“If we know we need a different future, then what are the texts that help us get there?”
What makes something part of “the canon”? How do we determine which media and cultural products are considered authoritative, definitional, teachable? It’s a question critics and media fans love to debate, but when the canon is queer, things get a lot more complicated.
The Vox Culture team recently got together to create a list of suggestions for a “new” queer canon. Our list consciously moves away from the idea of “the canon” as a list of towering works of art and toward works that offer diversity of human experiences, works that break down binaries, works that dare to imagine queerness as an art form unto itself. In light of a resurgence in political and cultural queerphobia, it’s more important than ever to elevate stories that point us toward a better future.
“What the canon shouldn’t be is a shibboleth — a test of whether you’re a ‘real’ queer,” Cáel Keegan tells me. He’s an associate professor of women, gender, and sexuality studies at Grand Valley State University and author of Lana and Lilly Wachowski: Sensing Transgender. “That taste metric and elitism that can come along with canonicity should ideally never be a thing.” Instead, he suggests the canon should be less about curation and more about function — a queer canon that acts upon culture in real time, rather than one that simply sits there being venerated.
That’s a big change in perspective. I asked Keegan to walk me through it.
The fundamental question of, “What even is the queer canon?” isn’t as easy to answer as I thought it would be. One complication I ran into as I was trying to explore this subject is that not everyone believes a queer canon even exists to begin with.
I think whether you want to admit there’s a canon or not, there just is. Either we’re gonna deal directly with the fact that certain groups have really driven our sense of what counts as useful or valuable media — or we’re not going to admit it and just have the canon exist as a sort of unspoken reality that directly reflects power. I think [in] having these kinds of conversations, it’s important to admit that not everyone in the LGBTQ community has been in the position to make those kinds of determinations.
The queer canon has historically been pretty white, pretty cis, and arguably pretty male.
Even when we do have texts that have diverse representations in them, they’re often texts that are elevated by white cultural producers for white audiences. Something like Paris Is Burning, for example, has been debated and debated [in terms of] who that film is actually for. So I think it’s better to lean into those questions. Whether you believe in it or not, the culture produces [a canon].
I think, too, so much of the queer canon is subtextual — Rebel Without a Cause, The Children’s Hour — the stuff of The Celluloid Closet. That obviously has such an impact as we process the stories that we are allowed to relate to.
Mmm-hhmm. And I have a certain love for films that weren’t representationally queer, but were made queer through different kinds of reading. Also, I think there’s a sense of dissatisfaction with directly representational media, where I do see people kind of wanting that older, more arcane way of finding things to be queer, even when they are not stated.
Absolutely. There’s a delight in subverting things that are textually heterosexual.
I mean, that’s kind of how queer media began, with the audience developing reading practices that were applied to the text, versus the text just being like, “I am a gay movie.”
Right. All of the textually queer movies I watched growing up in the ’90s were very cis white male-centered, in a post-AIDS culture that was very much about processing trauma. They were for a very specific community that I didn’t necessarily see myself in but was obviously drawn to.
There was a queer mainstream, if you can call something queer mainstream, canon that developed around teaching straight people how to incorporate gay men — and to some lesser extent lesbians — into the community of normative relationality. Like, this terrible thing happened, all these people died, and now we need these stories — not only for the community ourselves, to process the trauma through whatever mainstream genre codes were available in cinema at that time, but also to teach straight people how to incorporate or assimilate queerness into liberal democracy, through the mechanisms of family, acceptance, tolerance, things like that.
So I think that categorization was working in two directions simultaneously. Lesbians were much more the focus of television movies, particularly in the mid-to-late ’90s. There were a lot of soap opera plots around lesbianism because a lot of those were directed at more of a stay-at-home-moms audience on daytime TV. So those were less canonized. They were treated as more disposable.
I think the question now is, where did the functionality of the canon get us? Because here we are, right? Like, if you wanna say, “Oh, it was useful for getting us gay marriage” — sure. But it’s almost like the canon rewrote the purview of the political framework in which we could imagine a future.
And you might argue that the canon reified a lot of straight cis tropes about queer people at the same time that it was trying to assimilate gay people into that world.
Well, yeah, I mean, I saw a tweet recently that said that gay movies were better when people thought being gay was bad. That really stuck with me because I’m working on a book about bad trans media, and why good representation hasn’t gotten us anywhere culturally.
So much of queerness is about learning to define yourself through opposition and define yourself through deviance, embracing your villainy.
And recognizing that in the villainy there is value, and that villainy is required to alter the system in any kind of meaningful way.
Be gay, do crimes, essentially.
Traditionally the canon was driven by the decisions of a very limited number of people in elite institutions. It’s what was taught as, here is what you need to know in order to be a master of this art form or cultural form, right? I would argue for a redefinition of canon as being works that are popularly valuable — I think that’s a wider and more democratic framework for what is meaningful in any given moment. My idea of canon would make room for something like what you’re talking about.
