Just kidding, was the absolute worst of times. Moving through the world as a queer woman this year was a special kind of brutal. While we were getting acquainted our new post-truth Trumpian dystopia, we were losing our safe spaces even inside our fictional worlds. So many lesbian and bisexual characters fell victim to the Bury Your Gays trope this year that GLAAD had to step in and ask networks to put a pin in it.
There were some bright spots, though, some girls kissing the girls they wanted to kiss. And so here is our list of best and worst queer women on TV in I believe fully and truly and wholly with absolute and total conviction that if there were more TV characters like Annalise Keating in the world β in fact, if Shonda Rhimes were in charge of TV, full stop β Donald Trump would still be that blowhard billionaire nobody from The Apprentice tweeting weird shit about Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson.
When everything in our culture centers on white men, when all our best TV show and books and movies are written by and star complicated white men, they are the only ones who receive the benefit of nuanced criticism in real life too.
Why is that, do you think? A brilliant, successful, powerful, unapologetic black woman with complicated motivations and a capacity to do great good and great harm to herself and the people around her. We need a thousand more characters like her on TV, a thousand more black women, a thousand more bi women, a thousand more fully realized women. It would be a whole other world if there were more Annalise Keatings. A whole other unrecognizable world.
Oh, Orange Is the New Black. Tough but tender. Wise but so bad at love. Depressed but full of humor. She was relatable and real and wonderful and beautiful and just β ugh! Poussey Washington was murdered by an incompetent white man who will face no repercussions for extinguishing her brilliant light from this world.
