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By: JENNIFER VANASCO
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LESBIANS EVERYWHERE BREATHED
a sigh of relief this week.
“The L Word” is back.
“The L Word” is certainly not a great show. It’s not even a good show. It’s a soap opera. But it’s our soap opera, and really, that’s the thing that matters.
I usually watch Bette, Tina, Alice, Dana and Shane—OK, usually I just watch Shane‑—‑at a house party thrown by friends. Notice that I have left out Jenny. I hate Jenny. Every lesbian writer does. She is bad for our image.
For the debut of the third season, though, I thought I’d drop in on a Chicago party sponsored by the Human Rights Campaign at one of our neighborhood lesbian-friendly bars. I wanted to be with my people.
The bar was wall-to-wall lesbians in a way that usually only happens at Pride. Servers threaded into the backroom lugging cases of Miller Light and trudged back trailed by garbage cans filled with empty bottles.
It is winter in Chicago, but the heat of close-pressed bodies made it feel like summer, and conversation was loud enough to be called shouting.
But when the show started to play on a few small, wall-mounted TVs, everyone fell into a reverent silence. Mostly. There was awwww-ing when a circle of babies babbled happily in a mommy-and-me type class, and hissing when the wealthy, controlling and gorgeous Helena first appeared on screen.
And then it was over. The room cleared out.
HONESTLY, I CAN’T tell you what happened in the show. Neither, it seemed, could anyone I was with.
We asked each other what we thought of what we saw, and the answer, invariably, was, “Uh, I think I’ll have to see it again. Or think about it more. Or, you know, try to remember what happened.”
It was as if some evil memory-erasing device had passed over the bar, or maybe some sneaky memory-destroyer was slipped into our beers.
We had vague ideas about how Alice, dumped by Dana, is now emotionally volatile. Tina is eyeing a father in her mommy-and-me class. The androgynous Shane was tricked into wearing a dress.
And, um, nope. I’ve got nothing. That’s all I remember. And I saw it just a few hours ago.
The third season opener just didn’t leave much of an impression, or at least not as much an impression as the giddiness that happens when we’re with each other, when we reconnect with old friends and get another chance to witness how many lesbians it takes to fill a room, how beautiful we are, how different, how jubilant, how proud.
We don’t get many chances to do that, really. There are very few national lesbian events, very few things we can point to as belonging exclusively to us. And we need things that belong exclusively to us so that we can feel like there’s a world where we belong.
THAT’S WHAT “THE L WORD” is—a celebration of our world, but also an excuse to hang out with each other, to drink and eat together, and to talk about our own relationships and lives with a sexy soap opera as a jumping off place.
The conversations around “The L Word” are less about the women on screen‑—‑face it, the program is just not that absorbing—and much more about how we see ourselves.
It makes our romances seem important and exciting. It makes our lives seem important and exciting. It makes our well-known tendency toward lesbian drama seem less crazy and more glamorous.
And it reminds us of some eternal truths: Relationships end. Friendships can see us through some pretty devastating events. Our families have effects on us that reverberate through the rest of our lives.
But also other lessons: Your hair defines where you fit in your community. Lesbian sex is everywhere, and we are all connected through our sexual partners. There are a ridiculous number of synonyms for “vagina.”
Certainly that’s stuff that every lesbian needs to know.
And if we have to learn the necessities by watching beautiful women flirt with each other and sleep with each other and break up with each other and go back to flirting with each other again—well, then that’s just another example of lesbian luck.
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