You’ll always get people saying, “but what do we lose if we allow in this new stuff, and how do you know this stuff will be meaningful in five years?” But I find that those claims usually reflect the interests of white people with money. So, “What is the canon doing?” is the question for me. Canon isn’t a container as much as a function. If we know the present is pretty awful and we know we need to go in a different direction in order to get a different future, then what are the texts that help us get there? And those are the things we should be paying attention to.
The old canon has delivered us to this moment, which is not a great moment! So we should be asking some questions about why that happened and how it happened. Processing trauma, making arguments for inclusion and tolerance — that’s the old popular function of that post-Hays Code canon. What are the new demands? What are the new needs?
I think one new demand would be to really reflect the mentality of modern queer people. The people around me are all really diverse, really global. My friends are on many different continents, many different ethnicities and backgrounds, and they all bring so many different perspectives and there’s just such a breakdown of binary norms in general. I feel like very little mainstream media reflects that, which is perhaps why I personally, and many queer people, tend to go outside of the mainstream for the content that we consume. I think part of that is because we’re looking for things that are wild and outside of the box when it comes to thinking about gender and thinking about sexuality and thinking about a lot of things that are innately part of queer identity.
I like that you raised the idea of binarization because binarization was one of the ways in which that older canon made arguments for the inclusion of white cis gays and lesbians. Like, yes, we are gay and lesbian, but we can largely privatize our sexualities and we fit right into the male/female sex binary. We really do need cultural production that helps us question and see beyond this retrenchment of the sex binary that we’re dealing with. Ideally a new canon would help us deal with that.
I like to argue that we should be thinking outside of just film, TV, theater, and literature, and considering other forms of media. I’m wondering how feasible you think that is.
The old canon was really driven by content. It was about masterworks. “These are works produced by the great minds.” My argument would be that we should ideally move away from that because whatever we think is the masterwork in this moment reflects our own sense of what’s good and bad, rather than what actually is useful.
I would argue for a use-based canon. That means asking, “What is the media that is touching people the most? What are people referring to? What’s the thing people are using in their everyday lives to imagine politically, to organize, to communicate, to develop new forms of identification?”
I also think we’re pretty far from having an established canon that really fully includes genderqueer and nonconforming and nonbinary stories. In terms of what gets elevated and what gets talked about, we just don’t really have that many, and obviously that’s especially true for people of color. Could a new canon help boost those stories?
What’s interesting is that a number of texts that used to be thought of as genderqueer or nonbinary texts have been retroactively rewritten as being trans, but things that are very in the canon, like Stone Butch Blues for example, were understood to be genderqueer texts. There are things in the more recent canon that don’t show up the way they used to because of how “transgender” has risen as the new identity catch-all for non-cisgender things. So there’s a lot of potential transness that’s getting forced into this binary framework by a media culture that really needs trans people to show up as a legible gender to be marketable.
So there’s a lot of pressure on creators. The stuff that gets through presents trans people as similar to cisnormative standards of beauty and gender comportment — and really only trans women. There’s very little out there in the popular mainstream frame that represents trans men at all, in any kind of diverse way.
What we have is a culture obsessed with trans women for various problematic reasons. And that near-fetishization of trans women as either goddesses or sex workers really blots out everything else and makes everything else really hard to market. Which is the other big problem. None of this stuff exists outside the issue of it needing to generate money for somebody.
The ways you’re allowed to be visibly queer and visibly genderqueer in public are incredibly specific. I don’t really see any stories at all that reflect a non-binary experience for someone who doesn’t look like an androgynous model, ever. And I don’t think I would, because it would mean confronting people with very visibly jarring images of non-binary people and what we actually look like. Coming back to the idea that a new canon might be able to change some of this — is that too aspirational? Are there stories right now that you think are doing that work of changing the conversation?
I keep thinking about where people are making stuff that’s touching a lot of people, that’s driving conversation and rocking the boat a bit. It’s almost impossible as a trans creator to do that without getting a whole bunch of people really angry at you. I’ve been thinking a lot about this — what is the equivalent of a text now that’s gonna be as big as something like The Matrix was for 1999?
I would put Natalie Wynn in there, definitely. I understand that not everyone is a fan of hers, but I do think her impact on the culture and some areas of her videography have been really asking deep questions about representation and beauty standards. She’s not perfect, no one is, but I would argue that her work on YouTube actually has the level of circulation and impact that is arguably canonicity. I would just put her up there as somebody in the YouTube space who’s extremely culturally influential, even if we don’t think of her as making representational or narrative work.
