75 YEAR OLD LESBIAN PIZZA: REID #159

Featuring a COLLAB! with The Yearning!

Oct 17, 2023

gotta give it up for the brutally honest woman in the front row! i feel you, girl!

Before I start this newsletter, I want to shout out my friend Eva who has been working tirelessly for the org IfNotNow for years. If you can follow their work and donate what you can, I would greatly appreciate it. Never again means never again. I firmly believe that. Thank you Eva and everyone at IfNotNow for all that you are doing.

SHORT:

My mom was here this weekend (shouted ECHO in every tunnel in Central Park).

Her flight home was delayed by three hours, but don’t worry! She met a 75-year-old lesbian named Char who “lives in a senior living facility of over 5000 people and there are 200 ladies in the lesbian club”, and they split a pizza*.

“Good times in Newark,” she wrote via text.

May the three hour delays of your week be met with a 75-year-old lesbian “Char” or two!

*snack of the week

MEDIUM:

While I tend to ingest a fair share of television and film, I’ve been horking down media in a profound way as of late. I always want to see movies called "dicks in the sky with farts" and my partner always wants to see movies called "anatomy of the saddest thing you could ever imagine". We usually settle somewhere in the middle (“sad flaccid dicks on the ground with no farts and someone dies but it’s not that devastating because love is about emancipation, not eternal possession”).

In addition to shoving media down my hole (which one? you choose!), I’ve been reading a ton of reviews. And my favorite ones come from

Meg & Ali

. So I sent them a frantic message asking if they’d write a little somethin’ for this newsletter. In return, I churned out a piece on David Mallet’s 1999 filmed production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat that’ll be up on their Substack later this week.

Freshman year of college I wrote a terrible essay about how Buffy The Vampire Slayer perfectly straddles masc and femme tropes without letting one or the other desexualize or over-sexualize her (I identified as straight at the time). Their piece on Buffy below is much better. And way more fun.

Enjoy!

LONG:

Hi from our corner of the gay internet! We’re Ali Romig and Meg Steinfeld-Heim, and we write The Yearning, a weekly newsletter that provides rants, reviews, and recommendations on queer movies and television. You can read more about how we came to be here.

Gay Christmas season (Halloween) is upon us, and we’re pondering Buffy (the vampire slayer, that is) as queers are wont to do. In case you haven’t watched all 144 episodes and followed several Willow4Tara fan accounts like we have, Buffy is special because it had the first recurring depiction of a teen girl and animated corpse…wait, scratch that…lesbian couple on prime time television in the United States. Despite dabbling in a little bit of Bury Your Gays behavior, Buffy was able to eschew the casual “ew, gay!” 90’s/early aughts mindset. Instead, its characters could often be found sighing, “If only I was GAY”. In Buffy, queerness was aspirational. This is a message we can get behind 😈

Tara and Willow have the only truly successful love story in the entire series, their partnership only being interrupted by Willow’s magic addiction and eventually, Tara’s death at the hand of gun violence (perpetrated by Warren, one of the earliest portrayals of an incel seen on screen). And if you’re not dating gay in Buffy, you’re literally dating a monster. See: Buffy exclusively dates vampires (and Riley, who was in the military, so…), and every date Xander goes on is with a literal cretin from hell that has been temporarily transformed into a hot woman (or Cordelia, who is also from hell, albeit human). His longest relationship was with the beautiful vengeance demon Anyanka (Anya) – she has a terrifying musical number where she lusts after a comphet-white-picket-fence lifestyle and it can’t possibly be serious.

Never derogatory, Buffy always understood that being gay is quite possibly, most probably, the ideal. Even Buffy, who is hot, blonde, and into boys, has serious sexual tension with Faith–another Slayer who is basically the walking personification of the phrase “be gay, do crime”. This probably never worked out because they’re both tops.

Horror comedy–the genre Buffy is billed as–makes perfect sense as fodder for the gays. We love scary stuff, but we also require the ability to make fun of something at all times.

If you enjoyed this little word vom, come over and yearn with us <3

…

(Okay, it’s Reid again) Aren’t they brilliant? Dive into their stuff! This Jojo Siwa piece really made me laugh last week.

C U Next Tuesday