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Notes

Chapter 1

1. Interestingly, Kera Bolonik, the author of the "Not Your Mother"s Lesbians" fea-

ture article, is now the author of the "official companion book" to the series, The L

Word: Welcome to Our Planet

2. A significant dialogue about this generational oppositionalism exists (

see, for example, Martin, "Sexualities without Genders" and Walters, "From Here to Queer"), and the phenomenon continues in the contemporary context. Recent examples include Bolonik"s "Not Your Mother"s Lesbians," Levy"s "Where the Bois Are," and K. Fox"s "Blush: Making Our Own Erotica" (all 2004).

3. The influences of academia on such cultural products as drag kinging are per-

haps most thoroughly mobilized through the participation of academics and postgraduate students in drag king troupes and performances. Vicki Crowley writes of several academics and PhD students taking part in a drag king troupe in "Ben Dover and His Beautiful Boys" (288-89), and writers in the field such as Donna Jean Troka also perform in drag. An example of academics participating in and influencing lesbian performance culture can also be seen in the Chicago burlesque scene, with burlesque historian Tara Vaughan Tremmel recruiting per- formers for and organizing burlesque shows.

4. The full quote reads, "I hate that term 'in the closet." . . . Until recently I hated

the word lesbian too. . . . I"ve said it often enough now that it doesn"t bother me. But lesbian sounded like somebody with some kind of disease. I didn"t like that, so I used the word gay more often" (ellipses on interviewer asides).

5. Although I am characterizing the 2003-2004 focus on lesbians prompted by the

release of The L Word in the mainstream media (occurring in the midst of a more general mainstream fashion for gayness as seen in the 2003

Vanity

Fair cover

story "TV"s Gay Heat Wave") as the second wave of lesbian chic, one could argue that it is simply an extension or augmentation of early nineties lesbian chic.

Notes196

6. Gurlesque often includes drag acts, The L Word briefly features the character Ivan

Ay Cock,

Dykes to Watch Out For"s Lois is frequently seen as her drag persona

Max Axle, and

Queer as Folk ever so briefly shows the characters watching a performing drag trio.

7. Examples include Desert Hearts (1985), All Over Me (1997), Better than Choco-

late (1999), But I"m a Cheerleader (1999), and D.E.B.S. (2004). Many of these films do include a readable-as-butch lead role, but each of these characters dis- plays some markers of femininity.

But I"m a Cheerleader does include a very butch

secondary character who is, however, later revealed to be heterosexual.

8. See, for example, the following quotation from Levy"s "Where the Bois Are":

"What all bois have in common is a lack of interest in embodying any kind of girliness, but they are too irreverent to adopt the heavy-duty, highly circum- scribed butch role. To them, butch is an identity of the past, a relic from a world of Budweiser and motorcycles gone by" (n.p.). In The

Drag King Book,

Halberstam and Volcano also note a reluctance to identify as butch among the drag kings of New York (120-25), though they also note that "the Drag Kings in London almost exclusively identified as butch or transgender" (125).

9. Examples include Butler"s

Gender

Trouble; Cahn"s "From the 'Muscle Moll" to

the 'Butch" Ballplayer: Mannishness, Lesbianism, and Homophobia in U.S. Women"s Sport"; Inness and Lloyd"s "G.I. Joes in Barbie Land: Recontextualising the Meaning of Butch in Twentieth-Century Lesbian Culture"; various articles in such anthologies as Munt"s Butch/Femme: Inside Lesbian Gender, Halberstam"s

Female

Masculinity; and Doan"s "Passing Fashions: Reading Female Masculinities in the 1920s."

10. For further discussion of the category of the "feminine invert," see Clare Hem-

mings"s "Out of Sight, Out of Mind?"

11. Essays that address lesbian chic include Clark"s "Commodity Lesbianism"; Stein"s

"All Dressed Up, But No Place to Go? Style Wars and the New Lesbianism"; O"Sullivan"s "Girls Who Kiss Girls and Who Cares?"; Pottie"s "Hierarchies of Otherness: The Politics of Lesbian Styles in the 1990s, or What to Wear?"; Cot- tingham"s short monograph

Lesbians

Are So Chic . . . That We Are Not Really

Lesbians at All

; Inness"s chapter "'They"re Here, They"re Flouncy, Don"t Worry about Them": Depicting Lesbians in Popular Women"s Magazines 1965-1995" within her monograph The Lesbian Menace (52-76); and Ciasullo"s "Making Her (In)Visible: Cultural Representations of Lesbianism and the Lesbian Body in the 1990s."