Then I think about stuff like the video game Celeste, made by a non-binary creator who then, after the game came out, was like, “Actually, the protagonist of this game is trans and I created the whole game from an unknowing trans perspective.” Celeste is something I would teach in a class about queer and trans game design and what it’s like to make something that’s gonna touch a lot of people — that’s going to give them a queer experience of the world without saying upfront, this is what this is.
Obvious things like Moonlight are gonna be in the new canon no matter what. It’s the stuff that people aren’t quite aware of, on the edges of the cultural critical conversation.
That’s one reason why I wanted to include the Chinese danmei novel I recommended because it’s done so much to globalize conversations and really bring people together. It’s actively transforming publishing to a degree — this is a work that is actually changing the culture in real time. Maybe it’s not canonical in terms of what would have traditionally been considered a looming, towering work of great artistic genius, but it’s functioning within culture in a way that is very meaningful, and I think that’s important.
And then maybe this means that we just completely redefine what we mean when we say canon — like maybe we just throw out the traditional definition of canon altogether.
Well, to produce a queer canon would probably be to change the function of it, because to queer something literally means to change its direction — to twist it. So, yeah, I like thinking about it less as just a container of recommended content and much more like a tool.
The queer canon should point us toward the future. We made a list of new, vibrant queer stories helping us get there.
The Vox culture team thinks a lot about what stories matter to us and why: in other words, makes something part of “the canon.” Lately, because it’s Pride, but also because of the times we’re in — with anti-LGBTQ bills popping up all over the country, celebrity outings back in the news, and the ominous threat of a repeal of protected same-sex rights — we’ve been thinking a lot about the queer canon and its power.
“The queer canon has always drawn attention to works that counter prevailing images and narratives known to marginalize and stigmatize queerness, in favor of ones that are affirmative and/or offer alternative perspectives,” says Maria San Filippo, an associate professor at Emerson College’s Department of Visual & Media Arts. “That body of work often provides those who are queer and questioning with their earliest instances of self-recognition and community belonging.”
Storytelling has been fundamental to the progress of queer and transgender rights in America, but lately, despite an abundance of queer storytellers in the landscape of contemporary media, much of that progress has once again turned into a struggle for civil rights.
What kinds of stories helped get us out of this mess the first time around, and can they do it again? Or should those stories — what we might consider the essential “queer canon” — give way to something new? Could they pave the way for a rethinking of what queer and genderqueer storytelling looks like in the 21st century, and what its role in society should be?
This is a big subject. Trying to define what makes a piece of media feel essential is almost impossibly subjective. Even the idea of “the canon” seems especially fraught when we consider how much of the literary, cinematic, and artistic “canon,” even within a queer context, has been shaped and defined primarily by a hierarchy of white creators and critics. “Even the queer canon tends to favor works by and from more privileged creators and production contexts,” says San Filippo.
But the modern internet serves as a potential foil for this tiered system, bringing us a whole new virtual world of hybrid art forms, evolving subcultures, and expanding ideas of queer and genderqueer identity. Social media has given rise to interconnected international communities; queer creators and audiences are constantly breaking down boundaries, blurring art forms, uplifting traditionally shamed genres, and embracing creative anarchy. In other words, if there ever was a queer canon, it ain’t what it used to be.
Still, it feels especially urgent to ask: What are the great new stories that reflect contemporary queerness? What is this generation’s Angels in America — and what impact could that story have on a society rushing to criminalize and re-criminalize queer and transgender identity? What are the modern works future generations will look to to understand queer and genderqueer identity?
What if the new queer canon is something lighter and more fluid, less defined by towering importance or traditional literary and cinematic parameters for excellence? Might the new queer canon borrow the qualities of evolving queerness itself — less defined by binary dichotomies (exuberance in the face of suffering, survival in the face of ostracism) and more defined by fluidity and community? Could the new queer canon make space for more experimental art? Could it include international media? Would it emphasize heady romantic joy, or might it highlight anger and desperation? Can a comic-book arc or an innovative sci-fi or fantasy novel usurp a position of reverence once reserved for higher literary forms?
What do we do with Ryan Murphy?
We’ve chosen to focus on works that matter to us individually that we think might also resonate collectively. Obviously no one’s “must-sees” and “must-reads” will be the same; our method of selection is necessarily a little ragtag, and in a limited list, we couldn’t include everything we wanted nor capture the breadth of creative works that rightfully belong here. But that feels fitting. Queerness is too often defined by what it is not, when I suspect that perhaps queerness is a little of everything. Perhaps the new queer canon, rather than serving as a gate-kept list of exemplars, should be messy, inclusive, and a little of everything, everywhere, all at once. Hey — maybe that should be on the list, too. —Aja Romano
The Archive of Our Own
In fandom circles, the stereotype about queer fanfiction is that it’s, shhh, mostly written by straight, cis women. But the Archive of Our Own — formed out of the late stages of slash (i.e., queer male) fic fandom on LiveJournal — is a garden of sexual and gender diversity. AO3 was created by and for fans who needed a platform to write and read fanfic that was as weird, geeky, queer, kinky, and subversive as the fans themselves.
