Stella in praise of the L Word...
We like The L Word, Shelley and I. We like it a lot. The first reason we like it is that the women look like us. Well, they look like us if we were thinner, younger, had better hair, and had makeup stylists swarming on us between every take (and if we both did that weird over-product-ed sticky-out hair thing that about ten of the characters do) ... but anyway, they look like us. Our straight friends think they look a lot like us. (Clearly our straight friends think we're younger and thinner than we are. Sweet.) I have never called myself a lipstick lesbian. Never would, I think the term is both divisive ('this' type of lesbian as opposed to 'that') and also insulting (not really a dyke) not a 'proper' lezz ... like the twat who came up to me at a lesbian book event about six months after I'd finished chemo who congratulated me on "finally having the hair of a proper dyke". I didn't know this woman, she'd read a book of mine I guess, and figured that entitled her to comment on my appearance after I'd had a pee and was washing my hands. I explained in no uncertain terms that my 'lezz haircut' was as a result of six months of chemo and even if it hadn't been what I looked like was no business of hers. She spent the rest of the night apologising. Pissed, of course. And I loved my post-chemo short hair. I think I looked great with it. But I like long hair too. And it's my hair. Not the "lesbian community's" ... so we like how the women in the L-Word look.
True, the women in the show never seem to go to work, any of them, other than Jennifer Beale's over-achieving character, and they're all excessively cool and way too easy with their bodies and everyone else's - but that's fine, this isn't a documentary, it's Melrose Place for dykes. And if the lead couple get pregnant much too soon and much too easily (and almost mixed race shag for mixed race sperm donor in the same way 'my' Saz and Molly do in Fresh Flesh) then all the better to enjoy the lovely soapishness of it all. And they are all so sexy. Almost all of them.
Just NOT the annoying straight girl. Who isn't annoying because she's straight and would like to be a dyke. She isn't even really annoying because she's half the size of the other woman and it looks like the delicious Marina (Karina Lombard) is fucking her baby step-sister ... she's just really annoying because she's a writer. In that particularly weird kind of 'writer' that Joey was as Dawson's Creek wore on (and off) - that is, a typical American TV series writer. She's a wanker. Epitomizing the bollocks idea that writing is synonymous with pain, writing is hard work, writing (Julian Sands as writing teacher???) can only come from heart-wrenching experience and big fat suffering. Oh please. Get over yourself. (Yes, I know I'm talking to a character, but there are people like this too you know - and not even all of them are sixteen year old girls who just read Plath for the first time.) Being a waitress is hard work, being a nurse is hard work, being a teacher is hard work. Writing might be something you work hard at (though most of us don't get to do it in a pretty little Californian poolside annex while having no apparent need to earn any money at all) but it is NOT hard work.
Still, moany-anorexic-would-be-dyke aside, the rest of the L-Word is lovely. So aspirational, so Californian, so WOMEN HAVING SEX ON TV!!! And with a really good sense of humour. And lives where being a lezz is the least f their worries. Sigh. I can count on the fingers of two hands the times the Saz Martin books have been nearly-optioned, nearly-made, nearly become screen ...and every time someone who needed to pay money backed out, got scared. They know they want women and crime on TV, they know they want dykes on TV ... they just haven't yet worked out that the dyke part doesn't necessarily mean problems. I never wanted to write the Saz books as if being gay was a problem. Everything else might be a trauma, but - at least to me - being a dyke has never been as big a deal as straight people usually think it is. And that's what I like best about the L-Word. The women are dykes. So what?
Of course in England though, it's on Living TV. A cable channel. Not Channel 4. No, on Channel 4 you can have all the angry young men and anal-fucking beautiful boys you like. But you certainly can't have any lesbians who don't hate men, hate their mothers, and preferably, come out hating themselves as well. Lesbians who are actually OK about being lesbians (and not in prison for having killed their last pimp)? … now that one's going to take British telly just a little bit longer ...