12. For further discussion of lesbian and bisexual representation on

Law and Order, see Lo, "Lesbian and Bisexual Women on Law and Order

13. During research in the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn, I discovered the

existence of groups such as the media committee of Lesbian Feminist Liberation, Inc. (New York, 1975; see Cotter,), the Gay Media Project (Philadelphia, date unknown, appears to be contemporaneous with other groups, c. 1970s), and the Gay Media Coalition (New York, 1975), which aimed to fight media bias against gays and coproduced and advised public affairs broadcasts on homophobia through encountering letters and press releases from these groups. The pioneering

Notes197

efforts of these groups and activists were no doubt essential to introducing posi- tive homosexual representation to television screens, and their role in creating the groundwork for the contemporary growth in lesbian and gay images on tele- vision must be acknowledged. Such organizations also prefigure the role now played by GLBT media watchdogs such as the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against

Defamation (GLAAD).

14. "Unpacking the L-Word: Lesbian Representation in Contemporary Culture" at

the 46th Annual Midwest Modern Language Association (M/MLA) convention in November 2004. Although the call for papers asked for discussion of any contemporary texts including lesbians, seven out of the eight panelists discussed The L Word (see Beadling, Beirne "Lipstick and Lesbians"; Douglas "That"s Not Me"; Jaarsma and Pederson; Renshaw and Robinson; Williams and Jonet; and

Wolfe and Roripaugh.

15. Natalya Hughes has also observed this dimension of

Gurlesque

16. See, for example, Bensinger; Conway "Inhabiting the Phallus"; Katrina Fox

"Blush"; and, to a lesser extent, Engel.

Chapter 2

1. There are subtle differences in popular understandings of what mainstreaming

and assimilation constitute; undertaking a study and definition of these differ- ences is, however, beyond the scope of this project.

2. According to Vaid, "[T]he antigay ban [in the military] was not an issue on the

minds of most gay and lesbian Americans during the 1992 campaign: AIDS a nd the antigay [R]ight were" (161).

3. This excludes adoption by the couple and church weddings and stipulates that

one partner must be a citizen of and reside in Denmark. A step back from this early progress was taken when, in 1997, assisted insemination for lesbians was banned (Jensen 39).

4. The law provides the "[s]ame rights and responsibilities as opposite-sex married

partners" with the exception that the couple "cannot adopt a child from abroad" (ILGA-Europe, "Legal Recognition").

5. In Belgium"s case, the exception is that "Belgian law does not provide for pre-

sumed paternity for the female spouse of a married woman who gives birth during their marriage; no provision for joint parental responsibility, nor for adoption by a same-sex partner or a same-sex couple" (ILGA-Europe, "Legal

Recognition").

6. "Same-sex married partners will now enjoy all the rights and responsibilities

of marriage, including entitlement for joint adoption" (ILGA-Europe, "Legal

Recognition").

7. "Beyond Gay Marriage," a chapter in Warner"s monograph

The

Trouble with

Normal

, provides a fuller account of the various positions and arguments in the debate over same-sex marriage (81-147).

8. Interestingly, it took Camper six years to find a publisher for

Juicy

Mother, her

anthology of queer comics. It is now published by Soft Skull Press, and a second volume of Juicy

Mother

2: How They Met

was published in late 2007.

Notes198

9. Cheer Up! (2004), a short documentary on radical cheerleading, was featured as

one of the April 2006 Dyke TV segments rebroadcast online.

10. These struggles are discussed in English in the documentary

Dangerous

Living:

Coming Out in the Developing World

(2003).

11. While representations of homosexuals within the "married with children" model

can be indicative of certain normalizing attitudes and political strategies, les- bian parenting in practice should not be automatically considered as a gesture of assimilation and indeed can be read as a radical remodeling of the nuclear family. See further discussion of this issue in Chapter 3.