In the 15 years since its beginnings, AO3 has become a haven for queer and genderqueer fiction and themes of all sorts — though it must be noted, a space that’s still prohibitive for many writers and fans of color. Despite its flaws, there’s no space more messily welcoming, joyful, and flagrantly, abundantly queer. Even the platform’s growing pains are queer and kinky. And AO3’s cultural impact is no joke: At a recent Japan Foundation panel on the global rise of queer Boys’ Love media, every single panelist mentioned AO3 as a factor in the medium’s growing popularity.
In 2019, in an unprecedented move, the whole site won the Hugo for Best Related Work — an honor bestowed upon 9.4 million works and counting, a giant roiling body of queer-friendly writing. So why not just make AO3 itself, and all of its freakish deviant joy, part of the new queer canon? —AR
Hannibal
Hannibal, which ran for three seasons from 2013 to 2015, wants viewers to ask one question: When is queerbaiting not queerbaiting? One possible answer it offers is: when it’s part of a deliberate attempt by queer people to take characters you might already be familiar with and expose their super-gay core.
Creator Bryan Fuller takes the characters of Will Graham (tortured FBI criminal profiler with an extreme — and fictional — empathy disorder) and Hannibal Lecter (genius, psychologist, cannibal) from Thomas Harris’s novel Red Dragon and subverts them. Hannibal goes back to before the book, when Graham and Lecter were respectful friends and work colleagues, then shows how Graham finally figured out Lecter was the greatest murderer of them all.
Fuller’s great conceit is that Graham and Lecter’s cat-and-mouse game has a romantic, erotic tension at its core. Across three seasons, the show steps right up to the edge of pushing an explicitly erotic connection between the two into the text, always backing down at the last second. When the two finally take the plunge, it almost feels like a sigh of relief, despite them being killer and cop.
The show’s queerness goes beyond its central pairing, however. Queer characters exist throughout the show’s ensemble, and as critic Loa Beckenstein has argued, the show’s portrayal of murderers who literally rearrange the human body to express their innermost selves resonates with trans experiences too. Hannibal is a huge, queer soup — and incredibly compelling horror TV on top of that. —Emily St. James
In the Dream House
In the Dream House, Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir-slash-literary criticism, is self-consciously an addition to the queer canon, a story whose form Machado had to invent herself because she could not find it elsewhere. “Our culture does not have an investment in helping queer folks understand what their experiences mean,” she observes. Finding a way to help other queer folks understand their own experiences is part of the project of this luminous, harrowing account of same-sex domestic abuse.
In the Dream House is a memoir in fragments. As Machado walks us through the story of how she met, fell in love with, and came under the thumb of her abusive ex-girlfriend, each brief chapter plays with a different narrative trope: noir, erotica, folklore taxonomy, choose your own adventure. It is experimenting because it has no clear precedents, borrowing from other story formats because how else can you find a way to tell a story so unthinkable?
“I enter into the archive,” Machado writes, “that domestic abuse between partners who share a gender identity is both possible and not uncommon, and that it can look something like this. I speak into the silence. I toss the stone of my story into a vast crevice; measure the emptiness by its small sound.” The stone of Machado’s story casts strong echoes. —Constance Grady
Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian)
The last five years have seen a boom in terrific literature written by trans women, from Torrey Peters’s bestselling Detransition, Baby to Jeanne Thornton’s Summer Fun and the assorted works of Casey Plett. Yet my favorite novel in this movement is Hazel Jane Plante’s experimental 2019 novel Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian), which emerged from a tiny press in Canada and captured certain things about the trans feminine experience I had never seen articulated quite as well.
The novel’s narrator — unnamed for almost the entire novel — attempts to process her deep, paralyzing grief at the loss of Vivian, her best friend, who died in an unspecified fashion before the novel begins. To do so, she begins cataloging in alphabetical order elements from the fictional TV series Little Blue, which sounds like a cross between Twin Peaks, Gilmore Girls, and the old Nickelodeon show The Adventures of Pete & Pete. Little Blue served to bring the narrator and Vivian closer together, and the book explores their friendship both in the past tense and in the present, as the narrator rewatches her friend’s favorite show (for Vivian always loved it more than the narrator did).
