Catching your eyes at the bar...
...and asking you to read our newsletter.
Hi, and welcome! Thank you for reading our first newsletter. As we continue publishing The Yearning, we hope you’ll come to us for reviews, recommendations, rants, and raves about queer media. But before we get to that, we’d like to introduce ourselves as coauthors and explain what brought The Yearning into this world.
When I was five years old, I walked into my local Blockbuster along with my older sister to pick out our Friday night movie.
I remember trailing through the aisles, with their geometrically patterned carpets, looking for a movie about princesses, or a love story, or, ideally, something that incorporated both, when I stopped in front of a particular title. The VHS’s cover boasted a blonde girl with big hair, wearing a dress the burning pink of antihistamine tablets, and holding a sparkling pom-pom. I remember thinking, “perfect!” I brought the tape to my mother and she checked it out for me, not bothering to read the description (whether or not she’d have let me rent the movie had she known what it was about remains an all-consuming mystery to this day).
This movie was, of course, But I’m a Cheerleader. I’d love nothing more than to say that I vividly remember going home, popping the movie in, and watching something so gay and so joyful at the ripe age of five years old. I’d love to say that this was a formative experience, something I’d come back to again and again as I grew older and started to figure out who I was. Alas, I have no memories of that night after leaving the Blockbuster. I truly don’t know if we ended up watching the movie at all.
Instead, the first queer stories I remember absorbing were those fleeting, sensational ones that often aired during primetime television sweeps–a far cry from the gleeful defiance of But I’m a Cheerleader. I’m talking Marissa and Alex on The O.C., that one time Peyton shared a closed mouth kiss with A Gay on One Tree Hill, and, of course, Samantha’s unforgettable affair with Maria on Sex and the City…a relationship that brought about much discourse and no evolution. As I watched show after show use and discard these storylines, I found myself wanting to abandon the “main characters” and follow these other women—these women who were too resolute in their queerness to stick around for longer than three episodes—into their world. Wherever that was.
The mere implication that this other world existed was enough to eventually lead me back to movies like But I’m a Cheerleader, and so many others, and co-authoring The Yearning is an attempt to immerse myself as fully in that world as I can—to finally, and thoughtfully, absorb only those joyful, sometimes painful, and always dimensional stories by, about, and for queer people.
–Ali
I’ve always loved TV and movies - some of my earliest memories of childhood are from living overseas, where my older sister and I sat on the floor to watch and re-watch the handful of VHS tapes we had (My Neighbor Totoro, Babar, Tom and Jerry, and Ricki-tikki-tavi).
Experiencing my queerness for the first time was cinematic in a near performative way – I’m 14 years old, sitting in 4th period Choir, and the question (would I ever kiss a girl?) passes through my mind. (Absolutely not.) It was a Glee voiceover waiting to happen.
Back then, there was a distinct furtiveness, a taboo feeling, that I felt when I saw a queer character on television. I can still access it. I think to some extent I understood the tension implicit with their inclusion. It certainly didn’t feel special or primary – it felt risky. In the landscape of early-aughts television, Degrassi often felt like a departure from that, featuring at least 20 LGBTQ+ characters during its run. I saw many of my experiences mirrored through queen bee Paige Michalchuk on Degrassi: The Next Generation.
Paige, an energetic, popular overachiever, fit the requisite ‘mean girl’ bill to a tee. While at times manipulative or unkind, her distinct vision for her own life was palpable. It seemed there was no way that she could choose any path other than one lined with a white picket fence. This was the state of affairs, until a close friendship with unlikely candidate Alex Nuñez turned into something more. Watching Paige’s refusal to accept and process that first kiss felt like looking in a mirror. Together, Paige and I both tumbled into confusing, long-lived queer relationships marked with painful breakups and dramatic reunions.
I remember that at that time, every choice I contemplated felt irrevocable. My queerness had to be all or nothing. Right before senior year started, a friend got a tattoo on the back of their neck. I remember standing behind them in Chapel and looking at it, feeling that it was both impossibly brave and way too far out of my comfort zone. I created this absurd ‘if, then’ statement for myself: if I get a tattoo, how can I ever be a good Christian, marry a man and have 2.5 kids? In every phase of our queer little lives, we deserve media that supports the processes we’re currently going through. Paige’s character development was extraordinary - she stood out to me amongst a sea of stories that could be described as impermanent at best. There is joy in pursuing a greater understanding of yourself and we should be able to see that on screen.
By co-authoring The Yearning, I hope to share with you all my dedication to seeking out these stories. The trope of yearning within the classic queer narrative is critical; it shows us where we’ve grown from. We seek to honor that; while also providing you with what matters most — unabashed, sincere and multifaceted queer stories.
–Meg
Why yearning?
It’s a joke that “yearning” is a common ingredient in queer media. Some argue (reasonably) that it is too common an ingredient. But when we think of yearning in the context of queer media, we don’t just think of the yearning between two characters. We also think of the yearning of an audience, of a storyteller, for more, more, more. More to consume, more to create, more to critique.
We hope that you find The Yearning to be a place where you can come to read, discuss, and celebrate queer stories, always with the same goal in mind: that we need more of these stories, the diamonds and the duds and everything in between.
So, what can you look forward to in future newsletters?
Next week we’ll settle into what will be our standard format:
A feature film or tv show review penned by one of us (in this house we take turns)
Our patented rating system, rating each movie or show on romance, sex, storytelling, performance, and of course, **yearning**
An occasional ‘From The Archives’ segment, featuring some of the most iconic gay movie duds out there (they need recognition too)