12. Examples include Brill"s

The Queer Parent"s Primer: A Lesbian and Gay Families"

Guide to Navigating through a Straight World

, Clunis and Green"s The

Lesbian

Parenting

Book: A Guide to Creating Families and Raising Children, and Snow"s How It Feels to Have a Gay or Lesbian Parent: A Book by Kids for Kids of All Ages.

13. I acknowledge that the masculinity of many drag kings is not solely performa-

tive; however, it can be, so for my purposes here I am using this as an example.

14. An example of a cultural product growing out of this debate is Stacey"s comic/"zine

"Welcome to Sunny Camp Trans," produced by Butch Dyke Boy Press and the

Boston Lesbian Avengers in 2000.

15. A central narrative force in the film is a fictionalized portrayal of the battle

between the Little Sisters bookshop and Canadian customs that is frequently cited by propornography lesbians as the outcome of antipornographic feminist activism.

16. Further reading on the subjects of transexuality, transgenderism, and gender-

queer can be found in

Gender

Blending: Confronting the Limits of Duality and

FTM: Female-to-Male Transsexuals in Society

by Holly Devor;

Invisible

Lives: The

Erasure of Transexual and Trangendered People

by Viviane K. Namaste;

Gender

Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us

by Kate Bornstein;

Transmen

and FTMs: Identities, Bodies, Genders, and Sexualities by Jason Cromwell;

Lesbians

Talk Transgender by Zachary I. Nataf; Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue by

Leslie Feinberg; and

Genderqueer: Voices from Beyond the Sexual Binary

, edited by

Joan Nestle, Riki Wilchins, and Clare Howell.

17. Note that these texts (with the exception of Howes"s) all engage almost exclu-

sively with American television. While a significant amount of articles have been written on specific programs from other nations and various internet-based arti- cles chart a genealogy of development, to my knowledge no large-scale study has been undertaken to that effect in English that is not significantly biased toward American examples to the exclusion of (almost) all else. A very good early (non- academic) article on lesbians on television in the U.K. can be found in Nicki Hastie"s "It All Comes Out in the Wash: Lesbians in Soaps." A magazine article by Keith Howes, "Gays of Our Lives: 30 Years of Gay Australian TV," and my forthcoming "Screening the Dykes of Oz: Lesbian Representation on Australian

Television" (

J ournal of Lesbian Studies 13.1) both provide historical discussion of the Australian context. I have here left out those texts that deal exclusively or mostly with gay men (such as James Keller"s Queer (Un)Friendly Film and

Notes199

Television

), as there are quite different traditions, and this is not directly perti- nent to my discussion in this monograph.

18. Although gossip channels allege that Aguliera is indeed bisexual.

19. Several analyses of this character and the manner in which lesbianism is repre-

sented in

Heartbeat

have been undertaken, most notably Sasha Torres"s "Televi- sion/Feminism: Heartbeat and Prime Time Lesbianism," Darlene Hantzis and Valerie Lehr"s "Whose Desire? Lesbian (Non)Sexuality and Television"s Perpetua- tion of Hetereo/Sexism," and Marguerite Moritz"s "Old Strategies for New Texts: How American Television Is Creating and Treating Lesbian Characters."

20. Didi Herman argues in '"

Bad Girls Changed My Life": Homonormativity in a

Women"s Prison Drama" that

Bad Girls "disrupts the WIP [women-in-prison]

genre significantly. BG foregrounds lesbian heroines who have happy endings, and the normalization of lesbianism occurs outside as well as within the prison" (143). Herman also argues that the series, like Queer as Folk, "construct[s] an overt 'insider"s view," a homonormative space where lesbian and gay sexuality is both unremarkable and, potentially, desirable" (143).

21. Frameline awarded Channel 4 with a 1997 Frameline award for "outstanding

contribution to gay and lesbian media arts" ("Tribute to Channel Four"). Chan- nel 4 has since created and broadcasted the original Queer as Folk (1999-2000).

22. Iyari Limon has since come out as bisexual (see Kregloe).

23. This is in contrast to the sexually coded "magic" scenes, wherein Willow and

Tara magically "deflower" a rose or "levitate" one another, for example. For further analysis of this issue, refer to Winslade, "Teen Witches, Wiccans, and Wanna-Blessed-Be"s," or Beirne, "Queering the Slayer-Text."

24. J. Lawton Winslade addresses the connections between lesbian sex and magic in

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