Little Blue Encyclopedia aches, in the best way possible. As the narrator moves through her grief, we also get a beautiful portrayal of the ways trans people care for each other and the bonds that can form between trans feminine people who often have to create their own family structures outside the societal norm. This book is sad, yes, but death is never its focus. Instead, it is interested in all of the ways we find pieces of the dead to make our lives slightly more bearable without them. —ESJ
The Locked Tomb series
The tagline on Tamsyn Muir’s Locked Tomb series is that it tells the epic saga of lesbian necromancers in space, but I assure you that the necromancers are far from the only queer characters in this space opera. There are also nonbinary angels, pansexual Lyctors, and — arguably most important of all — Muir’s first title character, sweet dumb lesbian Gideon, a deadly swordswoman with a weakness for bad puns and a sizable collection of dirty magazines.
The Locked Tomb series, which begins with Gideon the Ninth and is planned to extend to four books total, is a study in nightmarish gothic maximalism. It’s a universe of ossuaries and skeleton monsters and appealingly gross flesh magic, and everything that could possibly emit a sepulchered groan and leak blood absolutely does. But at its core, the Locked Tomb series is a study of the power dynamics between two very close people, which is to say that it is a study of love.
It takes place within an interplanetary empire ruled over by the universe’s most powerful necromancer, where necromancers and their sword-wielding cavaliers are told to pair off in a quest for ultimate power. Over the course of the series, Muir makes an increasingly pitiless examination of what it means to offer one’s self, body and soul, to another person. What she finds will break your heart every single time. —CG
Mo Dao Zu Shi (The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation)
In December, the first published English translations of three novels by the pseudonymous erotica author Mo Xiang Tong Xiu (affectionately abbreviated as MXTX) all hit the New York Times bestseller list at once. This feat made headlines primarily because of the sheer novelty of it: a Chinese author of kinky queer historical fantasies finding mainstream success overseas, mainly due to the organically grown fandom for her works.
That fandom centers around MXTX’s “cultivation” epic Mo Dao Zu Shi, an intricate, politically charged novel about a brilliant historical cultivator who begins practicing a dangerous school of dark magic, low-key wrecking society in the process. The story quickly became beloved for its complex world-building and for the soulmate love between its two main characters. MDZS was adapted into the globally popular Netflix hit The Untamed, which alone had a tremendous impact on queer storytelling in East and Southeast Asia; now MXTX’s body of work has begun disrupting US publishing. The international bridges this story has built and the deep love it culls from its audience qualify it for entry into the new queer canon. After all, what is the canon but works that transform us? MDZS is transforming the culture in real time. —AR
“Montero (Call Me By Your Name)”
Music videos are a lost art. It’s not artists’ fault that the industry has changed; that MTV now just plays hours and hours of a show called Ridiculousness. What’s the point in pouring effort and money into a video, when so few are watching? Lil Nas X is one of the exceptional exceptions; his videos are must-see.
His clip for “Montero” features, among other things, Lil Nas X being seduced and licked down by a humanoid snake in a Garden of Eden, wearing a pink wig while being chained and judged in heaven, and ultimately sliding down a pole into hell, to give the devil a lap dance.
The visuals are explicitly queer, but also a blunt rebuke to the Satanic Panic launched against the singer by right-wing figures and politicians. Instead of shying away from the controversy, he doubles down, quite literally, with Satan.
Lil Nas X’s skill with both the spotlight and visual artistry brings to mind artists like Madonna and Janet Jackson, whose music videos are seared into pop music history. Same goes for his irreverent attitude about his biggest haters.
Love him or hate him, you can’t stop talking about him. —Alex Abad-Santos
Moonlight
One of the more unexpected Best Picture wins in the Oscars’ 94 years is also one of the most dazzling and sensitive films of the new millennium. Based on a play by Tarell Alvin McCraney and directed by Barry Jenkins, Moonlight sensitively weaves together several threads as it tells the story of Chiron, a young boy growing up in Liberty City, Miami. The film is structured like a triptych, with Chiron played by three extraordinary actors — Alex Hibbert, Ashton Sanders, and Trevante Rhodes — as he matures into adulthood. The film wasn’t widely seen before its Oscar win, and no wonder; it’s a small, arty film made on a shoestring budget about a poor, gay Black boy from the projects, with a mother who is an addict and a surrogate father who deals drugs, as he deals with bullies and discovers his homosexuality.
What Moonlight does best and most brilliantly is evoke the quiet ways that Chiron, who is bullied and lost for much of his youth, slowly and often silently grows into understanding his own identity. Through encounters with a childhood friend, Chiron struggles to accept that who he is will always be at odds with where he came from — and to live the emotions that realization raises. It’s a tale of yearning and pain, grounded in Chiron’s desire to escape himself. But Moonlight understands that need for escape doesn’t come from himself; it’s born out of the influences around him. Love, a place to belong and be safe, is what he longs for most of all. —Alissa Wilkinson
Portrait of a Lady on Fire
Portrait of a Lady on Fire, queer French director Céline Sciamma’s story of two women falling in love amid a too-temporary matriarchy, is one of the most romantic movies ever made.
