, a very established journalist, was once the proud owner of Lebanese lesbian.
Dot Course How could I forget such a thing?
How could you forget? Well, when we were talking, she confessed to me that she actually let it lapse, and I was horrified. I mean, like, honestly, that's pretty homophobic, maybe even, and so you know, I did what a good ally does. I decided to buy it for her. So, Susie, you're now speaking to the owner of Lebanese lesbian dot com, which honestly is probably appropriate. So I need to figure out how to transfer this to Maya immediately.
That's really beautiful.
Congratulations Maya, and congratulations to Lebanese lesbians everywhere.
Jess, do you want to tell listeners we have coming up next week?
Yes, it's an interview with the director of Bottoms, the hilarious gay fight club comedy whose director happens to also be the best friend of one of our producers, Sharon. I knew that I wanted to make a teen comedy and that I wanted it to be queer from the get go.
Yeah, there was no we'll see what the sexualities of these characters are. This is in retrospect. Thanks for listening. Is there a pop culture moment you can't stop thinking about and want us to explore in a future episode. Email us at in Retropod at gmail dot com, or find us on Instagram at in retropod.
If you love this podcast, please rate and review us on Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen. If you hate it, you can post nasty comments on our Instagram, which we may or may not delete.
You can also find us on Instagram at Jessica Bennett and at Susie b NYC. Also check out Jessica's books Feminist Fight Club and This Is Eighteen.
In Retrospect is a production of iHeart podcast and the Media. Lauren Anson is our supervising producer. Derek Clements is our engineer and sound designer. Emily Meronoff is our producer. Sharan Atia is our researcher and associate producer.
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