-
sponsorship
Margaret, like you, I will miss the gal pals of The L Word and loved spending Sunday nights with them. Although I've read about the show's straight male fans (no surprise there; we all know that watching beautiful women make out is the ultimate cliché guy fantasy), I wondered how many straight women like me watched the show and found the characters entirely relatable despite our differences in sexual orientation. Not that a world of only beautiful, perfectly coiffed, no-body-fat-having, lipstick lesbians actually exists anywhere outside of Hollywood, but their heartbreak over relationships gone wrong, their struggles to find respect and equality in male-dominated workplaces, and their quest to find love and meaning in their lives are things that most women understand.
I admit, though, that I never got into Max's transition from female to male, and unlike you, I found the baby shower scene entirely unbelievable. No strongly self-identified man as the bearded Max, who was clearly distressed about his pregnancy and abandonment by his scared-off lover, could stomach such a silly, girly, frilly baby-shower. And it seemed out of character, and a bit insensitive, for the highly sensitive lez girls to subject Max to an event so closely linked to female identity—birth and motherhood. Still, I wished the finale might have had Max giving birth and turning the baby over to Tina and Bette.
I, too, was happy to see the infuriating but sometimes sympathetic Jenny get her comeuppance, but I'm not sure she was killed off. (Alice seemed too genuinely upset to be the murderer.) I wondered if Jenny offed herself as the ultimate expression of her narcissism. The way she signed off on the video she made for Tina and Bette was very ominous, don't you think? And her character had always been self-destructive and sometimes highly emotionally unbalanced. (Wasn't she a suicidal self-cutter early on?)
The L Word, like Queer as Folk before it, was a pleasant antidote to the stereotypical one-dimensional depiction of gay people we sometimes see on the small screen. I liked and accepted the girls and I want to believe that they would have felt and done the same for me.
So what's a committed cable-watcher like me to do now that my favorite lez girls have gone the way of Sex and the City's Samantha, Carrie, Miranda, and Charlotte? Wait for the movie?