The connection between painter Marianne (Noémie Merlant) and aristocrat Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), whose portrait Marianne has been hired to paint, builds inexorably across the film. The two are left to their own devices on a remote island off the coast of Brittany in the late 1700s, yet even as they fall in love, their connection carries within it the promise of melancholy. Héloïse’s portrait is meant for the man she will marry.
Stories of two women falling in love usually end in sadness, which irritates many. (Not me! I love when people are sad!) Yet Portrait transcends whatever annoyance you may preemptively feel about its sad lesbians by creating a truly ravishing and revolutionary glimpse at what the world might look like when filtered through the female gaze. Above all, Sciamma understands that the best romances are about the proximity between two people who can’t help falling for each other, and the best love stories are about the separation of soulmates. Portrait somehow manages to pull off both in the same film. —ESJ
“Never Knew Love Like This Before,” Pose
Pose wasn’t a perfect television show (Ryan Murphy’s rarely are) but when it was at its best it was one that, as my colleague Emily St. James said, you couldn’t stop thinking about. And I can’t think of an episode harder to forget than “Never Knew Love Like This Before,” which aired in 2019.
Pose explores ballroom culture and the lives of trans and gay people in the ’80s and ’90s. But it also uses that story to reflect the violence against trans women happening in the present. “Never Knew” depicts the murder of Candy, a friend to the show’s main cast of characters. Candy is a ballroom hopeful, but struggles financially.
In order to support herself, Candy performs sex work — and ultimately is killed by one of her clients. The episode is moving and awkward, powerful and maybe too sentimental — sometimes all at once. It’s not successful at everything it tries. But what stuck out to me was how the show honors Candy’s life.
The show deliberately veers away from depicting violence and how she was killed. Instead, Candy’s ghost appears in the episode and interacts with the characters — a way to show her legacy, the life she led, and the dreams she had.
After her death and funeral, Candy is depicted in a fantasy sequence in which she has a ballroom performance of a lifetime. She looks beautiful. She’s smiling. She’s admired. But the sequence isn’t just about what Candy hoped would have happened in her life, it’s about how her friends will remember her. It’s about the brightness she brought to their lives. Pose itself is a reminder that joy is a crucial part of queer survival. —AAS
Princess Cyd
Stephen Cone’s 2017 coming-of-age drama flew under many people’s radars, but to those who saw Princess Cyd, it was an instant classic. Jessie Pinnick plays Cyd, who’s come to stay with her aunt Miranda (Rebecca Spence, playing a character modeled on the author Marilynne Robinson) for the summer. Like many a teenager, Cyd is trying to find herself. She finds herself attracted to Katie (Malic White), a barista, while also unwinding some of the ways Miranda’s life has gotten too safe. They provoke one another while forming a bond. Together, they’re prodded toward a bigger understanding of the world in the safety of a loving, carefully chosen community.
Cone is a master of small, carefully realized filmmaking; his earlier movies such as The Wise Kids and Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party combine an unusual level of empathy for his characters with a combination of interests that aren’t always mixed in authentic ways in queer film: love, desire, sexual awakenings, and religion. Princess Cyd is his most accomplished film to date, graceful and honest, but all of his work ought to be required viewing for young people navigating the tricky waters that often accompany queer identities in religious communities. —AW
A Strange Loop
Even before it won the Tony for Best Musical, A Strange Loop seemed obviously destined for greatness. You can’t escape its vortex. Michael R. Jackson’s dazzling metafictional show inverts and plays upon so many Broadway tropes that your head is spinning before the first number is over. The tale centers on Usher, a queer Black man who works as, well, an usher for the Broadway production of The Lion King and in his spare time is trying to write a musical about a queer Black usher who is trying to write a musical about … you get the idea. On stage, he’s accompanied by a chorus of his Thoughts, six of them, who at times evoke his family members, his emotions, or a bevy of other detractors. In the course of trying to write the show, Usher finds himself sucked into his own vortex. But his family members’ refusal to accept his identity, along with an unspoken part of family history, throw a key wrench into his mental works.
It’s a spectacular hoot of a show, and made even more poignant by the seething authenticity underneath it. Like a number of other recent Broadway productions from Black artists (including Slave Play), A Strange Loop isn’t out to just make fun of the overwhelming white preciousness of the entire Broadway apparatus. It’s ready to burn it all down, frustrated and radical and saying all kinds of things you can’t say on stage. (In one of the late numbers, Usher’s Thoughts, as his family members, sing a song with the chorus “AIDS is God’s punishment.” It’s a lot.) Polite, it’s not — but as Tony voters recognized, it’s a giant leap forward for the Great White Way. —AW
Veneno
Veneno is an HBO Max miniseries about the power of imagination and storytelling.
Veneno is the Spanish word for “venom,” but it’s also the nickname of the legendary Cristina Ortiz Rodríguez or “La Veneno,” a transgender singer and celebrity who rose to prominence on Spanish TV in the mid-’90s.
Cristina created a life for herself that defied reality. She dared to dream of something better for herself, and in her own way, turned her success and fame into resistance against transphobia and prejudice.
The series, based on Cristina’s biography, doesn’t shy away from the tougher parts of Cristina’s life — the friends she lost, the dreams she gave up on, the bad men she fell in love with, the failures she endured — and in doing so, gives us a portrait of how a queer person’s desire to be seen in the world is a constant, difficult negotiation.
Even with these obstacles, La Veneno was an architect of her own life. The show celebrates her for it. —AAS
Yuri on Ice
The 2010s saw a boom in what we might call queer comfort media: storytelling that prioritizes, first and foremost, creating a happy, loving, progressive environment for its characters and its audience that defied trauma porn stereotypes. Most of these stories — think hockey webcomic Check, Please! or cult webseries Carmilla — found niche audiences and left a relatively small cultural footprint. But Yuri on Ice, the 2016 skating anime that simply presents ice skating as the utopian queer fantasy space it was always meant to be, influenced so much media in its wake that the list is hard to enumerate. Among the mix is arguably the popular romance Red, White & Royal Blue and Netflix’s current hit Heartstopper — but Yuri on Ice tops them both for its charm, grace, and beauty.
For most of 2016 and 2017, this anime was everywhere, and it still resurfaces every winter as fans compare the intricate details of the show to the styles and bios of their favorite real-life figure skaters. Yuri on Ice makes a compelling, visually stunning argument for simply rewriting the world to make room for passionate, ebullient, happy queer love stories. No wonder the fandom is still huge, breathlessly awaiting the series’ perpetually delayed second season. We need that kind of hope now more than ever. —AR
How to make and sustain relationships in a new city as a single person.
Last December, I rode my bike from my brother’s apartment to Chicago’s Union Station and got on a 52-hour train to San Francisco. It was my fifth move in as many years.
I’m in my mid-20s, and I’ve moved over a dozen times. Since college, due to work and school, I’ve lived in Boston, Lusaka, Delhi, Chicago, and now, San Francisco. I’ve done those moves alone, and although I’ve had amazing support from my friends, family, and co-workers, it’s still quite a different experience from moving with a family or a partner.
I’ve figured out that learning to make the most of frequent moving is learning to make the most out of an imperfect situation: All kinds of relationships are difficult to sustain in the same way over distances and time zones. Being mobile is only one way of living life, and by living this way — for those of us who have the privilege to choose to move or to stay home — we inherently miss out on all the other ways to live and build community. But it’s the only life I know, and it is a life I love. I’ve found a lot of joy and meaning in moving, exploring new cities, meeting people very different from me, and working all over the world. And I’ve learned a lot from people wiser than me about how to move well as a single young person.
Chances are you’ve already got at least some of your logistics ironed out; you know which neighborhood you’ll be living in or what your job will be. Maybe you even know already where the grocery store is. When it comes to the more ineffable stuff, though, it can be a lot harder to plan in advance. You might have questions like “How do I make friends?” “How do I look after my well-being?” “Where does dating slot in?” And it can be daunting to answer them on your own.
Here’s some advice from my own moves, bolstered by the insight of a handful of friendship experts. There are a few tactics you can use, particularly based on wherever it is you wind up living, and they break down as follows: Do everything, keep in touch with people, and take time for yourself in ways that aren’t lonely — but understand that you will be lonely at times, and that’s okay.
Do everything!
The most important thing for me, being in a new city, is to put yourself out there to meet people. This could be through work, exercise groups, meetups, social media, volunteering, or even dating apps. This does not have to break the budget. In every place I’ve moved to, I’ve been able to find activities, such as outdoor exercise and volunteer groups, that are completely free to join. As your budget allows, you could also put a small amount of money into a social fund for these activities each month.
I spoke with Marisa Franco, a psychologist and friendship researcher, and Gillian Sandstrom, a researcher at the University of Sussex, about transitions. Both discussed the “liking gap” — people like you more than you think! Going into unfamiliar events and conversations with strangers can be a better experience, even for self-identified introverts, if you realize it’s likely to be a good experience where people like you. Sandstrom found that older adults, having accumulated this knowledge, “anticipate that a conversation with a stranger — any stranger — will be better than younger people do” since they expect a better outcome from such conversations.
My first few days in Delhi, one of my colleagues invited me to three events, and I dragged my tired, jet-lagged self to each one, where I made friends with my colleagues, met someone who invited me to join a football club (I’m still lurking on the WhatsApp group from across the world), and joined a board game/tech for development group. Finding sustainable communities that you see regularly and can invest in, as Allie Volpe wrote for Vox, is key to thriving in a new place.
When you’re meeting people, Franco told me, it’s often good to meet people who are also in life transition stages. This could be other people new to a city or country, people who have just graduated from college, or people who have recently gone through a breakup and are looking for friends. “It’s a shame if you avoid certain ways of connecting because you don’t think that they’re good,” she said, reiterating the importance of connecting through different channels, whether it’s social media, a group for people from the country or city you’re from, or an exercise or other hobby group.
Loose connections are also important. It’s easy to live in a bubble made up of only people who live and think like you, but this robs you of diverse connections and ideas. Sandstrom worked on a huge study on kindness with people from 150 different countries and found that people often reported kindness in interactions from strangers. People may also find conversations with strangers emotionally fulfilling — if they can speak to a particular emotional experience — or that they learn something from talking to people across generations.
Keep in touch
Keeping in touch is important. Reconnect with friends/acquaintances/friends of friends in the city you’re in, and communicate virtually with friends and family far away.
I spoke with Jeff Hall, a researcher at the University of Kansas, about maintaining friendships over time. He told me how young people who prioritize mobility in their lives often have trouble maintaining friendships, learning to treat the friendships they do have “as impermanent because they are; you learn the impermanence of life.” But while friendships may be impermanent, it’s not inevitable that they end when you move away from a place.
Something to keep in mind with reconnecting with old friends is that if you’ve fallen out of touch, it’s not necessarily your fault. It’s common, Hall told me, “to believe that you are in the driver’s seat in friendship.” “What we know,” he said, “is that conception is not accurate; other people choose to be your friend and choose to reciprocate.” People might fall away because of a busy job or a relationship or other things that are not related to you, he told me, but then they’ll be happy to see you years or even decades later.
“The bottom line is, if people fall away from each other because of life, it’s really important to generate an attitude of sympathy and understanding toward other people … because it’s not about you. If you make it all about yourself, you miss the opportunity for regrowth and renewal.” On the flip side, if it’s you who’s fallen out of touch due to moving or life, it’s completely good and fine to reach out to folks even if a lot of time has passed. They’ll likely be delighted to hear from you!
Now that I’m back in the US, where I grew up, I have found the truth in this. My friends in San Francisco consist of people I’ve met here, people I’ve stayed in touch with over the years, and people I’d fallen out of touch with for years for various reasons but reconnected with when I moved to the city. I also try to introduce my different friends from different stages of life to each other. This makes it easier for me to stay in touch and also for new friendships to form between them.
As for keeping in touch with people far away, I spoke with Hall about different modalities of communication. He talked about the importance of “rich channels of communication,” such as phone or video calls, for keeping in touch first. Text is the next best — like texting someone when something reminds you of them — and finally, passively liking posts on social media. Putting time and energy into long-distance friendships and other relationships is key to maintaining the friendship.
Visiting family and friends when financially possible is also important. I’ve found my relationship with my family has actually strengthened while living far away. Because I’m only able to visit them one to two times a year, I spend a lot of quality time with them when I see them. I have other friends who call their families every day, and while my family calls less often (although we have an active group chat), it has been great to see how different families find cadences that work for them.
This tip is also related to the first! Keeping in touch with old friends, Franco said, can make you feel more grounded, secure, and authentic, which will further give you confidence to put yourself out there and make new friends.
Take time for yourself
Taking time for yourself is especially important for self-identified extroverts like me. It’s easy in a new city to get into a cycle of meeting people and going to things every single day, which is great but unsustainable for all but the most social of us.
For me, this has looked different in different places. In Delhi, it meant eating kati rolls on my balcony at sunset and spending weekends taking the metro to different historical sites. In Chicago, it was biking along the lakefront every day. In San Francisco, it has been city hiking and trying to find every public staircase in the city.
“Whether we look at our alone time as alone time or lonely depends on things like how we’re doing mentally,” Franco said. “Part of it is, honestly, just taking care of your mental health more generally so you feel replenished rather than threatened by alone time.” So going to therapy, exercising, staying connected with friends or family “are all things you can think about doing so you can truly enjoy alone time.”
This may be exercising, reading a book, cooking, or watching TV — basically, doing something you love by yourself. Having time alone without being lonely is vital to making a relocation healthy and sustainable.
All this said, even with the smoothest transitions, there are downsides to being on the move. “Loneliness is going to be part of the process,” Franco said. “It’s not that you’re doing anything wrong.”
Whether you’re moving to a new city for a year or the rest of your life, the first few months can be a daunting time. Learning to balance time alone, new friends, and existing relationships won’t make a move perfect, but can make it much better.
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